skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The oldest program I wrote that has been used routinely since then was a Basic application to do precise calculation of some chemical assays.

This was on a HP benchtop gas analyzer where I had added the HP Basic option which was needed to handle the complexity of petroleum data like only companies having mainframes had been able to, up until 1979. Most other research operations did not need Basic since the underlying expert system was adequate for less data-intensive work. Those who had a bare-bones analyzer were way ahead of most of the world though, which was still going with analog chart recorders and simpler mathematical calibration techniques that had been well-established.

Interestingly, there are still plenty of non-petroleum gases and other analytes where the raw analog data is so simple that no computer has ever been needed at all, some needing not a calculator nor even a slide rule. But people naturally have all-computerized systems in the modern world anyway, including the complex software that for such simple analysis provides more room for error than the analog days. In theory and in practice as directly observed.

But the chemical assays were not related to the gases, I just liked having a personal desktop system that would compute, and wrote a couple hundred lines that would get it done in a way that was completely auditable. The workflow included manually entering data that had been gathered from bench work in the non-gas labs.

Slightly different syntax allowed my app to run on the P-E equivalent to the HP, and I managed to keep at least one P-E running until 2014 so I could operate the vintage analyzers in my own lab. But stopped running my old chem app on them in 1993 when my employer got their first office PC with Windows 3.1 and GW-Basic. So that was the first actual DOS version of the same old thing, which is the one still in use on my FAT32 partition when I boot to DOS, as well as run from the command line when booted to 32-bit Windows.

When it comes to timestamps a couple old EXEs that have been carried forward on the FAT32 volume are Tetris and Battle Chess from 1989 which I can still run any time since.

That looks like it for files that are actually useful still.
There is plenty of timber in northern California and southern Oregon, these regions are actually temperate rain forests, that are harvested sustainably and aren't old growth forests. Every 30-50 years, (depending on species: redwood or doug fir) the same tracts of forest can be logged again and again.

Once you get further north the taigas are colder and slower growing and may take 200 years or longer to grow back.

The best thing for the USA is to use the resources which supports jobs in logging, wood processing, transportation, and have lower costs associated with transportation and fees from importation. I'm not against importing timber into very northern parts of the US but there is no reason to ONLY use canadian timber.
Even smaller cities and towns can have good bike infrastructure. But it requires good interconnected infrastructure which largely doesn't exist in the US or Canada.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
Here goes Apple Intelligence / some random feature not coming to the US because Apple has too much compliance to do. /s
Is Claude Sonnet 3.5 All You Need – A Vibe Check
They don't have Syntax Tree analysis yet but I hear it will be released soon

Notice a common theme here? Literally zero ways to browse C# syntax trees available on the Mac. Nothing in the cloud either from what I could find. Roslyn was open-sourced in April 2014, which was 122 months ago.
(edit: Another commenter pointed out that there is in fact a new VS Code extension that can do this, released Aug 2023)

By the way, you can't get autocomplete either while interactively debugging C# outside of Windows. The debugger is proprietary. Maybe there's a way, but I haven't found one.
Windows 9x can run 16-bit realmode (V86), 16-bit protected mode, and 32-bit protected mode code in the same process by using different segment descriptors. Too bad amd64 wasn't compatible with that model, nor the virtualisation features that came afterwards, or Intel could've made ARM32/64-mode segments a reality if they decided to add an ARM decoder to their microarchitecture.
This is pretty awful. And if Apple, with all their supposed green credentials, are the ones dumping toxic industrial chemicals into the environment in the middle of Santa Clara, you can only imagine what the rest of the industry is like.
Unusually, the county of New York (coextensive with Manhattan) is only 1 of 5 counties inside the city of New York (which of course inside the state of New York).
And they were accidentally tipped off about the inspection when it should have been a complete surprise. I feel like stuff like this should be capable of piercing the corporate veil so that people involved could be criminally prosecuted. As-is, Apple is incentivized to just keep this kind of behavior in their ranks because it’s just the cost of doing business as they usually get away with this kind of stuff.
Smart school districts make each school's main driveway bus only.
I've called the county environmental service on a plastic recycling plant 0.5 mile's away from my house because any time the wind is blowing our way there's a really thick burning plastic smell that makes you want to gag. It makes it impossible to enjoy outside or open our windows.

