skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ending Civil Asset Forfeiture is an absolute mess for legislators because while it makes sense to end it based on past abuses, the reality is that it is a political grenade. Want to end CAF? Why are you soft on crime? Why are you supporting criminal activity? Why do you want law abiding citizens to pay higher taxes to offset the revenue lost from CAF?

It really does seem to be a thing that is best handled by a ballot measure or referendum.
What is a 'computation' exactly, and how do you know the duration of the slowest one? I imagine the complexity spirals as you try to answer those two questions...
Please don't take HN threads into ideological or political flamewar (or any flamewar). It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Making SSH host certificates more usable
Oh wow it’s so bad

I can’t get over HMS Samwise, like he’s a boat
I don't go up to an electrician and say "hey I could totally do this but you do it instead."

Instead I hand them a big box of switches.
HTML was designed for documents, which it does adequately. But for an actual UI, you need to be able to position things easily. HTML/CSS just has all these gotchas all over the place because the defaults are just unsuitable for UI. If you work hard enough you can something working, but QLayouts are so much easier. Then after that you have to work in a language that makes every error a runtime error and doesn't even distinguish between between float and int. Which you can work around by adding another layer, namely TypeScript. All these layers just add the complexity. Qt Widgets is one of the best-designed UI APIs.

I've kind of given up on Qt, though:

- they seem to want to go in the QML direction, and if I wanted to use JS I wouldn't be using a C++ library

- their interpretation of LGPL has historically required making the entire Qt library downloadable from your website, which is inconvenient. (This may have changed with Qt 6?)

- it never looks or works quite right on macOS. In particular, text in comboboxes is just not centered vertically correctly, and it drives me nuts.
Well, it also means we can build X number of copies of the Library of Alexandria, in different countries.
> This is actually an example of the opposite. How much time does she spend going inside the bank, waiting in line, and asking a person for help over the course of her life?

Yes, you're right that for the common people, it would be faster just to learn how to do it and get the money yourself. Maybe this wasn't the best example. The idea I wanted to transmit is that sometimes the process you need to learn is too complex, so tL >> N x tA, either because tL is big or because N is low. Maybe a better example is to fix a broken car engine.
The cloud has eaten all the hardware improvements of the last decade. It's insane that my base model Macbook routinely outperforms the (expensive!) AWS crap that most companies use as their application "servers" and yet it's the reality in many places.

So to a certain extent, you are forced to over-engineer for distributed workloads because any single node has the performance of a pocket calculator. This obviously benefits the cloud provider because not only do you rent more resources from them but you now rely on their management platform to orchestrate all those workloads.
The Teensy is an incredibly powerful platform for its size. I never cease to be amazed at what people manage to get out of them.
> If you need to mock out 80% of a system to make your unit test work, then yes, it's potentially pointless. In that case I'd argue that you should consider rewriting the code so that it's more testable in isolation, that will also help you debug more easily.

demands that people rewrite all their production code in service of unit tests are probably a big reason of why a lot of programmers don't unit test.

> On caveat is that some developers write pretty nasty unit tests. Their production code is nice and readable, but then they just went nuts in the unit tests and created a horrible unmaintainable mess, I don't get why you'd do that.

probably they write bad unit tests because they can't rewrite all their code but they have a mandate that all changes must be unit tested.

if strict purity could be relaxed and programmers were allowed to write more functionalish unit tests with multiple collaborators under test then there would likely be less resistance to testing and there shouldn't be any mocking-hell tests written.

higher level functional/integration tests also shouldn't be missed since your unit tests are only as good as your understanding of the interfaces of the objects and people write buggy unit tests that allow real bugs to slip between the cracks.
How does it stack up against MUI's Toolpad? (https://mui.com/toolpad/)

All things considered, they seem pretty similar - visual UI to generate React code that works alongside existing codebase, open-source & self-hostable, etc.
I feel this comment. I did a masters with a thesis option because I was not hurting for money with TA and side business income, so figured I could take the extra year (it was an accelerated masters). Loved being able to work in that heady material, but disliked some parts of the academic environment. Was glad I could see it with less time and stress than a PhD. Even so, I still never say never for a PhD, but it’d have to be a perfect confluence of conditions.
> When I don’t want to do something I act like I’m stupid and I ask for help.

> Her recommendation was to actively look stupid to avoid learning about things you are not interested in.

The flip side of this strategy is that you become a "help vampire": Someone who preys on the kindness of others to do their work for them.

The "help vampire" phrase was coined in 2006 with this blog post: https://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

The blog describes an actively malicious person, but several of the points apply to the exact strategy described in this blog:

> Is he obviously just waiting for some poor, well-intentioned person to do all his thinking for him?

> Can you tell he really isn’t interested in having his question answered, so much as getting someone else to do his work?

