skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you write an algorithmic betting software?
"The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory."

Just another proof that we may have gained a lot, but also lost something in our pursuit of modernity: on modern systems direct memory access is discouraged if not prevented by the underlying OSes, and this hack would not have been possible.
It certainly resonates with my experience. How do we solve this dilemma?
My two rabbit holes from the last ~year:

JellyFin. Amazing. A little clunky here and there, so some automation is needed. Then the weird bugs - gotta get a debug instance going to see what is going on. Once you start thinking about it as a "personal Netflix" you start building out a larger collection which needs organizing. Then your friends want an account. Then you realize your satellite tuner has a streaming function so you start reading through the plugin code for other streaming boxes...

Next one was the Japanese PS2 DVR combo unit. Sold as junk (which mostly they are - none can read discs anymore basically) but very interesting in that they are beautiful and cool and weird. The English OSD translations will often break your unit in subtle ways - so I joined the discord and identified that this was actually a configuration management problem - you have to only ever use a translation which was done to a set of OSD files which match your firmware revision. So I started writing a framework to auto-translate the XML file strings. Then the guys on the community mentioned the images with strings, as well as detecting when your translated string is too long for the UI element... I am still working on the framework. No dealbreakers yet! I will probably buy a few more to generate all my own OSD translations. My wife is going to kill me - I have 2 PSX DVR's now, and probably will buy more on our trip to Japan soon...
Do NOT use this proprietary nonsense, learn FreeCAD
Nice! I'm drowning in a sea of backlogs and this is the first thing I saw this morning. Totally worth it! Only thing I can feedback is to add a jump action using spacebar. Overall, it is awesome!
I think it really depends on if you think Meta wants to be a hardware company or if they want to continue being a data/advertising company.
>And we encourage the Google Play 2D

They just had to stick that 2D in there. Yes, poke the bear.
Plus a failed dev can pivot to tech grifter, which is a useful fallback for many
From the prospective of these companies, the "core input" of the product is already in their hands: The intellectual property of the stories/characters. Media productions from this core IP is down the value chain.
Having been through similar processes with family, scouring medical journals and trials for the answer as if its stack overflow, you're in a period of high stress I think I can understand that may have led to the authors perspective and expectations shaping the narrative here.
PDF files, and why the heck they are so slow to read. Hours upon hours of perf(1) and fiddling with ugly things in C. My main takeaway is everyone in the world is doing things HORRIBLY wrong and there's no way to stop them.

(Digression: did you know libpng, the one everyone uses, is not supposed to be an optimized production library—rather it's a reference implementation? It's almost completely unoptimized, no really, take a look, anywhere in the codebase. Critical hot loops are 15 year old C that doesn't autovectorize. I easily got a 200% speedup with a 30-line patch, on something I cared about (their decoding of 1-bit bilevel to RGBA). I'm using that modified libpng right now. I know of nowhere to submit this patch. Why the heck is everyone using libpng?)

The worst offender (so far) is the JBIG2 format (several major libraries, including jbig2dec), a very popular format that gets EXTREMELY high compression ratios on bilevel images of types typical to scanned pdfs. But: it's also a format that's pretty slow to decompress—not something you want in a UI loop, like a PDF reader is! And, there's no way around that—if you look at the hot loop, which is arithmetic coding, it's a mess of highly branchy code that's purely serial and cannot be thread- nor SIMD- parallelized. (Standardized in 2000, so it wasn't an obvious downside then). I want to try to deep-dive into this one (as best as my limited skill allows), but I think it's unlikely there's any low-hanging optimization fruit, like there's so much of in libpng. It's all wrong that everyone's using this slow, non-optimizable compression format in PDF's today, but, no one really cares. Everyone's doing things wrong and there is no way to stop them.

Another observation: lots of people create PDF's at print-quality pixel density that's useless for screens, and greatly increases rendering latency. Does JBIG2 support interlacing or progressive decoding, to sidestep this challenge? Of course it doesn't.

