skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My answers for 2, 3 and 5 were different:

2) I thought the type would be promoted to short. It turns out that the result of the arithmetic operation is promoted to int.

3) The signness of char is platform dependent. It is signed on x86 and amd64, but unsigned everywhere else. After seeing my mistake, I would expect this to cause the answer to be -96 on amd64 from sign extension when it converted into an integer, yet it is 160, which is what I would have expected from a platform where char is signed. If anyone knows why it is 160 here, please let me know.

5) This is a classic. I know to answer I do not know because despite having an Operator Precedence, C famously says that this is undefined. I have no idea why the standard does this when there is a clearly right answer. Java for example makes this have only 1 right answer.
> Under promise, over deliver… that’s the smart engineering way.

That brought to mind the glass-half-full / half-empty (false) dichotomy: The engineer thinks the glass is twice as big as it needs to be (or maybe 30-40% bigger to allow for a safety margin).
I can proudly say I got zero and I pretend to be a C programmer!
Automatic braking on my car kicked in to prevent something similar (it stopped me reversing into a tree, in the first week I had it, when I thought I was in first but was actually in reverse). In the following five years it has given me a false proximity alarm maybe two or three times, but never wrongly braked. I’d call that a huge success. (This a SEAT, so VW tech).
No, rivalrous has a specific meaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)
I get that sense as well. I really have to wonder how much of this alleged technology actually affects performance and how much is woo-woo nonsense -- so long as the bowling ball is a rigid body, the only relevant factors should be its weight, its center of mass, and its moments of inertia around a few axes. Putting weird swirls and ripples into the core won't meaningfully affect that.
That’s amazingly cheap to me if it’s a unit price per kWh.

In the UK for me unit prices from April to July last year were £0.50/kWh (USD$0.64) and that was with the government implementing a price cap and subsidising it.

It’s down dropped to a more reasonable £0.29 (USD$0.37) but that’s still with the government capping the maximum rates that can be charged, but no longer subsidising energy companies as the UK wholesale rate is lower than the cap.
> NASA engineers are better engineers…

JWST was built by primarily Northrop Grumman engineers
Spotify is profitable as of recent quarters.
The summary seems fine as far as it goes. But I don't see any comment on the source of the moolah.

From the point of view of someone who has never in their career gotten equity, options, RSUs, or whatever, all that free money is being expropriated from their IRA or 401k and therefore retirement.

It's odd when you think about it - in Soviet America, poor capitalists get robbed by rich workers. What a country!
https://archive.ph/Gffow
Yeah. It may mess with the artist's vision but the impact is still way more subtle than other methods used to protect against these unwanted actions.

Of course I'm assuming it works to begin with. Sounds like a game of cat and mouse. And AI has a lot of rich cats.
It's this simple: Twitter is where most of the people I want to follow are. When they move on I may well follow them there. I did stop going there for a few years, found that I missed them and went back. With the Control Panel for Twitter extension all I see is just what I asked for, no ads, no random hot takes. And that makes for a very information dense news break that I look forward to once a day.

I'm an invisible Norm sitting at the bar in Cheers, except the place is full of many of the smartest, wittiest people I know of. You don't replicate that by just building another bar.
First part, of course, but since HN is only like 50k that doesn’t say much about HN.

Second part, there can forsure be many “losers” here but it’s quite ignorant to think there’s the same percentage struggling in math classes as the general population. Think about it. If you took 100 HN’ers where do you think they skew on succeeding on math tests or even taking classes like Calculus compared to gen pop? The average person even in the US doesn’t have a Bachelors degree. Do you think that applies to HN? Or that it’s not correlative with educational success?
Now this is the kind of crazy stuff I come to HN for.
I grew up near the Cold Regions Research and Evaluation Laboratory in New Hampshire, and we (schoolkids) were told that our little town would be a primary target because “that’s where they study how we could survive a nuclear winter.” I’ve never actually figured out whether that claim is reasonable.
Interesting! What about it makes you sad? I'm happier than ever because I don't need to worry anymore about if something is safe, because I know it is safe.

Having sensitive data compromised would make me extremely sad.
The MouthPad^ connects via standard Bluetooth pairing and is compatible with most common operating systems, functioning like a Bluetooth mouse under standard Bluetooth HID protocols. In the future, we will introduce an SDK to enable direct mappings for more tailored applications.
> but how much consumption can you really move around like that, and how many energy hogs can you just decide to not use? If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you going to start eating more salads instead?

There’s been some interest in this locally due to energy regulation moving to a more punishing system for peak usage. Also high electricity prices. And the topic came up that people would be encouraged to do things that are considered unsafe like washing their clothes while they are sleeping.

Things like this need to be automated. (And be safe.) Manually following fancy gadgets won’t make much of a difference.

