skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When working remotely, I find myself working on my laptop while travelling to/from meetups.

When working on site, I find myself working on my laptop during my commute when my train in is delayed.

There’s free Wi-Fi on trains these days, but it doesn’t really work when you’re stuck in a tunnel, or halfway between cities. So something like a chromebook wouldn’t work for me.

Happy to accept that I’m a bit of an edge case though.
> Now imagine that the workspace/project format for the defacto IDE for all Apple related stuff uses this exact same format

It doesn’t. Xcode project files are something that look a bit like a cross between JSON and an INI file. This is unofficial documentation showing what it looks like:

http://www.monobjc.net/xcode-project-file-format.html

That isn’t a property list; it’s something inherited from Project Builder from NeXTSTEP, which Xcode was originally based upon. Xcode project files would be a lot easier to deal with if they were property list files, because they are a standard, documented format with official tools to work with them. The Xcode project file format isn’t officially documented and doesn’t have generic manipulation tools like plutil.

Maybe you are mixing the project file up with the Info.plist file? That is a property list file, but its purpose is to tell the operating system about the application. It’s not the Xcode project file.
Author seems to have built 5 systems from 2016 to 2023, or around every other year.

Some parts (e.g., RAM) are re-used across multiple builds

It's interesting to wonder: How much $$ is the hardware cost vs the lifetime energy costs? Is a more power-hungry machine that would operate for 4 years better than one that would operate for 2 years?

The motherboard + CPU is USD 322 right now on pcpartpicker. At USD 0.25/kWh (well above my local rate but below the highest rates in the US), 36W continuous over 4 years is also about $315. So, a ~43W, 4-year system might well be cheaper to buy and operate than a 7W, 2-year system.
> the function was actually last changed in 2016, but someone modified it last month only to revert the change before submitting a PR

I can't think of a specific example from my own history, but something like this is what has happened. A function was changed in order to support a different change elsewhere in the code. That other change was later modified, incompletely, to remove the need to modify the first function, and the change to the first function was subsequently reverted. Down the road, it's discovered that the modification was incomplete, and when reviewing the new code, you wonder, "how could this possibly have ever worked?" The answer is that it didn't, and when it was committed, there was another supporting change that made it work. By erasing the history of that other change, you remove the possibility of discovering the reasoning behind the change and the source of the introduction of a problem.

If I had seen that intermediate state that's been erased, remember it, and try to find it, now I'm being gaslit by source control, because I remember a real change that was there in a commit, but source control now will lie to me and tell me that it never existed.
Agreed! Despite being PCIe 3.0, these were perfect home server CPUs because of the integrated GPU and ECC support. The idles were a bit higher than 12th gen Intels (especially the similarly tough to find "T" and especially "TE" processors) mostly because of X570s comparatively higher power draw, but if you ran DDR5 on the Intel platform it was kind of a wash, and under load the Zen 3 PRO GEs won by a real margin. Plus you really could use every scrap of bandwidth and compute these chips could muster. You use ALL the chip. :)

My HP ProDesk 405 G8 Minis with a 2.5GbE NIC (plus the built in 1GbE which supported AMD DASH IPMI) idled at around 8.5W, and with the 10GbE NICs that came out around June, are more around 9.5W -- with a 5750GE, 64GB of DDR4-3200 (non-ECC), WiFi 6E and BT 5.3, a 2TiB SK Hynix P31 Gold (lowest idle of any modern M.2 NVMe?), and modern ports including 10Gb USB-C. Without the WiFi/BT card it might actually get down to 9W.

The hilarious thing about those is they have an onboard SATA connector, but also another proprietary FlexIO connector that can take an NVIDIA GTX 1660 6GB! You want to talk a unicorn, try finding those GPUs in the wild! I've never seen one for sale separately! If you get the EliteDesk (over the ProDesk) you also get a 2nd M2.2280 socket for mirroring.

