skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with you. Turing machines make sense and I can extend my intuition to a general idea of "dynamical systems can peroform computation", but I have no idea how quantum computing fits in there.
Old but still surprisingly relevant after all this time! I've just been rewatching all of them with my son.
Thinkpadism is really just "things used to be better", as evidenced by the models then-decried by thinkpadders as low quality flexing plastic garbage being hailed as "built like a tank" today, simply because it's old now. Just wait, eventually the X230 and X240 will be called "some of the greatest thinkpads ever made, built like tanks".
Why are they terrible?
I think this only works because a lot of games can be shipped and never touched again. A self-contained single-player experience doesn't really need to be maintainable.
Was. Despite owning one, I'd rather use my 14" M1 MBP thanks. Hell if I had to have a PC I've got a much much nicer Lenovo T14 gen 3 here!

For the MBP in comparison: Better screen, performance, battery life, OS that actually mostly works, connectivity, sound. The keyboard isn't that bad either...

As for ports, I don't need 'em. Last thing I want to do is drag a fucking drunken octopus around with me.

Even as a ThinkPad fanboy this ancient ThinkPad love is getting into self-flaggelating religious drivel territory.
Not really wrong but using quantum effects to basically model real-world quantum systems is only a subset of potential applications.
You probably ought to be more skeptical about nuclear fusion than quantum computing, to be perfectly honest: https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/atomicage/2022/12/17/clean...
> Unknown unknowns, e.g. we have no idea that we run the database on a buggy Linux Kernel version, where buffered IO in a cgroup is slow due to wrong memory pressure calculation and constant page reclaiming.

?
> confused as to why no where in the article do they mention the intent of attacking the ships

This appears to be a maritime news service. Why rockets are flying isn’t practically relevant. You’ll see similar parsimoniousness in aviation reporting around war zones (and humanitarian reports around natural disasters).

There is almost always a market for concise commercial communications.

> target ships that have Israeli links or heading to Israeli ports

Ships in international waters have been targeted for not responding to hails. There is also no evidence anyone is coordinating the various militias that have fire control.
Oh I managed today's word in 93 turns

I'm curious to see how people did with so few turns

Also I would like an undo or at least a reset button
Speed of Failing
Well, they run a *nix out of the box :)
I am trying to design a language based on Ian Piumarta's metaprogrammable object model [1] (i.e. a Smalltalk-like where two methods are defined "a priori" in the entire system, everything else is late bound and can be changed at runtime — believe it or not, more flexible than any Lisp) and I was trying to figure out how to implement the basic stuff like number addition in the language, when nothing has been defined yet.

Piumarta shows that with his model any function/closure/method can in theory and very easily be written in any language, so at first I was thinking of having tagged asm blocks:

Number + other = {.asm.
mov rbx, [self]
mov rcx, [other]
add rbx, rcx
mov [self], rbx
}
assert: { 5+6 } equals: 11

But then I would have to write an assembler, in the bootstrapping language (currently C which I've grown to dislike). So I thought about Forth:

Number + other = {.forth.
( self other -- self )
@ over @ + !
}

Which seems so elegant, portable, the bootstrapping language can be Forth (the Forth interpreter itself written in asm), and I don't have to write an x86_64 assembler in C. Win win win.

And during my research I came across this, running Pascal in Forth. Time is a circle and computer science keeps reinventing itself :-)

I like the opinion of the author that a great platform is one that lets you choose the perfect language to the problem at hand. My (ideal) language is fully late bound, based on message passing, which is extremely flexible, but not ideal for number crunching. Is this much of a problem, if a user can drop down to FORTRAN in the hot loops? I feel that is a much better idea than creating a multi-paradigm language that does everything but the kitchen sink (cough C++ and Rust), and is either mediocre like the former, or very complex like the latter.

IMO, we need simpler languages, based on the next level of abstraction — communication and not computation.

1: https://www.piumarta.com/software/id-objmodel/

See also COLA: https://www.piumarta.com/software/cola/ based on this model, but still too advanced for my brain to digest.

