skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The removal of generic syscall(), and introduction of pinsyscalls() which registers the precise entry location of every system call used by a program, makes me think of some kernel-level ABI issues that Linux has.

In particular, kernel ABI is the main stable interface that Linux exposes - and all applications can just use syscalls directly without having to interface with the libc at all. However, that means that kernel must not change its ABI lest it risks breaking compatibility, and each functionality that isn't implemented inside of the kernel (e.g. GUI stuff) cannot be implemented completely portably.

However, using pinsyscalls(), a kernel can make sure that syscalls can only be called from the libc - therefore, making the libc de-facto ABI! Which allows for much more freedom in changing kernel ABI, as long as the libc follows through. Perhaps this way the system can go away from the syscall-level ABI and move over to the libc ABI / shared library ABI?
Xr0 is currently targeting the c89 spec and working up from there, thread safety is something that we would address in C11 (See a previous discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39858240#39858813).
It seems like "think of the grandmas" is the new "think of the children" line.
> but were inefficient for one reason or another; that's the hard part.

The efficiency of such tools is mostly just a matter of familiarity. It's like asking what programming language is most efficient to do e.g. web development. There may be arguments for X or Y language depending on the specifics of what you're going to do and what you value, but ultimately the most important factor that determines whether it feels efficient to work with or not is how familiar you are with it.

> you certainly aren't spending it trying to make some application work with your Linux config management

I struggle to think of them needing to be aware of one another. Configuration management is pretty much completely a matter of moving configuration files and running commands. It's pretty universal. There's no "make some application work with your Linux config management". Configuration management systems may provide application-specific helpers that make things neater, but if you can copy files, maybe template them, and run commands, you're pretty much set.
- Aesthetics: Android phones are severely lacking in build quality and accessory design

- Software quality: last time I opened the Play store, it felt like I needed to use protection

- Lack of iMessage is a big one

- No long term support and no Apple Store equivalent where I can easily go if something is broken or missing.

- I straight up don’t like Google
I don't think you can simulate an experience, in a way that it ends up being profound. Reality is always more complex than our understanding, because understanding works by selecting, limiting information. So what these simulations often end up with is an incomplete, hollow imitation of the real thing, often missing a key ingredient yet to be identified. The efforts in human nutrition is a good example of this, always discovering something that was crucially missing from diets.

Simulations work for some, though. But they don't work for others, and this is what I wanted to hopefully make a bit more understandable.
"Quality control" doesn't tell you what standard they have for acceptable, just that such a standard exists.

I've heard that it is quite straightforward with modern tools to make new violins which pass a blind test against a Stradivarius — I wouldn't know myself — but that doesn't mean those with a target price of £500 are actually made to this standard.
It makes a difference in price for sure :)
Sure, it's bad, but suppose that all the power tool makers except Granny Smith Tools got together and made a standard for batteries, so now you can use Makita batteries on Ryobi tools, etc. The only exception is Granny Smith tools, which have proprietary batteries that cost a fortune, and have encryption chips to prevent making compatible third-party batteries or chargers.

The Granny Smith tools cost more than the others, and are sold in boutique shops by so-called "master craftsmen" who have never actually worked professionally with power tools. Yet somehow, half of tool buyers happily buy their tools, despite knowing they have to get batteries from the Granny Smith Stores and can't use any other tools' batteries. This is even touted as a feature(!), since it "protects" owners from "unsafe" 3rd-party batteries and chargers.

Is it correct for the government to step and and protect stupid consumers from themselves? If the government did this for everything that consumers buy, we might as well just have government ownership and operation of all companies, and that was tried before with disastrous results. So at what point should government just let people make bad decisions, as long as no actual fraud is being committed? And remember the safety aspect touted by Granny Smith: they claim that it's unsafe to use non-GS batteries in their tools, and that it's a burden on them to deal with warranty claims for GS tools harmed by bad non-GS batteries. (Remember, there are a LOT of users right here on HN who will cite this safety argument for iPhones.)
and they didn't fight it so they didn't have to count pirated copies of it for anti-monopoly antitrust investigations.
BugStalker: A Modern Debugger
Decentralized Future: ERC-4337 Shared Mempool Launches on Ethereum
Both can (and are) true.
Does it though? I mean it's not perfect (what is?) but one has to consider the amount of software which exists, the complexity of the work done by such software, the variety of devices on which we expect it to run almost perfectly.

Also it's a quite recent thing for people to expect perfectly functioning systems or programs.

Back in the 90s, my user behaviour was built around software/hardware sucking, it's still with me to this day: pressing CTRL+S bordering OCD, lack of quick save in games gives me minor anxiety, making backups of backups and not even getting mad anymore if my system crashes.

