skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's from a year ago. ChatGPT can add something new to this. I asked it to explain the code:

---

This C code appears to be a cryptic and obfuscated implementation that generates the lyrics for the classic "99 Bottles of Beer" song. The code employs various macro and obfuscation techniques, making it challenging to read and understand at first glance.

Here's a breakdown of the key elements:

1. *Macro Definitions:*
- `??=define _(please, help)`: Defines a macro `_` that replaces `please` with `help`.
- `??=define _____(i, m, v, e, r, y) r%:%:m`: Defines a macro `_____` that concatenates the parameters with `r` in between.

2. *Main Function:*
- The main function uses obfuscated code to generate and print the lyrics for the "99 Bottles of Beer" song.
- The song lyrics are printed using a series of nested macros and expressions.

3. *Obfuscation:*
- The use of obfuscation techniques, such as complex macro names and expressions, makes the code challenging to read and understand at first glance.

4. *Output:*
- The program prints the lyrics to the console, representing the number of bottles of beer on the wall and the action of taking one down and passing it around.

Overall, this code is a playful and obfuscated way of implementing the "99 Bottles of Beer" song in C. If you have any specific questions about certain parts of the code, feel free to ask!

---

I asked it to strip off the obfuscation, and here's what I get.

---

#include <stdio.h>

#define please !
#define help -
#define bottles_on_the_wall bottles
#define Take_one_down_pass_it_around printf("Take one
down, pass it around,\n");

void singSong(int bottles) {
if (please(please(help(help(bottles- please(please(help(help(bottles,please(!bottles<<help(bottles-!!bottles)))))),
help(help(help(!bottles<<!bottles))))))))) {
printf("%d bottles of beer on the wall, %d bottles of beer.\n", bottles, bottles);
} else {
printf("%d bottle of beer on the wall, %d bottle of beer.\n", bottles, bottles);
}

Take_one_down_pass_it_around;

if (please(help(bottles))) {
printf("%d bottles of beer on the wall.\n\n", bottles);
} else {
printf("%d bottle of beer on the wall.\n\n", bottles);
}
}

int main() {
int bottles = 99;

while (please(!(!help(help(help(bottles-please(help(help(bottles, please(!!bottles)))))))))) {
singSong(bottles);
}

printf("Please let me die. Mercy, I'm in pain.\n");
return 0;
}

---

It doesn't work. But it's a good start. Ironically if you remove the extraneous ) in the first 'if' statement, you only get the "Please let me die..." lol. So it's close, but not close enough.
Watching porn at work? It's apparently the most popular time for it
so the problem with "DO-178" OS like vxWorks or ghs is that it's not DO-178. it's a version of the OS that has artifacts to support getting your produce DO-178 certified using it. It's DO-178 "certifiable" maybe.

if you need to certify one million lines of OS and a 1/2 million lines of your application, it's handy to have that first bit done for you. Until you find that you have a 1/2 million lines of code that interface with the OS.

so we're _done_ with this crap. say we have a 1/2 million lines of our application and 50,000 lines to talk to our hardware, and less than 10,000 for a simple executive. I don't need your scheduler (which doesn't work right), your compilers (which are just buggy old out-of-date ports) or your IDE which is just buggy, old, out-of-date eclipse with a plugin and branding. And I don't need your DO-178 artifacts for a million lines of buggy OS code when I can replace it with less code than that it takes to interface with your bug riddled OS.

And when you buy the DO-178 version, don't think it means "has less bugs". DO-178 means that it has specific artifacts including MCDC coverage against requirement based tests. All of that is very expensive. None of that means it works right. If you put your money into checklists and process, guess how much is left for "making it work right".

Garbage. If you are responsible for safety-critical software, then you are responsible for safety-critical software. Paying a 3rd party for part of the responsibility would be nice if they took any responsibility, which they don't.

So, in conclusion: Pbththththh!!! on the snake oil vendors of safety magic.
I'm already at that point, effectively. I spent a few decades worrying about fitting data into hard drives... most recently with my digital photos. I've stopped worrying.