They try treating the smell as a nuisance complaint rather than a health hazard (tbh probably on purpose). Then they'll send someone to your property to see if they smell it.

They need smell it for 15 continuous minutes and consider it intolerable for anything to be done about it. But the wind constantly shifts a little back and forth so it's impossible to get 15 continuous minutes and what they consider intolerable is so subjective. Even when it's strong the person tries telling me its barely noticeable and has the audacity to tell me it smells like popcorn (wtf?!?).

The town doesn't care at all because it doesn't want to give residents preference over business.

Now people are just starting to move away because they can't tolerate it anymore. It feels helpless when you're likely breathing in toxic VOCs and the people that are supposed to be the ones that help and protect you seem to be working for the companies.
When to pivot your Indie Hack
So much for their environmental marketing bullshit
On its face that seems like a pretty ridiculous suggestion when the alternative is to just build nuclear power plants which don’t have any real geographic considerations and thus can be built next to existing factories that are already built around such things.
I feel your pain. I'm in the same boat as you (backed the astro slide - didn't get one).

I used the original Planet Computers device with psion-like keyboard, the Gemini, as my daily driver for a few years. The keyboard was no gimmick - it really felt like a quasi mini-laptop. A brilliant device, even considering the weak cpu (as compared to similarly priced phones)

Such a shame ...

(btw, had a psion 2, psion 3, psion 5 & sharp zaurus back in the day, so you can say I'm a sucker for these things)
I spotted the omission immediately and I knew that the moment had finally arrived: I used something that I learned in math class.
They never do, because it's a massive red flag. Pun nonwithstanding.
DSCP / ToS is used for traffic classification within a network (which can be used to select router policy), but generally not across autonomous systems. You'd have to get everyone to agree on what various traffic markings mean, and, more critically, which traffic deserves to be marked in certain ways.

For instance, suppose that you wanted a special traffic class that's prioritized over everything else. You really don't want just anyone to be able to send you that kind of traffic, since a DoS attack can easily starve all the other queues.

Your best bet is usually to match traffic based on other characteristics, e.g. port × protocol.
Yup that’s what I’ve resorted to (in Rust I do it at the crate level instead of translation unit). The only downside is forgetting about it and then wondering why stepping through is failing to work properly.
> Truly a case of ignorance is bliss.

Or "we fired the guys who complained until we stopped receiving complaints."
as always a delight to read ken! im curious about speculation how to do the bonding and mounting of these chips at scale. at this size even the general handling and cutting of wafers are hard to imagine for me. how did the connections to the antenna look like and was there an indication of different glue / adhesive layers apart from the coatings you described?
Discussion (48 points, 1 hour ago, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40772224
IC transit cards in Japan use heat-rewritable ink for something similar.

The ticket vending machines print your monthly transit passes right onto the face of your card at the beginning of the month, and erase it after it expires.

It's not a QR code though. Just human readable text for bus drivers. (Turnstiles in the subway still read the pass via NFC.)
Sorry it's slow for you – happy to help debug why - shoot me an email at jeff@ollama.com
The tech stack check seems to fail every time. Would love to see with the tech stack details included. Nice and fast, otherwise!
Get with your neighbors and pay a company to sample that air. A report with actual numbers might help considerably.
Planes flying from Lithuania to SE Asia mysteriously land in Iran
Why would you be skeptical of tree farming leading to less carbon sequestering?

The whole point of farming timber is to harvest wood which is lignin and cellulose aka CARBON.

