skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m so happy that this article mentions Bajtek.

It was one of the most important, if not _the_ most important, source of computing knowledge in my early childhood. I was born in 1984, got my first computer – a C64C – in 1991, and my dad procured a heap of past issues of „Bajtek” from previous years. In rural Poland those days, knowledge was hard to come by, so those proved invaluable to me.

Not only were there type-in programs and games, like in the German 64er, but most of them were actually accompanied by prose articles that offered clear explanations, background, and trivia. I learned BASIC from Bajtek and a few books. Bajtek literally had a monthly column called „For Preschoolers Only” with a BASIC tutorial in it.
I am a big film nerd and the strangeness was not evident at all, not even with zoom and spending time (I am very perceptive and attentive) trying to figure out what the complain actually is (oh, too much face detail? Smh...)
Drop the table from some sort of safe mode, or figure out the bad entry in the table and hex edit the file to exclude it, or find/write some sort of recovery/fsck problem for the particular database flavor in question. Those are three alternatives that come to mind for me, which is to say, I wouldn't have thought to spam the db like that. Neat trick!
In the US, all the prestige undergraduate (bachelors degree. age 18 to 22) universities are cheap for kids of most families.

If you are paying through the nose for a bachelor’s degree and not from a rich family, then that means you are getting bamboozled at a private school when you could have bought the same “prestige” at any number of cheaper state schools.
Exactly! My Atari booted up to a READY prompt and even loading a program/game from tape required typing a BASIC command. The on-ramp was incredibly shallow and smooth.
It makes a lot of sense to feed your ventilation output to a heatpump input for energy recovery with an air-source heatpump.

But otherwise I think there is a lot of value in other forms of heating. Specifically in radiative heating. Floor heating is great for that, but other water-based systems are also possible.
Not really scientific or anything but I tend to give it the task: „Write a simple http server in Go that saves all requests into a SQLite database.“

What I am looking for is:

- did it forget to import the SQLite driver?

- is it doing weird SQL shenanigans like selecting MAX(id) to obtain the next potential id?

- is the code rather simple or over-engineered?

update:
Most LLMs produce a decent answer, however it you increase the difficulty a little bit by asking it "Write a simple and CGo free http server in Go ...", most LLMs get the sql driver wrong (except for gpt-4-1106-preview)
Nobody is ever talking about the original Dartmouth BASIC, so we're really talking about a vast language family here. Arguably with more difference between different strands than e.g. within the BCPL family.
Interesting. Back when I was in uni, the university offered a 6 week prep course that would recap/teach the basics that were expected in the first semester.

So enrolled students could choose to take that course to brush up on or learn these fundamentals so everyone was (in theory) on the expected skill level. Other than that there was pretty much no hand holding - 18+ year olds are considered adults after all.
BASIC was ideal for introducing a generation of school kids to programming.

Back in the 80’s you fired up your computer and you had a readily-available interpreter for which you could immediately do ‘real’ stuff like printing characters anywhere on the screen and turning on and off pixels (even in colour on some platforms).

There was no need to compile or build a project or start with a lot of boilerplate. You just did stuff right away from a REPL or could make programs from line numbers and save them.

I learned a ton from it. Eg how to think algorithmically and break up something complicated into small parts. A key milestone was grokking the difference between GOTO and GOSUB. I also understood much about its limitations once I started learning Turbo Pascal in high school.

If you’re judging BASIC compared to a modern IDE with a modern structured language of course it falls short, but for what it was at the time it was nearly perfect.
As a child a learnt BASIC after having taught LOGO. As a child that was an advancement (with all due respect to LOGO). Almost every computer included BASIC so it was an universal programming language for home computers. You could also interact with assembler (CALL/SYS instructions) so it enabled to go even farther. Conclusion, BASIC was pervasive and it was not horrible since your focus was in creating something on cheap personal computers. I know two older people than me, accountants, that learnt BASIC around their 40s and build their own accounting programs in a ZX81 [2] and TI-99/4A
[3]. I don't think many people now of that age (plus "age inflation") learn this new skill (programming) and create an useful program or even a script for themselves.

The language is primitive by today's standards but it gives you all sort of ways to express yourself. When BASIC progressed and was more structured, for example AmigaBASIC from Microsoft [2], there were more alternatives and more evolution so it is natural that BASIC faded.

Also important to highlight that every popular computer magazine (media) published BASIC code, also books.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaBASIC

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A
> can't even do their calculations mentally and sit there writing furiously when doing problems on exams.

What calculations? There were no calculations in my Applied Physics finals in 1977.
Out of curiosity, did you consider transpiling to LaTeX? Memoir.cls is fantastic at those sorts of calculations and actually the formatting output from pandoc is usually quite good too.
The evolution of this is fully automated checkout like in Amazon Fresh stores.

