skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best code that I've worked with is always code that is easy to modify. Code that I read rarely could be anything; I'm really oblivious to how good or bad it is until I need to modify it.
Blogrolls and Webrings are largely extinct unfortunately.

Even for the big media sites, they mostly link to other pages on their own website.
Nah. This is basically the worst of the worst IPCC scenarios, highly unlikely but for some reason the preferred ones by journalists and self-serving politicians as well as big green industry grifters.
1994 called and wants your opinion on (hot)linking.

If you email them, they'll usually respond quickly and stop. Otherwise, what's stopping you from blocking / rate limiting their ranges?

I set them up over a decade ago, but I still have some honeypot crawler traps just to keep their cores busy ingesting junk, with autoupdating rules for some of my domains. If they're not obligated to ask, I'm not obligated to give them anything useful.
FSD is maybe following the steps of the Segway… soon it will be ubiquitous.
They really, really won't.

Like, I'm in favor of personal liability for execs who willfully sacrifice everything and everyone else for their own increased profit as much as the next guy. But there are at least two major problems with your statement:

1) The kinds of infrastructural improvements needed to genuinely increase security are likely to take significant time and money to put in place—and the money, in many cases, will also mean more time. We're talking years in some cases, even if people are moving at the fastest pace they can while still being responsible.

2) Security is a genuinely hard problem. No matter how good your procedures, your hardware, and your software, humans still have to interact with the data, and humans will always be fallible. Social engineering, blackmail, revenge, and just plain carelessness will always put data at risk, even if the company as a whole is fully and wholeheartedly committed to security.

So are you going to put the heads of your local credit union in prison if someone in their IT department is disgruntled about not getting a promotion they think they're entitled to, and decides to stick it to the man by stealing the DB of social security numbers and selling it on the dark web? (Or whatever other scenario you can think of)
> What's the point of low speed single ended I/O into an FPGA module?

Hardware interfacing with the physical world. Driving small numbers of LEDs, h-bridge drivers, load switches, regulator control signals, reading buttons, accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, PWM controllers, GPS, ...
I saw this and have been trying to determine the best means of complaining to Vanguard about their vote.
Penrose basically thinks that biological neurons do QM magic and therefore classical computers can't do what they do.
But is it good?
I’m wondering how those proofs work and in which problems their conclusions are relevant.

Trying more promising branches first improves efficiency in cases where you guess right, and wouldn’t sacrifice completeness if you would eventually get to the less promising choices. But in the case of something like a game engine, there is a deadline and you can’t search the whole tree anyway. For tough problems, it’s always a heuristic, incomplete search, and we’re not looking for perfect play anyway, just better play.

So for games, that trilemma is easily resolved. And who says you can’t improve heuristics with better guesses?

But in a game engine, it gets tricky because everything is a performance tradeoff. A smarter but slower evaluation of a position will reduce the size of the tree searched before the deadline, so it has to be enough of an improvement that it pays for itself. So it becomes a performance tuning problem, which breaks most abstractions. You need to do a lot of testing on realistic hardware to know if a tweak helped.

And that’s where things stood before AlphaGo came along and was able to train slower but much better evaluation functions.

The reason for evaluation functions is that you can’t search the whole subtree to see if a position is won or lost, so you search part way and then see if it looks promising. Is there anything like that in theorem proving?
As I mentioned, older Boeing's. The Dreamliner been flying since 2011, that's an older Boeing for me, compared to the 737 Max which has only been flying commercially since 2016.
Obviously, no need to answer further, I'm just being grumpy I imagine.

Man - why go there? What are we looking to learn?

Do they have the kilometer Gw phased array yet?

The meterwide/gram weight sails?

The chips that weight one gram with comms and cameras and all that?

And just to clarify, they can't flip and slow down, so it's a 0.15c flyby of alphacentauri, entirely automated. So hopefully the code does't fuck up in this alien environnement without human help.

What do they expect to learn at that speed and with such small sensors? Like a picture of the planet, like we get telescopes? I sure wonder the speed at which that's going to transmit data.

I'm just seeing "proof or concept" but this is mostly concept and no proof.

And if this is "step one" of interstellar travel, what's step two?

Edit0: Just reading the wiki this is so absurd -atmospheric turbulence is a challenge to deliver te GW laserb- so were planning on building a km phased array in space to accelerate the swarm. Just this itself is way way beyond realistic. Doesn't this breakdown at napkin math levels?
Former Neuralink Staffer Sues After Scratches from Herpes Monkey
I suspect part of it is the serdes.
this just shows that whistleblower protection still does not go far enough. it should be possible to reveal such information without fear of retribution in the first place. in an open and just society this would not be necessary. but even if the sources remain anonymous, anyone making accusations public should at least be able to provide proof for the accusation itself. judges should be able to see that proof but also possibly keep it sealed from the public if necessary.
Stripe now supports usage-based billing: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/usage-based/pr...
This reminds me of a depressingly common mistake in web design that seems to affect almost every internet banking system and most government web sites. You know the one: having an "inbox" of automated messages with a number in the corner, which you slowly see tick up as you check the website a couple of times per year for a decade or two.