My first computer stored data on audio cassette tapes. When I started college, the new hot machine in the server room was a DEC VAX 11/780 running VMS.

For nostalgia purposes, I have a virtual VAX 11/780 running VMS in my phone, it only takes about 3 GB. I don't do much else with the phone, so I have plenty of room left over.

I can imagine ways to fill up a petabyte personally... but not much past that.
It’s a long running feud I believe. Look at his twitter profile and website to see how he communicates.
The D language dynamic array, which is a pointer+length pair, has (over time) nearly completely supplanted pointer arithmetic. The pair prevents buffer overflows and underflows.

Raw pointer arithmetic is not allowed in code marked @safe.

I've proposed it for C and C++:

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html

It would be simple to add it, and would be legacy compatible.
If you’ve never watched a video of one of these interceptor rockets, it’s worth a view. They take off at an insane speed.
I don't really have the discipline to sit down and actually learn some useful math, however I enjoy the subject at a superficial level, so... that is, everything I say is wrong.

There was an interesting comment in the CouriusMarc video I linked. Quoted in full.

"Folks, no need to argue about colorful alternative mathematical theories - the thorny problem of division by zero was solved for good over 100 years ago by the rigorous development of infinitesimal calculus. Which says: division of a positive non-zero constant by something that tends to zero, tends to infinity [added note: dividing "zero by zero", or more exactly, two things that tend towards zero, is more complicated: it can give zero, infinity, or anything in-between, but that's for another time...]. So the calculator sort of gives the right answer, using almost the correct method: trying to fit an infinitesimally small number into a big one, and finding it fits so many times it goes to infinity. I would put it in the category of happy mechanical accidents."

Which fails to entirely satisfy, I suspect this is because it focuses on the mechanics of one view of the problem and leaves many other views still conflicting. The heart of the problem, that is, why the operation tends to be left as undefined, is that to be mathematically rigorous you have to satisfy all views as to what division actually means.
Nature, almost completely analog, has been around a thousand times longer than humans. How many times has 'evolution' used digital methods to accomplish something? Perhaps we've chosen to switch to digital because we're in a hurry and its easier ... in hopes of, some day, asymptotically approaching the advantages of analog.
It's sad that you feel like you have to preemptively defend yourself against criticism for implying children shouldn't be exposed to subversive or NSFW content.
No kidding about cicadas being loud. We were in the south of France earlier this year and it's incredible how much of the soundscape is dominated by the cicadas. I have no idea if it was just a couple or a couple billion, but it seemed to just come from everywhere above us
GCP is pretty reliable - for a smallish deployment you could probably go a couple of years before seeing a machine die.

So they probably never built in health checks and auto fail over.
The Fork Bomb: What it is, how it works, and where it originated
The guys I knew in Africa all thought of the Chinese as white people.
Films that made people emigrate
Tom and jerry is popular as it kept the kids engaged and since there's only action involved, anyone could watch it regardless of age, i remember seeing old people watching tom and jerry with joy, that's why the numbers are high.
From reports online the UDM-SE won’t actually NAT close to 10 Gbps and the manufacturer doesn’t provide any NAT performance numbers…so it becomes a bottle neck if you have 10 Gbps internet which is widely available and not that expensive my part of the world. (Hong Kong).

The only reasonably priced router I could find about 6 months ago that would NAT at line speed was the TP-LINK Onada ER8411. I ended up going with an all Oanda network which seems to work fine but ubiquiti had originally been my first choice.
We had a big year for them in 2021 in Australia. I was testing an Apple Watch at the time and since exercise was one of the reasons at that time to be allowed out I went for bush walks in my local area.

In quite a few areas the noise was so loud the watch informed me I was going to damage my hearing if I remained in the area.
Write Code in Your Sleep
I didn’t see that one. If I saw someone publicly describe being dishonest in an interview process, I think I’d have to rule them out by default.