---

If anyone reading is familiar with Piumarta's COLA/object model and/or very late bound minimal systems, please drop me a line, I would be happy to pick your brain.
The illegal bit of ripping a Blu-ray is circumventing the copy protection, not the storage. At least, that's how I've always understood the effect of the DMCA on the situation.
Unpopular opinion: low-code always existed. Examples: stored procedures, Oracle/MSSQL, SharePoint, SAP, "Cloud"(in the dumb, use-these-20-services-to-make -your-app, not in the IaaS sense), Docker, etc
Bad software is bad software.

The comments are hilarious though, I had no idea anyone cared about AWS certifications that much to call them "Career Ending"
I have an X220 (and a bunch of other Thinkpads) and they're nice hardware but come on, let's not go overboard. Those CPUs kinda suck now. Slow performance and they run hot.

I also think people overstate the "build quality" of old ThinkPads a lot. They have a bunch of really thin plastic parts all over the place that have a tendency to crack easily. Yes, they're repairable, but they show wear a lot more than your average modern aluminium unibody machines.
And similarly, the article claims that

> Since his reign began in 2012, Xi Jinping’s endless purges have removed millions of officials
> a war that people in power were already wanting to start

This is synonymous with a political goal. War is politics by other means. The dirty secret under that being most wars democracies engage in are publicly supported, at least at the outset.
Think of quantum computing progress like this. There were fundamental problems keeping it from working, and those have been largely overcome. Now we have a path and we are really just improving the technology until it’s useful, and that path is very clear. It’s just a matter of going down it, which is what’s really happening.

The general consensus is that there will be a fault tolerant quantum computer by 2035-2040. So like silicon, it is going to take us a while to get there, but we are only talking about 11-16 years or so according to the best experts in the field (remember AI has similar longer terms before it rapidly accelerated).

And quantum computers are profoundly powerful — as in civilization changing computer power.
Actually you can use the U there. It is Unix!

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3700.htm
> I don’t know what the future holds for LuaX. It’s not ready for other people to use, and I’m not sure it will ever be.

I hope he decides to open source it.
I have an X220 that I put an IPS panel into. It's definitely nicer than TN but once you've used a modern laptop with a 4K screen (with HiDPI scaling), anything less looks really dated.
The point isn't just to make a game, but learn how all how it all works under the hood. He's stated multiple times throughout Handmade Hero that you probably don't want to make a game that way.

> Don't spend... how many years has it been now, nearly ten? On a debug room that looks like a high school CS project.

If you add all the hours up from every episode it's less than a years worth of work...
Call it Stockholm syndrome but IMO modern MacBooks have some of the nicest laptop keyboards around. And I'm the kind of guy who uses a custom mechanical keyboard at his desk and turns his nose up at Cherry MX switches.
What? Mozilla's pursuit of other ventures of varying importance is precisely what lead to the Chrome (Blink) monopoly in the first place. FF lags behind (or is perceived to)⟶users switch to Chrome⟶sites stop testing on FF⟶sites don't work on FF⟶users switch to Chrome...

(Also, was Firefox was ever locked out of the smartphone market? I thought only Apple blocked third-party browsers.)
With FreeBSD userland tools, no less.
That drone was most likely downed because of plain incompetence by the Russian pilot. In such a case there's no point in "rewarding" the Russian propagandists with a similar response.
I sometimes sum this up as:
Don‘t listen to your customer. Watch your customer.

Obviously needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but seeing how users behave is often more insightful than asking them what they want. You just need to setup the environment for watching in a way that you learn what you want to learn.
Brain Dead 24Hr Clock with Just Uniselectors and Nixie Tubes [video]
Have you done the math on how much energy the ventilators use, vs how much energy the heat exchangers recoup?

Because without doing the math on that, such a statement is absolute pointless.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the heat exchangers save 1000x the energy that they consume.
I have Starlink myself and installed it on a 2 m pole next to the house. Went very easy, as fast and cheap (40 euro/ month) as fiber and never had any noticeable connection or stability issues. No waiting list.