Everyone's doing PDF things wrong and there is no way under the blue sky to make them stop.
This is only partially relevant, but there is some analog film theory buried about halfway through.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE9rEQAGpLw
This is really cool. I work in the plant industry, and most people don't know this but huge numbers of the plants bought in the U.S. are grown from tissue culture. I would guess it could be in the ballpark of half of all small and medium-sized plants (< 10" diameter), because it brings some benefits when propagating at scale for certain genera. For others, it's too difficult to grow a stable plant from tissue culture, so they need to be propagated vegetatively.
Why does HN and other Tech elitists treat creator/influencers with disdain that they don't show the same sympathy as they would to other professions?.

This is akin to saying "Mom and Shop Retail closes? who cares, the workers can go work at Walmart"
"Coal Industry shut down? who cares, they can learn to code"

It's not easy for someone to easily rebuild audience from one platform to another or easily transfer the skills required from one platform to another.

Remember these are small businesses run by people with little technical skills. Many have toiled to be where they are.
I've seen this too, just once, but I haven't logged in in two months.
I got into cross-compiling Python wheels (e.g., building macos wheels on linux and vice versa). Zig's `zig cc` does much of the heavy lifting, but one step in building a portable wheel is the "repair" process which vends native library dependencies into the wheel, necessitating binary patching (auditwheel does this for linux, delocate for macos).

I wanted to be able to do this cross platform, so I re-implemented ELF patching and Mach-O patching and adhoc signing in Python, and wrapped them into a tool called repairwheel: https://github.com/jvolkman/repairwheel
Maybe Gutenberg was right on his market positioning after all.
Great post, thanks! I was hopeful the internet archive had an old snapshot of 7427466391.com, but, no such luck:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130815000000*/http://www.74274...

Does anyone know or recall what the even harder problem hosted on this website was?
I'd be willing to give some companies the benefit of the doubt, but not amazon of all things.
I was actually just thinking last night about how something like Fortnite handled emotes. Skins and cosmetics I can understand, but they have 100 players and hundreds of emotes that any player can use at any time. Is it all really just streamed in on demand? Most common preloaded?

Made me ponder a bit.
LLMs mean now you can write simple imperative code to perform NLP tasks.
Port Forward Transition from SPDY to WebSockets in Kubernetes 1.30
I remember that website. I reported it to the moderators the same day and all related accounts got suspended.
Is your argument that we shouldn’t ban TikTok because the CCP can manipulate upset users? Isn’t that one of the reasons we’re banning it in the first place?
Yeah, sorry for the snark. I was mostly referring to how the comment I replied to said they hadn’t actually used GPT for coding, but had lots of ideas about its limitations etc.
Unrelated to work: the black hole rabbit hole.

It started with an article about the hypothesis that planet nine may be a primordial black hole with 3-6 Earth masses.

What’s a primordial black hole? It’s one that formed in the first seconds after the Big Bang. We don’t know for sure they exist but many theories and simulations predict them.

They’re an excellent dark matter candidate. Could it be that simple? Could at least a lot of the missing mass be tied up in little baseball sized embers from the birth of the universe that rarely interact with anything so we don’t see them? They’d be small, would rarely interact, and unless they are sucking in mass (causing a hot accretion disk) would be dark.

Then I got onto Hawking radiation and whether micro black holes could exist. Along the way I read about loop quantum gravity (LQG) which looks to me like a decent stab at unifying QM and GR that’s much less baroque and more testable than string theory.

That then led to the LQG “bounce” hypothesis for black holes. See LQG does away with true infinite mass singularities. Instead a black hole would be matter packed to its theoretical maximum density (which is still insane). From there it would quickly “bounce” and become a white hole.

So wait… how do black holes persist then? Time dilation! From a the hole’s frame of reference it collapses and then instantly bounces and goes kaboom. From our frame of reference though all that gravity slows it to such a crawl that the black hole phase at or near max density looks like it’s stable. The bounce takes billions to even trillions of years!