I have three of those beefy ProDesk 805 G8 Minis in a Proxmox 8 cluster, and it mostly runs Apache Spark jobs, sometimes with my PC participating (how I know the storage server can sustain 55GbE data transfer!), and it's hilarious that you have this computerized stack of napkins making no noise that's fully processing (reading, transforming, and then writing) 3.4GiB/sec of data -- closer to 6.3GiB/sec if my 5950X PC is also participating. I don't need the cloud, we have cloud at home!

-----

If you want a 5750GE, check eBay. That's where you'll find them, and rarely NewEgg. Just don't get Lenovo systems unless you want the whole thing, because the CPUs are PSB fuse-locked to the system they came in.

4750GEs are Zen 2s and cheaper (half the price), and pretty solid, but I think four fewer PCIe lanes. Nothing "wrong" with a 5750G per se, but they cap more around 67-68W instead of 39W.

Just if you see a 5750GE, grab it ASAP. People like me hunt those things like the unicorns they are. They go FAST! Some sellers will put up 20 at a time, and they'll all be gone within 48 hours.

-----

I really look forward to the Zen 4 versions of these chips, and the eventual possibility of putting 128GiB of memory into a 1L form factor, or 256GiB into a low power storage server. I won't need them (I'm good for a looooong time), but it's nice to know it'll be a thing.

Intel 15th gen may be great too, as it's such a massive architecture shift plus a new process node. Intel also tends to have really low board chipset power consumption, and really low idles.

Obscenely capable home servers that make no noise and idle in the 7-10W range are utterly fantastic.
> How else would you aim your infinite efforts as a citizen of your country?

The problem with aiming for utopia is you don’t understand the problems. People in 1100 couldn’t really conceive of an obesity epidemic and the founding fathers didn’t understand the issues with political parties or lifetime nomination to the Supreme Court.

Instead you can understand the local situation and aim for something slightly better. Rather than trying to have nationalized healthcare system what if we lower the age for social security eligibility to 60/55 or add kids under 18 etc.
I assume they're different from me and write bug-free code that never needs to be refactored the first time.
People robbing a car dealership shot a police officer in Ohio a few months ago.[1] What do you think this proves about car dealers?

[1] https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/bank-robbery-...
Tesla model 3 wouldnt work in the environment demanding a 4x4 truck.
How do critical thinking and problem solving work?

How do we evaluate potential courses of action, if not by predicting their consequences?

I showed how prediction is involved in a basic example from everyday life. Do you dispute that?
> I don’t think seeing where someone is reading is enticing.

I agree that if we explode the word "reading" into everything it might be an analog for, then some of this could make more sense.

If "reading" a page on the web is supposed to be an analog of "reading a book", maybe most don't want to see others.

But if "reading" a page on the web is supposed to be an analog of "attending a lecture" or "showing up to vote" or "standing in line to buy a ticket", then "reading a book" may not be the best frame of reference :)

(I think about this stuff a lot. I lean extroverted. Maggie and I seem to be working through the same thoughts I've been picking through for the last few years, so I'm definitely a bit biased as to the wisdom of the post :)
Here's a two-hour session of HOPE attendees telling stories about crazy things that happened there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46Tofimmga8
> The fact that people both use social media and have off-platform group chats should indicate that they serve different purposes.

Do you mean that social media platforms are distinctively for exploring content outside the people you know? Leaving aside the technical side, it seems to always come down to a social spectrum of public/private. From open web to social media like FB and Twitter to private group chats to private one-to-one chats. Another spectrum seems to be the one between topic/content-focused on one side and people/social-focused on the other, and everything in between.
Interesting I assume it's with all drives off, how many Watts with some disk usage?
There are 6 slightly different variants of tar that GNU tar can unpack. In general the tar formats do not have to store the directory record, but the more recent can as to preserve its metadata. Also, modern tar formats generally store UID and GID as an symbolic name that might be useful on different system in contrast to numeric UID/GID. The format still is this 70's absurdity with octal-in-ASCII headers (like the “traditional” CPIO) and block aligned. Well, it is a format designed for magnetic tape.