Meanwhile we’re (or were, don’t know the current status) selling hydropower to the rest of the Europe during the fall, emptying the reservoirs before the winter so that electricity prices become unreasonable (leading to strategies like washing your clothes while you sleep or just being content to freeze while indoors).

And I have never seen a good argument for the export/import (Europe) arrangement. But I guess we can try to sideline that whole conversation by nagging people to turn off the light in the bathroom when it’s not busy.
Aren't there units smaller than nm?
Baltics to Build Joint Fortifications Along Russian, Belarus Borders
By taking control of the UX of the most popular platform?
And so the cycle of programmers that create serious errors and vulnerabilities because they think they understand UB and don't respect it continued...
TFA is clearly written in jest. The provided code is not supposed to be run in production, just to illustrate how easy is to trick a "leak detector" in your debugger. You just put all your mallocs in a list, and at the end of your program you can free them all.

Yet, the idea of not freeing some memory in your program is not entirely stupid. Unless your memory is allocated inside a loop of unpredictable length, it's not really necessary to ever free it. Worse: the call to "free" may even fall after your program has run successfully. Thus, avoiding the useless (but typical) freeing spree at the end of your program may make it more robust!
I end up eventually using them up in various DIY projects. I like to have a pile around because it lowers the inhibitions to get started with one! Nothing to break your new-whim momentum like a missing part and shipping times.
Still full of microorganisms and algae it seems like. Seems like it also passes some areas with greenery.
Another 50-year gap:

1934: IBM 405, 150 cards/minute, rented by businesses at $1000/mo (USD 23K/mo in 2024)

http://www.righto.com/2017/11/identifying-early-ibm-computer...

1984: Apple Macintosh, 6 MHz, bought by individuals at $2500 (USD 7,4K in 2024)

https://support.apple.com/kb/sp186

(and for that matter, 50 years in aerospace is the difference between https://www.kshs.org/index.php?url=km/items/view/210706 and https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/space_level2/... )
That is more or less exactly what HaptX does.

The problem is latency. Your actuator needs to be able to move from 0 to 100% actuation within a half second or so. Ideally as fast as possible. If there's significant delay between visually seeing your hand contact an object and feeling the haptics, it becomes worse than useless.

To make pneumatic actuators go really fast, you need a lot of pressure. The reason the HaptX system is so big is that they have dozens of individual actuators. You need a lot of valves, which is what's in the backpack. The compressor is a separate unit that sits on the floor. It's also huge.

But this is very much an area of active research. There's a lot of interesting actuators out there. Overall, people seem to be moving away from pneumatics because the cost and complexity is so high.
I kind of agree, but at the same time I don't. Before REST API's has always been a situation of discussion ( as in schema and what not, even with openapi). But with GrapQL I've seen more discussion about the schema the anything else. Which is what I prefer as a backend developer.

So if GraphQL front-end developers into discussion about schema I rather take that over whatever REST solution they're using today.

But I might be biased here...
Most of these things are implementation defined rather than undefined. Only the 5th is undefined.
This airport was most likely a military airbase during the Cold War though?

At least that's the case in the closest target about 40km from my home village in Altenburg in Thuringia/Germany (a small town of 30k people). Today this is a tiny civilian airport, but during the Cold War a Soviet military airbase: https://www.mil-airfields.de/de/altenburg.htm
It is only natural to see a moral difference between people going to school and learn from your art because they are passionate about it, versus someone on the internet just scraping as many images as possible and automating the learning process.
For a device with so little functionality and non-critical functionality at that, I wouldn't call $24/year negligible. My whole home Ryzen router/server idles around there. Honestly I'd bet the fuse was missing because the last tenant was an engineer, investigated this thing themselves, found it a useless waste, and pulled it.
I’d say it moves “all the complexity” to the backend if it were defining one REST endpoint for each page the client loads. With GraphQL, each resolver is individually much simpler logic, and there’s no effort to do the stitching.

So basically frontend+backend effort with GraphQL is much smaller than frontend+backend with REST
> Pol Pot wasn't "innately" evil and I doubt many people would say such a thing.

> Personally I am not a christian

You really shouldn't extrapolate from yourself then.

I've seen this discourse repeatedly in Germany when it comes to Hitler and the Nazis:

1. Hitler did unspeakably evil things.

2. Therefore Hitler was evil.

3. However the evil he did was so uniquely evil he can not be compared to others.

4. Therefore Hitler was uniquely capable of committing such evil.

5. This implies Hitler was already innately evil prior to committing those acts.

This usually extends to falsely distinguish the evil SS from the "patriotic" Wehrmacht (who were "ordinary soldiers just following orders" and only "incidentally" ended up participating in mass murders). It's directly tied to the Great Man narrative of history: only Hitler could have been Hitler because he was innately different. The idea in the Great Man narrative usually being that a great leader emerges and changes history, rather than history changing through the conflict of material conditions (or ideas, if you're a Hegelian) and the actual figureheads being largely incidental (i.e. what Marxists call dialectical materialism).

