skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There’s nothing remotely nuanced nor truthful about this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40696242

He’s saying that with a compiler flag you can get the same kind of safety as in Ada or Rust. Later downthread he clarifies to say that you only get this safety if you stop using pointers, which he considers “trivial” to do.

This is the same guy who commented a few months back saying the following:

“All decent C compilers have compilation options so that at run-time any undefined actions, including integer overflow and out-of-bounds accesses, will be trapped.”

There is, put simply, no flag that will trap on “any undefined actions”, period. That’s not what sanitizers are capable of. That’s the kind of overhyped comment that isn’t helpful when trying to understand what sanitizers are actually useful for.
"The second kind of occasion on which you must act without rules is when you can refer the situation to a known type, but are not content to do so. You know a rule for dealing with situations of this kind, but you are not content with applying it, because you know that action according to rules always involves a certain misfit between yourself and your situation. If you act according to rules, you are not dealing with the situation in which you stand, you are only dealing with a certain type of situation under which you class it. The type is, admittedly, a useful handle with which to grasp the situation; but all the same, it comes between you and the situation it enables you to grasp. Often enough, that does not matter ; but sometimes it matters very much.

"Thus everybody has certain rules according to which he acts in dealing with his tailor. These rules are, we will grant, soundly based on genuine experience ;and by acting on them a man will deal fairly with his tailor and helps his tailor to deal fairly by him. But so far as he acts according to these rules, he is dealing with his tailor only in his capacity as a tailor, not as John Robinson, aged sixty, with a weak heart and a consumptive daughter, a passion for gardening and an overdraft at the bank. The rules for dealing with tailors no doubt enable you to cope with the tailor in John Robinson, but they prevent you from getting to grips with whatever else there may be in him. Of course, if you know that he has a weak heart, you will manage your dealings with him by modifying the rules for tailor-situations in the light of the rules for situations involving people with weak hearts. But at this rate the modifications soon become so complicated that the rules are no longer of any practical use to you. You have got beyond the stage at which rules can guide action, and you go back to improvising, as best you can, a method of handling the situation in which you find yourself."

--

From the autobiography of R.G. Collingwood. His writings often have the theme of trying to understand particular instances of a thing on its own terms, only generalising into abstractions when seeing some quality in crowds of individual instances. I've rarely regretted that same approach when it comes to abstraction in code/software, but have regretted premature abstraction many times.
It never ends. After tenure it's about getting grants to have resources (equipment etc) and to hire a large enough team of PhD students and postdocs. Universities cover some of this by default but they expect profs to draw in third party funding and without extra grants you can't really keep up with the competition. And for grants you needs lots of papers in good venues.
> but these fucking parenthesis are ridiculous

I thoroughly agree. I am deeply into functional programming, but syntax built entirely around endless nested parentheses has never felt like anything but a nightmare to me. Doubly so because even in 'clean' code it's reusing the same syntax with what are for most coders three clearly different logical concerns (defining functions, listing statements to execute in order, and invoking functions).
Why is this flagged? When cloudflare announces R2 there are hundreds comments praising their announcement-ad. Now that we get an actual review of what may happen, it gets flagged?
It's not defeatist, it's called defense in depth
The best modern reason to have as much swap as RAM is to make hibernation to disk more reliable, but a lot of people don't use that anymore. It's more reliable because the kernel doesn't have to work as hard to find space to write the system image to.
They're both pretty chill-inducing.
Sorry, I don't understand that. Could you explain?

Arrow's Theorem applies when you have a discrete number of choices and you try to aggregate people preferences over them (in specific ways etc).

If instead of discrete elections, Alice and Bob can negotiate that _today_ they go to the football match and _tomorrow_ they go to the opera, that opens up new spaces for coordination that Arrow's theorem doesn't touch.

Similar, if Alice is allowed to pay Bob, or if they can do political horse-trading like 'I support your foreign policy, if you support my lowering the speed limit', that's also not covered by Arrow's theorem.

The theorem really only applies to deterministically aggregating people's individual orderings of a discrete set of options into some aggregated order for the group. That's it.

So it doesn't concern side-payments, or other continuous compromises. Or repeated play.
I've gotten a series of deranged preprocessor hacks from friends since sharing that repo, the possibilities are ... terrifyingly limitless.
It’s about abstractions, and a lot of the time visual programming tools don’t get it right. Either they are too abstract and your limited to a set of nodes/blocks that are not powerful enough and adding more is challenging because the abstraction is so high there’s lots of overhead to get there, or the abstraction capabilities are too low and the ability to encapsulate and extend visually programmed code for reuse in other places or larger projects is hampered by the design.