In practice there are huge incompatibilities between non-standard SVr4 and GNU implementations, but both of them go to great lengths to detect that the format is the other one. And then there are two POSIX/SUS variants that can be easily distinguished from each other (and the SVr4/GNU variants) which are most of what you will see today.
oh im running a few thousand maus on their protocol. solarplex.xyz.

we don’t federate yet but that’s an easy thing to pull off.
> The IDF doesn't target civilians, and would definitely never brutally massacre, rape and torture civilians.

They have unequivocally done all of those.
> 3-5W per 8GB of RAM

I think that's wrong. It would mean 4*6=25W per DIMM.

I also have 48GB DDR5 DIMMs and HwInfo shows 6W max per module.
But does it ever work? Its just a game of cat and mouse.... like all other software, bugs will always be present apparently.
Two quick thoughts on this:

1. Working on tech is a pretty good way to kill whatever love of tech you might have. As the old adage goes, if you want to enjoy something, don't make it your day job.

2. Why does tech often end up being the field where people think everyone working there needs to be obssessed with? The vast majority of fields and industries are treated like a day job to pay the bills (even some incredibly prestigious/high paying ones like law and medicine), but there seems to be the assumption that this isn't true of the tech industry.
yes sorry i didn't notice that at first read. Thanks for the info about imessage, i had no idea about that 10% market share..
When Our Gaze Is a Physical Force
mentioned in ops reply but we run our own instance over at solarplex.xyz
Seems very interesting. Skimming the synopsis, it reminds me a bit of Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney, which is one of my favorite books.
Happy New Year, Master Ken! Thank you for all the gifts you've given us this year, even on the last day! Cheers, from an island Brazil!
Methods for Studying Superconductivity?
this. i’ve spoken to 206 creators - comic book artists, movie makers, video artist, digital artists, music makers.

on an nps score:

- building relationship with their audience - 9/10
- monetizing their audience through the same channel - 7.5-8/10
If you just want the Wikipedia article, you can go straight there. Why are you searching for it?
Some states effectively do. Georgia and Florida will pay full tuition for In-State students with high enough GPAs. Students still have to pay some fees, so it isn’t perfect, but it provides incredible value.
> Keep a log of your work. In fact, keep a log of everything you do

This is exactly how contract work is done. If you’re doing this as a full time employee you’re underpaid (assuming it’s for your employer - doing it for yourself is a great idea!)
Something something AI.
Like the Fairmont Toronto has
the biggest challenge with patreon and kofi is that they control the content, its monetization and its distribution.

creators also want a way to have more fun ways for their audience to engage with them around their content that RECOGNIZES the top fans in a reasonable way.
This is astoundingly vacuous.

The moon is a whole planetoid. To speak of 'the moon' as one place is meaningless.

Imagine a people that asked "don't bury your dead in the earth's soil! Soil is sacred to us! Everybody please burn them instead!"

We'd all laugh. Whose business is it to dictate the activities on an entire world?

It's like treaties that forbid certain things 'in space'. Wha? You mean, the entire Universe? Meaningless.

For instance: We could dump waste on the moon for centuries, and never see it from the earth. It is as big across as Australia. Dump something in the outback of Australia, and challenge anyone to find it. Silly.

A polite answer is required, but by no means should anyone consider such a request as a serious matter.
Artists, programmers, normal people. All kinds of people.

Matte screen option was simply taken away, leaving these people with the choice of sticking to an old computer or monitor, or upgrading. I for one am content to keep my old laptop with its nice screen and keyboard, and do any heavy lifting on a different computer. It's quite easy - ssh, x11, VNC, etc.
Everytime I see JSX I think of E4X, which is a now defunct standard that contributed to JS having for(of) instead of for each() :-/
That doesn't preclude this cultivar being African in origin. Could have made it to Africa in the 1500s, undergone selective breeding there, and returned to North American via the slave trade later. (See also: North American potatoes coming from Europe, not directly from the Andes.)
Many memories from this hotel as a teen visiting NYC for the first time. Splitting a room with people I'd only met online. Meeting Jello Biafra in the lobby. Volunteering for HOPE. Trying out a Segway for the first time on a level with floor-to-ceiling windows. Standing on the roof with friends, taking in the city skyline, glancing over at the open login of the NT4.0 Workstation running the elevator motor controls. Walking the back passageways, inspecting ancient NYTel/NYNEX cross boxes, taking the giant service elevators up and down, walking through the abandoned floors covered in dust.