This isn't so much "stupid by choice" as it is taking advantage of other people to offload tasks you don't want to do. The blog highlights positives such as "You have time to dedicate to other interesting things" which is another way of saying that someone else has lost some of their time in exchange.

The given example of going to a bank teller instead of the ATM is harmless enough because the bank employees are getting paid either way, but the example also doesn't really make sense: Standing in line and conversing with a bank teller is much more demanding and time-consuming than simply learning to use the ATM.

There's a lot about this blog post that either doesn't make sense or advocates for manipulating others. It was written in a kind, light-hearted way, but it's not good advice.
The article this is based on had a major thread yesterday:

Mickey, Disney, and the public domain: A 95-year love triangle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38678021 - Dec 2023 (200 comments)
> The article could use a bit of proofreading; I noticed several grammatical mistakes

I'm not sure how to do that, could you show me how that works? I'm just an old grandmother, you see, I've never used a spellchecker...
Yes, I’ve been freelancing for a company making a couple of billions in revenue here in Denmark, where basically the most critical infrastructure is running on maybe 2-4 windows boxes with a big mssql database backing it. They are serving a lot of daily transactions because they among other things primarily sells gas.
Has to do with the large amounts of flammable oil that inevitably spill out.

Some years ago, I saw a video, done by Consumer Reports, I think, that showed a fireman, in full heat gear, using a turkey fryer, and showing how incredibly easy it is to spill oil.

Every Thanksgiving, there are always quite a few turkey fryer accidents.
S/Acc: Safe Accelerationism Manifesto
Adding shape or location is better than color alone. For example, most countries accommodate color-blind drivers by standardizing the ordering and orientation of traffic lights in addition to the colors. In the US, there's no shape variation, but some other countries add it.
Oh man, xray is just a nightmare waiting to happen.
Note: this lawsuit is actually different from the epic lawsuit. This lawsuit was brought by several states.
Would you say that saying that Argument X belongs to category (True/False) is immediately fallacious? And that therefore your last sentence is self-contradictory?
I would like to take a stance on one aspect of this argument, namley costs.

If you design it smart than your application can scale both ways not just up, but also down, even down to zero in some cases. So as soon your app is not used anymore or not used as much the costs should go down. If you buy the hardware or rent it and calucluate the costs up front for one year, then its not that easy.
I'll add one more that's accurate yet unpalatable.

You cannot pretend to be dumb and not lose credibility if the ask is a basic expectation of your gender. A man can't get away with pretending to be dumb about finances (mortgage, debt), a woman can't get away with pretending to be dumb about cooking or raising a baby.

What I mean is that the bank example worked for the article author's grandmum because she was a woman.
Only for reproducible builds, a lot of work has been done to encourage and facilitate them in the last years, but they're still a minority of the apps.

By the way, these reproducible builds apps run a high risk of being signed with the same key that Google has
Yup. That’s the cloud working as intended: every slightly different functional component split into its own AWS (or whatever) service, with its own IAM roles and billable usage.

Then we decided it wasn’t enough and we wanted kubernetes in our cloud architecture too.
In my opinion, yes.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaponized_incompetence
Honestly yes. I believe once I create art and present it to the public, it belongs to humanity. I would be honored if someone else took my art as a jumping off point to inspire their own. I would have my own opinions about its quality of course, but art is not sacred, and I would never discourage someone from creating.
That’s why flight plans have diversion fields, with requirements to have enough field to get to the diversion airport, and even to hold _there_.
There is also Arduino on Raspberry Pi. The Arduino IDE is a bit annoying but the compatibility between platforms is really nice to see and makes a lot of boards a drop-in replacement for each other if you run out of a particular resource or need some other capability.
> How do you load your games into a chess engine?

> Where do you play that allows you to export games?

> And then are you loading into another site or using a local application on your laptop as the "chess engine?"

I assume that you are a beginner and the following is quite simplified but I believe will assist you in getting started.

Most sites allow you to save your games as PGN (Portable Game Notation). On lichess, for example, you can go into your profile page an click on the download button to Export Games. This will save your games in PGN format. You need to download install a chess engine onto your computer / device. On a laptop or desktop it is relatively simplest to first install chess software with a Graphical User Interface - google that term - I will mention just one - no affiliation - just that it's relatively simple. Arena is a free graphical user interface for chess that helps you analyze and play games, plus test chess engines. After you run Arena chess you can import the games you exported in PGN format.

