skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every given day there's probably dozens of miles of lanes that are closed due to crashes or refurbishment. Probably a lot more than that depending on where you cast your net. Whats another stretch of road going to do on aggregate anyhow? When bridge work or sewer work goes on over these same roads they go down for years too, sometimes totally down with no travel at all, e.g. in LA it took the city 8 years to replace the 6th street viaduct in Downtown LA and traffic was forced to detour for nearly a decade. Yet the sky didn't fall, things carried on basically how they always have with hardly a noticeable impact, and now that the bridge is open today I wouldn't say that traffic in the nearby area has been dramatically changed one way or another. There was plenty of redundancy and spare capacity in the network as it were.
I enjoyed “Data Structures and Algorithms in Python”!
I think this problem mostly exists in places where people have a single recycling bin. If each type of material is collected separately, it's easy to establish when recycling makes sense. And then you can also create incentives for using packaging materials that can be recycled.
Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO
This is the plot to Demolition Man :D
> The result would be a de facto ban on AI chatbots

No, the result would be a de facto ban on using them as a replacement for customer service agents. I support that for the time being since AI chatbots can't actually do that job yet because we don't know how to keep them from lying.

They could put a disclaimer on it of course. To be sufficiently truthful, the disclaimer would need to be front and center and say something like "The chat bot lies sometimes. It is not authorized to make any commitments on behalf of the company no matter what it says. Always double-check anything it tells you."
Maybe. But just look at the comment replies to this question on the highbrow HN community.

Even your own comments about him being an ugly commenter on X and putting out an ugly truck are mainstream opinions that have been greatly parroted across media in recent weeks.

I don’t use X and never really liked Twitter so I don’t know what he’s been posting, so apologies for not having a great opinion.

I was trying to ask the question about whether anyone sees the giant propaganda effort or not, not become some Elon defender.
Maybe with climate change and more brutal summers that calculus will change.
Well, if I'm taking shots anyway, here's the one that really got me:

> JP Doherty did not want to sign the email. But he knew he didn’t have a choice. His son, Rhys, was scheduled to have strabismus surgery in January, correcting an eye issue that made it difficult for him to walk on his own. The procedure cost $10,000 out of pocket. Doherty discussed the decision with his wife, and while she wanted him to be able to quit, they both knew the kids needed his health insurance.

This is one of the employees who signed the "hardcore" ultimatum that Musk set for his employees at Twitter.

The plutocrats who exert outsized control of our lives get outsized attention in the media, as it has always been.
The Danger of Detaching Partitions in Postgres
If anyone is feeling doom and gloom, the field of plastic pyrolysis looks promising. It will require processing similar in scale to manufacturing hydrocarbons, but there is still hope.
A friend told me that the third video in the recommended list (the one that you see on the side when playing a video) often seems to be a (sometimes) barely related one from a small channel you've never watched. I can confirm the same happens to me.
> Occitan native speakers: Estimates range from 100,000 to 800,000 total speakers (2007–2012)

No assimilation and cultural genocide policy in any form. It has just dwindled to these numbers on its own. Also has no relation to the topic that we discuss. Don't forget to call whataboutism.

I gather that reflection is not a strong side of Western Europeans.

> those very same Russians that are currently bombing the shit out of anything Ukrainian

That's called "a civil war", and that's how it viewed by many Russians and some Ukrainians. Indeed that's not a great condition to be in.

> who wish to eradicate the Ukrainian nation and culture

Again, this accusation is coming from a proud member of a nation who eradicated a couple of cultures very recently. "While I had already been born" recently.

People of Donbass were fed up with Ukrainization to the extent that these two Republics do not have Ukrainian as co-official. But Crimea, and the "new territories" of Kherson oblast and Zaparozh'ye (whatever left of them, arguably) have Ukrainian as co-official. Crimea also has Crimean Tatar as co-official. If anybody wants they can study their language and their culture, including in schools. That's what was not permitted to Russians in many, many ex-USSR countries.
It's kinda like how church attendees aren't always upstanding moral individuals.
When I was a kid almost everything was recycled. People took your metals, glass, paper, peelings, wood and so on off your hands and frequently paid for it. Now you have to do the sorting yourself and you have to pay for the privilege. The large conglomerates that then take your pre-sorted scrap sell this for the market rate. And they're sitting pretty on decades long contracts with municipalities.
I’m reminded of a podcast I recently heard that looked into the whole fraudulent industry in India where they just make up colleges sell people on them.

The front was probably a fraud to begin with and there was never a plan to do anything other than add you to a list of potential marks.
Commands are guaranteed to start in the order they are inserted into the buffer but not guaranteed to complete in that order.