But now I can leave my computer (even Linux) on standby/hibernation for years without ever needing to reboot it to "clean things up".

So I don't actually believe software is worse, the best software is better than it used to be, much better I'd say, and the worst is not really that visible anymore. The worst software changed from having functional issues to be the software which works as designed but it's designed by the devil and his minions (like Medium, ironically used by the author to make a point, I'd assume.)
This article is all controversy with very little substance.

Saying software is lower quality now more than ever is pretty insane considering we have been continuously improving it for as long as its existed. The examples cherry picked are hand wavy and totally lacking in nuance. Would love to hear him explain how Linux is worse now for example.

Finally blaming focus and Martin Fowler is also confusing. Maybe some engineers struggle with focus or choosing the right complexity but clearly a lot of engineers have other issues.

It’s just weird that anecdotes and shaking a stick at banking websites qualifies as worth reading nowadays.
> Weird that the yield statement is conflated with coroutines instead of iterators/generators.

The concept of coroutines (Melvin E. Conway in 1963; who was also the source of FORK/JOIN) predates by a decade that of iterators/generators (which come from Alphard and CLU).

The term "yield" had already been used for many years for coroutines before being used for iterators/generators.

Usually the use of "yield" is not ambiguous, because the context is clear.
singularly, iMessage and the associated features like FaceTime and location sharing. They work on Android, but network effects of everyone else I know using iMessage means it's just more seamless. I don't have to get other people to install some app just to talk to me.
I find this far more useful than a suite of tools or "AI agents" which always work well in a controlled development environment but not so much further than that.

Function calling is a great step towards actually production-izing LLMs and making them extremely robust - I remember when GPT-3 API first came out and I was furiously making sequential calls with complex if/else and try/catch statements and using a couple of Python libraries for the simple reason...I need the output to be a valid JSON. It was surprisingly hard until function calling solved this.
I hope they put a bit more effort into this compared to OpenAI.

The most crucial things missing in OpenAI's implementation for me were:

- Authentication for the API by the user rather than the developer.

- Caching/retries/timeout control

- Way to run the API non-blocking in the background and incorporate results later.

- Dynamic API tools (use an API to provide the tools for a conversation) and API revisions (for instance by hosting the API spec under a URL/git).
Thanks for sharing - Do you have any blogpost or YouTube video where you go deep into the details of the implementation? that would be a good one
why do you say it's abolished there? it's my understanding that those areas are acutely suffering under the existing system.
> I can really understand how it feels from their perspective. Work feels much better when we do stuff that makes us connect as humans, and quarterly corporate events don't cut it. They created a culture where they did something fun together and had a conversation topic other than work, and there's this one guy who just refuses to participate and doesn't even try to find a way to include himself in the group.

Could also say the group failed to integrate a person who had different preferences for their free time and then bullied them when they weren't present at work?

I think both perspectives are quite extreme and miss the mark.

If reading a book a week in my free time was a work requirement, I would be out and quick. That sounds ridiculous!
>As I understand it, the difference between a crafted instrument and a factory one lies in the way the creator adapts (or doesn't) to the natural grain of the wood. A handmade instrument by an expert can't be beaten by a factory process because each piece of wood resonates differently and those differences must be accounted for to get a good sound.

Violin makers have, sadly, decided to pursue a complete dead end, because of the near-universal preoccupation with old instruments. Stradivarius violins have become the platonic ideal, therefore any new violin can never be better than a close copy. Improvement of the instrument is not merely discouraged, but definitionally impossible. In blind tests, players and listeners consistently either fail to distinguish between old and new instruments or prefer modern instruments, but these findings have had essentially no impact on attitudes.

There is no Greg Smallman, Lucien Gélas or Ervin Somogyi of violins, nor will there be without significant cultural change.
I count at least 5 versions identifiable by patches. With version numbers ranging from 1.1v to 1.9v. So patches have been available for long time. And initial software often was quite buggy.
> I would define it having in mind the following dimensions: functionality, reliability, usability and security

(I will pick reliability for the sake of example)

Let's start from perfect state where every one of those dimensions have 100% quality --> Impractical (or even impossible for some dimensions)

Ok, now let's do it 6 9s (99.9999), AWS S3 (which is a simple CRUD API for storage, kidding) has this kind of reliability, with 100s of engineers --> Practical, very high cost

What are we left with 99.9? 99.0? to achieve this level of reliability you need a solid team (>2 people, because of bus factor) who constantly monitors the situation and makes necessary improvements to the product, which means either you need additional hands or you sacrifice product development

Now we are at 95-99 range. Doable with 1 person, but again needs some trade-offs to have a balance between new feature development, maintain the old system and bug fixes.

