skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There is no single answer to all of this, because it's too complex to boil down to a single number.

Having a single number that is a rough measure is still useful, though perhaps a (weighted?) average would be more useful.

Anyway, I just downloaded the Python tool (called "libyear" on PyPI) and ran it to quite quickly find three dependencies on my project that were over 2 years behind. That was helpful and I would use it again.
Brazilians of years, not billions
Exactly, the US and Europe are free to reforest but choose not to for some unexplained reason.

Brazilian beef is frankly way less deforested than anything from
the U.S. or Europe.

The three most forested countries in the world are Russia, Canada and Brazil in that order.

In all honesty I’m perfectly fine with the bans / boycotts it keeps farmers here poor and beef cheap.
I had the same immediate reaction that you did, but the key here is that the age of dependencies is not absolute but calculated against the latest release. So a one-day-old dependency with no succeeding version is 0 libyears old, not 1/365.24. Likewise for a decade-old release, if it is in fact the latest release.

It’s about the time delta between the used version and the latest available version.
People expressing doubts up to the initial reports are now, retroactively, "Russian misinformation bots"
Boeing 737 crashes during take-off in Senegal
I've actually been a developer of FORM since my PhD (which I did with the author of FORM, Jos Vermaseren)! In Symbolica, I am taking the best features of FORM, while making it easier to use.
How can you prove that damages were done to you?
Unicode creep - more features nobody uses.

Unicode is the wrong abstraction layer for doing this. URLs and hashtags belong to structured text. Adding stuff for parsing them is not the job of Unicode.

Unicode has lots of legacy stuff, like U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR. They exist and are justified for backward compatibility. Using them for writing today is not a good idea.

Inventing new stuff to be ignored just because a standard body has been set up and needs to do something is wasted time.
I have a more expensive family plan, it just went up to £20 a month. Spotify is still forcing adverts down my throat though and we're planning how to migrate back to self-hosted.
Show HN: Browser-based knitting (pattern) software
I wrote some simple open source web-based app to (1) dynamically compute knitting patterns (based on input parameters, such as the exact desired size), and (2) display these patterns and help me keep track of which row I'm on (as I start knitting), similar to minimalist "row counters" that other knitters use. It also gives you a simple visualization of the shape of what you're knitting. You can see it in action at https://alefore.github.io/knit/ (and read about it in https://github.com/alefore/knit).

Right now I only implemented on simple pattern: Sophie scarfs. After knitting one that came out somewhat … asymmetric, I decided to just write some software to help me (1) easily adjust the length/width of the scarf (using Bézier curves), and (2) keep track of which row I'm on (so that I can make sure I apply increases/decreases at the right places). In the future, I expect to extend this with many other knitting patterns for other types of items.

The application is 100% browser (JavaScript, tested in only in Chrome in Linux/Android) based (no server-side component): all state is kept in the URL hash. I've used it to knit two scarves, including https://github.com/alefore/knit/blob/main/images/000.jpg.

The current state of knitting patterns is far from optional, stuck in pre-computer times. Perhaps knitters are not the most technically minded group. Most knitters just download patterns as PDF files. These files will show multiple numbers from which you should choose one depending on the size you're knitting, saying things like "Purl 24 (32 38 42 50 64) times" (you're supposed to pick the right number depending on the size you're knitting). They'll say things like "repeat rows 4 to 6 sixteen times".

I think software can display patterns much better (including not being limited to a few pre-selected sizes, but letting you choose the _exact_ size you want, and adjusting everything accordingly), and keep track of your progress much more easily. For example, for my scarf, the user inputs the desired number of rows (based on the desired length, which makes the pattern agnostic to the needle size), and the software computes where to apply increases/decreases.

I have many other ideas for improvements (e.g., track how much time I've spent in each row, show a clock), but I figured I'd share this early and ask for feedback. Hopefully there are other fellow knitters in HN. :-) Check it out and let me know what you think!
Japan to allow commercial fishing of fin whales
From early design with simple behavioral models to simulating complete Verilog implementations. Useful in systems with multiple instances of the accelerator and machines running full OS and real applications. https://www-netbenefits.com
That's essentially what we do with cows. Do you see the hypocrisy? We don't inflict this on humans so why do it to other creatures which can know terror and pain just as we do?
My wife will be happy with this.
>will get you L5 eventually.

"Eventually" wasn't the sales pitch.

Is FSD an awesome technology? Yes. But I've watched enough YouTube videos of it, including by superfans, that I know if you set the navigation and climbed in the back seat, that car is not making it to its destination without getting in an accident.

That's why the safety vs no FSD comparisons are so silly: you have a person intervening. How would it look if you didn't? Guess we'll find out!
The best democracy money can buy. ;)
>Within the past 4 years or so, Android has consistently outlived Apple. Coworker still kicking around a Pixel 5, paid a guy to replace the battery and its works for him.