Per kronos:

> Commands are also guaranteed to start in the exact order they were inserted, but because they can run in parallel, there is no guarantee that the commands will complete in that same order

https://www.khronos.org/blog/understanding-vulkan-synchroniz...
That’s a well thought out take. Let’s hope because we sure have a lot of them.
It is getting to the point that I feel we need a rule of the form: your UI is rejected unless you can tell a new user how to succeed with it over the phone.

To my mind this means at least: fewer modalities, no hidden menus (hamburger), and, many other things.
He anticipated your comment and already replied. You're free to disagree with him, but he clearly thought that part through already and already knows he disagrees with you and with the OSI. This entire post is his justification for his disagreement, while all you have is an appeal to the OSI definition that he's specifically rejecting.

> “open source” / “free software”

> Note the deliberate use of lower case. I’m not referring to Open Source™ as defined by OSI, nor to Free Software™ as defined by the FSF. I mean these terms in the broadest, most inclusive sense: “software with source code that I can read and modify and release variants of, perhaps under some conditions.” So I’m including OSI and FSF licenses, but also the Polyform licenses and the JSON license and, yes BSL in my version of “open source”.

> This is perhaps a side point, but the “minimalist” definition of Open Source meaning “only OSI-approved licenses” – or, worse, “the GPL is the only ’true’ Free Software license” – is part of the problem here. I want to see more experimentation and variety in licensing options, and if that means introducing some additional restrictions beyond “anyone can use this for any purpose” I’m pretty okay with that. In my book, a broad spectrum of licenses from Blue Oak to BSL (and even more restrictive) “count” as open source.

> ... I’ll put it this way: if my sloppy use of these terms bothers you in the context of talking about how people make their living, it implies that you care more about terminology and definitions than about the people, and I’d like you to sit in that discomfort for a while.
It doesn’t take 20k syscalls to print a plot, the 20k syscalls is for the import call. I would hope that drawing plots takes a lot less.

To engage with your point: loading a dynamic library in a regular language takes significantly less than 20k syscalls. Probably 20-40 for C on Linux. Python is uniquely inefficient. On most plots comparing resource use by different languages, in order to even show python together with regular languages like Java and C, either you use the log scale, or everything but Python is shown as a single point.

Of course, most people use Python to glue together stuff written in C, so it’s not that big of a deal, but it becomes a problem when people forget pure Python code is literally hundreds or thousands times slower than a “regular” program doing the same thing.
Is there a git equivalent?
It could be an argument, but no politician inside Russia call people to the streets either. Navalny abroad had more influence than all other opposition personas in sum.
I put "dirty" in quotes for a reason. People are just expected to hold themselves to a higher standard of cleanliness in other cultures instead of hacking around it with copious amounts of plastic.

Much of the rest of the civilized world holds cleanliness in high(er) regard, but they're not germophobes.
When people say "I want the <insert metric> from G42" with G42 being a certain screen, it's helpful to be able to quickly see what all is populating that screen. It's not exact but over the course of 30 years a lot of tables can get created and 7-8 character limits on table and field names doesn't help.

I am not sure if it is a requirement when creating a table to have descriptions but they are all there in my org. So go to the screen to get the tables and then join it with a "give me the list of all tables, table descriptions, columns, column descriptions" SQL query. EZ.

After seeing how useful these descriptions are, I firmly believe that every organization should make them a requirement even if the rdb itself does not. Just simple form of documentation at time of creation that allows for context while still giving you the ability to enforce rigid naming structures.
I'd love to chat as well if you've still got bandwidth — I'm at alex@kolch.in

Thanks, appreciate it!
India won't become a semiconductor superpower anytime soon, says think tank
The real problem with deep learning approaches is hallucination and edge case failures. When someone finally fixes this, I hope it makes the HN front page.
Wow, really unique accent he had back then. It's like a mix of British and American with a slight bit of Indian.
To be pedantic, this was more of a cosmetic choice rather than an engineering choice.

The other bare stainless vehicles learned the same lesson (and are not produced today).
The tenth amendment constrains congress from regulating outside enumerated powers. Intrastate trade is not an enumerated power. Most applications of the NLRB are tyrannical short-circuits.
> However, it is still better to recycle plastic at home than throw it away.

After acknowledging that recycling is a scam, you cannot introduce a statement like this without a lot of careful justification.

If everything previously in the article is true (which it is) it is not better to recycle plastic at home than to throw it away: it is approximately equivalent.

Your recycle bin ends up shipped somewhere halfway around the world, where most of goes into a landfill.
> Well where do we draw the line here?

Yeah, that's a fair point! To the user it doesn't matter.

And to further prove your point, if you access the raw file at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gsutil..., it only takes 25ms, even uncached. It's half a kB.

Add the Github UI, it's suddenly 1.2 MB... that's 2000x bigger, lol. And even with the UI already loaded, it still takes nearly 500ms to navigate from one file to another. It IS slow, isn't it?