According to demographic data, over 40% of Germans identify as non-religious whereas in the US it's a bit over 20%, so I would expect Americans to actually be more likely to think this way (if not outright going with the "demon person" idea of evil).

Also, according to most Christian faiths Jesus specifically atoned for the Original Sin (Adam and Eve disobeying God by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil). The entire "redemption" thing is also a bit more complicated: in practice even Protestant and Catholic Christians generally behave as if they were following the Eastern Orthodox view of mortal sins where mortal sins are irredeemable and the separation from God they inflict on the sinner is permanent.

But this is a digression. The point is, most people view evil when it comes to person not as a mere descriptor of having done something but

- either: having a pre-existing innate essence of evil-ness that allowed them to do it

- or: having been so corrupted by the act itself that they now possess a permanent essence of evil-ness

or a combination of the two. In other words: an Evil Person™ is not just a person who has done an evil thing but a person uniquely capable of and predisposed towards doing evil things to a greater extent than a Normal Person™ would be. Pol Pot wasn't just evil because he did evil things, he did those evil things because he was Pol Pot, an evil person.

I'll shut up now before I get started on how different ideas of free will play into this.
Yeah there's a whole genre of talks, blog posts, online rants of the form:

"So you think you know C, huh? What does this horrible piece of code do that no one would ever write and if you see it should be nuked from orbit? <ridiculous contrived example>"

I just clicked I don't know on all of em, cause I realised what the metagame was from a mile away.

Some of these things are at least a little insightful, but overall, kind of a waste of time past a certain point, unless you work on a compiler or something like that. Much more constructive would be making resources on best practices for things like memory management, string handling, knowing where the footguns are in the stdlib and other common libs, managing complexity etc. Most bad C code isn't because of some standards gotcha, it's because of those things.
> When I see it used it's as a device to set expectations when there are so many variables at play that any promise or commitment would be foolish, lead to disappointment with no upside. And that's how I'd interpret it here too.

In such a situation, why not say like it is? Just explain the client the situation, what's the risk and for what additional cost it can be lowered. And I have no doubt this is what was happening in NASA, in other words this was no "underpromise and overdeliver", this was "explain the situation and agree on trade-offs leading to the best ratio of positive outcome for the price".

I think the only situation where this approach is valid is when your client is not sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs and make an optimal decision.
Vastly better hardware and software support too by virtue of being x86. Preferred flavor of *nix, Windows, Haiku, whatever, as well as the possibility of virtualization of any of the above.

Not to knock ARM SBCs — ARM is great and I think holds a lot of promise for the future, but there’s no arguing that the platform tends to be restrictive outside of mainstream devices (e.g. Samsung Galaxies and Macs).
Back when I worked in manufacturing, this kind of tone was pretty common. We even called the quarterly speeches from the CEO to employees "you suck meetings" (out of earshot of the CEO, of course). As software engineering becomes less about innovation and more about a relentless slog to reach milestones, I'm not surprised that it's taking on aspects of the manufacturing world.
I think the mold linker does this.
Rotting minds, really?
No, but there’s a big difference between the machine causing you to fall with force vs just falling on otherwise flat ground normally.
> As I conclude that I am not special

Aww, don’t sell yourself short!
Same. Love it
> If you post your images for the world to see, and someone uses that image, you are not harmed.

Let me define a few cases of 'uses that image' and see where your line in the sand drops

* If someone used that image as part of an advertising campaign for their product, they are profiting off your work. Are you not harmed?

* If someone used that image and pretended they created it. Are you not harmed?

* If someone used that image and sold it directly. Are you not harmed?
The screenshot is just a small snippet, zoomed in for clarity (and to avoid sharing PII from my actual calendar) but I actually see about 5 months ahead at a time with zero clicks/scrolling on my standard browser.

Also I find the horizontal timeline view helps to spot clusters of too-much-going-on more intuitively than the typical wrapped view of a calendar block.
We are just temporary occupants of this office
I also agree with that!

I'm not actually opposed to Graphql as a technology, One of my favourite pieces of technology is actually PostGraphile.

I just believe it's easy to misuse it (in similar ways to an ORM) that result in not utilising server capabilities to their fullest.
I learned C on a VAX, then used it on 68K, ARM6, very briefly Cray (that's a weird one), x86 in segmented mode, x86 in 32-bit flat mode, and now 64-bit in various flavors. As soon as I saw this code was using "short" and "int" I immediately knew all bets were off!