I switched to Starlink because a truck took down the fiber which hangs on poles along and over the street. Took days to repair and still looks very fragile.
Important to note that this config is still stored in an XML file inside of WEB-INF and can be version controlled etc. (Or at least it can with Lucee. Don't know about Coldfusion Server. Surely nobody seriously uses that any more?)
> and that path is very clear

How is the time of this clear path measured? I actually have the exact same question about fusion reactors (such as ITER with results planned decades ahead of time)

What could speed up those decades? Letting more people work on it at the same time? Throwing more money at it? (e.g. for ITER, are we just waiting for them to pour concrete faster?)

Or are these decades of planning also waiting for other technologies to appear in 10, 20, ... years? (Which would be some kind of unclear uncertainty after all)
I've used AWS Amplify in the last two years. As the others low-code tools it's fine until it isn't, then it's a nightmare.
But with time they've started to allow for more and more escape hatches.
They've recently announced a V2 marketed not as low code but as code first, built on CDK.
They've probably found that most of their users are devs and code is the right interface for devs.
> read it more as ‘actually holding them responsible’

What about recent events suggests Israel isn’t held, and does not hold itself, responsible for Gaza’s affairs? The principal complaint is that they’re holding themselves too responsible.
I forked SteamOS for my living room PC
Wow, reading the original Reuters report is extremely scary.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-mu...

A friend of mine bought a brand new Model S, and within weeks experienced the squeaking noise the article talks about. Tesla took months to sort it out, after making excuse after excuse.

He never bought another one.
Zig-cookbook: a collection of simple Zig programs that demonstrate good practic
Even the purehase order isn't always enough. If the cost of developing that feature, inclueding long term maintenaece is less than they are willing to pay fine. However often they are buying from you to share costs wiht your other customers, and what they want is you to split the costs.
Interesting project. I can't help but ask if you've ever considered how Richard Stallman would feel about people configuring Emacs to upload code into OpenAI's cloud. It amazes me even more that you get people to pay to do it. I'd rather see Stanford helping us put developers back in control of their own AI experiences.
What's in My Bag, 2023
They are not random (e.g. weather data should have a daily or seasonal pattern). And the fact that there does exist a random-looking data doesn't refute the original claim because AI can conclude that the data has a close-to-maximal entropy (i.e. "incompressible") instead.
And quantum computers are profoundly powerful — as in civilization changing computer power.

How so?

The main promise/fear I hear about is breaking cryptography, but then it sounds like we can switch to new post-quantum encryption and we’ll be essentially in the same place as before.
Pre-post edit: excuse the keyboard rant.

They're not bad. Definitely better than the soggy ass Dell and Lenovo keyboards at least. But I would still rather have a proper keyboard with some travel. But the whole laptop experience is a compromise generally so I'm willing to live with it.

My daily driver keyboard is an Apple Magic Keyboard on my Mac mini and that's fine as well. I only use it so I don't have switch back and forth between a different keyboard and the MBP when I need to.

As for the Cherry MX, not a fan either. I tried a few over the years of different switch variants (at great cost) and they actually hurt you if you have to do some serious work on them after a while. When I say serious, a lot of my existence these days is hacking out large quantities of LaTeX and switching between that and paper. The MX boards are just too high, too noisy and too expensive.

Got to say the best keyboard I've used in recent years though is a Cherry Stream TKL. That's actually surprisingly good and very cheap (£25). It'll annoy the purists here because it's a rubber dome SX switch.
You know what literally no one asked for though? A faster horse controlled by a touchscreen, or a horse which spies on you to show you ads, or changes its crappy electron UI every 5 days thanks to corporate branding follies.
Next year, even more dupes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777115

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38614465

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38715337
Same, I run a large-ish website with it. Lucee is insanely stable and reliable, and is VERY actively maintained. It just works, and it keeps on just working.