Thanks for clarifying what you meant.
Here is a thought: you never see PET bottles labeled "I used to be a sweater". :)
If only there were some way of doing math where different symbols were substituted such that people could recognize patterns that they had difficulty understanding with the original symbols.
Relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/605/
Could be batteries that could accelerate rusting
I'm not arguing for luddism, I'm arguing against blind optimism and mindless consumerism. Your response is just a red herring.
A few weeks ago a wrote in to my Senator on the complete lack of government funding for independent engineers/small projects building FOSS (USA).

NLNet in the EU is awesome. We really should have something like the NLNet in the USA.
I used lower case deliberately as well.

It's a term that excludes source available not just because of OSI but because of the original community. And members of the current community can argue for a new, weaker, openwashed meaning of it, but people can always look back to the early days and see the true meaning of it.
Campaign types: mostly test campaigns: lead generation, paid subscription promo, cost optimization. Average cost of conversion/lead within 5 months: $3.28
>Does it matter to you whether you're interacting with a human on some level when watching a show or movie, specifically on an artistry level?

Yes it matters to me a great deal. But there's a reason Stephen King made that observation a long time ago. All the actors in a modern Marvel movie look like they've been grown in some petri-dish in a Hollywood basement and all the lines sound like they come from LLMs for the last fifteen years. There's been nothing recognizably human in mass media for decades. 90% of modern movies are asexual Ken doll like actors jumping around in front of green screens to the demands of market research reports already.

I'm not saying the scenario isn't scary, I'm saying we've been in that hellscape for ages and the particularly implementation details of technologies used to get us there ("AI" in this case) don't interest me that much. And in the same vein, an authentic artist can surely make something human with AI tools.
Maybe, but I think the book really was different from any book I had read before. Most books teach the language, but Think Python showed me some of the why, what each data structure might be used for, it would quickly dip into some interesting implementation details to give me a more solid foundation and then zoom out and give me perspective on why something is useful and related software writing skills and tips. It was thorough, but also concise, and the exercises were engaging, so I found myself for the first time really getting sucked into the zone with the problems and time was flying by. This hadn’t happened to me with Java or Perl.
Yes, that's what the ruling essentially said.

However, that's not what Air Canada wanted. And I'm not saying they should have won either. Just that, that's what they wanted.

Because if they can ignore the output of the chatbot when they want to, they can gut their customer service department.
There is no error message here - more often than not it's a straight up crash. No HRESULT, no popup, just NullPointerException, straight to jail.

In many cases like this, crashes like this are in app startup, so it's not like you learn not to hit a certain button - it's just that the app doesn't work, an awful UX.

As called out in the article, there are (and always should be) APIs like "IsPrintingEnabled" so that forward-thinking apps can show better UX. These practices aren't for those apps, they're for everyone else.

Also, if your app preserves state well enough that a keep-alive daemon can restore after a crash and the user doesn't notice, that is ABSOLUTELY an improvement in UX over just crashing. Sure, you should still fix the bugs, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Similar to how one can pass around state inside an OTP GenServer in Erlang.

In Python, it could be a class managing a session type of object, like a TCP socket connection, or managing some piece of hardware that is doing something independently of the other parts of the system, or a database writer, etc.
I wish we had more guns in Russia. Then the war wouldn't have happened -- how could you conscript a person if you know he can shoot you the moment you come for him?
does anyone use Sublime Merge for this? do you like it?
> someone chimes in about how much better the conversations/etc are on Twitter since Musk took over

I always assume these types of comments are some kind of dog whistle
Crafting good commits is a skill that nobody seems to care about. In fact, nobody really seems to care about learning git at all despite it being one of the main tools in software development.
> It's hard to overstate how hard Microsoft has worked to maintain backwards compatibility.

Here's a pretty detailed list:

- It is possible to target Windows XP SP3 (released 2008, EOL 2014, 10 years ago) from Windows 11 and Visual Studio 2022[1] using C++23. Windows 2000 can be targeted with a little more setup[2]. Windows 2000 is 24 years old this year.

- It is possible to run a binary written for and compiled in Windows NT 3.1 x86 on a modern 2024 Intel/AMD PC running Windows 11 with absolutely no modifications to said binary whatsoever. Windows NT 3.1 is 31 years old this year.

- It is possible to write one binary and target multiple versions of Windows by simply choosing a Platform Toolset, which is paired with a Visual C/C++ Redistributable.

- Windows has a run-as mode to run programs in what is essentially a super-thin VM; like you mentioned, emulating different iterations' behaviour for a given program.

