skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You misunderstand. The objection is not to the methods in which the task is accomplished. The objection is to the principle of the technology. The objection would exist under the best of forms. There is no misunderstanding of the operations you mention; you rebut but a strawman. In fact, the fear was never about "Tim Apple looking at every photo" and has little to do with Apple itself.

It is about how such a technology can enable abuse. It does not matter if the technology is exclusively used for good if the harm it does if abused is too great. And we have plenty of evidence to see that irrespective of which country you reside in, that the scope of such projects typically widens. We also live in a global world and we are not exclusively subjected to the laws of our own governments. We don't have to go far back in history to see examples of the government turning on its own citizens. It is not just the US, it is not just German, not just Russia, not just China, but such actions have been prolific. I do not believe the is sufficient reason to believe your own government is incapable of abusing such power and I'd accuse you of lunacy if you claim that no government would seek to abuse it. Was not the US founded on the explicit principle of treating the government as an adversarial entity? Because if not, well then one of us must be illiterate, since Federalist 10 and 51 famously write this explicitly. Not to mention a litany of quotes by Jefferson.

experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny

So no, it is not a misunderstanding on my part as to the specs of the technology. Because the matter is about how much harm could be caused when such perversion happens. It is the understanding that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That evil is not solely created by evil men seeking to do evil, but the unfortunate reality is that it is often created when good men are seeking to do good. Even under the best forms.
The mass of human contributed CO2 is tiny compared natural CO2 emmission and still it's bad for us.

More is bad that's the bottom line.
Is there a type of geo engineering that can soften the effects of a nuclear exchange?
Which is why water desalination tech is one of their major exports. They mastered the technology out of survival need (Malaysia constantly threatening to cut off water supply) and are exporting it now.
Mexico. Ok, just joking, they like real coke without HFCS
> In software engineering everything is basically overcomplicated handwaving.

No, it is worse than that. There are people who claim the proof is the code itself. Just look at it. These are the same kind of people claiming good code needs no documentation.

That is like a bridge engineer saying they need no structural calculation because the stability of the bridge is obvious to a certain kind of bridge nerd if they look at it. Only that civil engineers figured out after a few high profile bridge collapses that "trust me bro" isn't good enough and software engineering people are still in the: "trust him, he is a genius"-phase of the field.
> Old growth plateaus from a ton/acre of carbon perspective pretty quickly, and old growth forests aren’t meaningfully sequestering much new carbon in their soil. It reaches a steady state, with excess rotting. Almost no forests do, or they’d be sitting on hundreds of feet of charcoal like matter.
> New growth pulls carbon out of the atmosphere fast - and cutting it down and using it, gives room for more, fast.

Once it reaches this steady state, how much carbon has it already stored? How long will the average undisturbed old growth forest remain at steady state? 200 years, 1000 years? 10000 years? Surely longer than the average lifespan of all the products a destroyed old growth forest might produce. This is especially true when considering that old growth wood is particularly valuable for use as biofuel due to its high carbon density. This means that that carbon will be released far sooner than it otherwise would have, likely magnitudes sooner. And it says nothing of the carbon that doesn't even make it into a product. The simple act of killing the forest and turning over the soil will immediately release carbon.

But, you might say, we'll plant new growth and that'll absorb carbon at a faster rate than ever. Is that rate fast enough to account for the early release of the old growth carbon? How many cycles will it take to recapture that carbon?

> Even the best of them it’s less than 6 feet of carbon containing soil.

So? Is that an average for old growth forest soil? How does it compare to new growth soil average? A single measurement is meaningless here.

More importantly, what is the comparitive density of the carbon in the soil? Depth of carbon-containing soil without a density doesn't tell me much about the total carbon stored.

> the math is clear and easy to verify.

If you say so, but unfortunately you didn't provide any math whatsoever. You seem confident though so if you have any sources, then please do share. I did a quick search for various numbers and comparisons and the numbers don't look good for your argument unless you are only comparing the rates at a given moment and ignoring the total sequestered carbon over a suitable time range (there's probably a better description for this...something like average years of sequestration for any given carbon atom during the average lifespan of an undisturbed old growth forest vs the same tract of land cyclically harvested and replanted at a profit-maximing rate over the same time period)
I understood what IR was, but due to the capitalization of the title, I thought it was written in Scratch programming language.
Isn't the goal 'may I be happy' at odds with the underlying philosophy as it ignores the reality that without sadness, we cannot understand being happy. Wouldn't 'may i be at peace' or 'may i be present' be more suitable? And even futher 'may I' is a wishing of a future state which is a attachment to a certain state and which also means we are not at peace nor present. If we constantly wish this, are we not missing the point?
In theory, your software itself provides the proof that it does what it claims. The proof would directly link to unit tests or integration tests at the meta level.