It's the most user-hostile web design imaginable, far beyond just being ugly or unclear, because it creates busywork or stress or both. It's effectively saying that you might have an actually important update to read, but you won't know that unless you sit down to read dozens of automated messages to sift through them; and if you don't have time or motivation to do that right now, you're left wondering if you're making a mistake that might cost you down the line, especially when it comes to many of the kinds of websites that choose to do this.

If you actually want a user to take action, you need to tell them that front-and-center in the first page after the user is authenticated, and design cues like size and color can help with that. A truly serious matter can put a modal in the flow. They have no problem doing this for the triviality of requiring you to change your password "for your security"[1], but a message about possible financial consequences is unread message #73.

[1] They had a breach they hope you don't know or care about.
We call them runbooks. In SRE good practices, they are required for all actionable alerts.
I'd be curious how hard it would be to add things like teleport or double jump. I was telling my brother that these would make pretty interesting FPS maps (really probably not what most people would be using this for).
No paywall: https://archive.is/xaedo
First task, create checklist.
As someone who has professionally read code, I don’t think a lot of code gets read very often. It could be also that good code doesn’t take long to read.

Also about the claim that that 10x programmers are fantasy, I call your attention to Fabrice Bellard https://bellard.org/. I have also worked with one or two in my decades of programming career. I probably peak out at somewhere around 0.75.
Show HN: Tiny game where you fight a virus in a grid
The quality of the average pull request has really started to go downhill since LLMs went mainstream, especially following GitHub CoPilot. I can't think of anything worse than reviewing PRs of code generated by LLMs from other people. Total waste of time, IME.
Anonymity is good, but a VPN doesn't really help for anonymity. It only prevents some MITM security. The moment you access an NSA data provider, e.g. Gmail, over the VPN, your IP address is immediately correlated in time with your chat activity, and your identity is revealed. I know you mentioned an AI-addon, but there are too many limitations there in terms of the number of models available, usage quota, and API access.

Regarding llama3, it works for some applications, not for others demanding higer intelligence. Surely there will be a llama4 and a 5. They're coming fast.
I get that with Firefox 127.0 (for Linux).
I had a similar reaction while reading this, something along the lines of “well, that’s a bunch of idealistic tripe”.

And, honestly, I think that somewhat holds. That said, as an aim, writing readable code that doesn’t need to be read to be used is a good one.

I wrote as much in a quora response almost a decade ago to the question “how does one become a great coder” ( https://www.quora.com/How-does-one-become-a-great-coder-prog... ), and I think it still holds.

However, the other part of that answer was to make the code immensely readable, because we read more code than we write unless we’re incredibly junior or comically superhuman.
I live there now and don’t doubt it for a second. MS’s government is completely corrupt at every level.
Your comment could also be considered a form of propaganda.

Another layer of the onion is the truth values (perceived/cultural truth, "actual" truth, etc) of the respective claims, though that often gets overlooked when it comes to propaganda, or geopolitics in general.
It's generally held up as the standard codebase that you can go read to learn how to write "good C", so community consensus appears to be yes.
The premise of the article is flawed. I read a lot of code, and that's how I learn and discover new things.
Those who are disagreeing with the author seem to not realize that he's just engaging in a bit of navel-gazing wordplay. Sort of like when people say "good programmers should be lazy". What they really mean is that good programmers should think ahead and craft their code with an eye minimizing future modifications.

Similarly, I think the author is simply saying that well written, easy to read, easy to understand code shouldn't have to be re-read multiple times by the same person. Which is good. The inverse would be that difficult to understand code would have to be read, re-read and studied deeply to actually grok. And thus read a lot. Which is bad.
Perhaps another reason for good code being hardly read is that good code doesn't break anything.
That "nuanced understanding" is not on display here. It's just insinuating something nefarious in a very simplistic way. It's like saying because the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline is on the board of Microsoft that Windows will now ship with antidepressants.

What does it mean when a Russian citizen [0] on social media smears an American company that's blocked Russian disinformation campaigns [1] for appointing somebody that's been in charge of defending against Russian disinformation campaigns [2], who has said as recently as last month: “If they are trying to influence or interfere in our elections, we should make it as hard as possible for them.”[3]?

(Vf guvf ahnaprq haqrefgnaqvat be vf vg vafvahngvba?)