Last but not least I learned about the black hole starship idea. It’s a set of ideas about how far future intelligences could use black holes as mass energy converters to reach relativistic velocities. Might be somewhat easier (for crazy sci-fi values of “easy”) than handling antimatter. This also gives SETI yet another wild extreme technosignature to look for.

… and back to the beginning I found a post about how if planet nine were a PBH we could use it to yeet probes to the stars at meaningful fractions of c… at least if we could make them able to survive insane g forces. Unlike the black hole starship this would be feasible today. It’d just be a gravity assist off a ludicrous gravity well.

Here I thought black holes were dull. Turns out they’re the most extreme objects in the universe and a whole lot of the most amazing physics intersects around them. If there is any way we could tap into the phenomenon we could potentially access sci-fi levels of energy too.
Why have all the TikTok competitors launched by US social media companies been total flops, then?
>Lidl Schwarz group actually went into recycling

Because of EU vide law. https://www.surfrider.eu/learn/news/the-deposit-return-schem...

>valuable

Its not valuable, its the thread of fines for not fulfilling EU regulation on accepting plastic bottle returns.

https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20240318-activists-s...
I have too many books. I physically can't find more places for more books.
I love, love, love the visual style of this game. It's so aesthetically pleasing!

But even more than that, the game felt crisp. Movement, Mechanics, Voice Acting- all done fantastically. Just a 10/10 demo.

Now make a full game like this! I assure you, it'll take the internet by storm.
Mildly related programming language trivia:

Fortran has virtual functions ("type bound procedures"), and supports a NON_OVERRIDABLE attribute on them that is basically "final". (FINAL exists but means something else.). But it also has a means for localizing the non-overridable property.

If a type bound procedure is declared in a module, and is PRIVATE, then overrides in subtypes ("extended derived types") work as usual for subtypes in the same module, but can't be affected by overrides that appear in other modules. This allows a compiler to notice when a type has no subtypes in the same module, and basically infer that it is non-overridable locally, and thus resolve calls at compilation time.

Or it would, if compilers implemented this feature correctly. It's not well described in the standard, and only half of the Fortran compilers in the wild actually support it. So like too many things in the Fortran world, it might be useful, but it's not portable.
Yea it’s not nothing, but that’s a rounding error on the number of smartphone users.
Supreme Court appears to side with an Oregon city's crackdown on homelessness
Click on “safe space”.

DEVOPS is a meaningful term.

YOU WERE BORN TO DEPLOY KUBERNETES CLUSTERS!
I'm sure you have the same sympathy for Coal workers, Steel workers, Mom & Pop Retail, right? or is this specially reserved for people who make a living out of content creation, just because you don't like it
That SRE video accurately depicted my life in DevOps. I felt that one.
if i want to play a map of alkatraz, which is a song i own, i cannot do so without modding because beatsaber will never release demondice tracks
it's been about 4 years, but in Grafana at the time we were using something like ArrowJS + Arrow Flight + protobuf.js to render datasets into dashboards on Canvas, especially for streaming at ~20hz.

when i benchmarked the fastest lib to simply run the protobuf decode (https://github.com/mapbox/pbf), it was 5x slower than native JSON parsing in browsers for dataframe-like structures (e.g. a few dozen 2k-long arrays of floats). this is before even hitting any ArrowJS iterators, etc).

Grafana's Go backend uses Arrow dataframes internally, so using the same on the frontend seemed like a logical initial choice back then, but the performance simply didn't pan out.
When privatization is in the news, we like to joke, "I have a Venmo username to send $20 for a practice approach, advise when ready to copy."

Or, "Airlines123, ten miles from POINT, fly heading 360 until established on the localizer, cleared ILS Runway 1 approach. This approach brought to you by <advertiser>."
I think it was Chandler Carruth who said "If you're not measuring, then you don't care about performance." I agree, and by that measure, nobody I've ever worked with cares about performance.

