skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm still trying to understand why people recommend Nix in place of a build system.

Probably because Nix is a build system. After using it for a decade, I dislike that it describes itself as a "purely functional package manager"; that causes all sorts of confusion, since it has far more in common with something like Make (e.g. see my "Nix from the bottom up" page http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/nixos/bottom_up.html )

> Nixpkgs stdlib by default expects an autotools project

Ah, I see the confusion. Nixpkgs is not Nix; they are different things!

Nix is a build tool, similar to Make. It has some differences, like caching results using their hash instead of timestamp, but the main advantage is that its build receipes are composable (thanks to the FP nature of their definitions).

For example, say I run `make` in some project repo, like Firefox. Make will read that project's Makefile, which contains elaborate rules for how the various build products depend on each other. Yet despite all that care and attention, I get an error: `cc: command not found`. Oops, I don't have a C compiler! So I grab a copy of the GCC source, and what do I find inside? Another Makefile! The `cc` command required by the Firefox Make rules is itself defined with Make rules; but the Firefox Makefile can't refer to them, since Make is not composable.

In contrast, Nix is composable: Nix definitions can `import` other files, including from build outputs! For example, we can write a build receipe which imports its definition from a build output; where that build fetches a git commit; and the definitions inside import things from some other builds; and those download and extract a bunch of .tar.gz files; and so on.

Nixpkgs is the most obvious example of this composability, with mountains of build receipes, built up from a relatively small "bootstrap" (pre-built binaries for a few basic tools, like parts of GNU). It's also a testament to backwards-compatibility, since it features build receipes (and helper functions) which act as wrappers around all sorts of legacy tools like Make, PIP, NPM, Cargo, Cabal, etc. (if you're working on a project that's stuck on such things).

Whilst Nixpkgs provides support for all of these things; Nix itself is only capable of invoking a single `exec` syscall (see "Nix from the bottom up"). Everything else is built up on that foundation, and isn't tied to any particular tool, language, framework, etc.

Hence it's not so much that Nix is a "package manager", or "orchestration" tool, or "configuration manager", etc. It's more like: those categories of tools are workarounds for crappy, non-composable build tools like Make. Nix is a composable build tool, so all of those other things turn out to be unnecessary.
Wild speculation: Version envy. For a while, it looked like Windows and macOS were both going to stick to version 10. Then, after twenty years of macOS being 10.x, they announced a version 11, and one year later Windows followed suit.
[1988]?
If one drills hard enough into the stated rationales for languages -- and great pertinacity is required -- they mostly come down to complexity management; but complexity is not managed at the level of language syntax, but at the level of information architecture. In the real world, systems abstractions that enable useful complexity management also obscure failure modes, so that the desired benefits to maintainability are not realized.
That’s a reasonable guess if you don’t follow graphics developments, but the tech for producing realism hasn’t changed that much in the last 10 years, most of the realism developments have been incremental. The main thing that’s happened in CG in the last 10 years is speed and scale improvements. There were great fake-or-real CG photo contests in 2015 and earlier where some of the CG was photoreal enough to trick most people. The Windows wallpaper definitely could have been 100% there 10 years ago, for a skilled CG artist who knew what they wanted. The reasons for doing it practical don’t necessarily hinge on whether it was possible to do it in CG, there are good reasons to do it physically anyway.
None of these services has scheduled meds, so ADHD folks, keep going to your local pharmacy.
> very clearly describes the term as applicable to any legal action…only first encountering the claim that it shouldn't be used for civil cases here in this thread, today

Partly why I used that citation. It’s one of the few (adult) dictionaries that acknowledges as much.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Webster 3b usage is incorrect—it’s in some dictionaries and was historically unambiguously correct. But it’s non-standard to a high degree, to the extent that Black’s Law Dictionary only contains the criminal variant. (I’ll leave it open whether publicly referring to someone who has only been sued as someone who has been prosecuted, when intended as an attack, qualifies as defamation.)