About the only “general purpose” visual programming language I’ve ever come across that is genuinely trying to be able to do all of it, is DRAKON https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON

And even then, complexity can be a challenge because depending on how the software is architected the diagrams get unwieldy to read as more logic lives on a single layer… DRAKON does have a pair of little tricks that makes it a bit less confusing to work with than a lot of node based programming tools. The first is that lines cannot cross so you avoid the tangled knot diagram issue, the logical flow is relatively clear from your entry points to your exit or loop back to start. The second is that it serves as an abstraction to other programming languages, allowing for use of traditional tools and techniques to debug and analyse the output programs if needed, and then once you’ve identified the problem you can make changes to the diagram, export and then compile the program again after confirm your diagram changes had the desired results in the intermediate format.

And before anyone asks what’s the point why not just program in the target language? First I’d like to point out that TypeScript is a thing, and then second I’d like to highlight that it was designed to aid in the comprehension and maintenance of algorithms in the aerospace software world, it’s meant to allow you to look at a diagram see the data flow and logical code paths and visually check that you haven’t forgotten things, heck you could confirm you had covered all your necessary conditions with some coloured pencils on a printout… which might feel foolish in an era of automated checking tools which we have today, but this was developed in the the Soviet Union in 1986 as part of the Buran space program, it solved their genuine needs for how to make checking code for correctness easier for humans, and has stuck around because even with automation it’s one of the few visual programming languages that managed to strike the balance between going to high level or giving too few tools for abstraction.

Nothing is perfect of course, it has issues, like every programming language does, but it’s been a useful little tool from time to time when I needed to collaborate on fiddly algorithms with non-programming experts who understood what the software needed to be doing way better than I did, and I understood way better how to make the software do it than they did. I’d encourage anyone who ever gave visual programming a shot to check it out even just for the sake of curiosity, and possibly learning a useful new flowchart diagramming standard even if you never use the compiler.
I do this for some very small static sites like: [0]

[0] http://rbl.oc9.org/
These floppies won't be readable forever.

There's a level of moral obligation to do preservation.
> Like most people don't actually use personal computers anymore, even laptops aren't common among demos younger than millennials.

Is that actually true? I'd imagine people actually creating things on their computer would at least need the equivalent of a Chromebook, which I would consider a laptop.
Yes and no though. The frozen screen can be immensely helpful when you can see what happened immediately before. Obviously it's a gamble, but sometimes I'll have a terminal with logs on it on the frozen screen which can then be photographed and researched.

On Windows I hate that I lose all the context of what I was doing when the BSOD hits. Sometimes you can't even remember which app you were using.

I hope this just takes a small amount of screen and doesn't erase everything, and/or can be disabled.
I can't speak to the cloud provider support, as I don't use it, but they have supported scheduled backups since at least June 2019, as I have locally-stored backups from scheduled Takeout jobs going back that far.

Bear in mind that the scheduling support is extremely basic -- the only option available is to schedule six exports, one every two months. You can't change the frequency or the number.

Also, you can't pick when the schedule starts, so if you want backups every two months indefinitely, you have to remember to schedule the next set of backups two months after the final backup of the previous scheduled job finished.

It's better than nothing, but only just.
I don't know what the point would be? You still have to perform the entire Takeout, on a disk that already has a previous Takeout, so you always need double the space, and you always need to spend days (?) downloading terabytes (?) of data.

Once you've downloaded the entire new Takeout, there's no reason to deduplicate -- just delete the old Takeout.
stitch the images together (sift,orb) and apply a perspective transform.

if the images are uniform enough in style you can then probably crop them all at once with mask coordinates.

opencv/imagemagick will handle all of it.

if the images aren't uniform enough to crop them all at once, consider the use of a 'lazy susan' style vertical rotisserie, take all the photos from the same plane, easy post-processing.
Ask HN: Blog post about first months at a new job as a software engineer
I'm trying to find an old blog post that detailed the author's thoughts on what they do in their first few months at a new organization as a senior software engineer.

They mention things like resisting the urge to immediately start fixing things and instead they recommend you listen to your new coworkers pain points. They go on to recommend ways to ensure that its really a pain point, propose a change and get buy in, etc.

does anyone remember who might have written something like this?

I thought it might have been https://rachelbythebay.com/ or https://jvns.ca/ but I can't find anything like it on either one.
Especially since the board is clearly unfazed by this. Words like this really need to be reserved for situations where something actually got destroyed/damaged.
Please allow mixed use buildings please allow mixed use buildings

We gotta get rid of all that Euclidean zoning nonsense from simcity
Just remember, most of us are simply increasing the ROI of our millionaire/billionaire class overlords while we make modest gains in the ever shrinking middle class.

