skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why don't browsers just build a non-JS interpreter?
This is definitely a super noob question and possibly misguided. I don't work front end at all. But I am quite aware of the mountain of frameworks built on JavaScript to support modern web applications.

I was reading up on WebAssembly and how one of its intentions was to allow people to write browser code in other languages of their choice. However it seems that is proving to be quite difficult and you still have to fall back on JS at some point.

It got me thinking why don't Google, Mozilla, Apple (and Opera?) come together and build a non-JS interpreter into the browser? Google apparently tried to put Dart interpreter into Chrome but gave up somewhere along the way. So it seems possible, but just a matter of tremendous effort.

Obviously right off the bat I can think of dozen issues with this suggestion.

- This is huge engineering task, maybe impossible to achieve. Maybe it not feasible to have more than one interpreter in a browser without crashing the entire system.
- Maybe big browser vendors have no interest in doing so. They actually prefer JS?
- JS is actually fine, and any other language runtime will run into the same issues.

I am just looking for someone to explain to me at a high-level why this is a terrible idea. Thanks!
QBasic was a slightly cut down version of Quickbasic that didn't include the compiler, so your assumption was correct in that case. QBasic was bundled with DOS but you had to buy Quickbasic.
America doesn’t lack combat experience with small drones.

> The fighting in Ukraine has provided "reinforcement and validation" of what US troops have learned about drones in the Middle East, Gainey said at the conference, echoing Army leaders who say the drone war in Ukraine is influencing their planning — particularly for how to counter the one-way attack drones that Russia has used widely.

> "In some cases, yes, what we're sending to Ukraine are also going to fit into our future plans," Douglas Bush, the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics, and technology, said at a press conference in early August.

Further:

> "There's no one silver bullet. There's no one system that we can call out and say, 'This is a system that's going to defeat every threat,'" Parent told Insider.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ukraine-fighting-dron...

The truth is that there is no “drone warfare” only a new class of military tools that resemble drones and are built on drone-esque platforms. They come on the sea, they come by land and they come by air, and they can be millions of dollars or 3500-5000 bucks (which is utterly nothing for US military spending) and built of cardboard like this one:

https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/09/13/cardboard-drone-v...

They are using Ukraine as a providing ground for anti-drone technology for sure as there have been many reports of directed energy weapons in Ukraine and Israel as of late.

There are also sea-based systems:

https://www.newsweek.com/taiwan-drone-sea-china-attack-laser...

So definitely we are in the drone warfare period and those lessons are getting learned. Have been since 2013 to 2016 when we had initial reports of drones on the battlefield and reactions in military planning discussions.

With regards to the idea, that experience is the sole predictor of Battlefield success, I would urge the original poster of that comment to read a few history books.
Alright, let's take a step back. First, I am not a mobile developer. I was mentioning Android as an example of sandboxing outside the browser (mobile developers don't have anything to do with that sandboxing). Other examples include whatever iOS does (which I don't know), containers (docker and the likes), VMs, and everything in-between (like what snap or flatpak use). My point there was that running code in a browser is not - and by far - the only way to do sandboxing.

Sandboxes usually have to give permissions, with some granularity. The more permissions you give, the larger the attack surface. There is nothing that makes browsers inherently safer than other sandboxes: a browser is just a process running in user space. If anything, modern browsers are so complex (and getting worse with time) that the attack surface is big, which is why they require a ton of resources in terms of security.

Moreover, Web UIs bring their own class of issues that don't really apply to native apps. You insisted on CORS, which is one mitigation for some of those issues. But CORS is really a browser thing, I don't think it really makes sense to compare it to anything outside the "webview world".

If security is your concern (and you seem to insist that it is), then webapps are really not better than the alternatives. Actually, the Apple Store and the Play Store (to give an example in the mobile world) allow Apple and Google to somehow monitor the apps that users install, which is most certainly more secure than a model where anyone can load any webapp from any website.

I see many reasons to want PWAs (which I may or may not share), but security is not one.
Quantum computing startup says it will beat IBM to error correction
That wasn't the point.