More to the point of clear communication, I’d put it in a similar category as claiming one’s usage of terrific or silly was intended in its historic sense [1]. (Though I’ll admit my use of “nice” falls in that category.)

All that said, I’m very willing to entertain there being a dialect, probably in America, where the historic use is still common.

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/84307/7-words-mean-oppos...
What's impressive is that this is not tied to Linux utilities. In fact, the author developed it in Windows!
.net and kotlin work on Mac. Why would MS or Google subjugate themselves to an ecosystem driven by Apple?

Plus, honestly, moving from swift to kotlin or even dotnet is marginal. The problem is getting into the qwirks of the underlying frameworks like swiftui, the ios sdk, the android sdk, and the conventions of these platforms. Language itself is relatively marginal in that. So really I don't see the value in what you're claiming.
The backstory from the comments:

** 2006-10-31: The default prefix used to be "sqlite_". But then
** Mcafee started using SQLite in their anti-virus product and it
** started putting files with the "sqlite" name in the c:/temp folder.
** This annoyed many windows users. Those users would then do a
** Google search for "sqlite", find the telephone numbers of the
** developers and call to wake them up at night and complain.
** For this reason, the default name prefix is changed to be "sqlite"
** spelled backwards. So the temp files are still identified, but
** anybody smart enough to figure out the code is also likely smart
** enough to know that calling the developer will not help get rid
** of the file.
Show HN: Exceptional-watchdog: breaks out of Node.js event loop stalls
Solved long ago with evil.
The actual Sky voice actor was interviewed and, surprise, she sounds way more like the OpenAI voice than Scarlett.

That said, this is certainly a problem we will see in the future.
Pushing concerns up to the OS level is that one thing we could be doing in so many places, but havent really tried in decades. Should we use a universal format/protocol agnostic way of having data attached to files? Naaaahhhh. /s
Funny timing as I just revisited the brilliant "Step Right Up" (and the entire Small Change album) a few days ago, and had no idea about this case. Glad Tomcat won. Can't help but see some parallels between this and current Scarlett Johansson vs. OpenAI debacle.

My very favourite line, among many, from "Step Right Up":
__The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.__
I transitioned from software in my mid-20s to teaching and am now looking to transition back. Personally, I'd like something at the intersection of education and tech. I'm currently working for a startup doing backend dev, and it's ok, but I miss some elements of teaching.
Each row is a state and each column is the symbol that was just read off the tape. So the first row & first column mean "I have just read symbol 0 and am currently in state A".

The cell in the table describes which actions to perform. The first row & first column has "1RB" which means: "replace the symbol on the tape with '1', shift 1 symbol to the right on the tape and switch to state 'B'".

The state 'Z' corresponds to the halting state.
I kinda like the idea but unless something changes around Schedule II drug rules, you can't completely replace in person pharmacies.
I can only think of about 3 people that completely changed profession. I'm 48 and I could list hundreds of people that have been engineers, scientists, doctors, and lawyers since they finished college and are either still doing the same type of job or retired.
Each triplet seems to be the symbol to write, and direction to move in, and the next state. You can think of the behavior of a turing machine as a function of the current state and the symbol read that's repeated iteratively.
Even if they did. How does that matter?

Let’s say I want to shoot a movie. Id love to have Scarlett star in it. But I can’t afford her, so I hire some b actress that kind of looks like her. What’s wrong with that?

The only way I could see this being wrong is if they then processes the voice of this different person to make it sound more like Scarlett.
The UK used a different definition of trillion until ~50 years ago (10^18 vs 10^12), so it probably helps avoid ambiguity
I heard this comment in my mind in a flirty Gilbert Gottfried voice.

Thank you for the laughter.
French uses "Moteur" because it doesn't have a word for "engine". The closest is "engin", but that means "contraption" and generally applies to the entire class of "large mechanical devices that move".