Had technology induced productivity gains been distributed as they were proportionally in the 60s, the average wage in the US would be 6 figures.
With Elon’s general attitude towards rules, hopefully they’d only do it if someone was silly enough to put an address within the country in the account and ignore the physical location hah.
I got one a year or two ago from Detroit Modular for about $1500. I've been very happy with it.

I'm primarily a guitar player with some ability to muddle through on piano on simple parts if I have to. The Linnstrument feels to me like a cross between a guitar and a piano. The notes are all laid out side-by-side like a piano, but in parallel rows like a guitar, and it respnds like a string instrument to wiggling your finger for tremolo or sliding it along the row for portamento.

In the default tuning the "strings" are tuned a fourth apart, like the lower 4 strings on a guitar, which helps a guitarist adapt quickly.

The sensors are quite sensitive, with very quick response, which makes it feel alive and responsive. It came with access to downloadable content that included MPE instruments for Logic Pro. I've used Logic for years, so I just made a reference project with all the supplied instruments in it and use that as a starting point for new projects that use the Linnstrument.

I quite happy with it and don't regret the price paid one bit.

Here's a little thing I made with it:

https://mic11.net/assets/audio/Ribbon.mp3

I did all the parts on the Linnstrument with Logic and my reference project.
We are starting at $4.50/hr [0]. The catch is that we won't have availability until mid August.

The weird thing on Runpod is the virtual CPUs, you can't run MI300x in virtual machines yet. It is a missing feature that AMD is working on.

[0] https://hotaisle.xyz/pricing/
You'd write a DSL to somehow clarify formatting a matrix literal instead of just putting some spaces as needed to get the rows and columns to line up cleanly?
My Response to Terrence Howard [video]
body { display: none !important; }
Roger Linn is a nice guy but this is a puff piece for the MPC. It's not a baaad machine but there sure is a lot to be said about it's idiosyncrasies and I don't think they're all Roger's design. It sounds like he did whatever was needed to get the money Akai owed him from 30 years ago.

Also, the Linnstrument is cool, it's more unique and interesting than the MPC.
Look, automation is here. The existence of line-replaceable employees, 24/7 manufacturing and machine-assisted assembly is a century old today, we're currently living in the post-automation world and very little has changed. Humans do different things and the job market looks different as a result.

I don't know what your proximity to the field is, but I've basically worked in robotics and industrial automation since I was a high schooler. Nobody is talking about this stuff; it's a sideshow reserved for wooing investors and particularly gullible public audiences. Know why? Because computer vision has been used in production for over a decade now. We've already replaced those jobs and moved on. ChatGPT-4o isn't even a party trick to these people.

If you continue to assume that AI will accelerate along a neverending path of success, then you'll believe anything. I have watched and implimented LLMs since BERT was released and I strongly feel that you are overestimating ChatGPT's capabilities to an unreal degree.
It's already very much a DSL, and has been for the decade-ish that I've used it.

They're not building a language. They're carefully adding a newly-in-demand feature to a mature, already-built language.
Brain with circuit traces on it.
What planet are you on? Nginx had a 0 day as recently as April 2022 https://www.accuknox.com/blog/nginxday-2022-nginx-ldap-zero-...

This happens _all_ _the_ _time_
As of the latest update FSD is not yet FSD, but it’s _way_ more than ADAS. Underestimate it at your own peril. It behaves like an experienced, if too timid, driver.
Pi's were never a good for compute-intensive tasks; running a DNS resolver (PiHole), print-server, or uploading backups to the cloud is the sort of thing it excels at. The Pi Zero W costs $15 and idles at less than 1 Watt; it's the always-on-appliance that turns on my GPU-workstation or NUC for the heavier stuff.
Here is the open source backend...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMD_MI300/comments/1dgimxt/benchmar...
Of both quotes the latter is definitely closer to the truth.
I didn't have time to check when I wrote this comment, but looking now, the US rate looks like it's usually more than double that of major developed peers, and in some cases more than 3x as high.

Fatalities per 100k inhabitants:

South Korea - 5.3

Japan - 2.1

Italy - 5.2

UK - 2.9

Germany - 3.7

France - 5.0

Canada - 5.3

# USA - 12.9

The US actually does about the same as Mexico (12.8) despite being enormously richer and generally more developed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...
Yes, you can extend Arrow's theorem a bit. But again, it doesn't apply to people who can negotiate or compromise or who play repeatedly. And it also only applies to aggregating an ordering of preferences. It doesn't apply to eg filling up a parliament for proportional representation.