What can you say that I can hear on a recording that would stress you out if I listen in 3 hours but not if I listen after 1 hour? Is 2 hours okay but 2,5 is perpetual suddenly? That's a strange hill to die on. Zero hours make sense. 2 and no more or less seems ... strange. Why 2 and not 3? 33? 0,3?
> But to the point of this discussion, for business / military I wonder how much ugliness plays a factor. If a 5% more effective fighter plane was clashing shades of horrible colors (for camo) and had a laughably ugly form, would it be used? What if the pilot mounted/dismounted in a ridiculous position, maybe upside down? Otherwise, people are dying and wars are being lost for aesthetics. What about 20% more effective? Where is the line?

Military transport planes have rear-facing seats, which are known to be safer. The only reason airlines don't do the same is that passengers wouldn't be happy.
Honestly, the first thing I'd do is hope that they forgot that I make house and car payments though them and that they forgot how much damage they could do to my professional life just by intentionally sabotaging my credit. Crypto doesn't provide any realistic protection to me from their whims should they become bad actors.
To add to the list of (subjectively) ugly airplanes. Here is the French Pou-du-ciel (literally: louse of the sky) [1]

Besides its unusual shape, it is also what would be called "open source" today. The blueprints are freely available [2]. It is a popular home-built airplane, even today, 90 years later. It has created quite a community has seen several improvements over the years. It is now one of the safest and easiest light airplanes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mignet_Pou-du-Ciel

[2] http://avions.mignet.free.fr/spdlr.php
Again, already possible. Go to your Fidelity account and check.
I agree there is often a lot more nuance, but I don't entirely agree that the entire concept doesn't exist. For example there is no word for "sibling" in Dutch, and some of the entries on that list such as "koukleum" (person who quickly feels cold) don't really have good translations to English. It's not "untranslatable" in the strict sense (I just translated it here), but there is no analogous word and it's "untranslatable" in the colloquial sense.

Either way, I think a site like this could be a really interesting, if it was written well, with appropriate context and nuance. I would also choose a very different list (I drafted an article for this years ago, and it has 0% overlap).
My understanding is that in recent versions of iOS (and iPadOS) Siri runs a decent percentage of requests locally as well.
As much as many people want alternatives to JavaScript, there are also people who consider themselves JavaScript experts (or the various related languages like TypeScript). They’ve invested a ton of time and effort into getting to where they are.

There’s a balance between disruptive change and keeping these folks on board. Get it wrong and you’ll end up with it strangled in its cradle.

My own take is that low-code platforms will continue aggressively moving into this space, especially in the enterprise space. They come with their own problems and are often aggressively overhyped, but they will put pressure on “traditional” developers to move faster and look for better solutions.
Mastodon is extremely similar to the consumer Twitter product, and "Twitter-scale" is a known number that we tested well beyond. Among other things, we verified our timeline delivery latency was at least as good as Twitter's number ad that it scaled linearly.
> I can't believe this is really what they ended up with: multicolored stars to indicate different things? I thought it was a joke at first

What's the issue with it?
The US has decades of intensive research, development, and operational experience with of drones at every scale and for every mission. This ranges from the multi-million dollar predator drones you are thinking of to the dirt-cheap disposable drones used by infantry units that are basically just higher quality versions of what is being used in Ukraine. US military has been preparing for this for a long time and has a lot of real-world experience with it.

I think people have already forgotten that many of the early small-format drone capabilities used in Ukraine were provided by the US. An issue is that many of these types of drone systems developed by the US are export controlled, particularly the sensors and electronics, which limits the types available to Ukraine. Much of the equipment given to Ukraine by the US is obsolete or downgraded prior to delivery.

Ukraine and Russia are speed-running drone warfare that the US has been trying to perfect for decades. The US military has solutions to particular drone warfare problems that Ukraine/Russia have not yet solved.
On the other hand, it's /very/ short. Wasn't totally my cup of tea (picked it up because I LOVED her "Wayfarers" books -- /The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet/ and the two sequels) but I finished it in just one cup of tea.
That kind of defeats the point of the metaphor. At that point just say the system is rigged.
How Safari can improve extensions
I can't speak for the other commenter, but I don't think they said that "web3 is responsible for all the crypto nonsense". My impression is that they're just hinting at a relationship between the two.
The biggest take away from this is the LAM-over-email which was hidden away in one of the demos. This has a lot more potential (esp. in a business context) in my opinion than the phone itself.