I know not everyone is perfectly honest all the time. But if you advertise cheating a process meant to reveal rather than conceal information, there’s a real problem.
Decoding the gun-wielding angels of Bolivia
You can check the Wyoming BLM records for the past history of the Brook Mine, near Sheridan, plot parcels, or you could get an account or ask for a demo on something like:

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

that archives that stuff daily and has done so for five decades & more.
Am too expensive to hire, but if you want to try, send me a message fridaycandours@gmail.com

Currently learning how to lead large teams
I can't recommend this enough! It's such a quality of life improvement to get the powerful dynamic documentation features of rST and Sphinx (and its many extensions), but in the more pleasant and familiar syntax of Markdown. I use MyST + Sphinx for all my project docs now.

This podcast episode is worth a listen for anyone interested in these tools and where they're headed:
https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/354/sphinx-myst-and-pyth...
When small companies get big, there must sometimes be legacy compute jobs still left on the original infrastructure right? Ie. Jeff's original php script to trigger some automation that never got adopted by any team.

Do all the big tech companies still have a box somewhere full of legacy stuff that 'probably isn't important, but not worth turning off just incase it is'?
Can you add some qualitative comparisons that make you say that?
At that level of effort entire electronics systems might be replaceable too.

If a washing machine circuit board breaks (It probably won't, so e mechanical thing will), I could probably swap everything to run on a PLC if I really had to.

I wouldn't have a clue what to do if the mechanical timing stuff broke, other than cleaning it and swapping it for a PLC if that failed.
Mister Rogers had an excellent jazz pianist doing all the music live in studio throughout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Costa
Ask HN: How do you handle underperforming remotes at your company?
When a remote employee appears to be slacking off regularly, what is the right course of action to handle this situation?
There are some contexts in which division by zero is defined in a meaningful way. The most common such situation is the real projective line or its complex analogue, the Riemann sphere [0].
We’ll focus on the latter, since it has a richer structure. The Riemann sphere is essentially just the complex plane “closed up” (compactified) by adding a point at infinity. The metric is defined such that points of very large norm are all close to infinity, and hence to one another.

Any nonzero number divided by zero is infinity. Zero divided by zero is undefined. The operation of adding 1 has a parabolic fixed point at infinity.

The Riemann sphere is not a group, but it still has many very nice properties. For instance, the set of analytic maps from the Riemann sphere to itself is precisely the set of rational functions (together with the constant map infinity).

A much more profound statement is Thurston’s characterization of rational functions [1], which states that every orientation preserving branched covering map F from the sphere to itself is equivalent (topologically conjugate) to a rational map on the Riemann sphere, unless F satisfies a certain computable property.

In other words, maps on one of the most ubiquitous topological spaces, namely the sphere, are often best understood by introducing a structure where division by zero is allowed.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sphere

[1] https://pi.math.cornell.edu/~hubbard/ThurstonRatMaps.pdf
I've seen data on floppy disks from the early 1990s a few weeks ago, on an Apple ][. Magnetic media lasted way longer than I expected.

But, in this case... I have a hard time believing in a "Thousand Year Write" ;-)

There's no way that something that thin and ceramic isn't going to somehow become embrittled, or fracture, in 100 or more years.
Usually compilers default to the ISA they were built on. In the case of Clang this is controlled by LLVM_DEFAULT_TARGET_TRIPLE cmake option - maybe a weird mix of options occurred where Clang for armv6 was built on armv7 but the default triple was not adjusted correctly.

Current docs about this option:

> LLVM target to use for code generation when no target is explicitly specified. It defaults to “host”, meaning that it shall pick the architecture of the machine where LLVM is being built. If you are building a cross-compiler, set it to the target triple of your desired architecture.
here’s how it makes sense to me:

What question are we actually asking when we ask “what is 8 divided by 2”? We’re asking “If I have 8 jellybeans and break then into two groups, how many jellybeans are in each group?”
So Consider the question for 8/0: “If I have 8 jellybeans and break them into zero groups, how many jellybeans are in each group?” The question itself is invalid. Answering with any number wouldn’t make sense, the only response that would make sense would be “what do you mean? There are no groups!” It’s almost like it stops being a math problem at all, hence no mathematical answer.
I suspect we're both arguing the same thing - that some level of regulation is important.