The green leaves on the tree are not what will store carbon. The green will fall off and become forest duff which gets digested by fungi and bugs and the carbon released back to the atmosphere.

Goal of timber companies == make more timber
timber == captured carbon
I worked at a Colgate manufacturing plant and we were given about a week heads up when the FDA would come do an inspection, we would know the exact day about 3 days before, and we would have about a 4hr heads up when they'll arrive.

The way the plant operates normally and when they're there is night and day. We will shut down lines and clean for whole shifts leading up to it and when they're there we'll double the staff to have a whole shifts worth of people just constantly cleaning while the others work.

We'll also slow down the lines to make sure things run smoothly and do more quality checks.
ByteDance working with Broadcom to develop advanced AI chip
Have you contacted the EPA? This sounds like a violation of the clean air act. Your county enforcement might have limited powers vs what the EPA can do.
If you control the font, you control the content as well, I don't see the attack vector.
We were having trouble finding anybody that would want to help and the costs were astronomical. Like we were getting quotes in the $250k range for the tests and the study.

And even if we did that we'd have to prove that the poor air quality was coming from the plant, which you can't do unless you setup monitoring in their property, which they'd never allow.

The company has a history of violations, but were somehow allowed to expand during COVID. That's when we started smelling it even though they were around for decades. They had air scrubbers before, but I haven't seen any new ones on their roof since the expansion, so all that new stuff from the new building must be just venting out.

I feel horrible for the people that have to work inside. They're all foreigners that don't speak English. It doesn't seem like any of them are given breathing protection either. They're all getting taken advantage of.
Yes, so an open source...backdoor.
I figured the "main characters" on the radar map are the current location and precipitation relative to your current location.

So the watercolor map layer looks more aesthetic while hiding unnecessary detail ^^
Physicists Accidentally Found a New Way to Represent Pi
MISSING START TAG
In-depth: What is Customer-facing analytics?
My understanding is that the STM (runs the Métro) likes to keep fares on the actual paper tickets or rechargeable card, rather than in some central database.

The paper tickets can hold many fares, including unlimited evening fares or two day fares. I believe this would be hard to pull off with QR codes without having to keep track centrally.
> Are you saying we should only code everything in C and C++ and Bash with as few dependencies as possible?

Every so often I encounter a package with very few (or no external) dependencies that just works, and it's wonderful.

There is something to be said for going with a mature, stable, non-bleeding-edge platform and minimizing dependencies.

Regarding C/C++, they tend to facilitate memory errors, while memory-safe language systems (Ada, Java, Javascript, Rust, ...) all seem to come with various down sides.
If there's a terrible smell, it should be detected by a $100 off-the-shelf TVOC air quality meter, the type that can detect perfumes. Have you tried one?

If you know which specific gases may be present in the plant exhaust, there may be an existing low-cost (~$50) sensor [1] which can be assembled in a custom DIY air quality monitoring circuit like AirGradient (who post on HN). There are consumer particle counters (0.5 micron) for about $300, which have a serial port for continuous data logging.

> setup monitoring in their property, which they'd never allow

Once there's a low-cost (sub $500) continuous air quality data recording device, then 4 of those devices in different directions from the plant, along with local wind data, could show a pattern over an extended period of time. In theory, wind-borne flying objects like kites and drones could also collect data on air quality indexed by GPS location.

[1] MQ series of gas sensors: https://www.open-electronics.org/presenting-mq-sensors-low-c...
NJ Transit uses QR codes for all train tickets and it works well enough. It's not quite as seamless as a tap card but NJT has moved largely to mobile ticketing and they're in the odd position of having to scan tickets both at turnstiles and by train crew (handheld scanners); cards would be awkward in the latter case. The paper tickets used to have magstripes but once they adopted QR codes for the mobile app, the tickets lost the magstipe and gained a printed QR code.