The only thing going against it is prejudice, IMHO.
Is this an advertisement for thinkpads?
Yes not those classical-era legendary hybrid creatures that GNU provide on other platforms!

(Edit: old commercial Unix person. I never liked GNU stuff. Sorry!)
Beautifully designed, very clean, but frustrating to play due to being unpleasantly difficult. I gave up after 5 minutes.

It would help to have an unlimited undo in a dedicated button. I realize that the undo can be done by spinning words in reverse order, but that's inconvenient and I really wouldn't remember what I did beyond last 2-3 words.
All very nice, but not with such dated CPU and memory.

I also have a thinkpad with archlinux, but a 10 year newer model (T14). The CPU is fine. But it also has 16GB of RAM, and I wish there was more, it doesn't even take that many firefox+chrome tabs to fill it all up.
Well the compeny should care what someone does as repeat customers and recomendations matter.
GGUF File Format
Ask HN: How do you balance parenting with your career?
Me and my wife have 3 kids under the age of six. We both work part time and are ambitious with our career. We often have to make the decision between going home early to support each other and spend quality time with the kids vs working more. It feels right in the moment to heavily prioritise time with the kids but I still wonder if that decision will impact our careers significantly.

My personal point of view right now is, that we still can focus on our careers once the children are older.
One area in quantum that’s getting a lot of attention is dealing with noise. (Basically you want to decrease the number of qubits needed to make a reliable logical qubit to a reasonable number.)

This has turned out to be a big problem (with some calling it potentially intractable.) But a lot of progress is being made in this area. There’s a good article in the current issue of Technology Review.) This is one area that could lead to outsized advances.

More money and people can usually move but there’s a limit to which just throwing money at a problem can accelerate the outcome in part because of all the complex interconnection, some not even appreciated. Think ML with GPUs.
How does that help stability? You still need the peakers, unless you propose building excess amounts at massive capital cost to be used for an hour or two a day
The only problem with that eventual comparison is... you have to start comparing things to the early unibody MacBook Pros.
List of all malicious packages detected on NPM
There was a thing called OtoTech talked about on Reddit years ago that I think people were making DIY versions of. It was supposed to cure motion sickness without using electrical stimulation I believe, but it's been a long time since I've looked into it much and the company never made consumer versions but stuck to military and medical stuff.
I think it's misleading calling these things "computers". They are no more "computer" than the analog computers, like MEDA: https://www.analogmuseum.org/english/collection/meda/43/

I've worked with analog computers, they were used in control systems. I understand that Moon landing used analog computers along digital ones as well.

Basically you can do PID (proportional, integrative, derivative) calculus on them using plain analog electronics. Very specialized and nothing to get overexcited about.

It's like calling these biological machinery "computers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_computers_-_Dryden....

Bottom line "quantum computing" has nothing to do with the classic field of digital computers (personal PCs), it's a stupid, deliberate misuse to borrow from the legitimacy and respectability of an established field.

The term should die in a fire. "quantum crap putting" is a lot more appropriate given all the crap they put in the headlines to fool the guillible.
It is a web app - just visit https://osmapp.org in mobile or desktop.

PWA is experimential feature, it lets you add it on homescreen, but nothing more. It is still online web app. See https://osmapp.org/install For mobile we have already several great native apps (OrganicMaps, Osmand, Mapy.cz).
What switches do you prefer instead?

(I currently use Cherry MX browns, interested to learn what's better since I thought non-cherry switches were bootleggy)
> Whether that justifies Russia invading parts of Ukraine is the debatable part

No it isn’t? When America invaded Vietnam to keep it from going communist, that didn’t make Ho Chi Minh and his backers war mongerers. And it didn’t mean that we were provoked. We went to war to achieve the political objective of containing communism. We were the aggressors.

With Ukraine, Russia’s political objectives were unclear. The stated ones, about NATO expansion, have backfired. But just because Moscow was stupid doesn’t also mean it was absolutely the aggressor.
The gloablized world and the abundance it has is driven by laws and regulations.

