skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This doesn't even make sense. What is an example of something that can't be fast because it is done in C++? What "compatibility hacks" are slowing programs down?

Let's look at two very different perf leaks in ISO C++. Firstly move assignment which is right at the heart of the language. Initially C++ doesn't have move semantics at all, which is a problem because in a bunch of cases that's key to "extreme performance". So in the "lost decade" period between C++ 03 and C++ 11 considerable work was done to figure out a way to unlock this, but of course C++ insisted on backwards compatibility with the code written for C++ 98 with no such semantic.

The result is that the actual move semantic people wanted can't quite be done, this is now called "destructive move" and proponents of the compatible option C++ 11 and later had claim it's equivalent to the move they delivered, plus delete. But that's... disingenuous. The C++ 11 move is actually (move + create), so to build "destructive move", when that's what you need, you must write (move + create) + destroy. Sometimes the compiler can see what's happening here and emit the same machine code you'd get in a language with native move semantics, but sometimes it has no way to figure this out, and you're emitting move + create + destroy, which is markedly slower as well as of course being more error prone.

Secondly right up at the surface, where we can feel the rain, and appropriately something Bjarne Stroustrup (author of the book we're talking about here) has noticed himself, the provided growable array, std::vector lacks the bifurcated reservation. Vec::reserve_exact isn't enough, you need Vec::reserve as well for good performance with a growable array API, but C++ doesn't provide this, it provides only Vec::reserve_exact under the name "reserve" and there's no room to offer both in the compatible API, which means as a user/ application programmer this fundamental type is a small perf leak.

Bjarne shrugs this off, oh well, just don't use the reserve API to get performance
benefits. But everybody else can do so, this choice means C++ is leaving it on the table for somebody else with a better growable array type.

Finally though, I want to look at a beacon over the horizon, where "extreme performance" really is something they're thinking about. Iterator Loops (sometimes "Chunk Loops") are a technique where the language lets you directly express in your definition of a loop how it can be performed in a SIMD-fashion, so e.g. you write the code to search an N byte buffer for the byte you're looking for, but then revisit that loop and also write code for searching N=M*16 bytes, using 16 bytes at once. This lets you write, in a high level language, code which will be easy for a compiler to SIMD accelerate without fragile idiom recognition. C++ of course does not provide Iterator Loops and instead you'd reach for manual inline assembler in these cases today.
I remember using https://github.com/facebook/lexical for a project a year ago and mostly things worked our of the box.

Any reason to prefer quill?
What you're describing is well-known to mathematicians. The idea is that if you struggle hard with something (perhaps till you have to give up), your brain feels there is "unfinished business" and keeps working on the problem even when you're not consciously thinking ("grinding" in your words) about it. The second time you engage with the problem, you're primed to understand it - or understanding may just pop into your head, like an unexpected pizza delivery. A couple of examples:

The great mathematician Henri Poincare was struggling with a problem on fuchsian functions. He made some progress, and then: "Just at this time, I left Caen, where I was living, to go on a geological exursion under the auspices of the Schools of Mines. The incidents of the travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it ..." [1]

"Incubation is the work of the subconscious during the waiting time, which may be several years. Illumination, which can happen in a fraction of a second, is the emergence of the creative idea into the conscious. This almost always occurs when the mind is in a state of relaxation, and engaged lightly with ordinary matters. Helholtz's ideas usually came to him when he was walking in hilly country. ... Incidentally, the relaxed activity of shaving can be a fruitful source of minor idea; I used to postpone it, when possible, till after a period of work." [2]

[1] Jacques Hadamard, "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field" (p. 12--13)

[2] J. E. Littlewood, "Littlewood's Miscellany" (p. 192) [A wonderful book, by the way!]
That’s a good point. Thank you.

Happy one-decade anniversary, by the way. I just noticed https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over... was almost exactly 10 years ago.

The trouble with your frame is that you can’t know what people actually want until you try to get them to use what you’ve built. There’s a sort of chicken and egg problem here: you have to think of an idea first, before you build anything. "Choose what people actually want" begs the question.

It’s probably true that it’s better to work on something that you personally believe in (in the https://paulgraham.com/earnest.html sense), because you’re more likely to find ways to grow it. It’s hard to be earnest about an idea that only interests you because it might grow at 5% per week. But pg chose Viaweb, and he couldn’t have known ahead of time that anybody would actually want it, since it was the first webapp. Nobody even understood how to try it out, since this was the era of desktop software. All he had was a hunch that lots of people would soon want websites for their businesses.