It's fantastic: I can go to the store, shove some groceries in my pockets or backpack, and walk out in 45 seconds. Amazon pings you a notification telling you how long you were there after you leave, and I'm convinced they do it to have people try to improve their shortest times.
Very handy in Scotland where there are far too many deer.

Venison, venisoff. As Mr. Miyagi never said.
I made an AI Christmas card this, year, here's what I learned
Dock’n’Roll looks interesting, but, alas, he didn’t share the source code (or did he?)
Whether the community is hurt in the long run is a complicated economic question involving many factors.

Specialization is one of the most important motors of economic development. Not every community can or should try to produce everything.
Human Rights Watch is biased

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watc...
I've programmed extensively in QBasic and TI-BASIC. Both were extremely limiting, ofc.

But there is one thing I'm very grateful for, in retrospect. Both languages required very few "concepts". Functions? Pointers? Classes? These are basics for coders, but BASIC didn't ask even this of you.

With a small syntactic baseline you could make full on games pretty easily. Compare this to making games even with Python using PyGame, or Godot, or whathaveyou.

Of course, nothing prevents you from learning Python and just limiting yourself to a few data types and control structures. But what really made BASICs easy (for me) was that "draw to the screen" was such a primitive operation. Same with detecting keypresses.

Again, these are easy if you're a software engineer, or even if you know how to code. But what if you don't?

Even Visual Basic had this virtue. When I was in Mexico I volunteered at a homeless shelter. The man who operated the shelter had no coding education, but was able to self teach Visual Basic two decades ago, and had created an entire system for managing the facility.

He had tried to rewrite it to use a more modern language (I believe C# or VB.Net) and was totally unable.

I've never used VB but I've heard countless tales like this, where non-coders create entire functioning software in it.
Agree.

All those remastering are often done with more importance given to the economic side of things, instead of respecting the art.

Some are destroying the original work.

The first thing that pop into my mind is how they destroyed Buffy with the HD makeover:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

As a reddit commenter said about the cropping job: "All they had to do was nothing and they still fucked it up."

It's a disgrace.
I don’t really understand this comment.

I didn’t “slap” any date on top of the article. 2 Oct 2023 is the date I published my article. (This is how blogs on the Internet work.)

The first line of the article says that this all happened in 2012. I’m not sure I could get any clearer there.

The “GPT distillation” phrase is pretty rude. Anyone reading the article can see the difference between it and the presentation. Every “hand-drawn” image in the article is created by me in Excalidraw, and any images from the presentation are sourced with a very clear link to the presentation.

If you have any constructive feedback, I am happy to listen and take it into account.

Otherwise, I’m not really a fan of the rudeness. Thanks.
I think that's more because Pinterest dominates the image results but you can't view things at a higher resolution without signing in. I certainly blocked Pinterest for that reason.
Sorry, but no. Edmonds clearly maps "efficiently-solvable problems" onto the notion of P in a complete way, not only as a subset of P.
They're sort of self-selecting over an extended period of time. While your degree may sound interesting it won't attract too much talent when there are not relevant job openings and every graduate ends up pivoting. Of course, demand does not zero out which is probably a good thing.

The only degrees where this selection mechanism seems to have inverse effects are business management related ones.
Lotka–Volterra equations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...
> saw the next chapter was literal witchcraft and gibberish (pointers), got overwhelmed

I remember being very confused for a time by C pointers as an undergrad in the late 80s - a situation that none of my teachers really helped with. Eventually I realised that they were just memory addresses, and a whole lot of confusion collapsed into a simple concept. I still remember what that felt like in my head.

Turned out that many of my peers had a similar experience, and not all of them got through it.

So I'm wondering yet again: why do people find C pointers so difficult to grok? Is it conceptual (indirection), notational (& and *, arrays as pointers, etc), or something else?

(Pre-uni I'd devoted a lot of effort to getting VIC and SID chips to do stuff with peek and poke commands, and writing some assembly language, which I reckon did me no harm when I first encountered C - even though I probably didn't immediately recognise the connections. I do wonder what the contemporary equivalent is.)
Sure, they have to pay for those who get an education. In return, they get doctors to help them when they are sick or injured, lawyers to aid them when they are wronged or do wrong, engineers to make sure buildings do not fall on them, and myriad other benefits.

Seems like a worthwhile investment.
Not sure why you're seeing that - I see a short article with multiple paragraphs and a few photographs, using uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
Love the lesson here. Don’t wait to reach out for help!
Basically, I have a big corpus of text (novels, as I'm interested in getting the learners to read) and a dictionary. I annotate the words using the dictionary, and then give the text context, the target word and the possible dictionary definitions as input to LLM, and I let it select or score, which definitions could be considered to "apply" given the context. Finally, I tally the counts.

