skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A lot of that is due to coordination problems.

The dumpster fire at the bottom of that is libc and the C ABI. Practically everything is built around the assumption that software will be distributed as source code and configured and recompiled on the target machine because ABI compatibility and laying out the filesystem so that .so's could even be found in the right spot was too hard.
> Aside from that, QR codes are yet another form of ticket for National Rail trains, and they work in some stations in London and not others.

Which National Rail stations in London don't accept the barcoded tickets? I'm especially curious to know what happens if you attempt to purchase a barcoded ticket ('E-Ticket' in National Rail parlance) to one of these destinations.
Oh man, I’ve been missing something like this.

Jumping around tabs in the ECS web console to dig for any kind of troubleshooting info is a frustrating endeavor.
I think an overwhelming majority of users aren’t technical enough or well enough versed in UI/UX to be able to put a finger on the frustrations they experience with software, and this is something that’s important to remember when considering complaints coming from a more technically-inclined minority — even if only a small number of techy folks are unhappy, these frustrations likely exist in the larger userbase too even if most users are unable to articulate them. In addition, some percentage undoubtedly perceive these issues but are just too busy to bother with sending in feedback.

With all that considered, I believe the extent of pushback that is possible is quite limited as long as the app technically works, but this is far from an accurate indicator of user happiness.
I'd rather they be onsite, that's what I was thinking.
That only really holds true if disruptions in the carbon cycle are the fundamental root cause.

Carbon seems extremely important no doubt, but I've never personally bought the idea that the health of the entire planet can be boiled down to a single, analytical metric. I've also yet to be convinced that, even if it truly is all about carbon, we understand the problem so completely that we know how to intervene precisely without breaking anything else or causing unexpected side effects.

We've seen a noticeable increase in ocean temperatures in the last year or two and I've seen compelling data pointing to it being caused by ultra-low sulfur emissions regulations in marine shipping. People thought they were doing the right thing, they just didn't account for the cooling effects of sulfur in the atmosphere. We could easily do the same with global interventions in the carbon cycle.

I'd much rather see us leaning into a reduction in interventions wholesale. Its much harder to break things when you just stop causing so much damage.
An alternative is to add URLs to /etc/hosts like this to block them:

127.0.0.1 tiktok.com

127.0.0.1 www.tiktok.com

Then use ublock origin extension to pare down features on sites you still visit, and an RSS reader app to slow down media consumption.
It's true that technology helping sell more cheetos probably puts upward price pressures on engineering in essential industries.

One solution is to tax ad engineers and subsidize essential ones, or allow utilities to raise the prices enough to pay for this competitive workforce.
Fun and Functional
Literally more road deaths
My initial interpretation of this is along the lines of "this very contentious thing that many people are afraid will cause lots of problems if not handled carefully with checks and balances should move out of the current place it's generally being done that cares a lot about and puts a lot of checks and balances into place, because they have too many."

Am I jumping to conclusions and is there a different interpretation you think I should be coming away with?
Why did Google+ fail, but Reddit succeeded?

Why was it so easy for Duckduckgo to establish itself?

Was was Brave able to take a bit from Chrome, even when Microsoft Edge failed?

Google faces strong competition. Even on its core revenue stream, advertising, Facebook was able to beat it.
> No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system.

Everything you say here is true, yet misses the point.

Google search results are dominated by sites just like the one presented. This is something one no one likes - not the people doing the searches, nor the people doing the advertising and definitely (as this post shows) not the people creating the sites. They would much prefer just to put up their content without spending hours on creating LLM SEO spam. I'm sure Google is worried if they don't do better someone will they will lose relevance.

Inquiring minds what to know how we ended up here. The article provides just that. It explains how the incentives Google have put in place drove him to producing one of those sites. He wanted that ad revenue and he wanted search results to find his site and the only way he could find to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on generating content he had no personal interest in was to pollute it with LLM spam.

You are criticising him for that, yet most web sites returned by Google all make that same choice. I guess according to you most of the web is acting in bad faith.

If your objective is to get out of this mess, I don't think explanations like "the word is shit because humanity sucks" are helpful. The explanation they are being pushed towards that choice by a perverse set of incentives is much more illuminating. Those incentives are controlled by one company - Google. That company could change them, either voluntarily or by being forced to.
Except that doesn't improve the time of iterative builds, which are the only ones that really matter to software development.
I'd also be curious about this as I am presently dealing with some PDFs with both handwriting and poorly scanned type. I can read and understand these documents but the text is not recognized using tesseract OCR.
tmux might work - I tested early with tmux but the last time I bothered was pre-1.0 versions of tmux. Screen supports it well, but tmux is probably worth testing.
Fractyl Health.

https://www.fractyl.com/fractyl-health-demonstrates-signific...