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/02/edward-snowd...

[1] https://openai.com/index/disrupting-deceptive-uses-of-AI-by-...

[2] https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/3508639-cyber-comma...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/us/politics/russia-disinf...
> basically ruled out nuclear as a sensible option

The report's conclusion has been drawn from a single comparison (USC coal in South Korea/Australia then scaling the APR-1400 cost), and they don't really show their workings. A factor of 2.8 is asserted/accepted, which does make me query the competitiveness of the Australian economy.

A counterfactual would be to compare using Japan. The USC coal plant in Japan and Australia cost about the same, so nuclear would be 3963 USD/kWe (2018); exchanging for AUD (1.35 AUD/USD) and allowing for perhaps 20% inflation over that time we get 6350 AUD/kWe . Scaling up to a 1400MW plant decreases the capacity cost by 10% to 5715 AUD/kWe ( (1377MW/1152MW)^0.6 = 0.9 ).

So I think there is certainly a weakness in the report's methodology; a national level decision should probably not be based on a single comparison. Getting quotes from a few builders (KEPCO, Westinghouse/Bechtel) might be a good idea before remodelling the energy system.
Maybe that's a harsh lesson in making promises that can't be delivered?

Or, more likely, no lessons will be learned and people will still trust what the company says in the future for arbitrary reasons.
That’s just not true. I’ve consulted with a few privacy legal agencies and spent a lot of time evaluating the law. Some sections are even worded in a way to allow wiggling room for prosecutors, or require good will on your part. What would even be supposed to happen if you weren’t „compliant“? In the end it’s always about specific kinds of misconduct, and that means fines. The amount of a fine depends on the severity of the misconduct. The GDPR isn’t different at all from other laws in that regard.

If you’re found to be in breach of the GDPR, the severity of the breach as well as the amount of negligence or malevolence on your part is taken under consideration to decide on the fine. The prosecuting attorney also doesn’t have to actually fine you if it’s clear you put in effort and acted in good will.

For a concrete example, a startup usually isn’t required to provide a fully fledged data deletion policy, but if you cannot roughly outline how you intend to handle people’s requests to delete their data, that doesn’t look good. If you don’t even have some sort of privacy policy on your website, that looks worse.

Nobody can implement the GDPR 100%. But you can try to handle data responsibly, and if someone discovers you don’t and you try your best to fix the error (which is on your part, mind you), nothing draconian is going to happen.

And we’re still talking about basic respect towards your users or customers here, it’s not like someone asks something ridiculous of you.
He was paid in stock options. He is not allowed sell the stock for 5 years after exercising. He hasn't exercised any of them so far.

Here's the 2018 compensation plan:
https://ml.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/edfcfa2e-bcb6...

It basically says that Elon doesn't get anything unless the stockholders at least 2x their investment, and Elon gets approximately 10% of the company if stockholders 10x their investment. Each tranch had revenue and EBITDA requirements as well, so it was not possible for Elon to just pump the stock. He achieved all the milestones: the company grew significantly, the stockholders 10x-ed their investment.

The judge thought that the stockholders were not properly informed about the board in 2018. Now in 2024, not only have they been informed but they reelected Kimbal Musk as well.

BTW this deal was the most stockholder-friendly deal ever, because Elon only got his compensation if the stockholders got rich. I think it was a good thing, the first of its kind. If they made a new package like this (+10% for another 10x from here), I would vote for it.

Also worth mentioning that his compensation package was worth 2.3B in 2018 when the shares were separated.

Also worth mentioning that everybody found the milestones ridiculous and unachievable in 2018.
Yes, they are necessarily global pointers. If a self reference is an offset, what happens when you take its address (and pass that somewhere else that doesn't know where it came from)?

Now every "reference to a reference" (and similar things) can dynamically be a global pointer or a relative one, with no way to tell how to use it.
>Scripting Emacs in small ways is really easy and really useful

While I agree, for some reason I have a hard time with lisp, will have to revisit again :)

But I do use emacs a bit of 50% of the time for development and I find it better than the fancy code environments like M/S VScode
That's what microcontrollers are for. FPGAs are harder to program and use a lot more power. So the juice needs to be worth the squeeze!
I thought this was a good discussion of the issues regarding the nature of the bubble:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

"Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? ... "
'Just too burnt out': Child care crisis crunches providers
Precisely! If Google tells people to drink urine for kidney issues or kill themselves, I wouldn't trust any healthcare "professional" that needs an LLM when theres countless resources available for figuring out contraindications et al.

The information resources already exist, if people can't be bothered to access them the old-fashioned way that guarantees accuracy then they're not fit for purpose in their role, and should be fired on the spot.