The disambiguated senses are provided by the dictionary. Does that answer your question?
Cummins Paying Record $1.7B for Allegedly Bypassing Emissions Tests
"Preliminary estimates from the Justice Department suggest that defeat devices on some of the engines led to thousands of tons of excess emissions of nitrogen oxides, which Garland said could lead to breathing issues like asthma and respiratory infections over long-term exposure.".

They and the other polluters should be made to pay the medical bills for their victims.
We miss having environments like BASIC nowadays, Python is probably the closest to it, but at least by the 16 and 32 bit days of home computers, BASIC not only was structured, native compilation was part of the picture against.

Guess we need to hope for Mojo's success.
Thanks, I look into these.
With modern nuclear weapons design they could probably be a lot lighter. Speculation has it that the US can now build fusion secondaries without the heavy pusher.
“reality-star-cum-influencer”

I read that the wrong way.
Mastodon features a more complex content filtering based on keywords [1],[2] and you can always try to pick instance that fits your needs. Hashtag support is here since beginning if I'm not mistaken. Bluesky has a rather simplified filtering [3], [4] that most likely will be appealing to mass users, tho since service revolves around customized multiple feeds they shouldn't in theory see and interact with the content they don't like in the first place [5]. There's no hashtag support so far - which seems odd because this is a pretty much standard feature on social networks.

[1] - https://ibb.co/km5nGDW

[2] - https://ibb.co/Xpp7t05

[3] - https://ibb.co/QcG1G4d

[4] - https://ibb.co/K2WPvfW

[5] - https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/3-30-2023-algorithmic-choice
The Ferret Show
I believe this was 10 or 15 years ago, but TTC really went hard on getting rid of Tetris clones... Even the x86 bootable one from a couple years back got shut down. I wouldn't risk it personally.
When I say calculations I mean doing algebraic manipulations, not arithmetic.

I have a strategy: first it try to do it mentally, if I can't I start doing it on paper, then once I solve it I wait for a long while and then I do it mentally.

My impression is that that kind of thing isn't really taught and I believe it needs to be taught.
I’ve tried the Amazon Fresh stores.

It seems to be a fair amount of pfaff getting in to confirm who you are, there didn’t seem to be that much selection to find much worth buying.

But automated tills have long queues, and I’ve noticed I sometimes bodge the payment system and leave without paying. But being in the habit of checking my bank account whilst shopping I notice payment hasn’t gone through and put my shopping through.

Which is strange since someone ran after me when I absent Monday walked out of a store with an empty shopping basket.
That's what I was about to comment, 13 billion videos and the same 10 videos recommended in a loop, what a product failure.
I’ve always wanted something like this but integrated into the terminal or vim. Like you could have a hotkey that sends a json object from your debug session over to this scratch pad to save for later.
I bought an Analogue Pocket and installed a bunch of emulators and games from archive.org. Gameboy Tetris is great (I bought a cartridge from EBay) but for me, that’s the exception. I’ve tried a handful of the other games and came to realize that games from that era just don’t click with me.
Try reading it on a phone with Chrome or Safari
Why doesn't it have suckless' st?
Which is why VBA is still loved, regardless how many think it is outdated.

Lost count of non-coders that outgrown their Excel macros that I got to know, that dive into VBA, eventually ask IT for VS and VB.NET.
Allegedly?

This sounds like an out of court settlement to side step guilt.

Either that or caution in the title to avoid legal action.
The excuse there is that the whole video is kind-of "moving images" inspired by Sgt. Peppers covers and the fact that the music is also a result of combined sounds recorded in different decades.

On another side, we have the recent "washing and flattening" of the films by AI for no reason but to "look better" for those who aren't really going to invest their energy to see where it gives worse results.

"It is expedient and profitable if people don’t remember what film is supposed to look like."

And there are also enough who have never seen how it looked like before, anyway.
Maybe it was just really bad comping/roto-ing of Lennon from original footage, but it looks pretty face-replacement-like to me...

Unless you're talking about original 35mm negatives (which in some cases might have been lost / destroyed / degraded) where there is normally 4K resolution (with decent film stock - as mentioned before, some of the stock quality from the late 70s and 80s was very bad and digitising it didn't produce the resolution expected), using print copies (one or two removed from the original negative) will generally only give you 2K resolution.

The VFX would have been done at 2K anyway...
That doesn't logically track, given that one can become a great software engineer anywhere they have an Internet connection these days. It's probably good advice for maxing out your compensation, though.
I can't agree on OP's criticism of They Will Not Grow Old. First, the used footage was not an art movie. It was journalistic/documentary. It was meant to show reality (although mostly as propaganda).