When I came back as an adult, this hotel was the cheapest room in the city, and it showed. Run down and falling apart. It's extremely hard to turn a profit on a hotel this large; the maintenance is constant and expensive, and if you skimp on anything (like shuttering a few floors) they just get worse over time. There was absolutely a time when it was a money maker, but that time is gone. I just wish they could have converted it into apartments. It would have taken a big investment, but I think the city owed it to both the building's history, and the people trying to "make it" in the big apple.
That was a great conference. HOPE filled the space nicely. It was a good match.
I think this is still covered on the CEH exam. Or at least mentioned along with war dialing, wardiving, etc.
Amazing stuff... duplicated

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38785699]

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779667]
OOHHHH great question:

A competent Manager:

* Is willing to be a leader: https://www.modernservantleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/...

* Protects you from BS from the rest of the org.

* Eats the shit sandwich with you when they can't protect you.

* Can do your job if you end up rage quitting, getting sick or just needing a day off and there's an emergency.

* Can give you a candid and fair review. They can discuss your faults and successes in equal measure.

* Knows how to say NO, knows how to manage up. (sometimes hard to spot)

* Lets you earn your leash or your rope (don't hang yourself).

* Is not a gossip.

* Has good standing relationships with peers in other groups (accounting, marketing...) also hard to spot.

* Knows how to hire (skill and fit).

* Is someone you are willing to go to a social lunch with.
<pedant> I am a Native American. I was born here. The technical term for those who's ancestors lived here from time immemorial is Aboriginal American I believe. </pedant>
There's still other things that are absurd to do under Linux. Like turning off write caching for removable drives. Unless something has changed in the past couple years, you need to either manually edit fstab per-drive or setup udev rules.

(Not write caching for removable drives should just be the default. Windows hasn't used write caching on removable drives for 20 years. It also presents a toggle in the drive properties if you really do want it on though.)
Fun tinkering like that is not about saving money. It's about the journey, not the destination.
I had an employee that did this (I was his manager), and I was quite grateful.

He wasn't our most productive or "rockstar" engineer, but he was highly organized, and I appreciated it.
If I've already pushed my branch, typically I have a draft PR open and tests are being run against it, and I'm not going to force push, because that's obnoxious and I've probably prohibited it in the repo.

If it's a local commit and I catch it in ten seconds, I will sometimes throw up in my mouth a little bit as I amend the commit.

I view source control as one of the best places for an immutable log of events, and prefer immutable logs for many things in general, for a variety of reasons. So yes, I fix forward.
One of Israel's main talking points is an unironic repeat of an abusive trope and they wonder why they're losing the propaganda war, incredible stuff.
And not a moment too soon!

They are a plague upon the midwest. Conservation groups have been working hard to let them grow without limit for decades. It has become a disaster. There are something like 100 deer for every section of land in the US Midwest. They are destructive and dangerous. They kill people every year (automobile collisions). We'd be better off without them.
I guess for anyone interested in Bun and Javascript, it would be more obvious.

User
what does "TCO" mean in " Bun, JavaScript, and TCO"

ChatGPT
"TCO" in "Bun, JavaScript, and TCO" refers to "Tail Call Optimization."
I’ll be honest, I don’t know what we’re celebrating.

The planet has been on a slow roll into oblivion. 2024 will be the hottest year in recorded human history and we’ll probably pass the irreversibility threshold for average global temperature.

There are multiple extremely unsettling ongoing global humanitarian crises: Chinese-Uyghur, Russo-Ukrainian, the latest Israeli conflict*.

What exactly are we celebrating?

*note: I’m not taking sides. There are atrocities perpetrated by both sides, and grievances experienced by both sides. It just makes me sick generally to think about.
This is my experience as well. Unit test suites tend to be huge, which costs effort to maintain, and they generally tell you little about the actual quality of the software.

