skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No one copies small indie apps. Copying makes sense only with popular apps.

Also, web is very open ecosystem and phishing is a problem but for users and corporate, not for small devs
I've never seen more people use it, as in being actually active on it, and it pops up everywhere due to the community note memes. But yeah I really need to get around creating a Mastodon account since some very good posters moved there too.
The root of the problem is sudo, and su more generally. This derives from *nix, or mainstream versions today, requiring a super user, a manifestation of the problem with monolithic kernals. A microkernal may be a stepping stone to improving this but even this is not a solution. The only solution is no kernal space, no privileged user(s), all processes negotiate independently with each other.
The point of an integrated system is that interactions between components enhance the system as a whole. This is obviously incompatible with an easy replacement of components.

This is literally just basic systems engineering. I don't even know what you are arguing here. The more tightly integrated a system is the harder it is to replace individual components.
Here is the usage of arcane that I think is apt when talking about shell scripting:

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/arcane

" known or understood by very few; mysterious; secret; obscure; esoteric "

And as an example for something arcane, the Sanskrit language is brought up. I think this is a perfect example to compare with shell scripting. Sanskrit is from an era where it was more common, but nowadays it's usage is more of a specialty. The rules are understood and public, easily accessible technically, but it's hard work to get good at it. Since it has a long history, it has many variants, both over time, and depending on locality. There is a kind of common form of it that people can use for everyday matters, that is much easier than knowing all of the rules and cases.

I think it's a good argument that shell scripting is arcane, even by investigating the definition of it. Not to mention that in the original post, it was just postulated that shell scripting is a bit weird, and maybe not the best tool for the job, a kind of a lighthearted jab at the language, and at the practices people sometimes do.
Do you know of a resource that explains character encoding in greater detail? Just for my own curiosity. I am learning web development and boy, they brow beat UTF-8 upon us which okay, I'll make sure that call is in my meta data, but none bother to explain how or why we got to that point, or why it seems so splintered.
Can you explain the credit thing?

Surely a credit provider is just lending you money?

Money is fungible.

If I have £100 already, and someone lends me an extra £100, and then I buy two things that both cost £100, and one of them is faulty, how do we determine whether the credit provider is responsible?
It was 95%* about immigration so none of those arguments mattered

* number pulled from my behind. But it was surely very high
> Several of the Citabrias I fly don't have stall horns, all I have is the buffet.

That's fine, as long as the airfoil and wing planform you chose have a forgiving-enough lift vs angle-of-attack curve that you get plenty of buffeting before you start loosing significant lift and fall out of the sky.

> Airplanes which are designed to do this (most airplanes) do it very reliably

Yes, this is by design. Enough pilots were killed because their planes were not doing this reliably, and they literally fell out of the sky.
Yeah but it is fire.
It can replace a junior "developer" who only really knows how to copy-paste from stackoverflow. Anything beyond that, no.
I was flying once with the president of the EU commission that time, a socialist Portuguese. The highest ranking European. I loved Barroso. Two rows ahead of me, and a lot of people started talking to him.

Think about von der Leyen flying commercial :)
Archive.today (/ .is / .ph - though .is has been failing to load for me the last few weeks, I assumed it was a dead domain until your comment) is great for sharing an offline, or paywalled, article or single page.

But for full websites that are more than a single page, the IA's Wayback Machine is even better (if they've got the site archived), because unlike archive.today they crawl links and archive (some of) them too - so for example you can click on links such as "user guide" or "what we want" and see the archived versions of those pages, whereas if you click on them from the archive.today page it hasn't saved them so it tries and fails to do it now.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240430041911/https://only9fans...
There's Intl.Segmenter now which does Unicode Segmentation to count the amount of graphemes for example: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Though you are right in that I don't know of a built-in way to count Unicode Scalar Values (USVs).
It's the man page for the Nintendo device emulators of 9Front. 9Front is a distribution of the Plan 9 operating system (most likely the most usable because it's the most actively developed one)

The link is interesting because these emulators seem to be part of the standard distribution of 9Front. Most likely those are written from scratch, given that Plan 9 is not a POSIX system (unless they are using http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape).
Obesity is correlated to potentially harmful issues. That's a difference that matters when people reverse the goals and the means, reducing obesity often doesn't equate to solving the related issues.
I believe that it's currently best to wait until everyone has had a chance to cool down a bit and then see what state the original Nix project is in. There has certainly been a lot of drama and I don't think it's just a vocal minority that's making the news here, but I also believe that long running open source projects like Nix are pretty resilient. Some folks will leave, some will come back, constructive changes can be made and hopefully we'll all be able to reconcile as much of our differences as is necessary to resume work and collaboration.
> Hence, no tree-of-objects database engine provides the level of detail in their "EXPLAIN" output that SQLite provides.