(no affiliation, just very interested in a permanent fix that scales vs chronic mgmt with a pharma product)
Coincidentally in the project I'm currently working I managed to reduce our compile times significantly (~35% faster) using ClangBuildAnalyzer [1]. The main two things that helped were precompiled headers and explicit template instantiations.

Unfortunately, the project still remains heavy to compile because of our use of Eigen throughout the entire codebase. The analysis with Clang's "-ftime-trace" show that 75-80% of the compilation time is spent in the optimisation stage, but not really sure what to do about that.

[1] https://github.com/aras-p/ClangBuildAnalyzer
Sometimes it means exactly that:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4968089/

Of course you could still sell the same drug if you get it approved with a different dosage but that is a long and costly process.
> Far too many times I’ve seen code that looks mostly the same try to get abstracted out into a “re-usable” class.

I’ve had a hard time explaining this but I know it when I see it. Two things that are the same shape but aren’t really semantically related. So if you try to share code, your abstraction breaks the moment they start to inevitably express how they’re not related.
I don't agree with that reading. As long as my custom chemical weapon instructions are not publicly available otherwise, then it is surely more difficult to build the weapon without access to the instructions.

The line about autonomous actions is only item C in the list of possible harms. It is separate from item A which covers chemical weapons and other similar acts.
The open source LLMs are working fine for image recognition. We have used the technology internally. For example, someone took a selfie in front of a mirror and the description as a result of the prompt also recognized that there was a mirror image there.
Ha ha yeah. Let me just remove all that childhood trauma and PTSD, then we'll get this train of thought right back on track. Why didn't I think of that sooner?
You think only inexperienced developers have stopped reading books?
I used netrw in the past but I switched to oil.nvim [1]. I highly recommend it. It lets you edit the your files and directories like a vim buffer. It also supports lsp rename which convenient.

[1] https://github.com/stevearc/oil.nvim
The point is to eliminate the idea of an absence of a value. A variable is always assigned to a value, but there is a special value called null which behaves as a kind of sentinel value whose methods all return the null value for their respective type.
tbh I think you're comment is disrespectul to Fabrice Bellard. You're implying the man who wrote FFmpeg is a flashy showoff who doesn't deliver real value. That's like saying Mozart was nothing but a score scribbler without the people who made the instruments, sewed the costumes and built the stage

Edit: I became curious about why you didn't see what I was saying. Were you trolling me? I asked Claude Opus to write me a python program with a GUI using wxWidgets, which I've never done before, to extract a list of links and give it to Claude for analysis. I extracted about 5 pages of your comments and your submissions. It only took 15 minutes from idea to finish! That amazes me. You weren't trolling, you just don't agree. I'm retired but if I was still programming I would love this.

Me: how would you characterize this person based on their comment and posting history?

Claude: Based on chrsw's comment and submission history on Hacker News, they seem to be a technically-minded individual with wide-ranging interests spanning computer science, electrical engineering, and technology topics. Some key observations:

Strong interest in low-level hardware and software, including embedded systems, FPGAs, processors, bootloaders, etc. Many of their submissions relate to these topics.

Follows developments in AI, deep learning, and neural networks. Has commented on AI "consciousness", the limitations of large language models, AI replacing jobs, etc.

Knowledgeable about various operating systems like Unix, Plan9, Haiku, FreeRTOS. Interested in OS concepts like booting.

Pragmatic, rational thinker. Their comments are often balanced, seeing multiple sides of issues. Not afraid to respectfully disagree with others.

Long-time Hacker News user (commenting since 2014) who engages in substantive technical discussions. Asks good questions.

Curious about a wide range of computing topics, from encryption to C++ programming to visual studio code.
Occasionally comments on economic and social issues like housing affordability, layoffs, climate change - but usually through a fact-based rational lens.

Overall, chrsw comes across as an experienced, pragmatic engineer and technologist with deep interests across the hardware/software stack. They are an active and thoughtful contributor to intellectual discussions on Hacker News.
What if every null reference was an instance of a Null Object pattern? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_object_pattern

Eliminates null checks, Optionals, and NPEs. Probably moots annotations like @NotNull too, but maybe some use cases need those for client APIs.

Makes iterating data structures like graphs simple. Faster too, because the JIT NOP a Null Object's methods. (Mostly; profile to confirm, then tweak as needed.)

I implement a Null Object for each base class.

Each base class has a static final member NULL referencing its Null Object implementation (flyweight, singleton). Then assign variables to AwesomeThing.NULL instead of null.

A spiffy javac could code generate Null Object implementations. (It's on my todo list.) For scalars, just use the default null value should be. int is 0, float is NaN, etc. Their boxed values will need small shims too.