Both Motor and Engine are generally translated into french as "Moteur"
Who’s their target market? Just one off prescription?
>> "then using another actor telling them to copy the first actor's likeness"

Assumes facts not in evidence
I didn't read anyone saying they loved their career, actually, just that it wasn't bad and the money was really hard to give up.
That Statnews article might be on the level, but it quotes Rob Enderle twice. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, here are some of his greatest hits:

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rob_Enderle
I love the idea and simplicity, thank you for sharing!

Small bit of feedback: would it be possible to make the UI a bit more mobile friendly? Or, alternatively, is there an API that others could use to build different interfaces?

Again, this is a Thing That Should Exist, so thank you for bringing it into the world.
> Plane

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40372686

I also remember yet another OSS alternative to linear.app being posted here, but can't recall the name.
The designation of trillion is ambiguous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion
The RP pronunciation (i.e. standard British English) is /sləʊθ/ ... i.e. slow-th, and that's how it's indicated in the OED.
If you search Google scholar you’d find well over 20,000 studies. That’s more than “a bunch”, and I’d love to see how you know all of them are flawed.
Wild birds possess genetic predispositions to learn population-specific songs
There are a ton of different promising AI approaches explored by researchers. When I was at MIT in the early 2010s, when Deep Learning was just taking off, it was seen as one of a suite of new exciting techniques. For example, some of the grad students that taught the AI classes I took were hyped on an approach called Probabilistic Programming, which adds a complete suite of programming concepts (eg. If-statements) to Bayesian networks allowing you to write extremely concise and powerful programs that can learn based on data and handle uncertainty during an execution. Also while I was there Geoff Hinton gave a series of master lectures on the future of AI after Deep Learning and he talked a lot about an approach called Inverse Graphics: basically treating images as one output from a graphics rendering pipeline that includes a scene with geometry and lighting, projection transformations, etc and then trying to learn all the parameters of that pipeline from images so that you produce not just a classifier output but a whole scene description. Both really cool and exciting approaches that build on top of deep neural nets but aren’t bound to them.

One of the negative effects of the huge hype wave (hype tsunami is maybe more appropriate) around LLMs and genAI generally is that it starves these other approaches of resources (as well as discouraging people from exploring other new approaches). This is what LeCunn is responding to. I know some zealots believe that “bigger LLMs” is all we need for AI progress forever, but based on the entire history of the field, a number of technical issues with LLMs, and the nature of progress of LLMs in the last few years I would described this view as blinkered and risky at best. The field often advances fastest from the early years of new approaches rather than massive over-investment in a single approach based on some early promising results. Historically the later approach tends to lead to AI winters.
> I guess my point is that even for key input, you don't need terminfo.

Right, I read that the other way round ("no, you do need terminfo for key input")!

For basic input it's fairly straight-forward, and even for various "special" keys like arrows and function keys it's not too bad: just check from a list.

But with modifier keys it gets more tricky; lots of that isn't even in terminfo
and requires "special" handling.

If you know how this works and you know what you're doing it can be fine, but for most people it's far easier to just use a terminfo library that does this for you.

And yeah, Kitty keyboard protocol being the default would be brilliant. Right now support is (far) too flaky though, so maybe in 5 to 10 years.
See these studies and make up your own mind:

Maternal Urinary Fluoride and Child Neurobehavior at Age 36 Months (2024)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38767917/

> Prenatal fluoride exposure was associated with increased neurobehavioral problems.

Association of water fluoride and urinary fluoride concentrations with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in Canadian youth (2019)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31654913/

> Exposure to higher levels of fluoride in tap water is associated with an increased risk of ADHD symptoms and diagnosis of ADHD among Canadian youth, particularly among adolescents.

Prenatal Fluoride Exposure and Cognitive Outcomes in Children at 4 and 6-12 Years of Age in Mexico (2017)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28937959/

> Higher prenatal fluoride exposure, in the general range of exposures reported for other general population samples of pregnant women and nonpregnant adults, was associated with lower scores on tests of cognitive function in the offspring at age 4 and 6-12 y.