Arguably, software engineering does this much more exhaustively then any other engineering field... To very varying quality output, from masterpieces like SQLite to your average B2B artifact which barely works despite having 99% coverage.
> Instead of AVL and red black trees, we instead learned about 2-3 trees and B trees

When we first were taught about B trees in my databases course in college, he professor quipped something like "these are the reason you'll never actually use a red-black tree in practice". I've actually found that in practice I rarely ever up actually needing to use any sort of data structure that maintains sort order; for whatever reason, I've run into cases far more often where I need to maintain insertion order than sort order, but I'm not confident about whether this is due more to the type of stuff I work on or if it's just a more common requirement in general.
The idea behind this research is to generate answer few times and if results are semantically vastly different from each other then probably they are wrong.
Because ideally good code should make the intent obvious from the names and comments, so inferring a full description should really just be an autocomplete task.
Passive income only after your active income has stopped growing exponentially.
Is there formal methods 'tooling' similar to TLA+ that is more targeted to State Machine design and perhaps State Machine Replication?
hackclub
non-trivial

I guess hn is suitable for teenagers as well.
I've worked in public transport ticketing for the past 30 years including the first system outside Japan (Hong Kong's Octopus).

The problem with QR codes:

1. If they're printed, they can be copied.

2. "Dynamic" QR codes can be screenshot.

3. They're read-only (by definition)

4. Readers are slow, require good orientation by the user.

NFC is good because it's read/write, has a ~10cm range, the larger cards can hold up to 4K of data, the ultralights can replace single journey tickets and can be recycled like magnetics being captured at exit.
Thought you were talking about React initially.
Performance is the enemy of clean code
how did it end up there?
I learned to program in high school on a Teletype Model 33 ASR that dialed into to a timesharing service. This was the version with a paper tape punch and reader.

Dial-up time was very expensive, somewhere around $50/hour in today's dollars.

So we would punch our code onto a paper tape, then print it out locally to review it, and finally dial in, run the paper tape through and wait for the printout from our program, and immediately disconnect.

In theory, CR LF should have been enough at the end of a line, but we found that sometimes, especially after a long line, the next line would start printing before the paper had fully advanced.

To play it safe, we would punch CR LF RUBOUT. RUBOUT was a character with all eight holes punched in the tape, i.e. 0xFF. By convention, this code was ignored by any system that received it.

The intended use of RUBOUT was to correct an error you made when punching a tape. You would back up the tape as many characters as you got wrong, then punch that many RUBOUTs, and continue from there. Because RUBOUT had every hole punched out, it would erase any error.

And it also served to give the paper a little more time to advance when we punched CR LF RUBOUT.

Maybe our machine was in need of some oiling or adjustment. The Model 33 was designed as a light-duty machine, unlike the more rugged Models 28 and 35.
Left leaning red black trees are simpler to implement than the regular red black tree.
On the input language nothing appears
Autocomplete works fine interactively debugging on MacOS with JetBrains rider.

Syntax trees can be browsed on https://sharplab.io/ or again via Rider and I'm sure there are some other tools that I'm not aware of.

The Roslyn sdk is part of .NET (cross platform) these days so anyone can use it to build a visualiser should they wish to.
When I got my dad's old Series 3a, it was one of the coolest things I ever saw. We had a computer at home, so I knew MS-DOS and then Win 3.1, but it was another thing to have a computer in your pocket!

Then, when I was in high school, my dad was developing applications for the national gas and water utility companies and they used Psion Workabouts with printer attachments, since they were rugged and basically only device approved for working in places with gas. He wanted to get out of the business, so he basically said if I would take over the devleopment and clients, which I did. I rewrote the code for the Psions and wrote an app in Visual Basic for windows machines (I cannot recollect which database I used) so they could download the client readings via the serial port and print it out.

I never really got into "professional" development after that, sticking mostly to product design, but I still like to dabble in code. I guess the thrill of working on a product from start to end and have it used by so many people still gets fills me with joy.

Fun times and to think that this has to be more than 20 years ago is crazy!
> In theory, your software itself provides the proof that it does what it claims.

If you manage to solve the halting problem first.
They must have the card identity because you have to explicitly 'tap out' at the other end, if you don't want to be billed with a maximum fare.

Don't ask me how though
I’m probably wrong, but this entire article felt as an advertisement for violin plots without it being mentioned once
I’m not sure I agree with C# being the only first class citizen in Azure. A lot of the Azure stuff like the whole automation is done with Powershell (or Python, but what Microsoft ops people does that?). On the development side of things Microsoft is pushing their container apps platform over their app/function platforms and it integrates with virtually everything.