(Btw, the random dictatorship doesn't sound too bad. As a slightly modified form, I think it would be a good experiment to fill up parliament with a few hundred randomly selected people amongst all who are willing.)
The problem is that copyright laws were not designed to encourage historical preservation, at least not for computer software. Source code escrow should be a condition of copyright for closed source software.
I would sell all tech inside and use the money to at least start a renovation and sell it as a fixer uppper. Whos gonna buy this?
The USB-IF publishes a list of member companies[1]; purchase products from these qualified manufacturers, and perhaps more importantly, from authorized distributors.

This is a good enough "policy control" for the average consumer.

[1] https://www.usb.org/members
The broadcasting doc is surprisingly readable and easy to follow. And the rules are surprisingly simple. The diagrams and examples are excellent. https://numpy.org/doc/stable/user/basics.broadcasting.html

After taking the time to work through that doc and ponder some real-world examples, I went from being very confused by broadcasting to employing intermediate broadcasting techniques in a matter of weeks. Writing out your array dimensions in the same style of their examples (either in a text file or on a notepad) is the key technique IMO:

Image (3d array): 256 x 256 x 3
Scale (1d array): 3
Result (3d array): 256 x 256 x 3

And of course with practice you can do it in your head.
What made Texas attractive to crypto mining? Maybe the heyday is over but why Texas?
Do we really need to argue or split hairs that not having soap in a restroom is disgusting? Nobody is saying anything about masks or the pros/cons of air dryers. But not washing your hands after using the bathroom is disgusting.
No offense intended, but your comment reads a bit like a word salad of some economics concepts which you likely don’t fully understand.

- “presumes that workers might never beat the prisoners dilemma” - that has nothing to do with demand curves. I have no idea what you are talking about.

- “[presumes??] that consumers will never make any informed purchase” - nothing of the sort is true.

- “selling light bulbs that expire in weeks is better for the supply curve.” What??
I agree with the difficulty of Starlark. I worked with Starlark a couple years ago to build some non-trivial things, which included writing custom Starlark providers. It was a gigantic pain. Documentation always felt very incomplete and finding existing examples were hard to come by (that has improved somewhat since I worked on that project, I believe).
There is so much begging the question in this thread that it’s absolutely mind-boggling.
didn't google kill google photos once?
Who's going to decide what voting system is good or bad? At some point, you have to inject some judgement calls, if you want to end up with a judgement call.

Btw, the protectionism was bad for the US economy, and did not help its dominance at all. (That's assuming you like US dominance?)
A language with semantic white space seems a somewhat strange choice for an example of when formatting stays out of your way.
I've made a decent chunk of edits especially in the area of reliable sources, so I might as well extend on what the article is saying.

First off, Wikipedia is pseudonymous. You can't cite yourself because anyone could easily claim to be a domain expert and lie.[1] Rather than verify credentials, it's generally expected that content be cited to a reliable source other than the user.

And it's also not just about being a domain expert, because experts frequently disagree. The ideal source isn't "domain expert says x",[2] it's "academic article says major views in domain include x,y,z".[3] The goal of this isn't to entrench a cabal, it's to ensure that Wikipedia doesn't spotlight fringe perspectives only seen by a few experts in a field. So, re; "Wikipedia specifically rejects domain experts until someone who knows nothing cites them elsewhere", that's a feature and not a bug.

Anyways, to add some more context, Wikipedia has a big problem with people citing their own content to boost SEO.[4][5] Even academics publishing peer-reviewed content do this because Wikipedia cites are now a tracked metric. I can't verify whether that's what happened in the original blogpost. But the average editor seeing someone that isn't very active come on and repeatedly cite a single book is going to get alarm bells in their head.

About citing a company on itself, I wrote a lengthy comment on that below.[6]

Probably the single piece of advice I'd give to someone wanting to edit Wikipedia is to understand that someone reverting your edit is supposed to start a discussion, not end one. This is called the "bold, revert, discuss cycle".[7] You're entitled to ask for reasons why your edit is reverted, and if you can't reach an agreement, you can get input from other people in the community. The main place for discussing whether a source is reliable is the reliable sources noticeboard,[8] but you can also get help editing at the Teahouse.[9]

Also, if you're a grieving widow trying to get your husband's article updated, I would recommend contacting the volunteer response team at info-en-o@wikimedia.org. This is a private email (instead of the publicly visible Teahouse), one of the purposes of which is to help people who are the subjects of articles to get errors about themselves fixed.[10] You can also use photosubmission@wikimedia.org to submit photos of yourself for articles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?fulltext=Search...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40698952#40701045

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Volunteer_Response_T...
72% seems kind of low
Testing and surveillance shut down, a growing body of medical research ignored, govt policy prioritizing political considerations, a rampant virus with immediate symptoms less detectable.

Its not great Bob!