So the central server model is practical. The user's device has to have an internet connection at some point to activate the ticket within a reasonable period before using it but the connection doesn't have to persist after that. I don't know how their handheld scanners work in the Hudson River tunnels where there is no cell service but they do, so long as the user activates their ticket before the train departs.
Meta's Ray Bans could really well be the smart glasses Apple missed making. As well Apple with it's huge privacy marketing wall it's built around itself doesn't bode well for selling smart glasses that take pics and videos. Yet, Facebook has none such marketing and of course many are going to complain about not knowing if their pic is being taken in public but in public we have no privacy. Sure creepers can use it as they currently use their phones to creep .. its just less noticeable with smart glasses. But benefits of smart glasses (just went river/creek tubing as well as easily was able to to capture friends & family enjoying the day in the creek... video-ed riding a rollercoaster last week... not having to carry around my phone to know the time/weather/etc just ask the glasses... airpods are uncomfortable to wear to listen to music & takes calls, glasses are not... obviously huge fan here but they are awesome) personally outweigh a present day argument around privacy that will fade to black in time.
Tell HN: Samsung Galaxy S22 become faster after upgrade to oneui 6.1
It's surprising that the 3yr old phone feels faster, almost new like after June patch and upgrade to oneui 6.1 when under optimized speed settings. Not only that, the battery also lasts a bit longer under similar use full day. It's only been a day, hope it stays like that. Anything changed in android 14 recently that made it possible?
In a sense, red-black and 2-3 trees are just a special case of B-trees with small nodes. Smaller B-tree nodes have (by a constant factor) more expensive searching than larger nodes; but smaller nodes are more efficient for mutating operations. And indeed, if you have an insert/delete heavy workload you can't beat something like a red-black tree.
This is in Santa Clara, probably quite close to many HN regulars https://maps.app.goo.gl/WjLPzwrGvqoivBFT9

I personally wonder if this is why I have been occasionally smelling weird chemical odors from time to time. I live about 7 miles away, so probably not, but maybe.
Because the solution to a housing shortage caused by overly restrictive zoning is urban sprawl. To support urban sprawl we have cars and long commutes. Cars create problems for other cars so we need bigger cars for crash worthiness. In response to traffic jams caused by too many cars we double down on cars. This effectively turns valuable urban land into de facto highways: 45 MPH 6-8 lane wide stroads that heavily deprioritize alternative traffic modes and safety. Don't worry citizen, we'll widen the road even if we have to bulldoze some homes that are in the way of our SUVs getting downtown 1 min faster. For a few months before more people drive.
Set a short timeout on lock acquisition, eventually it will get through or you have to tolerate a larger timeout
thank you kind soul. I just push new version of the script so it only accepts 3 likes per visit. Not ideal, but a quick fix (:
I've contacted the EPA and they said contact the county. It seems they want to see a county report before they get involved.
Martin Shkreli: "AI Will Crash Like the Dotcom Bubble in Late 1990's" [video]
Go is child's play to build (and cross-compile).

Simpler than having to worry about Python versions, let alone dependencies.
Shoving your head in the sand instead of learning from mistakes doesn’t seem very productive
I suppose you believe that the "artificial five-second delay” for Firefox was also a conspiracy ? Google already have billionaire-rich lawyers defending them - there is no need for unpaid volunteers.
A million cores won't look like a bigger Xeon or EPYC in a socket.

It'll be a combination of nascent technologies on the cusp of viability.

First, something like this will have to be manufactured with a future process node about 2-3 generations past what is currently planned. Intel has plans in place for "18A", so we're talking something like "5A" here, with upwards of 1 trillion transistors per chip. We're already over 200 billion, so this is not unreasonable.

Power draw will have to be reduced by switching materials to something like silicon-carbide instead of pure silicon.

