skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Portugal decriminalised consumption of all drugs for personal use in 2001; it technically remains against the law, but instead of prison, users are registered by police and referred for help (attendance is voluntary). In the early days, it appeared to be an unequivocal success: HIV transmission rates via syringes dropped, as did the number of overdoses, and prison populations were down 16.5% by 2008. But a recent national survey shows illicit drug use up from 7.8% to 12.8% between 2001 and 2022; overdose rates are at a 12-year high, having nearly doubled in Lisbon between 2019 and 2023 (this is still below the European average). In Porto, there has been a 24% jump in drug paraphernalia being collected from city streets in the year to 2022, with this year set to outpace that. Crimes such as robbery in public spaces rose 14% from 2021 to 2022, which police have in part blamed on the rise in drug use.

(italics for emphasis)

> Are you American?

Yes

> Is this some point of pride for you to be agaisnt this kind of program?

On the contrary! I am in favor of this kind of program. I am very critical of my country's war on drugs. It is a war with one singular belligerent: US.
Those bioassays are also uterly unreliable and are done in conditions, especially concentrations that are nowhere near what happens in a human body.
The link is about the assembly details of the compiler code. But that still misses the point in a few important ways. And I'm not talking about the Turbo Pascals with the numbers 5 or higher, but about the first ones actually used, like the one for CP/M where the OS and the program all have to fit in 64 K. Turbo Pascal was more than a compiler fitting in that space: it contained editor, kept the source of the compiled program completely in RAM, and produced executable with one write to disk and just a few reads.

https://techtinkering.com/2013/03/05/turbo-pascal-a-great-ch...

1) The fact that the author was very used to think in assembly is that he was able to generate a compiler to the native code that even without optimizing passes already "well behaves": not squeezing every drop possible for optimization but also making a lot of optimization passes not necessary. That's the "magic sauce" in being what was called "a single pass."

2) Description "a single pass" is actually somewhat imprecise when used by most who talk about it. The passes through something are necessary in compilers, the actual goal is making once the processing on the levels which hurts the whole compilation process the most.

3) So the major difference between the typical "production" compilers and Turbo Pascal was in later being able to fit "everything" in the RAM between the last edit and the production of the compiled code. If I remember correctly it didn't even have to write anything to the disk if one just needed to run the program(!) Only when one needed the executable the write happened.

So assembly was an important part of the story but at the time most of the professionals used assembly anyway, the speed vas result every other decision was also made to achieve minimal I/O (which also wasn't necessarily unique feature) while also being useful enough for the real programs (that was less unique) and comfortable (Wordstar-keys editor, jump to the error after compilation).

A lot of very good decisions combined, that was special. And finally, comparably cheap, too.
I love the idea of this.

The big disconnect here is I can't share code with OpenAI for various reasons.

Would you consider using something like AWS Bedrock+Anthropic Claude, where we have better (more predictable/risk profile) control over data-sharing, etc?
Vacuum tubes are his specialty area. He's building a much larger vacuum tube computer and this is supposed to be a more mobile display version he can demo at events.

He's also done quite a few videos restoring old vacuum tube based test equipment from like HP. He does some really cool work.
No, they're right: your understanding of each other diverges when you write "it's not because of any technical difficulty" --- correct, we all agree there. However, it is still difficult.

Big companies have big processes and that, at least at Google, would have prevented this from happening for at least 12-18 months. Then those things aren't pursued because of A) the literal cost of getting that arranged over 18 months B) the individual's decision not to invest in beating their head against a wall for 18 months for something that'd be done in a week if leadership cared. Leadership does not care, so QED, it will not be a positive for your career.

Things either get done because A) leadership cares and has skin in the game and everyone is afraid of getting in the way of whoever delivers B) leadership cares and will keep asking about it over and over again for a year or two or C) no one cares so no one will get in your way.

That's also the crux of why things at Google go sideways. A) is only true over a year long cycle (I.e. you need to get to launch) B) people are afraid to do because it's hectoring and C) if no one cares its probably not much of a game changer anyway, there's no incentive to do it, and especially in FAANG's Efficiency/Focus(tm) era[^1^], you can actually get pretty easily brow-beaten for it by middle management. Then what are you going to do? Appeal to a VP that your manager and managers manager are big ol meanies?

[^1^] I originally wrote error, which, lol
Andrei Alexandrescu went back to C++ and is working at NVidia CUDA nowadays.
I disagree, we might not be able to acertain the truth but I certainly want to know that there is some potential issues.
Plagiarism and You(tube) [video]
That may be true in aggregate, but for tech workers over the past 20 years the scales have been as heavily in their favor as any industry's employer/employee relationship potentially ever.
Yea, taking a few photos really doesn’t take very long. ‘Loosing’ 3-5 minutes of a 3 day ski trip really isn’t much of a sacrifice.