Being able to directly email an autonomous agent or even CC one later into a conversation with instructions can be a game-changer. Not only would the replies be faster but the result could be cheaper compared to a human equivalent.

One use case which comes to mind is, which was also demo'd, is making trip arrangements. In the demo, the spoken request to book a trip to London was long and precise; no way I would get that right the first time on any push-to-talk device. At my company, we use a travel agent for business trips which we email and they book everything and send over receipts and tickets. I could just as well be emailing a LLM/LAM.
Note that interpreter in the Lisp world by default has a different meaning.

A "Lisp interpreter" runs Lisp source in the form of s-expressions. That's what the first Lisp did.

A "Lisp compiler" compiles Lisp source code to native code, either directly or with the help of a C compiler or an assembler. A Lisp compiler could also compile source code to byte code. In some implementations this byte code can be JIT compiled (ABCL, CLISP, ...).

The first Lisp provided a Lisp to assembly compiler, which compiled Lisp code to assembly code, which then gets compiled to machine code. That machine code could be loaded into Lisp and functions then could be native machine code.

The Newton Toolkit could compile type declared functions to machine code. That's something most Common Lisp compilers do, sometimes by default (SBCL, CCL, ... by default directly compile source code to machine code).

SBCL:

* (defun add (a b) (declare (fixnum a b) (optimize (speed 3))) (+ a b))
ADD
* (disassemble #'add)
; disassembly for ADD
; Size: 104 bytes. Origin: #x7006E1789C ; ADD
; 89C: 0000018B ADD NL0, NL0, NL1
; 8A0: 0A0000AB ADDS R0, NL0, NL0
; 8A4: E7010054 BVC L1
; 8A8: BD2A00B9 STR WNULL, [THREAD, #40] ; pseudo-atomic-bits
; 8AC: BC7A47A9 LDP TMP, LR, [THREAD, #112] ; mixed-tlab.{free-pointer, end-addr}
; 8B0: 8A430091 ADD R0, TMP, #16
; 8B4: 5F011EEB CMP R0, LR
; 8B8: E8010054 BHI L2
; 8BC: AA3A00F9 STR R0, [THREAD, #112] ; mixed-tlab
; 8C0: L0: 8A3F0091 ADD R0, TMP, #15
; 8C4: 3E2280D2 MOVZ LR, #273
; 8C8: 9E0300A9 STP LR, NL0, [TMP]
; 8CC: BF3A03D5 DMB ISHST
; 8D0: BF2A00B9 STR WZR, [THREAD, #40] ; pseudo-atomic-bits
; 8D4: BE2E40B9 LDR WLR, [THREAD, #44] ; pseudo-atomic-bits
; 8D8: 5E0000B4 CBZ LR, L1
; 8DC: 200120D4 BRK #9 ; Pending interrupt trap
; 8E0: L1: FB031AAA MOV CSP, CFP
; 8E4: 5A7B40A9 LDP CFP, LR, [CFP]
; 8E8: BF0300F1 CMP NULL, #0
; 8EC: C0035FD6 RET
; 8F0: E00120D4 BRK #15 ; Invalid argument count trap
; 8F4: L2: 1C0280D2 MOVZ TMP, #16
; 8F8: 0AFBFF58 LDR R0, #x7006E17858 ; SB-VM::ALLOC-TRAMP
; 8FC: 40013FD6 BLR R0
; 900: F0FFFF17 B L0
NIL

I've entered a function and it gets ahead of time compiled to non-generic machine code.

Calling the function ADD with the wrong numeric arguments is an error, which will be detected both a compile and at runtime.