Prenatal fluoride exposure and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in children at 6-12 years of age in Mexico City (2018)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30316181/

> Higher levels of fluoride exposure during pregnancy were associated with global measures of ADHD and more symptoms of inattention as measured by the CRS-R in the offspring.
Yea, take it from someone who tried to do this: (MBA from reasonably good top-10 school)

1. The degree itself, even from a top school, doesn't guarantee you anything. It opens a few doors in finance (Investment Banks) and consulting, but you still need to fight your way through them. Wall Street also doesn't really like career changers, so it's already an uphill battle before you even enroll.

2. Silicon Valley doesn't seem to give even a tiny shit about the degree. In fact MBAs get regularly dunked on here at HN (as if the degree itself turns a smart engineer into a drooling dumbass, but whatever). So if your plan is to get an MBA to zoom back to tech to become a Director or VP or something, your plan is flawed.

I wasn't successful at either of these paths, so I went right back to "Individual Contributor" software engineering after spending 6 months unemployed hopelessly looking for an investment banking job. So the degree ended up being a waste.
There's a brief explanation at [0]. (Note that "1RZ" is understood to be a halting transition, since state "Z" has no rules.) Wikipedia also has a more elaborated example of a TM state table [1]. You can see the trace of this particular TM at [2].

[0] https://bbchallenge.org/story#turing-machines

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine#Formal_definiti...

[2] https://bbchallenge.org/1RB3LB1RZ2RA_2LC3RB1LC2RA_3RB1LB3LC2...
From discussions with security professional friends and folks on E2E encryption of protocols: I don't think it's that they can't figure it out, it's that they know it's hard to get right and harder to fix later, so they're taking their time to do it right in the first place. They don't want to end up like Telegram or Matrix with furries doing unflattering writeups on their security.
> there's a fundamental difference practically and philosophically between macro stupidity and C++ doing things under-the-hood. of course a user (you, a co-developer, a library author you trusted) can do all sorts of stupid things. but it's visible and it's written in the target language - not hard-coded in the compiler

I specifically reject this. Constructors, exceptions, and so on are as similarly visible at the source level as macro definitions.

And thanks to macros, signal handling, setjmp, instrumentation, hardening, dynamic .so resolution, compilers replacing what look like primitive accesses with library functions, any naïve read of C code, is, well, naïve.

I'm not claiming C++ superiority here [1], I'm trying to dispel the notion that C is qualitatively different from C++ form a WYSIWYG point of view, both theoretically and in practice.

[1]although as I mentioned else, other C++ features means that macros see less use.
And yet being able to practice that failure while in the classroom is all but outright disincentivized. I completely agree with the interview... but educational currents do not have the space for the type of failure that helps one become a good mathematician. In fact, failing can remove a lot of prospects.
I feel like I’ve been using this tool for 20 years. So useful!
But it’s more like identity theft, they are stealing his identity, not mimicking him. They are hijacking his fame, obviously that’s the just of the commercial. This is free speech.
> Okay so we can't use voices that are similar to actress voices, and we can't use names that starts with the same "rare consonant cluster" as actress names.

No, we just can't advertise or get other clear benefits based on the fame of something well-known without considering these entities.

It is about the overall picture, and in this case there is very high relation to the movie and Scarlett.
I'll work on that, sorry yes i didn't spend much time on making it mobile friendly yet!
To me this is the difference between ADHD and just being alive and having to do things that you don't want to do sometimes. I don't mean to be dismissive, I struggle greatly with the same things you do - but I avoid trying to solve things like this through medication.
I wonder if they're as bad at preventing knock-off drug supply from polluting their inventory as they are with retail products. I can't think of a product line I'd feel less comfortable buying from Amazon than pharmaceuticals.
I tried Go for a while after coming from JavaScript and didn't feel productive enough. I think this explains why exactly.
Yeah that's what I was kinda getting at, "lets put this somewhere people are going to interact with it and learn but the stakes are very low"
OK, I watched this expecting to be convinced.