Now let's discuss current market, imagine you just built a new product and people started copying your offering, with more features. What do you sacrifice? If my company's existence depends on feature parity because customers demand it from every similar offering, I would sacrifice reliability.

It's not 0/1 decision, good enough is really good enough in some cases, but it is difficult to sustain good enough when you are competing with other players in the market
Horrific confession time: I have several .sqlite files that exceed 1.5TB in size and consist of a single table with a single field called JSON (guess what it contains!).

Early days, I just used 'JSON LIKE '%json-substring-match%' for queries, and that did get a bit slow after a while, but mostly the syntax was just really gross when doing aggregations. Fortunately, these days, you can do:

CREATE INDEX IDX_Foo_Bar ON Foo (json_extract(JSON, '$.Bar'));

...which makes subsequent SELECT queries on that function nice and quick again.

This has been going on since (checks create time on one .sqlite file) July 2018, with pretty much zero perf or downtime issues.
Our workplace outlook phishing protection does though. I was signing up to test one of our apps recently and my email was auto confirmed in 5 seconds despite me never receiving it. Turns out it was caught in the phish filter which automatically clicked the link to check it, so the above is not always true. Confirmed this with a few co-workers too.
I found this post to be interesting discussion on how a not profit organisation could practically operate to support FOSS maintenance. It still has risks surrounding infiltration by bad actors, but mitigation is easier since staffers are paid.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/04/01/OSQI
not 0-day patches though
> When her lack of any(!) degree
> was uncovered, she had to
> resign.

Maybe you should fire someone with a history of flagrantly lying, but shouldn't that make MIT consider dropping its degree requirement for that job? Clearly it's not necessary.
I'm not always sure offshoring is the blame. Onshore teams that just don't care will equally produce crap. And I think that is even more likely thing to happen. Or they make software worse in other ways like overengineering it or wasting system resources...
have you seen spotify’s new app in europe?

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2024-01-24/the-dma-means-a-bett...

they pushed hard for apple to open up in order push more ads.
Comparing to AV1, VVC / H.266 is expected to offer 20-30% reduction in Bit-Rate with similar quality at similar level of computational complexity. And it is already deployed and used in real world in China and India. I believe Brazil are looking to use it as their next generation codec for broadcasting along with LCEVC.
Yeah, I forgot about that: the client on my Android TV frequently crashes on start-up.

I haven't had any trouble at all with the server side though (Linux).
I'm from the UK and would probably have fallen for this for several minutes as well. I hope that I'd eventually realise from the number of states down the West coast.
>One person is conscious, but do two people form a collective consciousness?

The set that is me and my friend behaves differently than me or my friend alone, we go to different places, act differently, think better at two by talking to each other, etc. I don't know how conscious a 2 men system is but it sure has all the characteristics of a conscious being, by myself I wouldn't usually go to a bar and drink, I wouldn't get the ideas I don't usually get, etc. together we can go grab a drink, I'd say something I believe and he'd argue against it and maybe we reach a conclusion that was outside my reach, etc. But still getting a glimpse at this conscious 2-men system is still as impossible as a neuron getting a glimpse at me.

>Presumably consciousness arises from more than the amount of "stuff" in the system.

Yeah maybe the complexity, like two rocks still behave differently than a single rock if they touch each other but it's still quite simple, maybe the eastern philosophy (maybe Japanese but not sure I forgot its name) that everything has a consciousness isn't wrong.

>Is the earth really more complex than a human mind, in the ways that matter?

The earth as in the planet? like mars or venus? or the earth with its plants and humans and animals? if the latter then obviously being a superset it's more complex, if the rocky planet then I don't know, it sure has lots of subsets that interact with one another (moon, sea, rocks, rivers, etc.) and they're all subject to physical rules like gravity etc. whether its behavior is predictable or not in a way you'd think it's conscious is not evident, is out behavior really unpredictable? we are subject to survival and reproduction aka pleasure and pain, and even altruistic or "higher" acts usually either profit the community which is similar DNA aka reproduction (if I can't replicate then my sacrifice will allow those with similar dna to do it so I do replicate undirectly), maybe for a higher species we do act exactly like the rocky planet in the way that we just react to x or y with u or v, meh who knows...
Someone steals your identity, and is also committed enough to burn off their fingerprints in a way that looks accidental. What now?
This kind of things will stop only if there will be legislation in place to let somebody say "No, I'm not doing this because [leaving out moral considerations] if we get caught everybody in this meeting room gets jailed and everybody working at the software too."
Apologies for my earlier reply, it's been pointed out to me it was rude. It was and I'd like to apologise.