* (add 3.0 2.0)

debugger invoked on a TYPE-ERROR @7006E17898 in thread
#<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {70088224A3}>:
The value
3.0
is not of type
FIXNUM
when binding A

Redefinition of + will do nothing to the code. The addition is inlined machine code.
Previously discussed last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38870429
Apart from some edge cases, Western democracies have quite solid property rights upheld also by the judicial system. But yes if you’re in Russia or China then this argument is moot. They have much less property rights. However, Bitcoin is also not a solution because there is no point in owning Bitcoin if you fell trice out of a Russian window or are sentenced to a labour camp or to the death penalty in China for "fraudulus activities“. Difficult to spend your Bitcoin in both cases.
Not sure I get that. Are you saying that they lack an index of messages?
When I was younger, there were those who were commonly late or no shows, and their futures rarely went in a good direction. For myself I found I had to acquire quite a bit of resilience to reach average reliability. The youngest generations now see things like a non-fixed schedule as a lifestyle perk—and they're right—but I worry about how they can acquire resilience from this and other areas.
Yes. To the person alleging "luck":

what things have you said or done lately that will look incredibly stupid in 30 years?

Trick question. You don't know, do you?
The Joel article is about not rewriting an existing application. TFA is not saying that Twitter should rewrite. It's saying that if you don't work for Twitter but you want to write something like Twitter maybe this could be a good place to start.

At some point in time the same argument was made for relational databases despite there being stable systems built without them based on ISAM. The newer relational systems took a lot less work to implement but that didn't imply that it made sense to rewrite the ISAM based systems.
Web3 is the crypto nonsense. It was a rebrand attempt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3
I think many years ago I read about this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Odyssey and people liked it very much as well.
I wish they put it next to something, I have difficulty understanding the size of it. People in this thread are talking about it like it’s tiny, but I got the impression from the pictures that it was gameboy size.
Thank you! Please give it a spin. We'd love any feedback or thoughts. :)

We are using it on our codebases, and it's helped us secure our own product. Users have also been trying it out with their private codebases, and we even used our own personal projects to test it.

If you'd like to try Corgea with some open-source tools, there are a ton of applications that are vulnerable by design like. Some popular ones:

https://github.com/bkimminich/juice-shop
https://github.com/we45/Vulnerable-Flask-App
https://github.com/adeyosemanputra/pygoat

Edit: Forgot to mention, we've put in some controls to avoid hallucinations like comparing diff sizes between the two changes. Sometimes LLM's like to truncate code when generating
a fix or generates too much. We actually stop the result from being generated and we retry again.
Kind of a hilarious take if you watch the keynote where significant time and a moving backdrop are devoted to highlighting the miasma of navigating across 100 apps on a smartphone. Decrying "just install another app" is a big part of the raison d'etre for the whole product!
That's semantics. The US does much much worse things, but because the US or the EU brand something "terrorist" then those that support it in one way or another are evil?

How many have Iran killed? The war on terror alone have caused more than 500.000 deaths. Sure you can say Iran is evil, but nothing you said makes them an okay target more than the US, UK, EU, etc.
TE is known for hardware design. To be honest, nobody cares about another app promising to improve some aspect of your life.
Matthew C. Klein pointed out on Twitter: "the owner/operator of this website has a longstanding grudge against America's securities regulator."
Every so often this gets recommended again, and every time it does I can't help but not recommend it. Not because the content isn't very good, it's quite informative, but it's incomplete, and cuts off just as things are getting really interesting. It's been nearly a decade since the last update, but there are just better resources out there these days.
any ic engineering role in a big org has just a few ways to leverage change: oratory, effort, expertise, and resignation.

use the appropriate tools to solve the problem at hand. it depends.
Ask HN: Degraded reliability in print newspaper deliveries?
I'm curious if others have experienced this. I'd subscribed to the Financial Times last year -- my first ever print subscription to a newspaper -- in the interest of better-absorbing the information therein, giving my kids something offline to browse, and supporting quality journalism. It did not go well -- despite living in a major sub/urban area (a densely populated, major suburb in the SF Bay Area), delivery was extremely inconsistent and unreliable: the paper would arrive fairly late most days, and would be successfully delivered perhaps 4-5 times a week (almost never on Saturdays). The FT's customer service people were consistently considerate and empathetic, but interventions they made with the distributor (the Bay Area News Group) would have short-term effects, if any, and the non-deliveries would soon resume again. I finally cancelled today (though, caveat emptor, the FT has a rotten policy that it only pro-rates your cancellation if you cancel within the first 10 days of a subscription period, which means I have several more weeks of occasionally getting a paper.)