A good end to end test suite will give you a much truer indication of the state of your systems.

Of course I don’t say do zero unit tests, they have value, but I think too many orgs are too zealous about unit tests and too soft on higher level testing.
I looked at this and I was heavily inspired by it in terms of thought process when going through the process of looking at DAG like representation of pipelines. Nowadays there is stuff like Dagger, Dagster, Terragrunt that are more evolved forms of what this is doing, from different angles. I think it could be a good option for someone who wanted something dead simple with a very low dependency footprint though as it’s mostly just a bunch of wired up bash.
Where have you gone, Sam Cooke ("Don't know much about, hiss-toh-ree-ee ...")
That's not the point. I mentioned how to stay motivated when others are disengaged from their work. I'm not passing judgement whether it's right or wrong to be disengaged, I'm simply looking for shared experiences or advice on keeping motivated to do the job and do it well. It seems your comment is just a knee jerk reaction to some other thing I haven't mentioned.
I've been out of the loop for a number of years, but I believe there's a serious amount of ML being thrown at predicting time series, so this probably gives you an idea of how money is being made.

I've no idea what the current models look like. I imagine it was all RNNs but maybe transformers have taken over?
Because it's not an attack, meanwhile the accusation is.
We are the unbroken line of billions of years of life, and today we're still alive, unbroken. May it always be so.
Good list, but...

> Can do your job if you end up rage quitting, getting sick or just needing a day off and there's an emergency.

I'm not sure that we really want our managers getting into our code.

At my company, the company actively worked against managers, being technical. I had to "sneak" my tech, by doing open-source projects, on the side (no I didn't have a "shower clause" in my employment contract).

I'd say that it's a better bet that the manager knows who to grab, and stick on your project, until the leaks get caulked.
Lobbyists ?
This is a really good article to read if you're interested in any kind of systemic approach to load-testing, not just benchmarking databases.

- open/closed load generation strategies

- nature of the systems-under-test being almost always that of a networks of queues

- behaviour of systems-under-test tending to be non-normal and modal
Isn't prepending the efficient operation? Appending would require mutation or copying, prepending only requires a single new cons cell.

Appending to a linked list is fine if you can mutate and keep a pointer to the tail, but then again, extending mutable arrays is also amortized O(1) assuming a reasonable allocation scheme.
From another tweet below this one:

> The reason all these people have “turned on tech” is because it’s making everything dirt cheap. Similar to housing, there’s a cabal of evil people who want things to stay expensive.

These people: "Tech is exacerbating wealth inequality, making our kids depressed, polarizing our society, and making it harder for me to pay attention to the things I really care about"

Geohotz: "There's a cabal of evil people who want things to stay expensive."

I was considering a watered down, poking-fun version of Geohotz' perspective but I couldn't come up with anything goofier than the actual words he said. So I'll add to the valid complaints about tech: Systemic and profound lack of self-awareness among its cheerleaders.
EPW: Electron-phonon physics from first principles
$25,000 is basically nothing compared to the extra earning potential of the degree. It's less than a lot of cars. A good saver could pay it off in under 5 years without noticing a decrease in lifestyle.
> still not have an understanding of the details of what your reports are doing at some point in time in a given project

What’s preventing the manager from asking? More generally I think this is handled by standups (really any daily report of “here’s what I’m doing”) or some type of ticketing system.

> The brag document should include enough detail for the manager to understand (e.g PR, design links that the manager can review to assess what you did)

These should all be present in some type of ticketing system / wiki. What’s preventing the manager from using those?

Fwiw, on the other end I think managers are overworked too.
Would you rather they re-skin the same puzzles people have memorized?
> Settlers founding new places are different from immigrants. The US was created by British settlers. ... Immigrants aren’t founding new greenfield communities, they are moving into (and changing) existing ones.

Various Native American tribes — estimated population in 1492: 60 million [0] — would like a word.

[0] https://theworld.org/stories/2019-01-31/european-colonizatio...