Then this will have to use 3D stacking of some sort and packaging more like DIMMs instead of a single central CPU. So dozens of sockets per box with much weaker memory coherency guarantees. We can do 8-16 sockets with coherent memory now, and we're already moving towards multiple chiplets on a board that is itself a lot like a large chip with very high bandwidth interconnect. This can be extended further, with memory and compute interleaved.

Some further simplifications might be needed. This might end up looking like a hybrid between GPUs and CPUs. An example might be the IBM POWER server CPUs, some of which have 8 hyper-threads per physical core. Unlike POWER, getting to hundreds of kilocores or one megacore with general-purpose compute might require full-featured but simple cores.

Imagine 1024 compute chiplets, each with 64 GB of local memory layered on top. Each chiplet has 32 simple cores, and each core has 8 hyper threads. This would be a server with 64 TB of memory and 256K vCPUs. A single big motherboard with 32 DIMM-style sockets each holding a compute board with 32 chiplets on it would be about the same size as a normal server.
Sorry, you're right, I was using mobile at the time of the reply and thought that was the VS (non code) extension. I'll give it a try.
It's possible to play both sides of the same coin. The pressure is 10x greater on Apple because in many ways, they're 10x larger than their competitors. They should be able to make the right bureaucratic calls, if not then why trust them with anything?

A company like John Deere can lead the industry in fuel efficiency while also destroying the environment with an anti-consumer artificial depreciation policy. The idea that Apple systematically destroying the environment is at-odds with their pro-green marketing is a fallacy. They can (and do) make decisions that harm the environment that they refuse to justify. When your business makes a mistake and nobody is willing to respond or fix it, that's a sign that your bureaucratic body has become a corpse.
The likely outcome of the looming SCOTUS case regarding quasi legislation might make this meaningless.
> The only car that's safe for pedestrians is the one that isn't moving

Funnily enough, my first major bike accident as a kid involved me running into a parked pickup truck and ended up with a tooth going through my lip. Definitely my fault and not the truck's for just sitting there. But I thought it humorous that there are indeed people injured by non-moving vehicles.
Hallucination implies a failure of an otherwise sound mind. What current LLMs do is better described as bullshitting. As the bullshitting improves, it happens to be correct a greater and greater percentage of the time
And this kind of beautiful insanity is why you're one of my favorite developers of this era.

Also,

> I'm already putting the ARM code inside all my binaries.

Wait, I thought CPU architecture was the one limitation that did affect APE - you mean on unix-likes APE binaries are already compatible across amd64 and aarch64?

Edit: rereading https://justine.lol/cosmo3/ it does say that, doesn't it - and ARM64 listing "Windows (non-native)" just means that one platform uses (for the next few hours-days, at least...) emulation. That's amazing:)
Joe Armstrong of Erlang fame was a big fan of tiddlywiki, and he met up with the creator to give a talk together about tiddlywiki: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Uv1UfLPK7_Q

“Joe Armstrong & Jeremy Ruston - Intertwingling the Tiddlywiki with Erlang | Code Mesh LDN 18”
FWIW, Montreal used to have mag strip paper tickets and turnstiles to match, but ever since the new paper tickets rolled out we have new svelte turnstiles with an NFC reader exclusively.

They've been trying to get contactless bank card payments going on the same turnstiles but roll-out has been bogged down by other transit agencies apparently.
Yes. Shopify, GitHub, Stripe, GitLab and more, but in large part due to Rails, not Ruby specifically (although Ruby is one of the great things about Rails).
As a counter point, in Western NC the National Forests are major tourist destinations, and many rural towns with no other industry to speak of are able to thrive because people come from all over to enjoy them. These towns are filled with businesses catering to tourists and there are plenty of jobs doing so.

Logging isn't the only way for a community to profit from a forest, conservation can do this too.
PostScript is Turing complete and your PDF reader is a PostScript interpreter. So, yeah, potentially any PDF is instructions to a general-purpose computer.
I'm pretty sure the API you'll want to detect that is IsWow64Process2.
That's smaller than Noto