There are very strong open source / free chess engines (eg Stockfish) and other chess software with or without commercial chess engines. Just remember these three things:

- The format that chess games are saved in is PGN with a .pgn extension

- There is chess software that replays these PGN with no chess engine and that's fine to review a game digitally

- There are umpteen chess-engines that will analyze your games / moves - some free, some commercial
Grandma might act dumb, but it's the asking for help part that's the real trick. To me, among the most frightening things on this plane is a a stupid person full of confidence. I prefer someone who knows where they're on at on the Dunning-Kruger curve -- or that it merely exists -- any day of the week.
$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
I guess I was wondering how much of this behavior is endemic to MySQL, per se, and how much was endemic to InnoDB.
Good explanation why CG explosions suck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPb7yUPcKhk
Can you please give some examples where deceptive manipulation is considered a good/moral thing?
All the changes coming to Google Play and sideloading following $700M settlement
Per cgroups v2 documentation [0], `cpu.max` exists for all but the root cgroup. If it doesn't exist, that means the kernel at least is putting no restrictions compared to what the affinity says (use `nproc` to call `sched_getaffinity` from the command line). I'm not sure what hypervisor-based throttling exposes.

***

That said, there are several rules of thumb to guess the optimal number of CPUs, even before you measure - and to figure out how to improve the situation (since profiling is even harder for threaded code):

* if you are contending for a shared resource, even relatively rarely [1] (that is, assuming you're already using per-thread resources when reasonable and only sharing big chunks), you're likely to hit a limit for the maximum number of CPUs regardless. Numbers I've seen are often 20 or lower. Using a "nested" approach for resource sharing can improve this, but this may require pinning threads (which in turn threatens starvation - REMEMBER, YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PROGRAM IN THE WORLD!).

* if you are truly CPU-bound, microoptimizing to avoid (mostly: random-access) memory stalls (usually only possible for purely numerical code), logical CPUs are useless so you should limit yourself to the physical CPU count. Usually you should have an idea if this is the case.

* if your program is actively using an amount of memory similar to a shared cache size, using fewer CPUs is often better. This is not restricted to the exact counts of logical and physical CPUs, except for caches that are physical-CPU-specific (L1 almost always is, and L2 usually is these days for P-cores but not E-cores. L3 - and, for that matter, total RAM size to avoid swapping - is the one where the optimal number of CPUs varies arbitrarily in practice)

* if your code does even a small number of unpredicted loads (typical object-oriented code does far more than that!) logical CPUs are easily a win. Most code belongs here so you can assume even if you're not familiar with it, unless one of the hard-to-know points applies.

[0]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/cgroup-v2...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law
People saying that fuel efficiency is the most important factor often means a mid-sized SUV 3 row SUV rather than a Suburban.
Mine is not quite a window manager, I use Hammerspoon bindings. For example, Ctrl+Option+H/L moves the focused window left/right.
I think mine only conflicts with Ctrl Opt H, so it's still usable by clicking on the buttons
Yeah, I made them same observation when I tried to pick up Latin while learning Italian. It really doesn't make sense to multitask these, unless one is interested in learning both. Even though they are related, it's not necessarily of help when learning it.

Nobody is denying that French has Germanic influence. And it probably encouraged its highly divergent evolution from its relatives. The neighboring Picard language is a lot more conservative for example.

Please compare the following paragraph to its translation into German, Norwegian, and Italian. That should really settle the discussion. From the Wikipedia article about Christmas. My estimation is that like 95% of these words are of Romance origin:

> Noël est la fête chrétienne qui célèbre la Nativité, c'est-à-dire la célébration qui rappelle la naissance de Jésus-Christ. La fête de Noël vient peu de temps après le solstice d'hiver boréal auquel elle est associée (voir ci-bas). La déchristianisation faisant, la fête de Noël est aujourd'hui coupée de son fondement religieux dans de nombreux pays occidentaux, mais elle y subsiste comme fête traditionnelle.
> Also, front brake lights for people to see you are braking. Pedestrian crossings

The safer thing to do is just estimate the speed of the car and it's breaking. I never cross if it's obvious that at current speed/deceleration I don't have time to clear it. This tends to frustrate drivers because it makes them break harder (since I don't start crossing while looking at them) and it takes me longer to cross (since I start later), but I don't care.
Corporate influence aside it's a bad place to get your opinions from due to the hive minded echo chamber comment/post ranking system. Any contrarian opinion that contests the most popular opinion is simply not shown because over half the users will down vote it bury it. To make it even worse the the mods are usually unreasonably power hungry or opinionated too.
You can kind of have a debate deep in a comment tree but that isn't very visible.
The 15% could be fraught but I feel like it exists, especially when people critique full self driving services in r/SanFrancisco
He was an early detractor of Freud for example. Forgive me for not keeping my sources.
Great reference.