So which frame would you choose, if you had to decide today? Suppose you and Scott were trapped in a room, and the door unlocks only after you pick something to build together. How would you decide, other than "X seems most likely to be something that people will actually want"? (Which is similar to "has a chance of growing at 5% per week," just phrased a little differently. pg originally thought museums would want websites; if he’d asked himself whether it might morph into an idea that could grow at 5% per week, he probably would’ve realized museums didn’t actually want that.)
Except you see many of the same people staffing the boards of major companies, donating to politicians and contributing funds to think tanks that supply politicians with policy options.
Conceptually it's less helpful to keep politics and state institutions as distinct entities from the largest corporations as thinking of them as a single highly integrated system.
Is this the only path to the job?
>I'm pretty clear I'm just looking to learn

put another way, you're asking people to take some of their time to teach you. I'm assuming that if you were offering compensation for this time you'd have mentioned it.

getting a 1% interview rate for an ask like that is exceptional. especially considering the people you're asking are known for being extremely busy, and you're asking from outside their industry.
I was honestly shocked by this too, I never intended Sidekiq users to left in a lurch like this. It took them over three years from the RESP3 release before their service supported it. I figured any good SaaS should be dogfooding their own releases, but I guess not!
Also: reading through the questions in the application form and thinking about them is worth it even if you don't intend to apply.
Banks start using purchase history for targeted ads [video]
1% at seed stage also become 0.1% after a few rounds of funding, plus you are way down the preference stack and have no liquidity power.

Startup equity is pretty much objectively a terrible deal except for founders. Be a founder or get paid market comp in cash.
A timeless classic on this question:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ncPyMUfNyVM
Thanks for the feedback.

I've made some changes to help avoid the confusion: https://share.cleanshot.com/Gl1fg0gx
BugTraq Shutdown (2021)
I'm not a skeptic but I have standards. His comment was just as meaningless as mine, both were accurate though.
I think it's no coincidence that Kraken (a very old cryptocurrencies exchange) is publishing a post on its blog about Bitcoin the very day a Bitcoin halving is happening... Thought it was worth mentioning.
To be clear, I never suggested the many-worlds interpretation isn't philosophy, but I still think it's mystical nonsense (as most indulgent metaphysical speculation is).
EU could just forbid the use ASML machines by any entities to serve Apple orders
"When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it."

No bogus distinction between "developers" and "users".

No so-called "tech" companies acting as middlemen, calling their commercial surveillance "services".

The word "monetize" is not one I recall seeing on the early internet.

The internet was once thought as a medium that could be used to sell widgets,^1 not as a medium to provide free "services" that are a front for commercial surveillance. People will pay for widgets. No one thinks, "How do I monetize selling widgets?" People will generally not pay for what today's "developers" are creating. Hence the question, "How do I monetize it?" Easy, just ruin the internet by selling people out to advertisers. Until it collapses under the weight of all the garbage.

Perhaps someone might try to argue that people in the early days were just not thinking creatively and "innovating", and that today, they are. Yeah, right. Having lived through those days, what I saw was nerds who failed, and failed again, to find a business model, something they could produce that people would pay for. Eventually they gave up and sold out to advertising, which no one on the internet ever liked at all. Now people think this is a "business model" and represents "innovation". To me, nerds today actually seem less creative and less innovative because generally they all do the same thing: sell out to advertising and conduct surveillance.

1. Not that I am a fan of the company and what they have done to internet commerce, but Amazon has done quite well selling widgets.
The overall premise is true but this is a very poor-quality article that has a few extremely obvious giveaways that it was AI-written.
The other person to find the bug is currently a PhD student, which is more impressive. They beat all the other experts reading the paper.
> They build it in the city, which makes that city a tiny bit more dense, pulls in more people and makes the city a small increment more attractive and pulls in even more people which in turn raises prices even more and the cycle continues. As cities get more dense they always get more expensive.

This is only a feedback loop if the city becomes more attractive by a larger amount than the increase in housing. For example, if you add new housing for 1000 people and this causes 1200 new people to move to the city. If adding new housing for 1000 people causes 800 new people to move to the city, you've still created more new housing for locals than you had before, and can just keep at it.

We can use basic math to see that even if the former ever happens, it can't sustainably happen. If e.g. the Chicago Metro area had the population density of Manhattan, it would have a larger population than the United States as a whole, 750M vs. 333M. A single metropolitan area could provide more housing than there are people to live in it. That many people would have to exist before they could move there. And obviously the entire US population is not going to move to a single metro area anyway, so you would reach saturation long before that.