If we go by anecdotes then I use an iPhone 11 (original battery 95%) released a year earlier than the Pixel 5 so there is that.
Algebraic Data Types for C99
AI for project management is an amazing use case.
May I suggest adding features:

1. Expanding on the description taking the project meta info or history into account.
2. Adding to the above, come up with feature scenarios and test cases
3. An agent to listen into standup conversations to come up with an updated priority list for PO to approve?
4. Move tickets or suggestions to move tickets to next stage of workflows depending on the state of the ticket?
5. Optimising workflows and suggesting better workflows listening into stand ups, retros etc.
6. Come up with demo list of tickets for team to demo
7. Prefill or suggest topics for retros
8. Come with timeline suggestions depending on history and evaluating the code and designs
9. More on code, come up with architecture diagrams (puml etc) and API contracts dependant on code, tickets and conversations
10. Come up with sub tasks/suggestions after evaluating the description and code base.
Also: greening != biodiversity
Most importantly, what's the rocket equation of software?
North America (and the US) is greener than 20 years ago.

Europe is greener than 20 years ago.

Asia is greener than 20 years ago.

Africa is greener than 20 years ago.

The entire planet is greener than 20 years ago.

It has nothing to do with people planting trees and everything to do with Co2 being what plants eat.
I will keep using JNI, first of all because I cannot stand its boilerplate instead of having something nice like on .NET side, even jextract can't make up for it.

Secondly, our libraries also land on Android applications, and lets see if FFM ever lands on ART.
"A large amount of beef is grown in areas that are not suitable for crop farming in the United States. In fact, 85% of the land used to graze cattle in the U.S. is marginal land, which means it's not suitable for growing crops. Marginal land is either untouched or used for grazing livestock, mostly cattle"

Grain finishing is another matter. But it's not a 1 grain : 1/10th beef type situation.

Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.
Watch this talk from Albert Gu:

Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luCBXCErkCs

They made one of the best time series models and it later became one of the best language models too (Mamba).
What I mean when I say that machine learning in Elixir is production-ready
It's the same issue every time someone tries to brand themselves as an alternative to Jira. They implement 10/20% of the features, typically part of the task/bug-tracker and maybe the KANBAN boards and completely ignores the rest.

The fact that products and startups feel the need to brand themselves as "Jira alternatives" says a lot about the absolute dominance of Jira in some markets. You're just not going to replace Jira with a minimalist bug tracker. If profit is your goal, you'd probably be better of reimplementing your AI feature as a Jira plugin.
You can use Xpra, it's like tmux but for X. You can have your window follow you across clients.
Wait, DJT un-crashed?
DocGo patient health data stolen in cyberattack
Didn’t GeoCities popularity dive before Google became popular?
Another way to cast the meat vs crops debate is "true pricing": the growing demand for meat is not simply a result of growing population or growing standards of living, but caused by ignoring "externalities".

I.e.: if the true impact of turning crops into meat were reflected in the price of a hamburger, demand elasticity would eventually result in much less production. Or: growing meat consumption is mostly a result of implicit subsidies to maintain status quo, ignore climate change,etc.
That is an argument for libyears, not against it. If they only updated the docs, why didn't you upgrade already? If anything, projects using stable libraries like this could very easily reach 0 libyears, because there are no breaking changes when upgrading.
Absolutely, and that’s a valid point. But to me, seeing who’s behind a product or project is interesting and sometimes helpful.

For example (might be a bad one), the Astro.build project was a random project to me at first sight, but after digging into it I learned that it’s the same people (Fred Schott) behind Snowpack!

So then this turned into something very interesting. Why? Because now I know that Astro is backed by people who have a good knowledge of running a project, and years later my gut feeling was right.
So that means that the way to game this would be to create a wrapper project (e.g. called "external_deps") for all of my dependencies, and then have my actual project depend on that one. So I'm externalizing all of my tech debt onto external_deps and as long as I never make a new release of that, my main project will always be 0 libyears old.
Seems far-fetched. No one is forcing you to buy an S&P 500 fund. And you could have sold your S&P 500 shares the day Tesla entered the index.
Methane emissions from gas flaring being hidden from satellite monitors
Tech Jobs Leaving California
They have a million ways of conveying the message of "compress", yet they delibrately choose the most violent and destructive one.
Think of cinematic or cartoon-ish effects like turning the objects into colorful fluid on compress and magically forge an ipad.

Instead of this they choose to show every detail of instruments being painfully crushed and destroyed.
Yeah, because crossing a border completely changes the flavour of the meat.
No-one with the combination of motivation, time and skills needed get it into Debian. Someone wanted to get a Python implementation in, but it looks like they never found the time.

https://bugs.debian.org/838338

These days Debian packaging has become a bit irrelevant, since you can just shove upstream releases into a container and go for it.
> There is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle.