The best I'll see is somebody who cooked up a naive microbenchmark to show that style 1 takes fewer wall nanoseconds than style 2 on his laptop.

People I've worked with don't use profilers, claiming that they can't trust it. Really they just can't be bothered to run it and interpret the output.

The truth is, most of us don't write C++ because of performance; we write C++ because that's the language the code is written in.

The performance gained by different C++ techniques seldom matters, and when it does you have to measure. Profiler reports almost always surprise me the first few times -- your mental model of what's going on and what matters is probably wrong.
I'm absolutely not criticizing the author. I can understand how you'd latch on to any little signal of hope in this kind of a situation.

Hell, I'd go so far as to say that the oncologists who are saying this stuff probably think they're doing the right thing, and are just trying to give desperate people something to hang on to. It's difficult. But it's still necessary to make it clear what these trials are.
FWIW despite the weird name that invokes cheap Amazon noname brand vibes, these guys have been around for a few years now. They do have other headsets that are in the same ballpark price-wise as XREAL, too - e.g. GOOVIS Young, which is pretty decent for on-the-go use with a smartphone etc. I've owned that one for three years and used it many times with no issues before splurging on G3 Max.

And yeah, $1K is quite a lot, but the 65 degree FOV and 2560x1440 (per eye) OLED that you get for it really does look amazing - I haven't regretted that purchase in the slightest. It's rather bulky, though, although still nowhere near as heavy as VR headsets. Still, not something I'd want to carry on the go.

I hope we'll get 4K per eye some day with this tech. Whichever brand does it first for reasonable $$$, it'll completely replace my primary display.
> the TikTok ban will be barely felt

Banning TikTok will cause an entire generation of Americans to lose all trust in their institutions. Whatever vanishingly small influence China may or may not have through TikTok---still completely unproven innuendo---pales compared to the absolute public relations coup that would win were it banned. If you think cynicism is bad now, there will be zero trust in the democratic process and the rules-based order were this to happen.
California is trying to drive out everyone other than the homeless (err unhoused individuals) and criminals (err person who commits violent crime)
Another massive advantage to using Kindle estead of iPad - enourmous battery life. My like 6-8 year old Kindle survives what feels like a month without recharge with active use. This enables you to just drop it in your backpack and be sure that it works the next time you feel like reading.
This is a big part of why they are generally available. Building on top of AMD gear is currently more difficult than Nvidia. It's unfortunate, but the evolution of/from Cuda when AMD had little in this space gave intel a massive jump-start. As a dev it's way easier to pick up various stacks that work with nvidia gear and not have to worry anywhere near as much about what's underneath.
If this is your idea of "isn't that detailed"... please make a full game that isn't that detailed.

More detail would actually subtract from the experience. Keep it like this. This feels just right.
Is that the one where Jesus sells Thomas into slavery because he didn't go obediently to minister to the people in India?
I'm glad to see this is being studied. I did a brief half-semester project summarizing the usefulness of accelerators after the death of Dennard's law and Moore's law (this was when Intel was still pushing out incremental improvements on 14nm). The short summary is that accelerators offered substantial performance per watt improvement, at the cost of longer development timelines, cost of manufacturing in the case of ASICs and ASIPs, and the inability to fit large algorithms on FPGAs. Though Microsoft found a way to daisy-chain FPGAs for Bing's page rank, it just didn't produce the order-of-magnitude improvement necessary to justify moving to FPGAs. With smaller algorithms or bigger FPGAs or occasional operation offloading (like what we do now with TPUs and GPUs), they could be good candidates for accelerators.

Of course the real killer is how easy it is(n't) to develop for them. AMD offers much better performance per dollar than Nvidia, but of course their poor drivers make using their hardware a fool's errand.

RADs sound like a good idea. We should be making reprogrammable hardware available and easy to use for everyone.
A cynical take is that VCs still focus on the USA because the environment is far more lax and/or easy to take advantage of.