Even on something like their MSGraph SDKs we’re often getting better performance out of the JavaScript SDKs.

I think it’s a little silly to say that Microsoft isn’t taking C# serious. If you look at Azure DevOps, which has not been taken very serious by Microsoft since they acquired GitHub and then compare it to C# there is just a world of difference. I do think it risks going that way. I’m not sure I think Visual Studio is taken fully serious anymore, but it’s still getting much more attention than Azure DevOps and C# is just… miles ahead of every product in terms of seriousness. I do think they are making it more and more like Typescript, I’m sure we’ll eventually see classes replaced by Types and functions being capable of living on their own, but that’s not really a bad thing.
LLMs are trained with the objective: “no matter what, always have at least three paragraphs of response”. and that response is always preferred to silence or “unfriendly” responses like: “what are you talking about?”

Then yes, it is being taught to bullshit.

Similar to how an improv class teaches you to keep a conversation interesting and “never to say no” to your acting partner.
Parallel point: the tech stack is more of a business decision than a tech decision for early stage startups.

I’ve seen many clients fail, or lose a lot of money and/or velocity when they’ve had to shift their tech stack in order to scale their engineering team.

So many of my clients have just given the first techie who could live off next to nothing for a few months the keys to the kingdom, and then you end up with someone who just picks whatever they were excited by as the foundation for your company. “We’ve decided to build this SaaS in Erlang because we need extreme parallelism”

I’ve had a few clients who built products using languages/stacks that were impossible to recruit for. A bootstrapped startup won’t be able to compete for engineers in $LANG if a bank and a successful corp hire everyone in that space at twice your salary range.

One of the things I’ve done with clients is to educate the non-technical founders enough to understand the basic stack their MVP is built with, the architecture, and the kind of profiles they’re going to need in their tech team. After all, it’s very often going to be the non-technical founders who are going to be arguing with VCs and investors to justify the hiring strategy.
It's probably impossible to tell the difference (which would explain the lack of understanding of opposing groups in this thread), unless one tests their ability to actually see the details instead of merely believing that one sees the details.

If drawing is not your thing, consider whether you can count the number of creases in her sleeves, or what length the shadow under her nose is, and where the light source is coming from.

Note that I'm not interested in memory aspects here. If one can't differentiate minute details, yet still see them highly realistically, then what exactly is it one sees? Probably not the same as the real thing or a photographic image.

A follow-up question would be whether the envisioned details are stable enough to draw or reason from, or whether the image keeps changing in one's head. In the latter case, the process of phantasising may be more akin to what diffusion models do.
Please take care. There's the "dark night of the soul". Everybody is different. I and my wife experienced something similar to this phenomenon but my wife decades (!) earlier than me and she was completely alone. She had meditation therapy because of her cerebral palsy and when she fell into the night dark nobody understood her. I learnt a lot from her experience. Today I explain it like this: If you realize that everything is empty you lose ground. I and my wife are not experienced meditators and both stumbled upon it by accident separately and not at the same time.

What hit both of us hard is: if even being good and doing good things is empty then what's the point? Your dark night of the soul is probably different, so it does not make sense to tell too much about our experience.

The only thing I want to tell you: If you are going to meditate, you'll probably need help at some time. If someone supports, understands and loves you, this could be perhaps enough. If you see someone meditating needing help, try to help.

This said, it is better if you have an experienced person helping you, but if not, a good, understanding friend is better than nobody. Don't be afraid and start meditating anyway. Just keep in mind that not many people talk about the dark night of the soul and so most meditators in the West are completely blindsided.

If this happens to you, take rest and look for an helpful friend.

EDIT: added the last sentence.
https://www.storycubes.com/en/ have been around for a while and do not require a huge data centre to create random ideas.
Automotive software development services are essential for modernizing the automotive industry and meeting the demands of today’s tech-savvy consumers. By integrating advanced technologies into vehicles, automotive software development enhances safety, efficiency, and user experience, paving the way for the future of transportation. Whether it's developing cutting-edge ADAS, enriching infotainment systems, or enabling V2X communication, automotive software services play a pivotal role in driving innovation and ensuring the success of automotive manufacturers in a competitive market.
What is? Consciousness? Are you conscious when asleep? No? Then how do dreams work?

The only thing you can be sure of is that you experience some qualia; that you are conscious is an assumption.
> TCP will waste roundtrips on handshakes. And then some extra on MTU discovery.