You're not doing a whole lot to explain why there is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle. I can think of a whole host of reasons why it is wrong in matters of ethics and mercy. Who is there to advocate for the cow? We know cows feel a gamut of emotions just as we do. They are not insensate. Most humans, when given a knife or a captive bolt gun and told to go kill that cow on yonder would not. So we externalize the death-making to slaughterhouse workers who coincidentally also suffer:

> ...SHWs had significantly higher levels of depression compared with office workers, but not butchers. The difference in depression rates differed from study to study, ranging from 10% to 50% [1]

There's really no good, ethical argument to be made for the killing of animals for food or pleasure. Did we need to do it once to survive as a species? Yes. Are we largely living in a post-scarcity world where those practices should now be challenged? Yes.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10009492/
Personally I think that award belongs to the United Kingdom. They don’t even need a constitution.

To ensure the moneyed classes of Britain are well looked after, they have both a king who is a billionaire and a prime minister whose net worth is a more modest $500 million.
Good stuff, like the AI approach to this.

On Jira, I keep hearing the criticism of Jira on this forum a lot, but IMO it's not that bad product. Jira is used by all industries, not just by software management. Making a tool has to be a "silver bullet" for managing any kind of project is not easy. Tell me a better PM tool which is as widely used as Jira.
Sci-fi-like interactive "Portal" between New York and Dublin launches today
PGHero: A Performance Dashboard for Postgres
Not to mention, you know, the consumers who paid for FSD, starting back in 2016, and still don't even have that feature enabled on their cars.
Maybe anything so simple that it can be considered "done" shouldn't really be an external dependency in the first place.
Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial
> Symbolica allows you to build and manipulate mathematical expressions through matching and replacing patterns, similar to regex for text

Some details on this are at https://symbolica.io/docs/pattern_matching.html
Got a feeling that this August is the last chance Elon has to show off a working believable robotaxi/FSD or the hammer will fall hard on Tesla. There are too many viable options for both electic cars and personal robots out there now.
Haskell Weekly – Issue 419
Why always US only ? Do you have a problem with non US programmers ?
Nobody is against talking about that, nor is leaving it out.

Lets remove everything about COVID and it being a vaccine, or a pharma product at all, and rephrase it: "A company has a product in a crowded marketplace, and demand for that product category has dropped; the product is an effective and safe product, but has a marred reputation due to early issues with the product that have been solved; instead of investing further into the product, the most profitable thing is to exit the market."

Nobody would disagree with such an analysis, only anti-vaxxers and pro-corpos have a narrative they're invested in to spin it any other way, and they aren't 100% unrelated narratives. I think AZ made the right decision to bail if it wasn't the very best product it could be, and other companies legitimately are doing it better.
It's a bit of a loose analogy, but perhaps useful all the same. It's based around his rocketry "weight adds weight" no free lunch warning. Adding an extra expendable stage will get you further, but better be sure you need it since the added weight and complexity comes at a cost that the whole rocket will have to bear.

The software equivalent is adding infrastructure components to your project because on one level they help you towards the goal of what you are trying to build, but "no free lunch" applies here too, and there is a downside in terms of overall complexity, debugging times, build times, maintenance cost, etc.

Maybe "no free lunch" and/or "technical debt" already express it, and we don't need a new "weight adds weight" way to describe it, although there is something about the tautological inevitability of it that is a valuable reminder.
Highlights from the Django Developer Survey 2024
This was a terrible product. I'm not surprised it didn't get any uptake when it was launched. It was confusing and distracting and hard to use.

The underlying tech of performing live updates from simultaneous users survived, though. It's now part of Google Docs.
"Green" is a 2-D layer of colour in a photograph.

"Forest" is a 3-D bulk tonnage of captured (for now at least) carbon dioxide.

This increase in the colour green that you tout hasn't made a dent in reducing the ever increasing amount of insulating CO2 in the atmosphere.

Otherwise yellow grasses being greener due to increased CO2 is of some small interest, but it's not the same as a similar area X height of large trees in terms of capture.

Just pragmnatic facts, not a "convenient" or "inconvenient" "truth".

Nice attempt at a tangent, pity it fell flat.
> On April 5th, xkcd released Machine, our 15th annual April Fools project.

Wait, “our”? I thought XKCD was just Randal Munroe.

> Machine’s backend was written in Haskell by davean and Kevin

So at least two other people. Three when counting the author of the blog.