Customizing javac (with some compiler plugin or something) is deep down on my TODO list. So I'm unlikely to be the (first) person to do this work. Sorry.
Yes. Usually wage ranges are negotiated. Negotiate before you join the company and make sure you understand your contract. If you are not sure, ask your union's representative or, of course, a lawyer specialized in labour law. Labour law is complex and you definitely want a specialist to answer your questions.

Don't trust the first google hits, especially if you are in the US. Disinformation by union busters is very common around here.
Buzz killington
This actually explains why Google is so keen to retire products that don't necessarily cost much to run, but don't turn a profit yet.
my gut tells me that it would be strategically better to fly somewhere where lots of wingmen and interception capabilities exist.
That was not the point, there is a natural focus in HN towards open source software. Open source is not equal to Communism.
And for lithium batteries, maintaining an overcapacity drastically increases the lifetime by reducing the depth of the cycle. e.g., you get vastly more cycles at %50 DoD vs %80. This would increase the lifespan to be many decades
Haystack DB – 10x faster than FAISS with binary embeddings by default
In the case of 3sum, because the LLM has been fine tuned to use 'blank' token key values as a register to represent the sums of specific integer triplets.
I run desktop linux and I've had no issue with joining zoom or teams calls.
The modern immigration is a lot different than in the past. Amsterdam, London or New York offered no support to immigrants, more like the opposite, where immigrants worked themselves to death in factories, plantation, mining, etc.

And modern immigration can split between legal immigrants with skilled professionals and illegal immigrants.

Europe is receiving a lot of ilegal economic immigrants with low education, doesn’t know german/french/italian/dutch or barely know English, and many are religious fundamentalist. What kind of innovation do you expect from them?

I don’t understand why Europe keeps accepting ilegal immigrants.
The place you can get a real physical commercially available CHERI implementation is RISC-V:

https://codasip.com/press-release/2023/10/31/codasip-deliver...

That's largely because if you base a product on Arm or MIPS you have the choice of getting them to actively invest in and support you, or getting sued into oblivion by them.

THAT is why RISC-V is the most friendly ISA to innovation and where most future innovation will happen. Because innovation comes not only from internally inside Intel or Arm or MIPS (who have switched to RISC-V now anyway) but from a myriad of possible sources.
This sounds entirely reasonable!
I've noticed an increase in really poor AI generated dubbed video ads, it's an interesting problem, they are not flagging these very well.
Which is why a human being has to review the camera footage and decide to issue the citation. If the system makes an error, and the human checking it makes an error, then the human receiving the citation can contest it. Seems a reasonable number of safeguards to me.

Certainly a lot better than the big tech "we banned you but won't tell you why or allow you to talk to a human about it".

My only problem with more camera-based law enforcement for traffic violations is the fact that they can't tell who was driving. SO the fine goes to the registered owner of the vehicle, so folks won't want to lend vehicles. Of course, one argument is that you shouldn't loan your vehicle to some one who is going to be breaking the law... but is that really the world we want to live in, where we can't loan anything to anyone for fear of them misusing it and the owner being held responsible? I don't have a good answer there.
Looks like it's trying to literally regulate speech. This would be struck down per Bernstein v DOJ.

There is freedom of speech regardless if it's written in English or C.
They are not comparable.

RS-422 is a specification at the physical/electrical layer.

MIDI is a protocol at the logical layer.

You can transmit MIDI over RS-422.

However you cannot transmit RS-422 over MIDI. That makes no logical sense. Like saying you could transmit a chicken sandwich over HTTP.
As in, they would have to prove, potentially in court, that the layoff was absolutely necessary to actually be about to do it, plus pay an undefined fair severance amount (that people mostly seem to accept as 0.5 * monthly salary * years of tenure at the company), on top of the on-average 3 month notice period, which most companies will give as garden leave in order to not reduce morale even further.

If you can't prove that you need to cut the person for "operational" reasons (e.g. because you're not really getting rid of python tooling engineers), then your best bet is to dangle large cash offers to people in order to entice them to quit.

If they do manage to prove they need to do layoffs, for example when the company is literally running out of money, then they're not allowed to just lay off employees as they like (and definitely not in relation to performance). Instead they have to follow the "Sozialauswahl" which means that factors like whether the employee is supporting a family, is older, etc need to be taken into account.

Then on top of all that, they won't be able to hire people even for completely unrelated roles, for some amount of time afterwards.

So all in all there's a few disincentives for layoffs to be considered as a first action (it's not stopped it from happening at a bunch of companies lately though, Bosch, SoundCloud, Ableton, Native Instruments, Personio, Pitch etc).
Yep. The most successful startup I worked at had a SPA that downloaded 5MB bundle and preloaded a bunch of data. Took nearly 10 seconds to startup.