That’s not an easy scenario for other countries that care to counter.
Just seed your lawn, easiest most expensive way to feed birds ever invented.
Question since you are probably knowledge-able about it right now.

> Another observation: lots of people create PDF's at print-quality pixel density that's useless for screens, and greatly increases rendering latency.

Is this relevant to text in the PDF? I would assume text is vectorized, meaning resolution is not relevant until you _actually_ print it?

Or is it just relevant to rasterized content like embedded images?
Except when 10s of thousands of requests can be handled in 32GB of RAM versus in Java where you need an instance four times as big to handle a load one fourth the size. That's annoying when you only need one or two instances. A real dent to your operating costs when the instance count gets much larger.

https://instances.vantage.sh/

A 2GB RAM C7G medium instance costs 2.4¢/hr on a reserved instance. A C7G 16xlarge with 128GB RAM costs $1.53/hr on a reserved instance.

It adds up quick. Do you want to pay for the work getting done or pay a Java memory tax?
Omg, what did I just read? That was some good greentext
Cool! What else can you tell us about this robot you built?
I'd say the Game Boy also won in terms of library of games, and the popular properties owned by Nintendo, such as Super Mario Bros., Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, among many others.
Not really sure if the Vision Pro could be called the iPhone of VR. It's not nearly as popular and its demand has ground to a halt.
> The copy-protection mechanism of the SNES is something I already dig into in my 10NES article. It works by having two chips talking in lockstep. One chip is in the console, the other in the cart. If the console CIC sees something it does not like, it resets every processor.

It was easily defeated for consumers though (but probably not for game producers/editors)...

Back then we all had a "backup device" for our SNES: a device you'd plug into the SNES and which had a floppy drive. So we'd "backup" all our games on very cheap 3"1/2 floppies. All that was needed for the system to work was to have one original cartdridge, which you'd plug into the copier, and the device would reuse that cartdridge's CIC chip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_backup_device
> And Delaware has ruled on and struck down CEO pay packages before. This isn't uncharted territory.

The judge literally said it's unprecedented. That's why I quoted it.

> Shareholders have no fiduciary duty to do anything, and nobody is saying that the board was "hoodwinked."

Institutional investors have a fiduciary duty to their investors. Again, the largest shareholders were massive financial firms who represented millions of shareholders.

They absolutely do have a fiduciary duty to fully evaluate a CEO pay package and use their very significant voting power.

The only possible reasons they voted for it: a) they agreed with it, b) they didn't care or c) they failed to uphold their fiduciary duty.

Do note that the pay package passed with 73% of shareholders (who voted).
That varies from person to person. I have played games with keyboard and mouse in VR (e.g. Polynomial 2, or the unofficial GTA 5 VR mod), and it works great for me.
I clicked on safe space and all was right in the world once more
> Trump started it

It was the OPM breach [0] and the brutal eradication of the CIA network within China [1] that tipped the scales

Mutual US-China espionage has been common for decades, but these two actions were a step too far.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme...

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932012_killing_of...
I do like physical books, but I personally don't enjoy having to move to change pages.

I usually read lying on my side and that means that every second page I have to hold half the book hovering in the air which gets tiring.

An ebook is way more convenient. I can lie in one position and it doesn't change, and I don't spend half my time changing pages and getting comfortable again.

Also they have built-in backlights so I don't have to light up the whole room to be able to read.
Business is business. If a publisher is refraining from going into ebooks altogether because of Amazon, when they get the option to direct sell and also access the other ebook platforms as well, I feel they're not long for this world either way.
When moving into a market where there are no competitors one should be wary that this may be because there are no customers.
The old-laptop -> install-linux-because-windows-wont-run -> tech-career pipeline is absolutely real.

It got me to learn C, graphics programming, operating systems, networks and firewall, literally everything I wanted to do required a couple of days deep in arch linux wiki learning about all kinds of inter-connected systems.
> The one airport in my region that I know is privatized has a horrible reputation among pilots and DPEs alike.

KSQL?