The Wikipedia page for XKCD doesn’t show these names. Is XKCD a multi-people effort now, or are these “friends of the comic” who work on interactive stuff?
It's for and against at the same time. Depends on your software upgrade roadmap. I think that's just a silly number, that us correct and incorrect at the same time, but probably good enough on a large scale, just like story points.
Sentence Purpose: Declarative, Interrogative, Imperative, and Exclamatory
Fully agree. The world was greenest during the Carboniferous when avg temps were 0 above modern levels and CO2 was 800ppm.
>The whole point of money is being able to do what you enjoy.

That's a very common and reasonable way of putting it, otherwise it wouldn't be so popular.

An antithetical approach that is completely compatible without conflict, would be to say the whole point of money is to have some financial results from doing what you enjoy.

It's fully possible to achieve the same monetary reward by performing the same tasks, under either scenario, even though the attitudes can seem mutually exclusive, there is a shared basis for coexistence.
Great paper Maria! Core challenge is uneven-ness of networks; ie if you're well networked, you know from whisper networks which VCs are value destructive. If you're, you don't which leads to unequal outcomes. How could we fix for this?
<3 [o_o]
> Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.

How?

I mean, I'm not a fan of destroying forests, etc, but around here, there is no unmanaged land so presumably all the forests were already burnt etc for farmers... But we're all around, right? I don't get how burning the Amazon for food people want will actually kill us.
$2.5M revenue, $52M loss. What even is that?

[1]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/trump-media-technology-group/...
I think the point is that a staged rocket is clearly "better" in theory, but adds a step-change in complexity and overhead that might not actually be required. It adds a non-zero chance that the mission fails catastrophically due to a defect in the staging system at a critical moment, or the design process overtakes the budget and the whole thing is scrapped. In either case an N-1 stage rocket may have done the job. Doubly so if you are experts already in single-stage rocketry, but lack staged rocket design and execution competence.

Akin's Laws¹ of Spacecraft Design have a few relevant ones:

> 13. Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.

This is not the only one that's relevant. Also 15, 27, 33, 34, 36, 36, 38, 44, and, if you substitute "distributed architecture" for "launch vehicle":

> 39. Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.

Of course, if a staged design is actually required (and not just because your engineers need to buff their CVs so they can jump out when the project fails under its own weight):

> 41. There's never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there's always enough time to do it over.

¹: https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
There's a ludicrous aspect to software development, which is if you ask around about early uses of computers you'll run into lots of people doing critical path analysis for other industries, yet we have persisted in pretending software development is somehow unique and does not actually work like this.

The whole idea humans should be prioritizing tasks has been wrong from the start, and indicates a lack of the right information in the system.
There are a lot of breathing methods out there, like this, and Wim Hof. Is there any side by side comparisons.

Side by Side Down to exact method. So many breaths, long, short, lengths, times.

I'd really like to know if it all boils down to just O2/CO2 balance, and each method just ends up with a different ratio.
Constant Velocity Physical Warp Drive Solution
Models with Large Context Window
Recently Gradient AI announced that they released the Llama 3 models with a 1M context window for both 8B and 70B sizes. And now they just dropped a 4M context window for the 8B size.

what do you think about this and models with Large Context Window?
You could be like my buddy and change your 401k allocations to TSLA and some crypto indexes. He said he bought TSLA at a little less than $300. Hopefully he still has some in a target date fund.
A way for foreign nationals to donate billions to a US presidential campaign legally.
True. The exact ratio is three non-native speakers to one native speaker.
I heard rumor back in the late `90's of an e-commerce site that stored the prices for it's products in the browser cookie. Presumably a motivated buyer could go in and edit the cookie before checkout, although I don't know if that ever actually happened.
> while UT1 is astronomically interesting, it's not actually a sensible basis for day to day living.

Hard disagree!

Allowing ones clocks to gradually drift from the behaviour of the Earth (which regulates our biological lives) is a mess. Once can compare the eventual correction that will be required akin to the shift from the Julian to Gregorian calendar and the problems that caused.

TAI was always there for those who needed it.
This is how I run graphical Emacs in WSL. And how I was developing SDL games as well.

I hear this might become a native built-in feature in Windows but for now I just run an X client.
and Brasillians will have nothing to sell to us
It’s more the feed. If you’re getting factory farmed stuff yeah it’s all going to taste roughly the same.

But the Amazon, Chaco, and Pampas are wildly different ecological regions.

Will Argentine Chaco and Paraguayan Chaco taste roughly the same, yes.

But the pampas, that is where real beef comes from.
This is factually untrue, easily disprovable by checking the chart over 3 months - https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/DJT.

What are you going to do now? Claim that going from $66 to $22 isn't a crash?
Agreed on using energy consumption and how many times do you reasonably expect to use it as important considerations.

Additionally you have to factor in the toxicity you introduce, especially with things like cookware.

An umbrella maybe a 1000 times (massive upper bound), but a le creuset pot I would expect to use 3000 times, and we eat the foot made in it.