I've seen some cool graphical visualisation tools for postgres http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan-visualization/
I wasn’t allowed to play video games as a kid (in the 90s and early 00s). I don’t really care about it, but it has 100% been an occasional barrier to socializing. I don’t have any of the necessary coordination, so I’m not even fun to beat, because I just shoot myself or fall off the road immediately.

There’s definitely parties where people just play smash bros or inside jokes about water levels that I’ve literally missed out on, though I don’t especially care. If I were a more regretful person or one who experienced FOMO more, I could absolutely see feeling it about video games.

I don’t know that it’s 100% analogous to smart phones/social media (particularly because the required skills are probably lower), but kids are prone to social pressure.
These are the cases where even senior developers should use AIs.

When I'm creating a CRUD API I know exactly what I want, I know exactly how it should look like.

Do I want to spend 15-30 minutes typing furiously adding the endpoints? No.

I can just tell Copilot to do it and check its work. I'll be done in 5 minutes doing something more engaging like adding the actual business logic.
Dear lazyweb: I think I read something about Postel's Law being essential to the internet's success -- maybe this was also IPv6 related? Does anyone else remember this?
Depending on what you’re building, likely sometime in the near future.
I’m a senior dev, I’m just using Cursor.sh and my day is essentially telling it what I need done - and the code is written much faster than I could have.

Essentially I now just architect and review. Cursor has good context, so if that gets extended to the way Devin operates I think this could go pretty far.
You know that EU also have computers engineers ? It’s not like we couldn’t survive without Apple or Google.

Probably nobody wants it to happen but if it were to happen, well, I prefer regulated companies than monopolies.
Do you know that, for statically defined arrays, you can get the size like this:

int foo[10];
int ten = sizeof(foo)/sizeof(foo[0]);

Of course, that doesn’t work if you do that with a function argument because you can’t pass arrays as arguments, only pointers, so a function can’t know whether a passed value is a statically defined array or dynamically allocated.

int f(int * foo) {
return sizeof(foo)/sizeof(foo[0]); //
}
int notTen = f(foo);

That even is the case when you do things like these (https://stackoverflow.com/a/2375038):

int f(int foo[10]) {
return sizeof(foo)/sizeof(foo[0]);
}
int notTen = f(foo);

or

int f(int foo[static 10]) {
return sizeof(foo)/sizeof(foo[0]);
}
int notTen = f(foo);
Have to admit I'm a little confused by this blog post. I think the target audience is people working in managed languages (e.g. on the web?), especially given the part about primitive types and objects in the intro. In that case, "stack" and "heap" are kind of different from what the native stack and heap are. Often your (runtime-allocated) stack will contain just data and be in the heap. However, if you read the rest of the blog post it is clearly talking about native code. (Though, I will note that not just GPRs get spilled on the stack: it also contains locals.) I guess this could be useful to introduce some terms that people use when talking about memory management, but there's no tie to "my language", because it doesn't really pick one. So it's difficult to generalize from what it talks about or put it to use because languages do things differently.
They called it p-code at the time. The purpose was (purported) to simplify the porting between architectures.

https://casadevall.pro/articles/2020/11/compiling-word-for-w...
I watched the first episode the Sympathiser last week. It occurs to me that South Korea is the only Asian country that has produced significant modern-era (i.e. Cold War and later) espionage dramas that have been widely distributed in the West: these with the two Koreas as protagonists, of course. The only other Asia-focussed espionage dramas that spring to mind are a few with pre-WWII era plots involving Imperial Japan.
It's going to change how interviews are done with developers, no more leet code homework. And it will speed up some devtime, but I don't think its going to replace junior/senior devs any time soon.
The number of user is the important metric. I doubt VisionOS will quickly get to the threshold that would make the EU deem it a gatekeeping piece of software.
That sounds like a job for systemd.generator.

I don't think having an unit that generates units at runtime is an officially supported use case, since generators exist.
For seniors I think it depends on how much breadth you need. I find them very useful to explore/poke around new areas where I don't have domain knowledge. I agree that areas/problems that I worked in the past it just slows you down but as you move into more unknown territories they are kind of nice to have as a sparing partner.
> systemd is not init system, its and umbrella project for various core system components, which includes an init system.

The point being made is that it directly depends on the init system part.

> well, in this case there is good reason to have it interact with service manager in general

I disagree! There's no reason to not have it be its own daemon with its own configuration and looser bindings to the rest of the systemd ecosystem (e.g. through dbus and other protocols). KDE applications do this a lot, where they take advantage of other KDE components if present. This is strictly a philosophy thing and not a requirement for achieving what he proposes.