Now, one thing that does happen is that tall buildings are more expensive to build, so when you get into the extremely high densities like in Manhattan, part of the high cost is the construction cost for a building that tall. But Manhattan is an outlier. If we're talking about converting single family homes into 12-unit condos, the cost per unit isn't much different and you get a 12X increase in density.

And here's another piece of the puzzle: Where are these people coming from? If you build new housing in New York, that might attract people who used to live in Boston. If you build new housing in Boston, that might attract people who used to live in Seattle. What happens if you build new housing in New York and Boston and Seattle and Los Angels etc.? If people move from everywhere to everywhere, there is no net migration and no increase in local demand. And even if you did only increase the amount of housing in New York, and that caused people to move to New York from Boston and Seattle and Los Angeles, then housing would become more affordable in Boston and Seattle and Los Angeles because the local demand there would go down. So you're talking about a hyper-local effect, whereas on a question of national policy, supply and demand is in full effect and "build more housing" makes the average unit cost less even if the ones that get more affordable aren't in the same place as the ones you build.

> I have no idea to be honest. Do you have info on that?

It's the same two cities. It's New York and San Francisco. They both make it extremely arduous to add new housing. Many of the existing buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today. SF is even worse.
Not strong enough to survive collisions of satellites with the space elevator.
I suppose, but, not on the basis of "they are granted the authority to do this thing, but will not abuse it", so much as, "it is costly for them to do this thing, and it is unlikely to be worth it to them" ?
The verbosity reminds me of ChatGPT generated text
The A(braham) Bomb (2023)
I thought I would share this interesting piece by Walter Russel Mead which explores the idea that we are increasingly fighting our political battles like religious wars.

I think it provides a valuable framework for understanding both Peter Thiel's Philosophy, but also explains the writings of Max Azzarello, recent Self immolator.

Thiel frames a socialist One-world order as the antichrist and totalitarianism as existential Armageddon[1]. Azzarello tries to grapple with the same idea, saying "We are in a totalitarian doomsday cult", but identifies Theil and the capitalist elite as the antichrist(s)[2].

Anyways, I thought all three pieces were very thought provoking, especially in contrast.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/peter-thiel-poli...

https://theponzipapers.substack.com/p/artifacts-from-the-doo...
More specifically, bitcoin holders are trusting that some collection of entities with more than 50% share of the mining power won't collude.

It seems like a reasonable assumption honestly, everyone would know and value would tank.

I'm by no means a fan of bitcoin, but miner collusion was never what kept me away. I like the original arguments for bitcoin related to a decentralized currency and privacy. Neither have proven to be possible on the bitcoin blockchain and I see absolutely no value in btc if I have to use off chain solutions to make it fit any real world use case.
Really dumb foolish suggestion? Check volunteer opportunities at your local hospital or health clinics.
Live Bitcoin Halving Clock
Firefox Nightly Now Available for Linux on ARM64
physicians only have 10 minutes with their patients. How much time are you taking from them? On the rare chance they are looking to learn more about tech, they'll probably be going to health events where they're practically wined and dined to be there.

What city are you in? There must be a health tech meeting of some sort near you. I live in Austin and I run one with 400 members, but there are 5 others programming meetups all the time. pharma, billers, techs, and nurses shouldn't be forgotten either!
There were some great games for the TI-85 (and later the TI-83) written in Z80 assembly. Certainly things much better than snake. Someone needed a PC link cable to get it on, but then you could send from one calculator to another with just the link cable included in the box. None would have worked on the 92 or 89 which used a different CPU.

[edit]

For TI-89 games see e.g. https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/261/26100.htm...
Mercedes to sell autonomous cars where drivers do not need to watch the road
Nostalgia for a Dating Experience They've Never Had
Spoiler alert: it was a shelter for people moving herds between oases, and doesn’t seem to have had a permanent population.
I mean, just doing the math and being agnostic about the strengths of different interpretations seems to be an interpretation. Maybe it's more of an epistemic position than a metaphysical one, but it still kinda counts.
You realize that breaking into a private office, being asked, and then told, to leave automatically escalates a situation? Obviously they want to get arrested because they’re out for attention.

You realize there are many examples of these sit-ins lately end with protesters gluing themselves to the floor/road or damaging property, maybe toss some paint on priceless art when it happens to a museum? Or relieving themselves in place so that some poor underpaid janitor has to clean up? After the protesters smile for the camera of course.

I find that pretty intimidating because if the spoiled rich brats looking for social media points are willing to do that to themselves what else are they willing to do? Is it totally unreasonable to assume one could be stupid and end up hitting someone? In the United State where gun crime is unfortunately high?

The likelihood of this particular incident developing into that was probably pretty low but the point is that other people should not have to make that kind of mental calculus at work. They have a right not to be subjected to whatever hot button political cause is in vogue when they’re trying to go to work so they can feed themselves and their family.