The comments remind me of the VAX programmers in 1990 who wrote code assuming pointers and ints were the same size, and if yours weren't, they told you to get a "real computer".
If the bank allowed anyone to impersonate you at the bank and withdraw all your money, who would you blame?
Ancient cart tracks. Nobody knows exactly why they are there. And they are everywhere. Sometimes going from cliff into the sea.
> It's easy to say "don't do that" but shit happens: large legacy codebases, social factors, and individual incentives of backend and frontend teams with deadlines.

I don't buy this argument. Imagine if an airplane manufacturer had the same philosophy. "We can't just substitute that component because it wouldn't fit the existing frame... Oh but wait, we can't just change the frame or the new component to make it fit because of social factors within the engineering team. Let's just tack it on as originally planned and then work around the issue by implementing a complex solution in the software to make up for the structural design flaw.."

That's basically the Boeing 737 MAX story. We know the result of that philosophy.
that's awesome to hear, thanks!
How I helped build world's fastest temporary network
Not really. There is a reason why we find realistic painting to be more fascinating than a photo and why some still practice it. The effort put in by another artist does affect our enjoyment.
>In the rare cases where your program needs to be long-running, leaks may become a real problem.

Where did this idea come from? I have seen leaks where a program can consume all available memory in just a few seconds because the programmer (definitely not me...) forgot to free something in a function called millions of times.
I used Zim for over a decade but recently migrated to Obsidian because of the mobile support. Definitely a big change but I can say that after a year it has worked for me and I don't miss Zim as much as thought would.
Presumably, someone writing code for a nuclear power plant would be using astree and get warnings whenever they do anything wrong:

https://www.absint.com/astree/index.htm

It is a shame that it is not accessible to the rest of us. :/
LeCun seems to believe that only "human-level AI" could create huge, possibly catastrophic unintended consequences. That's not the case. Perfectly stupid social network algorithms have already huge detrimental effects on the mental health of millions of people. Perfectly stupid social network algorithms have big, serious and unexpected political consequences around the world, and can provably make or break elections for instance.

Implying that we need "human-level AI" to create a catastrophe is not merely short-sighted, in the light of what we already know it's either really naive, or a deliberate act of misinformation.
>I'm not convinced that most copyright infringements are immoral regardless of their legal status.

You're right and wrong. You're right because most infringement is from people who can do minimal damage and in fact so more help by giving awareness to your works by sharing. But this is only becsuse copyright it working (most of the time) against corporate entities who don't want to leave any room for legalities to come in.

If copyright ended I'd bet my bottom dollar Disney and all the other billionaires companies would be spamming any and everything that gets moderately popular. And Disney can put advertise the original artist easily.
any relation with this ? https://thegreattaking.com/read-online-or-download
Scraping, Suing and RAG
I have bases set up on Bluesky and Threads etc for when Twitter does implode, but in the meantime, the network is still valuable.

There is something to be said about seeing the downfall of a company or service in real time.
"Level 7" by Mordecai Roshwald, is a sobering take on this whole nuclear dick wrangling debacle.
Because accurately pricing sales around intended purchases makes the economy better

And it's more efficient for a company managing subscriptions to automate accurate pricing the right way than it is for each and every customer to sift through their payment history for anomalies
The shop's Instagram account says it specializes in "creepy dolls, oddities, and bone art," with posts including a real human skull and a case of 11 human vertebrae. The caption of one of the posts says, "If you're in the market for human bones hit me up."

https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/fbi-search-kats-creepy-c...
OP is saying that you can write (a < b < c) in C and the likes, but it behaves as if ((a < b) < c), which is pretty much never what you want - hence why ternary and N-ary comparison operators like the Python one are desirable in the first place.
Yes, exactly. I think they consider Boeing and SpaceX as “one of us”. It’s pitched this way on their website
Using warhead explosion as garbage collector might seem like a clever hack, but all it takes is an upgrade by a different team (say, adding a new engine, or longer-range sensors, or repurposing a surface-to-air missile for a surface-to-surface role), and suddenly your guidance software runs out of memory before it explodes, and your missile falls onto an an elementary school or hospital.
Compiling Python in WebAssembly Target?
Hey all, any tips on how to get .py file into .wasm file? Searched through many repos, but can't quite figure it out. Any input is appreciated!
reminds me of Dialup, which I used a ton during the pandemic: https://dialup.com/
I wonder if south america would have been hit...
We watched that in the US as well, great movie!
40KW.
You’re only looking at the declassified sites though
Related to killing EFI variables in a way the UEFI didn't expect I bet - would happen when boot loader is installed and boot entries set possibly.
systemctl just uses dbus, as far as I understand, and someone can easily send dbus commands too fast
It’s time for Ubisoft to get used to not making money.
Writing C in the blind for a quiz and deploying tested C to known platforms are two entirely different things.