Second, the restoration manages to bridge the gap between 1914 and 2014. Old B/W movies tend to give an impression of artificiality and distance. Seeing the colorized, interpolated version makes these soldiers people of blood and flesh. "This could happen to YOU", is what the movie says, and it couldn't have achieved it with the original footage. Given the slaughterhouse that was WWI, it seems entirely appropriate.
Counter example, VMS Basic.
Thanks you! Yep, multi-word idioms are tough. How do you quantify whether a phrase is just a "sum" of it's words, or is there some additional meaning, "idiomness" to it. I haven't thought a lot about that yet, but it's a problem that I need to solve for this.
Large domain-agnostic models can forecast chaos far into the future
All used as well :(
The irony of this article being hosted on a github.io page...
Question I have for HN is if you had a weekend to create a Pinterest competitor for a hackathon that needed to scale to the same number of users, what would you use?
The Matrix new transfer made me really sad. It is one of my favorite movies of all time, and this new version had the colors done all wrong and in some scenes, I had the impression that the framerate was wrong, especially the bullet time and other action scenes, like they don't match the rest of the movie.
So is the guardian. It's standard operating procedure for militant newspapers to express their own opinion by pretending to report on some random third party expressing them.

Typical example is headline in the style of "minister xx condemned for saying yy". And in the body of the article, "condemned" means some random university professor or political activist or even an anonymous tweet quoted saying they really dislike yy. And if the editor of the newspaper likes yy, the headline will instead be "minister xx praised for saying yy". It's all objective reporting of facts!
Just like unsafe code blocks in modern languages, quite easy to search for.

Basic has proper strings, proper arrays, with bounds checking, and automatic memory management.
I don't think that's how Strava on Apple Watch works
If you’re on macOS:

pbpaste >> ~/Scratchfile

You can probably hook that up to Alfred or whatever to have a hotkey for it.
Full of outdated advice. Tiobe? SOLID? Come on, these were never really relevant, and less relevant now.
Barcodes are much cheaper to implement, and provided a much greater benefit compared to the alternative (no automatic way of recognising goods), compared to RFID. RFID improves the customer UX experience at self checkouts, and also the opportunity to improve stock management (stock counts could be reduced to just waving an antenna over a shelf). But that improve is pretty marginal compared to barcodes. Also RFID tags aren’t a simple to introduce as barcodes, you can just slap an RFID tag on existing packing and just expect it to work, there are issues when dealing products that contain metal etc. Not insurmountable, but one more fly in the ointment.

Chip-and-pin is very poor comparison, there’s realistically only 3 major card networks in Europe. If they mandate Chip-and-PIN, then chip-and-PIN happens. They only need to update card readers, of which there is only a small number of manufacturers, and they all already are used to following strict standards, and cards can be replaced as they expire, and again only a small number of manufacturers.

Simply put RFID requires a huge number of manufacturers to correctly implement RFID tags on all their products, just so a single store can implement better checkouts. Why would manufacturers voluntarily pay for that cost when there’s no clear benefit for them? For stores, why would want to cover the cost of their suppliers adding RFID infrastructure to their supply chain, when the benefits are fairly limited compared to barcodes?

That’s completely to Chip-and-PIN, where only the stores need to update their readers, and they can easily change to which ever manufacturer is willing to make them.

Companies like Decathlon and Uniqlo have a huge advantage, because they get huge supply and stock control benefits from RFID due to their vertical integration. Better self checkout are just the cherry on top, but won’t be the primary reason for adopting RFID tech.
The deer population in the US, at least the eastern US, has been increasing since the mid-1930s. Largely this is because farms--where one might hunt--have been replaced by suburbs, which offer shelter and gardens. Because the overpopulation of deer is harmful to the vegetation, the US Park Service employees hunters every winter to shoot deer in Rock Creek Park at night.
Must be different kinds of film nerds.
Funny enough, my degree was in business management and it was basically useless except for the accounting and economics classes. I eventually pivoted to software dev (self taught).
The problem is most times C stuff doesn't crash, it corrupts memory and erroneous results.

We're lucky if it crashes.
Firefly suffers second stage anomaly on "Fly the Lightning" mission
I'm in the process of creating a web gallery for my Digikam [0] photo collection. The workflow is:

1. I organize all my photos in my computer, with albums, tags, faces, geolocation, etc.

2. The photos and the Digikam DB (SQLite) get replicated to my home server (using Syncthing, but anything would work).

3. Changes are automatically visible in the running webapp. I can access it anywhere, especially useful on mobile while away.

I have an MVP almost done, just had trouble with Digikam's thumbnails because they use an extremely obscure image format, PGF [1]. I wrote a WebAssembly version using emscripten that I called webpgf [2] and am now in the process of integrating with the web gallery. However I'm concerned about CPU and RAM use in the browser, so I will probably have to end up reencoding the thumbnails in the backend.

I will make a public announcement once the project is officially launched. It will be a bit crude at first, as it'd made to scratch my own itch, but I hope it will be useful to more people.

[0] https://www.digikam.org/

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Graphics_File

[2] https://github.com/haplo/webpgf/