Video is tricky. I find simply aiming in the right general direction without looking in the viewfinder means you get crappy video and can still stay in the moment. Then when watching it you kick of the actual memory even if the video isn’t that good.
For a shuttle launch, a picture of you and the shuttle would be cool.
> Can you be more precise on this?

Usage where you don't keep the Julia process running. E.g. "$ julia stuff.jl" form a shell.
Z80 + some mods = Sharp LR35902 used in original Gameboy
6502 + some mods = 6502 used in original NES
I think that in a few decades after we've had a lot more experience with various NN-based AIs, someone will come up with a more general quantification of "intelligence" that can integrate all these approaches into some vaguely orderable classes. After all a genetic algorithm seems clearly smarter (in some ways) than a rock but also it's clearly not as smart (in some way) as a dog. In that sense you could also say a physical lock is smarter than a rock (in that it processes a little bit of information) but not as smart as a human because it cannot learn.

Similar to how we have things like NP-hard > NP > (maybe) P, you could have a classification based on how many (types of) information can be processed or something like that. Maybe a similar but separate scale for learning capacity?
It already is quite difficult to recover to this level, even for a relatively small malware codebase this probably took hundreds of man-hours to decompile into a meaningful state.

To protect it beyond a basic level - You can try but it's a cat-and-mouse game. A sufficiently skilled reverser will drop a debugger on your program, execute the code until it's past any decryption and then dump it from memory. So better schemes to obfuscate applications have been developed, like VMProtect, which makes a simple virtual machine with a custom instruction set and uses it to obfuscate your application. It's of course possible to break that as well, but it takes more time and requires more skill.
The ABC computers used a Z80 in the keyboard and a Z80 as main CPU. Weird times. :)
firework displays are definitely something better appreciated in person. Music gigs are probably another.
Expect of course if you enjoy the process and want to say: “I filmed that”.
Lots of mundane human activities are most naturally represented as while (or do-while) loops.

For example, wiping one's butt:

do {
wipe()
} while { color_of_tp() !== "white" }

Or anything that falls under cleaning, really.

Although I'd argue while loops belong most at home in imperative code. (Cleaning for example is like the impure function par excellence, done only for side effect)
Perhaps I should have emphasized better that indeed the LLM's are trustworthy by themselves and require several extra checks. These would be policy simulators, connecting to cloud environments and running checks in Dev/Staging.

Again, I understand the skepticism using LLM's but currently everything is done manually and it shows that doesn't work well. So using LLM's is a quick way to improve the current situation and hopefully we can further compliment it with checks and balances
Apparently the iPhone automatically generates a photomontage of the past year. (It might be called "Memories".) So someone like me gets: some close-ups of body parts that were sent to a doctor; some photos of miscellaneous items that were offered for sale, including hutch of pet which died; some pictures of the damaged car after some moron smashed into it, required for insurance/legal claim. With the soundtrack, it's very uplifting.
Wikipedia says:

> In 1998, by means of a lengthy trial and error process, a process for dyeing with Tyrian purple was rediscovered.[37][38] This finding built on reports from the 15th century to the 18th century and explored the biotechnology process behind woad fermentation. It is hypothesized that an alkaline fermenting vat was necessary. An incomplete ancient recipe for Tyrian purple recorded by Pliny the Elder was also consulted. By altering the percentage of sea salt in the dye vat and adding potash, he was able to successfully dye wool a deep purple colour.[39]

So in that regard, the article seems not entirely correct.
Our Ongoing Refusal to Regulate Data Brokers Is Going to Bite Us on the Ass
Thanks Naresh
People have been saying the same thing about Howard Stern and his very large Sirius contract. And yet, SiriusXM keeps re-signing him.
Sorry, I don't know much about these, but how does anyone know what other communities you're part of? Is it difficult to have per-community pseudonyms?
So I am lost, are talking about Python JIT compilers or C performance?

Smalltalk, Lisp and SELF were used to write complete graphical workstations, where a debugger code change or dynamic code load across the network could impact JIT decisions across the whole OS stack.
I used to report spam calls, but quit when I received one from my own number, the number of the phone on which I received the call.
Best way to stay in the loop is to join their Discord server: https://discord.gg/A4z4ccJCep
A lot of these companies have people doing no real work, even afterwards of layoffs, they're bloated. You can't layoff essential people otherwise you die.