Also heard about accountants doing maths in ChatGPT—it ain't Wolfram Alpha lol.
Reality is more mad max style free for all. Guy with the biggest muscles and guns wins.
Indeed - a half-billion years of training since the first neurons appeared - but here I'm thinking more of the sort of understanding which leads, for example, to reactions of surprise to incongruous outcomes.

https://news.mit.edu/2011/infant-cognition-0527
Nvidia CEO: One of the most 'profound learnings in my life' came from a gardener
It's because they are using "read" to mean "understood/interpreted" in the sense that the reader is executing the program in their head.

In their last paragraph:

It should be so well-structured and named that its purpose and functionality are immediately apparent [when read]. This minimizes the need for others to read through **and interpret** the code, allowing them to use it more effectively.

(emphasis added)

So the point is really: "Good code should be so apparent that when the reader reads it they do not have to be a human interpreter."
Code quality and how often it is read are mostly orthogonal.

You can have an stinky old piece of legacy software that no one ever reads because that system is deprecated and slowly getting phased out, and we can live with it in the meanwhile.

You can have the most elegant a beautiful piece of code that gets read a lot, because it is in the critical path of a very active and rapidly evolving system, and people need to reference, modify and extend it a lot.

However there is a crucial way where OP is wrong: there is a pull and push between code quality and how often it is read. If your code is a legacy big ball of mud, people will be less inclined to touch it, probably going to the extend of rewriting the whole thing. On the other hand when code is well written, people are less afraid of digging into it.

Lastly, even if OP thesis was correct, I don't know think it would change anything. Strive to write the best code you can within reasonable constraints, independently of how much other will read it (which in my experience is almost always underestimated).
I've been doing this for the past 2 years with my two older kids (now 5.5 and 3.5) based on the same reddit post this article is about. I've found it works great, though I have high-focus kids. I call it "word cards".

For the older kid, he learned the letters at preschool and then we did the Bob Books together. That worked well for phonics, but we hit a wall with sight words that require memorization. That's where Anki saved the day. We'd do 5 minutes of word cards every morning, and he'd get a token on a reward tracker, which eventually added up to a toy. Worked great for both of us. He's now a fluent reader, and I add unusual words we encounter to the deck, though I've stopped pushing so hard on reading and we just do "fact cards".

For my middle child, I started with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (TYCTR100), in plain book form. That got her sounding out simple words at 2.5, but it's a really boring process, and I couldn't get her to do 20 minute lessons on a regular basis and didn't want to force it on her. But then I bought a set of TYCTR100 flashcards on Etsy and turned them into Anki cards, and that's worked great. Again, 5 minutes most mornings, though at her age it works better with a short term reward (eg, interleaving with Daniel Tiger).

Apparently my kids said they planned to do "word cards" with their kids when I wasn't around.

Anki is great at what it does, but the main enabler is finding a process your kids will pay attention to. I probably lucked out there.
The real stupidity isn't in arguing they aren't possible, it's in denying that superintelligence won't conclude humanity is dangerous, superfluous, and/or obsolete.

It doesn't take much conversation with really smart people to see what ranges from mockery to indifference to seething resentment most have towards other "lessers". I myself used to joke about eliminating the "bottom 90%" (of course for some metric that I obviously would safely exceed).

And human intellect is vaguely constrained by moral notions, culture, and pack instinctuality that should... prevent... mass... violence... against... each... other... um, well, yeah, excluding innumerable genocides and war.

So if you make something markedly smarter than humans, not just at the individual level but more significantly at the collective level, I'm pretty sure it's going to eliminate or severely constrain (think: factory farms for pigs/chickens/etc or alternatively, an Amazon factory worker)
Ironically, .Net has several.
We're working on a game engine in Zig[0]

If you're looking for interesting Zig codebases to read, you might be interested in our low-level audio input/output library[1] or our module system[2] codebase - the latter includes an entity component system and uses Zig's comptime to a great degree to enable some interesting flexibility (dependency injection, global view of the world, etc.) while maintaining a great amount of type safety in an otherwise dynamic system.

[0] https://machengine.org/

[1] https://github.com/hexops/mach/tree/main/src/sysaudio

[2] https://github.com/hexops/mach/tree/main/src/module
The aliens fixed it
Have you ever had the need to read the source code of a tool because it doesn't behave the way it should, and its help and documentation prescribes?

I have been there a couple of times, and how some stuff is handled in these codebases were sad. Sloppy, assumption ridden, or pure, inelegant and fragile hacks.

Even if you're reading a code to modify it, good code is easier to follow and read (point of the junior developer), and as a result, you touch less and less parts of the code to develop it even further.

So yes, Good code is rarely read, or "read less, and in more niche cases".