Clearly if you are in an earthquake zone then earthquake protection are high on the list. If you are on a flood plain, then flooding needs to be managed send so on.

Now for my next part, I run the risk of being flippant. That's not my goal. Clearly the building code failed those 115 people, and their loss is 115 families in mourning. But, and I say this with all due contrition, that "only" 185 people died is a measure of regulation success, not failure. One building collapsed, but most survived (at least enough for people to get out safely.)

No doubt that building will be learned from, and there will be efforts to make every building perfectly safe. As you point out some building may be too expensive to rehabilitate.

Should those buildings be demolished? It's easy to count the dead from one gat fell down. It's harder to count the deaths from no-building, or a demolished building.

Obviously in an earthquake zone, earthquake regs are critical. No argument there.

But what about a million small regs that add up to real cost, but offer minimal gains? Each seems, in isolation, to be Important, but their collective protection seems marginal.

Again, it can seem cavalier to say "good enough", when "perfect" saves lives. Its easy to count lives cost with "good enough". It's harder to count lives lost to "perfect".
Oh - they give you a support rep. Just the support rep is powerless to do anything.
Cut them some slack. What about their clients?

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core
i dont know what ads you are getting, but most of it is ether trash dropshipping products, gambling products(often bad mobile games) or other worthless stuff.

there are some plattforms with relative "high" quality ads, but facebook is not one of them.
Perhaps a list of bibliography tips? Here's my five cents: https://pivic.blog/blog/technical-writing/
ACC is an important security and comfort feature that is of course optional on the Porsche.
Thanks necovek, I just spotted that myself! Probably best to remove that link as I don't have an about page yet. I have just pushed a commit to do that.
Never considered the notion that we might be essentially the physical end effectors for a digital super intelligence.
yeah, I actually read a book about that, which there aren't many of. The multiple half-assed "invasions" of Canada were a disaster for the US, as was the loss of Detroit and Michilimackinac Island. On the latter, the Brits had no reason to give it back, but they did.

People like to remember the Battle of New Orleans, except the war was already over. Good thing the Brits were preoccupied with Napoleon.
Could be that dividing by zero is every number so it's 2 and it's also 3.

Or in the blog terms, the inverse of multiplying by nothing is dividing by everything.
For a place like New York City finding solitude would be nearly impossible. I really hope that anything the city does for the community doesn't destroy its sanctuary-like properties for the residents, but merely improves their quality of life. But I doubt it.

> Many residents of The Hole, long abandoned by the state, find peace in the isolation that The Hole provides.

> Then, he softens as he explains why he stays. “I stay here because it’s quiet. It’s peaceful,” Lopez says. “This place, it’s idyllic.”

My heartfelt respect to Richie Gonzalez for taking care of injured animals.
>I noticed that many people praising Ada on the internet

Not seen that anywhere, on Reddit or HN. I mean Ada is rarely even mentioned. On HN, Ada sometimes is hated by many. And this is speaking as someone who gets all the fingers for bringing up Ada whenever someone said Rust is the only PL for safety critical applications.

I am actually rather surprised this Submission gets some many people commenting.

And to be honest I think most of those point aren't because they dont know the language, it seems to be more like lacking in context. ( Which is often the case in any online discussions )
Why would Elon Musk want to deliberately destroy X?
Using CSS for a more personal web experience
2nd attempt at blogging. Comments are very welcome!
I learned about the reflex arc in the early 1980's via Charlie Brown's "Questions and Answers" series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Brown%27s_Super_Book_o...

It wasn't named, but it was presented as "if you accidentally touched a hot stove, your reflexes would move your hand before you felt the pain because the round trip to your spine is a shorter path." Which thinking about it now, doesn't quite make sense as an explanation because one is a round trip and the other is not, but oh well. There was an accompanying picture showing a round trip to the base of the skull/top of the spine (not the middle of the spine like the picture in wikipedia).