To this date, one of the best well-documented code is jQuery: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/main/src/core/init.js

I learned a lot from looking into the code.
> Teensy 4.0 is 600 MHz ARM cpu, so there are 1000 cycles even between the shortest transitions.

can you explain this a bit more? When you say "transition" are you talking about an individual transistor moving from on to off or vice versa?
Apologies, it's quite good overall. I'm just nitpicking. Here's what I noticed:

- "...and how [it] isn’t trivial for people.."

- "...argue that you don’t have to worry about looking dumb and [to/should] ask questions..."

- "If you don’t want to do something[,] make another person do it for you, and playing like you’re dumb [is] a great way of doing so."

- "...maintain focus on one thing at a time, [so/and] removing tasks that distract you..."
Sorry, but I don't have time to wade through idiosyncratic terminology. Scott's a big boy, he can use big boy words. Besides, pawning off cognitive load on the reader is such a lowball move.

> So your argument seems to be "rationalists aren't thinking about this correctly because they're not using the correct words that other people invented".

You could always ask what my argument is.

My claim is that we can cut to more interesting discussions by saying, "We're talking about the rationality of groundings. The utility/consistency/feelings/whatever the biologist gets out of scientific taxonomy grounding is X, and Solomon's utility/consistency/feelings/whatever in his groundings are Y." Saying basically, "groundings exist" isn't very insightful. Saying, "groundings are a product of Z" or "here's a framework for rational grounding creation" is actually interesting.

Using the full palette of words allows us to get to these interesting discussions more quickly. If you disagree then I'll challenge you to reply in hulk-speak.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37625560
This doesn't happen just down on the coastal plain. There are plenty of aquifers on the piedmont that were open streams until someone filled them in. Walk around the neighborhoods and you can spot houses that are leaning or have been jacked up, and other telltale signs.
FCGI and Go connected to Postgres/MySQL can handle quite a bit of load in a very simple environment. You can run those on shared hosting very cheaply. Do you really need more?

Remember Soylent boasting about their "tech stack"? It was just a shopping cart for something that sold a few items per minute. They could have run that thing on a starter account on Dreamhost or HostGator.
> [...] I am skeptical of the idea that any one window manager could accommodate the needs of GNOME, compiz (yay cubes), and dwm.

I am a former dwm user (contributed patches too), and I'd say we represent a group of marginal importance. Suckless is as much a philosophy as it is a lifestyle choice. It proves that simplistic software can be practical, but skims over many in-depth issues, such as accessibility.

Once we get the elitists out of the way, the needs of the 99.99% are not that hard to meet: Windows & macOS combined market share more than proves it; tools like Hammerspoon or AutoHotkey fill the gaps for most power users.

> You'd also bake in technical choices that would sit badly with chunks of the population; odds are that we would have ended up baking most of GNOME into the graphical server and being stuck using javascript for everything, or gone the other way and committed to using C forever.

Hammerspoon uses Lua; macOS doesn't even ship a Lua interpreter or ObjC bindings.

Also, the majority of the population is not technically competent enough to even care about decisions such as JavaScript vs Guile vs Bash; power users in practice turn out patient enough to put up with garbage like AppleScript, because it gets work done.

The continued prevalence of memory unsafe languages is unfortunate, but a well-written and well-maintained C project used by a million people is going to provide more value than an absolute marvel of engineering, written in Rust, used by a hundred.
> claiming that would be rediciulous.

What, then, caused the 40:1 inflation?

> if you believe people being much more knowledgable about those things

My father was head of the business department at a college and taught finance. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of how money worked. He had a degree in economics from MIT and an MBA from Harvard and a PhD in history from KSU.

We had a lot of discussions about this.

But since he has passed on, you might be interested in "Monetary History of the United States" by Milton Friedman.
so why then do you continue living in NYC if the quality of life is relatively worse? i bounced from a similar situation in sf to a lower cost of living area and am loving it, albeit i have the luxury of working remotely.
It's not creepy.

Typically one of the first types of automations you do is presence and motion detection, for simple things like turning off lights when no one is home, turning on lights when you enter a room.

Then you find edge cases like wanting the lights to turn off when you're in bed, but not turn on if only one person gets up in the middle of the night.

If you want to automate any of these things then it's necessary for the system to see the events.

In my experience, people say it's all worthless, until they experience it themselves.
Yes, misleading other people to avoid having to do work you dislike is manipulation.

The given example (going to the bank teller instead of learning to use the ATM) is a weird one because the bank teller is much slower and requires more cognitive load than using the ATM.

I suspect the ATM example was given because the bank teller isn't losing anything by dealing with a customer. It's their job and they're on the clock anyway. In practice, people who use the "stupid by choice" strategy are usually dodging tasks at work or getting other people to do things for them, in which case the other party is actively losing time and energy.

It's manipulative and dishonest, despite the arbitrary (and nonsensical, tbh) example going to a bank teller instead of learning to use an ATM.