If you want to protest do it on your own time on public property or your own. Don’t expect sympathy from those of us that don’t want to hear it at our place of business.
I might be misremembering this but I was under the impression that Ceph offered the same or very similar object storage API prior to Amazon building S3.
I disagree. There’s no reason TCP couldn’t work like that. See QUIC for example
We got rejected (2nd time applying) and ended up raising a substantial seed/pre-seed round at excellent terms a month later.

Is there a compelling reason to still apply?
I spent most of the last 20 years in bootstrapped companies, helping grow two of them into 8 figures (which, when you don't have a board, is pretty neat). Bootstrapping is where my heart is, and almost all of the best memories of my career are from times when those kinds of companies were at the knife's edge of maybe having some kind of market fit and maybe just starting to have an identity and maybe just getting up on their legs. If that's your happy place --- again: it is mine! --- probably don't apply to YC.

I'm at a company now (Fly.io, W20) that simply would not make sense without funding (we rack hardware all over the world). I've advised close friends through other startups that might could have worked without funding, but worked better with it. I've seen the before/after on YC, years into the life of some companies (Fly.io started in 2016) and the win was significant.

It depends on what you're trying to do.

But like, pretty obviously, the point Dan is trying to make here is that there are lots of people negotiating against themselves, talking themselves out of taking the swing. And I'm not all that great at business or whatever, but one thing I think I've learned is that overriding the instinct not to take swings, succumbing to the urge to avoid potential nociception, it's a pretty important tool in the toolbox of entrepreneurship.

There are good reasons not to apply to YC, but "they will probably reject me" is maybe not one of them, unless your time is very scarce, in which case you probably already know why you're not applying to YC.
Do NOT do LSD before the age of 25 (male brain full maturity)
No investor is going to give you specific feedback.

Your best bet is to go to onto Reddit, Discord etc, find the startup communities and ask for advice there. There are a lot of people who want to support other founders. Or even better go on Linkedin, find some prospective customers and ask them for advice. I've had about 10% of people reply back some with page long answers.

If you are willing to spend money there are plenty of services like Kintell, Intro.co which will allow you to book an hour with investors or successful founders. But there are plenty of free options that I would start with first.
Are you sure it is in your interest to give up at the first hurdle?
Hail to the king, baby.
Nothing is more _inefficient_ than top-down governance from people who are so many layers removed from the folks who have built up real expertise from doing the work that makes the company's revenue.
Colour Science Precis for the CGI Artist
It takes 10-15 years to successfully IPO an Enterprise/Infra/Cybersecurity SaaS (eg. ZS started in the mid-2000s, work on Rubrik started in the 2013 time period).

One notable mid-late state Enterprise firm I've been following is Vanta. Others have been very successful acquihires (eg. Squeen becoming a core part of the Security BU at Datadog). Salt Security is a good product as well, but will most likely be acquihired.

Usually, most enterprise companies choose to be acquired because even though the pot of gold at IPO is amazing, it is annoying to work on the same product for 10-15 years (though occasionally you do have startups just being stupid at strategy - looking at you Lacework smh, coulda acquihired Wiz or Orca 4-5 years ago).
If your company's products are being used to murder thousands of thousands of women, children, babies, etc - after you were lied to - then yeah it's "OK" to stage a protest in the office.

In fact it's damn near mandatory. Everyone has a duty to prevent genocide, legally and morally.
I don't know how averages are related here.

Me neither. You're the one who brought them up.

Why is rental market relevant here?

Because it's what many people mean when the talk about housing affordability.

Especially, you know - regular working people.
Relevant details:

"Drivers can activate Mercedes’s technology, called Drive Pilot, when certain conditions are met, including in heavy traffic jams, during the daytime, on specific California and Nevada freeways, and when the car is traveling less than 40 mph. Drivers can focus on other activities until the vehicle alerts them to resume control. The technology does not work on roads that haven’t been pre-approved by Mercedes, including on freeways in other states. "
MXM: Powerful, Misused, Hackable
I found the 20 people I needed to talk to.

I found out where they worked.

I called the public number.

I asked to talk to them.

I explained I was thinking about starting a startup and I needed some help thinking through some ideas.

2 of them told me they couldn't give me the time. 15 gave me a longer than 1 hour call at a later date, 3 of them let me fly out to them and spend a day with them.

Took me about 5/6 months.
Gray and Reuter's Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques is excellent.
Not that I'm aware of, no, just the local state school.

My impression of the YC application process was that it was way more holistic than just educational background.