> their "portable and stable" APIs

"we're portable if you reimplement our APIs", idk how this is an argument. They consistently make very little effort to be compatible with (or provide fallbacks for) what's already there. Having stable APIs is nice but there's a reason most of the interfaces on that page don't have alternative implementations: They solve questionable problems and provide no tangible benefits over the methods there were before. Yet projects feel compelled to hard-depend on them...

> The couplings between systemd projects are not that tight, you can pick and choose which parts you want, they explicitly are not "forcing all their projects" to consumers.

In practice they are. The primary reason why everything is shipped as a single project is because that makes it easier to make available in different distros (they just enable everything), allowing it to become the "de facto" standard since it's available everywhere. There's a lot of projects that solve some of the systemd tools' in sometimes better ways, that never see the light of day because they don't have a trojan horse to ride in with.

There's a reason why projects like elogind exist, because there's only a very select few systemd tools that work without systemd at all
During the energy crisis libraries were places that old people could go to for heat.

Libraries are also used as a free Starbucks to work in.
This is ultimately a good thing since UK politicians are mostly selected for by class. It's good for the EU that these useless eaters don't get to write legislation.
I’m not scared by downvotes. I called out bad form as I interpreted it, just as you are you are doing now. Posting facts in HN should not warrant downvotes. Neither should reasonable discussions.
Let me guess: 1 Cor 13:11?

I can't not quote that in a Cereal Killer voice now.
> Should each owner run around and tell each employee globally how to do their job, what is the goal, budget, restrictions, rules, timelines etc?

Of course not, but there are many useful ways to organise this. Hell you can still have managers, but make them elected from the body of workers. It's more that because of the first thing you said (with which I agree) these managers are basically cops or wardens.
UTC+1/3 is NOT consistent with China's timezone.
If it's a common issue, services for automatic multi-store deployment and checks like that will appear very soon.
> store it in the bytes before the start of the array

Ah, Pascal strings. There is a reason why they have lost the battle.
I don't understand what you think pip, npm etc. have to do with dynamic linking. Those libraries get loaded in the respective interpreter, the linker doesn't come into action at all. And security wise npm, pip and the likes are nightmares waiting to be exploited xz style. No static linking will save you from it.
I am not sure that LLMs change much with regards to malleable software. A lot of software used to be somewhat malleable [1]. But that got removed, because it wasn't A/B testable or it wasn't the most easy implementation thinkable. Those two points are not changed by LLMs. Therefore, I doubt we will see a resurgence of malleable or at least configurable and scriptable software. Although, I would love to see it. Even those small features to adapt the application to your style of working instead of the other way around was extremely useful, imho.

[1] There was a time, when it was considered a standard feature of a UI that you could change keyboard shortcuts and toolbars. MacOS and Mac OS X even had an API that end users could use to script across multiple applications. Amiga OS had something similar based on the language Rexx.
You raise some valid points, but I believe your comparison isn't quite complete/holistic.

> If you are a solo app developer, you will now have to keep presence on all app stores out there, since if you don’t publish on one then a copycat will.

This doesn't make much sense. The App Store will still be where 90%+ apps are installed from, and I'm willing to bet money on that. Where are all the Google Play devs pushing their apps on the Amazon store or on 3rd party app stores?

> Furthermore, I believe you will have much less protection against plain piracy, which was a big thing in the days of yore until it was spectacularly dealt with by Apple within its mobile ecosystem.

Depending on your familiarity you already had lots of such websites (I'm not going to mention any names but it's easily googleable if anyone wants to verify). Yes keeping the app for >7 days was a pain as they expire but a 3rd party altserver helps with that.

> This is why I suspect the primary interests side-loading and alt app stores on Apple devices would satisfy is large enterprises and a few opportunistic middlemen.

Have you taken a look at any of the privacy forums/subreddits? Places where they use say GrapheneOS? Do you know what's their favorite app store? It's this thing called F-droid. And it only contains open source apps. Such a move would be amazing for open source devs. Hell, it would be great for beginner/hobbyist devs too. I (ages ago) had tried my hand at android dev. And unlike iOS, you don't need to pay $99 to appease the Apple gods for that. Free publishing is great for indie and small devs who may never hit $99/yr revenue.

Btw, afaik you already needed to pay a higher price for youtube premium if subscribing through the app. And apple's draconian/benevolent-and-super-nice policies (/s) meant that you couldn't even tell your users to get it for cheaper from elsewhere. Would you like paying 30% of your income regardless of choice?
Libraries are government funded. If they don't provide services that people want they're a drain on the city budget.
With these legislations, I always wonder how the lawmakers come up with timeframes like 6 months. Who is to say this implementation doesn't take, say, a year? I doubt lawmakers have the technological know how to estimate such a project (actually, I doubt anyone has) - but 6 months seems rather short (given they hadn't just had to implement the same thing for iOS)...?
Safari flaw can expose iPhone users in the EU to tracking
Yes, this has happened. See this example from OpenJSF:

"The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to “address any critical vulnerabilities,” yet cited no specifics" [0,1].