I think they might have mimicked the style. The voice, though, is not even close. If I heard both voices in a conversation, I would have thought 2 different people were talking.
Right.. but they already do. Teams ui is not the same as web ui is not the same as desktop ui is not the same as mobile ui.

All I’m suggesting is splitting it on use case rather than on which device I open it
My path was anything but conventional.

I had to leave game development because my seven year old son suffered a tragedy which completely disabled him. Game development is simply too volatile and risky a career for someone with that kind of family obligation.

As for the transition, I had accidentally achieved some recognition as a researcher of land economics through various blog posts. This attracted the attention of a new friend who was inspired by my work to put a startup together, seeing real estate mass appraisal as the most important missing piece for policy reasons, but also a potentially great business idea.

Investors agreed with him and a startup was formed. This gave me an alternative to game dev when I needed it most.

As for the actual work transition, I had a lot of subject matter to learn which we facilitated by hiring experts from the field, including former IAAO researchers (that’s the relevant standards body) as well as local appraisers.

I’m still learning but a lot of my skills transferred. The biggest difference is this is typically a pretty low tech field so many essential skills are soft — all the tech in the world doesn’t matter if you can’t explain things in simple terms to a citizen. As I like to say “Prepare for a property tax protest defense, not a PhD thesis defense.”

The other big difference is cost structure and expectations and competition. Game development is essentially selling one of the hardest kinds of programs to write, to the world’s best served audience, under maximum competition, for the lowest prices.

In local government you can charge what felt to me like large prices and still be genuinely considered cheap compared to what existing vendors charge. And people are used to software that doesn’t work and customer support that never responds. So if you can exceed expectations that is an edge here.

But many tech people have failed in this field, because they can’t master the soft skills and they can’t communicate simply; that part is deceptively hard.
Mr. Altman seems like a quite pedantic and evil people to work with—absolute psychopath.
There's a gray area. If Ford Motor Company hired an actor happened to sound a lot like Bette Midler using their normal speaking voice, Ford would have had a much better chance in defending their case.

As I understand it, that's essentially OpenAI's defense here.
What Is an Editor?
Beyonce and Adele publisher accuses firms of training AI on songs
Tags would be great
It's a somewhat interesting idea... I've had similar ideas in the past regarding maildir replacement without resorting to a db file. I like the idea of having directories representing email dir/folders, you generally will want some level of aggregation and/or search... I've thought that having separate eml (header + body) along with a .meta.json file for additional tagging/details (deleted flag, tags, etc).

Search is a very different story, you wouldn't want to have to do a full directory scan for text based search. So some level of indexing would be useful for a client mail service.

Similarly, I've thought it would be really cool if Cloudflare offered a TCP worker option, you could to a simple mail service backed by R2. The web ui/ux could be pretty awesome and geo distributed.
I decided to leave the world of engineering 1.5 years ago to pursue my passion as an artist.

Although my salary was a very good, competitive US rate at senior level, my artwork brought in more income for 2 years straight. I decided that it wasn't worth burning my candle at both ends any more, especially with a young child at home. Something had to give, and it was the job.

Now I still work like an engineer. I spend 4-5 hours a day programming and 2-3 hours managing my commitments and social media. My artwork is generative, so I use Javascript to build elaborate systems which yield visual artworks.

The stuff I do is much more diverse now. I just spent an hour totally leveling a table I built recently. I needed a custom table for my Axidraw pen plotter, which I use to draw generative artworks.

The pay is nothing, then a lot, then nothing. I'm white-knuckling it. At times it's very scary to not have a steady stream of income. But it allows me to be happy, and that's worth more than any amount of comfort.