Even the fact that you have abundant clean water and good food that you can enjoy in your electrified and heated house and you can order an overnight delivery for hundreds of things that will just fit and/or work in your house is the direct result of thousands of regulations.
There are extensions, and exceptions, and different licenses applicable, and fair use, and the concept of transformativeness, and... :)

Basically, IANAL, but if you just draw a picture of Mario, all you can do is hang it on your fridge. If you make it out of colored oatmeal, that may be enough of a transformative work for you to be able to sell and exhibit it. Or, say, a satirical cartoon for your newspaper featuring Mario, that might also be okay.
I’m more and more in favor of Markdown every day. If aou are writing for writing itself and you don’t need any fancy formatting Markdown is great. I prefer pure Markdown, the one that works on most places.
There was a war against terrorists in kosovo. But because USA had interests there, they removed KLA from the terrorist list in 1998 and had nato, a supposedly defensive organization, attack another country. If nato cared about genocide and went on offense again, it'd be bombing israel right now, but noone cares about brown people.

> Here comes the conspiracy theory, that a civil revolution after a president defraud their population with promises to try to join the EU, suddenly did a 180 turn in exchange for Russian cash - what a shock that people revolted.

Yep, all grassroots movements, no external financing and help to opposition group, nope, Victoria Nuland was there just randomly giving out cookies to protesters. The same thing is happening in serbia right now, vucic won, due to many reasons, and protesters with maidan flags, paid by outsiders are parading down the streets of belgrade. But as with iran, we have to wait for 50-60 years for the documents to come out.

> No one is placing nukes in Ukraine - yet apparently, they should now. Comparing Cuba in the 60's to Ukraine in 2023 is one of the most absurd pieces of Russian propaganda, only beaten by comparing Ukraine to Israel.

Maybe not nukes yet, but weapons systems targeting russia are already placed all along the nato border towards russia. If nato built a base in ukraine, who know what they'd put there. If a bunch of nato countries didn't gang up and attack a random country every few years, there would maybe be a bit less of nato hate around the world.

Also Israel is a lot more efficient at killing minorities in their country (depending on if you look at palestine as a part of isreal or a separate state). But otherwise, not too different, especially after ukraine cluster bombed a christmas market and an iceskating ring just now. The only difference is, that someone helped the minority in ukraine, and middle eastern countries are still a bit on the edge about helping palestine.. but considering how many countries got scared and bailed just due to houthi rockets, we're not far from another, much larger war there too, and US is already overextended, having to buy their own AD missles from japan, since they can't produce enough. I'm lucky to live in a small and unimportant part of EU, but when shit hits the fan, it will hurt in EU and US too.
I meant you don't need to vary nuclear plants down when they're producing too much electricity, I guess that does mean you'd need to be over capacity as a matter of course.
Absolutely and I would also add: passively monitor and listen to them. What are they complaining or asking about in communities/social media? What are they talking about in conferences and industry events?
> We were promised a victory many times thanks to the overwhelming power and sophistication western weapons

By whom?! The American establishment has been repeatedly forecasting doom and gloom for Ukraine.
Eh, Cherry switches are great. I had lubed Holy Pandas and sold them to switch back to MX browns. Genuinely a much better switch for mixed usage scenarios. I can't help but be suspicious when people are against Cherry switches, because often it is just Reddit cult/meme nonsense rather than from actual usage.

Honestly the Macbook keyboard for me is just as bad as every other laptop. Thinkpads or XPS are the exact same mediocre experience you get from the the MBP.
The first result on Kagi is exactly this, just tried it a moment ago. It processed and downloaded the video extremely fast. Why would any reasonable person prefer youtube-dl?
I have a few X220s and I really love them.

I would never say they could be my daily driver or come close to the capabilities of today’s machines.

But for me they really have a place. For hobby and random uses they are great. For a machine to hook up to various amateur radio equipment or some arduino gizmo or to try out that random Linux distro or hobby/toy OS… In this kind of role this machine absolutely rocks.