You can look at companies like Spotify and Twitter, they ship like one feature a year if you average.
I wouldn’t exactly say STIR/SHAKEN isn’t real security. The protocol works fine (like HTTPS), the issue right now is that the Certificate Authority network is still being built out and attestation isn’t enforced by carriers yet. Things should steadily improve now that the protocol itself is deployed.
Redux Toolkit 2.0: new features, faster perf, smaller bundle sizes, and more
I made this one you can try:
https://stephango.com/obsidian-web-clipper
If you want the world to transition to EV's and away from fossil fueled vehicles, cost reductions are necessary.
Tell them “that’s it, thank you” and then take the picture in the split second when they loosen up :)
Sadly for Carthage, in that era Rome's main strenght was its ability to take aburd losses and then just recruit back a giant army right after. There is quite a number of times where they lost a % of their army / populace similar to what that has crumbled many empires through history, but Rome just got back up like it's nothing.

I can't imagine how their ennemies must have felt in those instances.
> The number of Portuguese adults who reported prior use of illicit adult drugs rose from 7.8% in 2001 to 12.8% in 2022

Isn’t this consistent with decriminalization that people aren’t afraid to talk about past drug use? You see similar statistics with, say, people coming out of the closet when homosexuality is decriminalized; which conservatives like to paint as “legalization making people gay”. The OD cases could also be from people more readily calling for help rather than trying to cover up.
I am _thrilled_ to announce that:

Redux Toolkit 2.0 is LIVE!!!

- https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-toolkit/releases/tag/v2.0.0

This major version has new features, faster perf, smaller bundle size, and removes deprecated options.

It's accompanied by majors for all our Redux family packages

## RTK 2.0:

- a new `combineSlices` method for lazy-loading reducers - Updates to `createSlice` to include a `selectors` field and allow defining thunks inside

- Immer 10 w/ faster updates

- Removal of deprecated options

See the migration guide:

- https://redux.js.org/usage/migrations/migrating-rtk-2

All of the Redux libraries now have modernized packaging with full ESM/CJS compat. They also ship modern JS (no transpiling for IE11), which means smaller bundle sizes.

We've also done byte-shaving work to shrink the bundles (extracting error messages, de-duping imports)

## Redux core 5.0:

- The TS conversion we did in 2019!

- Action types _must_ be strings

- `UnknownAction` as the default action type

- Better preloaded state types

- Internal subscription improvements

- Still marks `createStore` as deprecated!

- https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/releases/tag/v5.0.0

## React-Redux 9.0:

- *Now requires React 18 and RTK 2.0 / Redux 5.0*
- Updates dev-mode checks
- Throws better errors in an RSC environment

- https://github.com/reduxjs/react-redux/releases/tag/v9.0.0

## Reselect 5.0:

- Switches to a new `weakMapMemoize` memoizer as default

- Renames `defaultMemoize` to `lruMemoize`

- Allows passing memoizer options direct to `createSelector`

- Many TS improvements

- https://github.com/reduxjs/reselect/releases/tag/v5.0.1

## Redux Thunk 3.0:

- Drops the default export and switches to named exports ( `{thunk, withExtraArgument}` )

- https://github.com/reduxjs/redux-thunk/releases/tag/v3.1.0

This has been a _huge_ year-long development effort!

We're thrilled to get these improvements out. The tooling and bundle improvements will help all users, and we think the features and TS changes will improve the Redux dev experience significantly.

Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has contributed or helped test out the work!

Please file bug reports for the inevitable issues that pop up post-release!

but now I'm going off on a conf trip and going to take a very well-earned break from Redux work for December :)
> Obviously a moderation rule of “no politics” or “no off-topic” would help, but sometimes even the moderators are passionate about those same political or social concerns, and believe that preventing discussion of such would be fascist.

Worse, as long as the the mods have free reign to decide what is and isn't politics this is just yet another way of phrasing the real rule of "no things we don't approve of".
Meanwhile Apple came late to the game and now is just sitting it out. Wonder what will happen in a few years?
Colonizing Mars isn't a rocket problem
You do realize that many addicts (of opioids) got that way after using legitamely prescribed pain-killers? And many others have other underlying health problems (often mental)?
This is an unnecessary ad hominem attack. He wrote this over a decade ago, in the midst of doing his best work creating Go itself.

gob was his opinionated way of doing a Go-specific encoding, while also supporting any number of other encodings in the language. Go has incredibly good support for almost every popular encoding there is.

gob has also been used successfully by a number of projects. In many cases, it's a perfectly good way to encode a piece of data that is completely local to a Go program.
It is a shame for Chicago that groupon didn't continue to find success. I really think that if they had continued to grow the Chicago tech scene would be significantly larger than it is today.
> You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed.