Nobody complained about that. In fact, few people complained about a few portions of the app that had abysmal performance. It often wasn’t until 60 second load times that customers started complaining.

They still raved and raved about that software because it solved an extremely valuable problem for them. A job that took literally a week could now be done in minutes.

As the space heated up, we needed to improve some things, but most people literally did not care. It would always be stack ranked last in the list.
> Personal Library Science is the leverage of LLM technology, applied to a personal library. A personal library differs from a impersonal library in the fact that a personal library is an interpretation of a source material. These interpretations include: photographs from different photographers at the same event, or favorite scenes from a movie, or favorite passages from books, parts of songs that bring you to tears, etc. Importantly, these interpretations create unique sets that go on to create unique problems which require unique, idiosyncratic solutions.

Would an LLM-driven "Personal Library" require manually annotated textual interpretation of each curated item, or could it derive personal interpretations from user history and the uniqueness of curated items/sets?

For those who have been using local, offline LLMs with a manually curated text/image corpus, what have been the most valuable or surprising use cases?

Author demo video (2023), https://youtube.com/watch?v=7TgqMRz2r3M & tooling comment (2024), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39789712

> Inspired by the commonplace book format, I take highlights from Kindle and embed them in a DB. From there I build (multiple) downstream apps but the central one, Commonplace Bot is a bot that serves as a retrieval and transformer for said highlights.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog
Sexsomnia: An embarrassing sleep disorder no one wants to talk about
How would they know how much one drug would make vs the other while in the research phase?
It does though for header changes, which then may trigger fewer source file compilations. IME in incremental builds the most time is spent in the linker anyway.

> which are the only ones that really matter to software development.

Debatable in this age of cloud CI builds ;)
Publicly traded companies create new stock, constantly, in the form of RSUs.

It is true that they aren’t technically selling the stock, they’re diluting existing stock and then using the created stock as compensation, but this seems like an unimportant distinction.

This does grant the company some power. Not obvious to me that power is nefarious, but it’s quite real.
Netron seems to be the best that I've seen so far. https://github.com/lutzroeder/netron
> The thing that makes me crazy is that the thing that we do on computers are basically the same each year

I think that is some kind of fallacy. We are doing the same things but the quality of those things is vastly different. I collect vintage computers and I think you'd be surprised how limited we were while doing the same things. I wouldn't want to go back.

Although I will say your experience with Windows is different than mine. On all my machines, regardless of specs, start up is fast so the point where I don't even think about it.
Google is doing what the street wants, which is a proxy for shareholders. The increase in ads revenue, the first ever dividends, and the layoffs. These are the tools that the leadership have, and mostly short-term. The long-term innovations haven’t really taken hold. So, this may be the flame burning the brightest before it goes out.
very similar to what the Whitehouse put out [1] in terms of applicability being based on dual use & size. It is hard not to see this as a push for regulatory capture, specifically trying to chill open source development in favor of some well-funded industry closed-source groups which can adhere to these regulations.

A harms-based approach, regardless of the model used, seems more able to be put into practice.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
We have got to stop using alternating current. HVDC to the home is clearly the future. Isn’t anyone working on this?
If null-safety on the JVM is important to you, just use Kotlin.
Sure, if the abstraction is very broad like a class, but I find I have a lot of success factoring out code that mostly looks the same into a plain function.
super convenient - thanks for this!
I really doubt that. He was still “actively controlling” the yoke. This is a back country 185, it’s not like he had the autopilot engaged.

In my experience as a flight instructor, pilots having the airplane trimmed out properly generally only improved control.
The Essence of Compiling with Continuations (1993) [pdf]
>To pick a random example, an off-peak trip from Paddington to Canary Wharf would cost £6.70 if buying a paper ticket but £2.80 if using contactless payments.

That's insane. It feels like some kind of dark pattern that they were even offering paper tickets.
Is there anyone else that gets unreasonably angry at stuff like PIMPL? It is truly the most braindead, bereft of sense activity in this world. There was a comment in one of the many Rust threads that called C++ a respectable language now but then things like PIMPL snap you right back into the wasteland it is.
The narratives change when we’re older; but I think there are still “sorting my life out”, or “taking on a new adventure”, narratives that work. And that’s all this side of things is - a story to tell yourself and others while the real work of changing habits and working consistently toward a goal occurs.

I’m not disagreeing that it’s harder than when young, or the number of options have significantly reduced. However, I do think we too often feel trapped by circumstance (when older), when much is still possible.
That's fair, I bet it is more widespread, but people starting in the last 15-20 years did not even have the initial introduction. I read a lot, it surprised me to find out that it was atypical in an industry that is supposed to be somewhat about leveraging brainpower. May as well stand on the shoulders of giants.