On your point I'm not sure where you get the assertion any human could kill any other in pre-technological society. That appears evidently false to me. How did you come to that assertion?
It seems that the problem is in Javascript itself, where almost every action can cause side-effects. This makes interpreter extremely complex and it is difficult to spot a mistake. Converting something to int shouldn't cause any side effects.
Lol he could've just changed his name, and the imposter would have been caught off guard.
I'm coming from a bit similar situation and I decided to build something for this.
Basically I see the domain registration itself as a commodity service (ie just go for the cheapest one), and then DNS management etc you can do through a common interface. A way to achieve this is to:

1. Register the domain at whichever place is the cheapest.
2. Set the nameservers to the ones belonging to the DNS management service.
3. All domain name management can be done from the DNS panel at the DNS management service.

Not sure if I'm explaining it clearly, but please have a look at our service at https://dot.bs if you're interested.
We're comparing a 140 domain registrars on price and provide the service I described above.
This guy deserves some prize for 1) great work, 2) attention to detail, 3) in-depth research, 4) excellent presentation of his work (sparing the usual questions like "but what is it, really?", "how do I start?", "can you provide some examples?").

People from Show HN - watch and learn.
Notice how little scrutiny Microsoft has been getting by Congress, DOJ, FTC, etc. despite these many huge security blunders and whatever is going on between them and OpenAI.

This might be because it is almost impossible to tell where Microsoft starts and the government ends these days. Also remember that Microsoft was basically the pilot program for Prism.
Oh yeah these things. Most fridges have a dial with 1 to 6 on it, no arrow, and I dont know whether it means temperature (degrees c) or power. So is a bigger number less cold or more cold? Have to turn it and listen to see if it gets noisier to know for sure.

This one with the arrow on it is even worse, crikey.
I have owned many freezers and fridges in my life, an it was always "higher number = colder". Which is usually completely obvious, because the dial includes a 0 position, which shuts it off.
> are forced to socialize and then they adapt.

Do they? Or are they just suffering silently?
Comment deleted. Thank you for the constructive comments. I’m reading, just not responding.
I use bvckup for years now might be one of my favorite little windows apps. Not OSS but fairly priced.

https://bvckup2.com/
Just spotted you are replying to the parent response, not mine.

Fully agree and very succinctly put.
Because eventually, the machine stops.
Llama2:7b makes the same mistakes. It's not until you use something like Mixtral or Llama2:13b that it actually gets the correct results (in my one example).

Interestingly Llama2:13b objects that there is no discount until I clarify: "the discount you're getting [with 2 apples]"

It's not just math though it's any kind of complex reasoning and ambiguity. Comparing to humans is always complex, but humans for the most part wouldn't balk at me asking what discount you're getting without specifying that it's the 2 apples that have the discount in this example. A more advanced model often states the assumptions.

There are lots of nuances in this question as well. I'm still paying 80c more than buying one apple, so I should only buy two apples if I would use two apples.
I have a short attention span, so I find the subject's endeavor both admirable and wholly unrelatable. I can relate to two things.

My parents weren't particularly wealthy. I remember as a kid when getting new shoes, I'd sleep with them next to me on the pillow. I feel fortunate to live in slightly greater abundance.

Second thing is about goal realization. About 12 years ago a photo of the Japanese coastline popped up in Reddit. I found it so striking that I made it a goal to visit, and I also set it as the wallpaper for my work computer. I've set goals for myself in the past, some of them a lot harder than this. However, the feeling of logging into the computer of a soul-deadening job, seeing the wallpaper every day, and then, after several years, finally visiting the place is unreal. It's the closest I've had to an out of body experience.
Nuxt Loads Fast
By the looks of it - soon we will be needing resumes and work profiles for tools and APIs to be consumed by LLM's
This is just a variant of those social media post with a simple math question made hard by imprecise notation. That being said 3 is obviously the colder setting.
A rounded arrow on turnable knob with text is a clear visual signifier for what will happen when you turn the knob. The ambiguity just makes it bad design.
You see this exact problem in task based libraries like task based parallel libraries such as taskflow. It's easy to get burned using thread local variables if you are not careful because a task might yield to the scheduler which runs another task ( of the same type ) on the same thread and then your thread local is corrupted.

You end up requiring more sophisticated object pools where you can check out and check in objects.
Respectfully this does not rebute my argument. We can find endless examples where consumers are ripped off with super high prices and get bad quality in return. If we stay in the realm of games, Cyberpunk for example is unplayable even after more than 10 patches. Many games are unplayable at launch. This never happened before.