There is a real risk that avoiding topics or people one finds offensive can make a person less resilient. Its a totally reasonable response to the internet where you have the opposite problem of being exposed to more than you otherwise would have, but creating too tight of a bubble can have downsides.
Can anyone explain why this comment was downvoted? Multiple sources linked below provide justification for the commenter's statement. Meanwhile, the person claiming otherwise relies solely on personal opinion and attempts to discredit these sources, suggesting they have an ulterior motive. What has been happening lately on Hacker News?
Hemp based concrete
I've just read this article. Have you?

"not working at all" is an overstatement, but might be logical since they cut funding by 60-70% or so (news to me but helps explain recent issues).

It contains two "criticisms".

First Porto's well connected mayor, Rui Moreira, and his people, saying that the problem is out of control. It very likely is, in Porto. I live there and it's kind of shit since the pandemic.

The second one (and in my view the only one that matters) is by the architect of the program Joao Goulao.

"João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding.

After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs."

So yeah here's the thing.

No one is having second thoughts about the program, they've just massively defunded it to the point its architect says it barely works, and the Porto mayor got to complain about it to the Washington Post, likely because he has a really good PR company.

That's it. Rui Moreira is not even a part of any major party. No data on Portuguese support for the program is ever mentioned. No major politician is ever quoted.
That's mainly because any dramatic change feels like a change and they haven't seen the downsides yet. Some downsides take decades to develop with some diets.

And the argument of "now I feel so much better" I have heard it with absolutely every kind of diets. Vegetarians now eating meat. Meat eaters now vegetarians. Paleo. Gluten-free. Crude/Raw...
AWS Lambda with Polars
Some countries have longer notice periods. If you would work for Spotify in Switzerland, after 2 years you have 2 months notice. Given the period must starts with a new month (by law), your notice would start on 1st January. Adter 10 years its 3 months, where 5 months severance pay (as i understand it) would "only" cover at least 2 additional months.
> People whose jobs depend on something claim that thing is getting worse, without any further evidence

That's not one bit compelling, and doesn't support what you're saying
This makes me so happy to read! I'd donate and definitely travel to Portugal specifically just to attend (as I did with the last ones when I had already moved away). Codebits also shaped my life, got me my first job, new friends, etc, so here's a +1. I think there's at least a good few hundreds of people with the same story :)
I read many posts of people complaining about some cloud service deleting their data for „no reason“ (= user error, mostly not reading emails) every month, while I can’t even remember the last post of someone losing their data due to a fire (except OVH bursting into flames ;) ). So I think it’s a valid argument to be made.

Bottom line: have a backup, and utilize cloud as well as local storage.
Atkins, low carb, paleo, keto, carnivore -- diet of the month. Sure but they are very close to the same thing and these have been rolling along for decades. Intermittent fasting and some new drugs are the only things in recent years that seem novel imo.
Or these guys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfside_condominium_collapse

42 years... and some poor maintenance
> Big companies have big processes and that, at least at Google, would have prevented this from happening for at least 12-18 months.

Well gee, if all these software developers are making them slower at software development, it sure sounds like they should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete.
> Genuinely excited to see RSS being talked about more and more

Ditto. Some positive trends for a while.
As far as I know, the US decriminalised with little funding for the health programs that follow it. that's been the main criticism I've heard.
I remember seeing this software on the university's computers, an acrobat.. and I was thinking.. WHAT is that software that I see in EVERY PC? I didn't know what PDF was at the time. I grew up with an Amstrad PC1512 (oh, and a family too) but never had to use Acrobat. Only GW-Basic, Zaxxon, Bubble Bobble, Defender of the Crown, and other super useful software ;)

The most 'complicated' software I used was Volkswriter!
Independently of the veracity of any statements from either side, the simultaneous resignation of 3 of the main foundation members of the primary open-source repository for the largest mobile OS seems worthy of HN.
The robust careers of Star Trek stars who became video game voice actors
yup, and if people are looking for usage I just found a gist that shows how gob handling can be useful (writing to cache that allows the reading back to be castable into the correct structs) https://gist.github.com/pioz/ca5b7a11200f54afbd76dee7acbcc06...
>How is that any different than a new Rolex and a Brooks Brothers shirt?

Also nevau rich shit
Fun fact is that they have this record "only" because the east asians seas just kept screwing with everyone doing massive fleets. The mongols, koreans, japans ...
For the home NAS, Assume a 5-6 year lifespan for the drives so in those 10 years you will spend another $100.

Of course this assumes you just need storage while a NAS can provide other services allowing you to consolidate calendars, shared note-taking, password managers, etc.