All four of these are nearly impossible on Linux. The fourth is essentially Docker, which is needed even to target an older glibc (i.e. the equivalent of the first situation). Windows has gone to extreme lengths to not only maintain API compatibility, but ABI compatibility as well. The fact that unmodified binaries from 20, 25, 30 years ago can run without a hitch is a testament to how important backwards/forwards compatibility still is on Windows.

Side tangent: all the criticisms levelled at Windows here and in many hacker fora are limited to its userspace—things like its shell and user-space programs, and trivial complaints like 'Candy Crush', or 'start bar', or 'extra right click', or even 'PowerShell aliased curl to Get-Content, grr'. The userspace changes so often because it can; it is a superficial part of Windows. To the haters: Try actually programming with NT OS primitives and even the (undocumented) NT syscalls. It is as enjoyable as UNIX system programming, and I daresay more productive.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-sg/cpp/build/configuring-prog...

[2]: https://building.enlyze.com/posts/modern-visual-studio-meets...
MySpace did it first.
Bitcoin: Exploring the latest trends the leading cryptocurrency
Look, you obviously have your opinions here. I'm not sure just saying "Complete nonsense" at things is really all that helpful.

What I said ("it doesn't tell you anything about the ability to differentiate between the three populations") is quite correct. This study shows that there is a difference between the groups of samples tested with their HER2 test strip, with a one-way p-value of ~0.002.

I'm not convinced that the samples are representative of their populations. The number of non-cancer samples too low.

>* You don’t really need error bars when you’re showing all of a small number of data points.*

Error bars are visually helpful ways to show that the group values overlap. Which, in this case, they do (I did replot this data to confirm).

>* Would be nice. Sounds like they did ten measurements per.*

This is for one test. They sampled the test strip 10 times. I mean they should have tested each sample on at least 3 different test strips to get a mean value for the sample. This is a paper that is trying to say that their test strips are accurate, so it would make sense to test them multiple times.

>I’m not clear why you’re saying HER+ vs HER- is the important difference here.

I'm not sure what they are trying to claim in there paper... are they trying to say that they can diagnose breast cancer (which would requires many more biomarkers), or are they trying to say that they can differentiate between HER2+ and HER2- cancers (which would be more appropriate for a HER2 test).

The other biomarker has even more overlap, so not sure how helpful that would be.

Really, I think they are also missing an opportunity -- the bigger use for me would be in longitudinal testing. If they could show changes in signal over time for a particular patient that corresponded to treatment status -- that would be a great use for a cheap non-invasive test.
> Much of the crappy legacy behavior that Microsoft maintains is the fault of other applications, not themselves.

Well. I have two or three (I am not even sure because for one email address there are probably two accounts, but no way to distinguish between them) MS Teams accounts. There is no painless way to switch between them. Currently there are probably at least three different MS Teams apps installed on my machine, one of them self-installed without my consent (my PC is not managed by an org or domain, it's mine). Switching accounts involves several confusing errors, at least three password inputs, and several complaints by MS Teams that something is wrong, but it won't tell me how to fix it.

Use the browser version they said. Well for scheduled meetings it works, but for adhoc calls Firefox does not (there is no reason provided, but at least it does say outright), while Chrome seems to work but does not transmit my voice and camera. All other meeting software, of course, works.

I am not the youngest anymore and this is my lifelong experience with Microsoft. Its software works barely enough to sell to corporations; poor users have to endure it.
Which reminds me of this most likely apocryphal quote:

"Interviewer: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think about Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/23/good-idea/
also my understanding is physical media is still popular. it is certainly more robust and requires less infrastructure.
The people who are recycling their plastics are doing their best, even though their well-intentioned actions aren't effective. A previous post was suggesting that they are somehow at fault for not paying ore attention and compelling regulators to act.
Not the OP, but I think that the point of squashing every PR is that the reviewers/PR run the whole PR, not the individual commits. If you have a PR with 5 commits, 4 of which break the build and the last one fixes it, then merging that will be a problem if you need to git bisect later.

So the idea is really "what's the point of having a history full of broken state?".

> It must be impossible to understand commits' diffs with the changes all squashed together.

This would be a hint that your PR was too big and addressing more than one thing.
Yeah. I can get this angle. This is why we don’t have small independent companies making C and C++ compilers today. Only BigCorps which fund this development with money made from less honourable business.
Today I asked a devops engineer to tell me how much time a long (3 seconds avg) api call was spending on database queries, application logic, and network etc. He couldn’t understand the request and instead opened up the azure console and recommended we increase the number cpu cores / memory if performance is an issue.

I look at posts like this and cry.
By picking his own definition of what open source means, is the author really arguing for paying people to work on open source? Or is his argument more one of being in favor allowing a bunch of things that happen to pay people to work on them be counted as "open source"?

For example, if RHEL still counts as open source, then Red Hat's programmers are paid open source developers, but if RHEL is now proprietary, then there are fewer people being paid to work on open source.