Setting aside Bay Area-specific pathologies, I wonder if print journalism isn't simply in a death spiral -- if there aren't few enough remaining subscribers that cost-cutting and general malaise means that the service and its reliability is severely degraded, regardless of specific paper/distributor and location. Would love to hear others' experiences with this.
if you take the time to think about what i wrote you'll see that none of that is true. the reason this has been a waste of my time is that you're so stuck in ego-defense mode that you can't even recognize a comprehensive and well-organized rebuttal when it hits you in the face
Walk into VC meeting, say "LLM", collect cash... profit?
Which variety of wojak spam do you find most insightful?
The CEO was/is also the CEO in an YC company: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/raven-tech

(Click the LinkedIn icon for more info)

Don't know the current status.
Thanks for sharing! Will look into it :)
> It's unclear to me if Github, as we think of it today, even existed or was at any level of popularity at this point in time.

In 2010, when Openstack has had its first release, Github already hosted 1 million repos. https://github.blog/2010-07-25-one-million-repositories/

For comparison: Sourceforge had less than 250,000 in 2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#/media/File:SF.net....
You're assuming the post was flagged in an effort to hide the alleged truth of the story. It's more likely it was flagged because it's political in nature. Change it to "Journalists, Rightists" and I'd flag it, as well.
> the industry is only starting to catch onto on-device models language models.

i mean there are technical limitations and tradeoffs to running LLM-size models locally. doesnt help to ascribe it to lack of foresight when it is a known Hard Problem.
But one of those things has the responsibility placed up on you.

The other, not so much.

Plenty of downsides to crypto no doubt, but I'm not sure "personal responsibility" is one of them.
That’s a fun site.
web3 is the moniker these crypto-zealots use for their crypto-currency-all-the-things efforts.

It secondarily has connotations of decentralization with stuff like Mastodon, but relatively few people care about that stuff.
And Miele. A bit on the pricey side but very solid gear.
Nowadays we don't really buy hardware or software... We buy into ecosystems.

The Android crowd, the Apple gang, etc... Once you are member of one ecosystem, friction is high enough usually to keep you in.

Moreover, many of the eco-customers wear more than one device.. phone, watch ...

So... why would I buy into yet another ecosystem with a third device to carry?

And no... most eco-clients will not abandon their current ecosystem that easily.

The 360 degree camera is quite nice, though...
The keynote takes forever to tell you what the thing does. It is a cool toy, and the price is low, but I don't know if it will go anywhere.
> That's the real advantage of having a system like git in combination with a server like GitHub.

I would say that it is the real advantage of having a system like git, period. Right?
Thanks for the detailed response and interesting links - I absolutely see what you’re saying. People like you are why hacker news is hard to quit!
For a 3% gain that they might well have missed holding out for more, lol.
It is fairly common to have noexec on /dev/shm; filesystem configurations are always up to the admin so they could feasibly set anything.
Since we're all being a bit pedantic here... the SEC would be responsible for negligently allowing a third-party pump to happen-- they would not be responsible for a pump and dump. Pump and dump requires intention (and requires dumping).
Those questions are all answered in the documentation, which we spent a ton of time on. Some available resources:

- Public build that you can download and run yourself locally https://redplanetlabs.com/docs/~/downloads-maven-local-dev.h...
- rama-demo-gallery, containing short, thoroughly commented examples in both Java and Clojure https://github.com/redplanetlabs/rama-demo-gallery
- Gentle six-part tutorial introducing the concepts and API, including how to run stuff locally https://redplanetlabs.com/docs/~/tutorial1.html
- Introduction to the first-class Clojure API https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/10/11/introducing-ramas-...

Here are a few pages related to fault-tolerance:

- https://redplanetlabs.com/docs/~/replication.html
- https://redplanetlabs.com/docs/~/microbatch.html#_operation_...
- https://redplanetlabs.com/docs/~/stream.html#_fault_toleranc...