This is especially true when using TLS (which is at least a major use case nowadays if not the default assumption); the TCP handshake has to complete before the TLS handshake can occur, whereas QUIC has protocol-level support for doing TLS negotiation as part of the initial handshake. Having the network protocol and the encryption be composable rather than tightly coupled feels more elegant, it's hard for me to convince myself that being able to save a round trip per connection isn't a more practical benefit in a world where we now expect pretty much everything to be encrypted in transit.
In 1826, at the age of forty-four, Thorpe studied early English antiquities at the University of Copenhagen

And here I am, in my late 30s, thinking that my productive age is far behind me
I am skeptical of most "more trees" approaches simply because it's not really sequestering carbon in the long term unless you carefully bury the wood underground in rot-preventing conditions.

It's like a bathtub where the faucet is pouring out more than the drain can handle, and the "solution" is to throw a bunch of sponges in. Sure, it'll kinda temporarily keep the water level down, but at some point...
This is honestly one of my favorite channels. It is one of those things where if one asks "why" the only answer that can be given is "because."

Just look at the 4 most recent videos. Maybe start with "Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need" where he tries to make hard drives out of things that shouldn't be hard drives. This includes: by pinging the entire internet, tetris, and Covid-19 tests. But in truth the absurdity is a deep dive into the nature of how data can be stored and encoded. I think it should encourage people to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge and how there are frequently deep insights into seemingly dumb questions, as long as you dig deep enough.

We do these things not because they are hard, but because they are harder drives!
People keep summoning the halting problem in unrelated contexts to handwave things awayvas impossible.
Does every completely legitimate condemnation of erroneous language have to be whined about by some apologist for linguistic erosion?
Weak debates but great spectacle

I kind of wonder if systems of LLMs are going to become its own new entertainment medium
Ask HN: Can decentralized social networks scale?
Hello HN community!

I've been diving into the concept of decentralized social networks and considering how they might address some of the fundamental issues we see with centralized platforms today, such as privacy concerns, data ownership, and censorship. Despite the promise, several technical and social hurdles seem to be holding back their widespread adoption.

1. *Scalability*: How can decentralized systems effectively scale while maintaining fast performance and low costs, especially with an increasing number of users?
2. *User Experience*: Centralized platforms have the advantage of massive resources to polish their UX. Can decentralized platforms ever compete in terms of ease of use and user interface?
3. *Monetization and Incentives*: Without centralized control, what are effective ways to monetize these platforms and ensure that there are enough incentives for developers and users to keep the network robust and growing?

I'm looking for insights, opinions, or even counterarguments. What do you think are the biggest challenges and potential solutions? Do you foresee a future where decentralized networks can mainstream, or will they remain niche?

Excited to hear your thoughts and learn from this community!
I think that was sort of their point argument. You could say the same thing about Python too.

The insinuation that you can’t be serious with those languages is silly though. I mean, Instagram runs on Python and a lot of really awesome applications still run on JavaScript. So while you can do terrible things with the freedom of dynamic languages, you aren’t forced to be a maniac by them either.
For a piece of code like this, it's too bad there is not a relatively easy conversion possible to an arena-based allocator. Because then the leak would not be relevant.

I wonder if it would be possible in Rust to do some magic at the Rust/C border in order to trick old C code into living inside an arena that is invisible to it?
Japan uses FeliCa for its integrated transport cards (I just read an Osaka Metro ICOCA card with NFC Tools to check). This is used by quite a few systems around the world, including Hong Kong's Octopus.
I've setup linqpad as a CMS for scripts and distributed it over nuget for support scripts.

Including login and etc.

Linqpad is great
The headline says 6 times per minutes, while the text says "can fluctuate as much as six times per hour when ESLs are in place."

Surely there are legal issues about changing the price that often. If I pick up an item priced at $1, but the price changes to $1.10 by the time I purchase it, then they are risking customer outrage, and potential legal liability.

Like, my grandmother would always double-check the receipt since (as I recall) the store had to issue 3x the difference if there was a mistake between the shelf and checkout price.

They could try to say that you scan the item, and it's locked into that price. Until you realize that people do things like pick up a can of beans, then 10 minutes later pick up three more cans of beans, and see it has a lower price. So now they want to return the first can and pick up a new one.

Or they might require everyone have a scanner with them, so the sale occurs right there. Except people do return things, so there's that hassle. And it means excluding customers who aren't able to use the device, like kids.
Why can't the teenagers read the same things the adults do?
That's not a fair comparison though: you can't even see that single character! /s
CYA: Keep comprehensive records of all decisions made and identify who made them throughout the process.
Net metering is great for the customers, but then your electricity provider becomes an equivalent of a giant battery. A batteries are very expensive still.

We have solar on our house, and we enjoy net metering, but I understand the arguments against it.