[0] https://openjsf.org/blog/openssf-openjs-alert-social-enginee...
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/other-attempt...
Why the Military Can't Trust AI
I was typing on my phone, the word 'explosive' was accidental but definitely fits in with the theme of crappy electronics!

I edited the original post.
Not necessarily, no.

It's a design feature to give pilots an advanced, physical warning that they are about to stall, and fall out of the sky. Electronic systems are all nice an well, but they can fail. So why not simply make it a physical feature of your airplane design, that triggers reliably not matter what?

In some very specific edge cases a designer might decided that the planform trade-offs needed to bake the feature into the wing is not worth the performance loss in other metrics, and might forgo a nice, buffeting pre-stall wing. But plenty of pilots have died because they unexpectedly stalled, so it is not a design decision that should be taken lightly.
I agree with you on most counts save for the piracy. It's highly dependent on market segment, with less affluent sectors especially with youth you'll find very high privacy rates.

I look forward to the day an fdroid like platform is available on Apple phones and tablets.
Well SQLite is basically a religious cult at this point. I am always impressed by it.
I hardly see any critic of the DMA talk about things like F-Droid. I suppose the generous explanation is that they don't know.
I don't agree with their comment, but they were specifically replying to someone who suggested italics, not bringing it up as a synonym for highlighting.
I'm not that far behind him but on the basis that syntax highlighting is sometimes completely wrong. That leads to a lot of head scratching when it turns out the highlighting engine is wrong and the code is not. Of course this is because a lot of the engines use naive regex to do the highlighting rather than a parser.

Calling it childish is a little wrong though for sure.
You see a lot of this kind of thing: "spiders aren't bugs", "whales aren't fish", "strawberries aren't berries"—no, words mean things, unfortunately, even if that's a little inconvenient for taxonomers!
Instagram have been changing the way algorithm works for a while and they did say they are prioritising reels over photos. The enshittification is real. When I block one "quotes" account, say "_quotes" then posts from "quotes_" appear immediately in my feed. Could it be done on purpose to inflate ad impressions and engagement?
systemd isn't a single piece of software. It's a collection of software with an unified theme, like KDE or Gnome.

Attack surface-wise, I don't think there's much difference between "sudo" being a part of the systemd package and not. Either way there's "sudo" code to be targeted, which package it's part of is just a technicality.
AI can give suggestions, but it can't actually deploy working software into the real world. For the foreseeable future there is always going to be a human who says "yes, lets spin up that elasticsearch cluster that costs 50k a month".
In the meantime I think Altserver works if you connect to a pc frequently enough
In fact blogging would be more than enough to compete with social media if everyone was to implement standards such as WebSub and Webmention (see W3C standards).

We have the tools to compete with proprietary platforms, we just need to commit to them.
How about ConnectRPC + grpc-gateway?
Please no. Generated TLDR includes useless fluff in my experience.
Like the halting problem, I think LLM tech is a "Halting AI" situation. I wrote about it here last month: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/halting-ai/

> This riff derives from a recent "AI Programmer" story that's making people in my corner of the nerdiverse sit up and talk, at a time when hot new AI happenings have become mundane.

> ...

> It is yet another prompt for me to take the lowkey counterfactual bet against the AI wave, in favour of good old flesh and blood humans, and our chaotic, messy systems.
Not just VMs, you could technically also run things like PC emulators, with real PC operating systems, especially older ones, with acceptable performance. Just imagine using Windows 98 on an iPad!
Extremes
I'm not contradicting what you're saying, no. I'm emphasizing that the well trodden path as being the majority of the work out there, as opposed to possibly being flippant about "anything else". if I'm reading you wrong, apologies.
> It seems plausible that the introduction of evolutionarily novel ultraprocessed foods, designed by scientists in labs to be as tasty as possible, could increase a lot of people's appetites.

Bravo. So we also know what we should go after instead of simply compensating the issue with new pills. Because we also know how well the pill approach worked in the US when handling pain..
Apparently much of ChatGPT's purple prose and occasional rare word usage is because it's speaking African-accented English because they used Kenyan/Nigerian workers for training.
Ok? Your question betrays a complete misunderstanding of how our system of government and law enforcement works. This is not a system of vengeful retribution. It’s based on measured checks and balances. Your feelings are irrelevant.