I did not learn about this in school, but it was apparently accepted enough to put into a children's "encyclopedia".
I think RPi has struck a reasonable balance where the mainstream Linux community doesn't really support ancient ARMv6 so RPI themselves maintains forked software (e.g. Raspbian). This way the cost of legacy is borne by those who benefit from it, not everyone.
I was going to ask if there was anything comparable for Android... :(
Bjarne and I met at a conference a couple summers ago. We had a nice conversation and there's no ill will between us.
I think this is also one of my least favorite syntax choices in rST. I second the suggestions to use Sphinx with Markdown via MyST.
Brown dwarfs and white dwarfs, please. We’re not talking about Duergar or Grombrindal here.
As a kid (11 or 12) I made an enlarger out of an old discarded slide projector, a dimmer switch and a scrap wood frame. I managed to scrounge enough money to buy supplies to make a few prints-- it worked pretty good. But, supply costs were out of reach, so those first prints were all it ever made.
Assuming you have objective performance metrics, and consistent criteria, the appropriate course of action would be to warn them, re-evaluate after a trial period, and fire if nothing changes.
- IPv6 - It's 2023 and it's still not deployed correctly and universally. Github, Github Copilot, Chromium-based browsers, and Amazon Alexa give up in the presence of IPv6.

- DNSSEC+DANE - It's half-assed deployed but there's a lack of end-user UX

- wais - search before gopher

- afs - distributed fs

- discard protocol - basically, a network-based /dev/null

- humans.txt - Not around as much as it was

- makeheaders - Auto-generated C/C++ headers

- man page generators - ronn and help2man

- checkinstall - The automatic software package creator

- bashdb and zshdb

- crystal - Compiled Ruby-ish

- forth - Powered the FreeBSD bootloader menu for many years and word processors (typewriter-like almost computers)

- ocaml - The best ML, used by Jane Street and Xen

- pony - A language built around an arguably better GC than Azul's C4 with arguably stronger sharing semantics than Rust

- prolog - Erlang's grandpa

- rpython - PyPy's recompiler-compiler

- pax - POSIX archives

- shar - shell archives - Self-extracting archives that look like scripts at the beginning

- surfraw - Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web - founded by Julian Assange

- step-ca - A Go-based PKI server

- dmraid - Because it works

- X10 - Before WiFi and IoT, there was the Firecracker: a parasitic power serial port RF outlet controller

- FreeBSD - It's not unknown or obscure per se, but it powers many important things in the civilized world without getting much credit

- :CueCat - A dotcom era barcode reader that was given away

- Xen - If you need to run a VPS but can't ju$tify u$ing VMware

- KataContainers - k8s but with VM isolation

- stow - software management by symlinks

- habitat - similar philosophy as nix but not as clean and functional and almost like Arch PKGBUILD but with more infrastructure around it

- JTAG - debug all the things

- in-circuit emulators (ICEs) - hardware-based debuggers

- polarized light sources - easier to see things under the bi/trinocular microscope
To add to this, you can easily learn to use the newest features. I cringe every time I read or hear "C++ has become so huge and complicated". It only takes 20 minutes to get proficient in the newest features such as modules and concepts. People hear "polymorphic lambdas" and imagine something so complicated, it came out of the Necronomicon. No, you simply replace your lambda parameters with auto and the compiler takes care of the types and that's it. And variadic templates aren't going to eat your soul if you can read code that has recursion.
The Ten Best History Books of 2023
Regarding kava, as mentioned in the first few paragraphs, I enjoyed it greatly the few times I tried it but had horrible skin reactions as well as strange arthritic-like symptoms. I think it can be an effective mechanism to replace alcohol addiction given there was no hangover, but as a Scandinavian maybe my naturally dry skin cannot handle it.

Regarding math, you can represent math in any symbols. Math is pure logic. No matter how esoteric your branch of mathematics it can be reduced all the way to basic axioms. Many ancient societies had understood enough mathematics in order to construct monuments aligned with the heavens, and reasoned about math in unique visualizations.
The plaid has better brakes as an option and apparently a much better handling since a software (!) update.

It’s for sure not a GT3 RS on the track but it’s not that bad like it used to be until very recently.
Uh, what? It's weird to assume "clang++ -Wall -o t t.cc" should produce a binary that runs on the architecture we're currently using?
Understanding the Fashion-Mnist IDX Format