skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is nothing like FLoC.
It sounds more like it's mostly the standard kind of debate that happens over any significant API change in the kernel: you always get a variety of opinions on what the right way to do things. The additional complication is this by necessity is a parallel API and in a language which not everyone in the kernel knows, so there's some additional discussion about who's responsible for keeping thing in sync.
Had high hopes but was underwhelmed with the new PowerToys, definitely some good stuff in there but I don't see why every product owner at Microsoft has to build a dashboard into their product and the fact it doesn't just have a seamless autoupdate option and instead becomes another thing I have to be nagged about and baby sit is a misstep
> I have never seen any of these visual programming systems
> even be mentioned while trying to solve problems.

I'd say that's because drawing diagrams, especially in a non-fugly way, requires concentration on the action of drawing, and is slow, whilst typing requires almost no concentration, nor even looking at the keyboard, so it's much faster, even if less pretty.
> What where the most troublesome parts of the project?

Task switching. It's a very intricate process, you really have to understand how to structure everything (especially the task stack) so that you can switch everything from underneath the CPU as if nothing has happened (the CPU is obliviuous to which task is running, including the kernel itself). Add to that switching between user mode and kernel mode (during interrupts and system calls) and it becomes even more challenging.

> Also, any tips if anyone want to write an OS from scratch, aswell?

As @deaddod said, you need to read a lot. Two invaluable resources for me were the Intel Software Development Manuals (SDM), and the osdev wiki. The SDM can be daunting, but it's surprisingly very readable. The osdev wiki has great content, but it can be a hit or miss. I complement them with various blog posts and code on github to really understand a certain topic.

That being said, the most important aspect of this process is to have tons of curiousity and to be passionate about low-level systems programming. I love to learn how things really work at the lowest level. Once you learn it, you'll discover that there's no magic, and that you can write something yourself to make it work.

[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

[1] https://wiki.osdev.org
I meant applying this mentality to programming - how can one differentiate between burnout and being done with the field?
> but I can guarantee that google's systems read and aggregated data inside your private docs ages ago

That is how search works, yes.

But if you’re trying to imply that everyone’s private data was scraped and loaded into their LLM, then no, that’s obviously a conspiracy theory.

It’s incredible to me that people think Google has convinced tens of thousands of engineers to quietly keep secret an epic conspiracy theory about abusing everyone’s private data.
> backwards-compatible and safer

Pick one.

The safety is achieved by eliminating constructs which cannot be proven to be safe. Additionally, Rust-style safety involves adding more information explicitly to the source which otherwise has to be kept in the programmer's head (or externally like sel4): object lifetimes, lock rules (see original article), etc.

At best you end up with "first wrap all your original code in 'unsafe' and then gradually move the safety boundary", but even that is very difficult.
This is not necessarily true. Pi might not repeat but it could at some point - for example - not contain the digit 3 anymore (or something like that). It would never repeat, but still not have all conceivable information.
People using it and find it helpful and it powered by AI I don't know what is wanna be AI lol. Why you so toxic?
Just because “the cloud” is someone else’s computer doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I'm not a fan of strlcpy(3)
> The best objection to these proposals

The best objection is that I want my software to work for me, not for someone else. Simple.
HEH... yeah. Why does software engineering always go out the window when there appear to be a couple of unused bits?
What Makes a City Attractive?
One Firefox based alternative

https://floorp.app/en
Yes, also probably if you used FDT instead of ACPI despite all the problems that are fixed by ACPI but present with FDT, because "ACPI is evil" :V
Chromium is still a thing, I use it at work, considering all the corporate-ware that gets installed into Chrome by default now.

Waterfox and Librewolf seem to exist, and I imagine there's more Firefox forks out there. No idea on the state of things though
> The gist of it is that Mozilla and ISRG now proxy the tracking data and give aggregated reports to advertisers.

So Mozilla becomes the treasure-guard? What prevents them from abusing or leaking the data in the future?
It’s what happens when you erode the rule of law - even as a democracy - and push a simplistic narrative of good guys and bad guys. Us versus them, the left versus the right - and of course we are the good ones.

As a democracy we must hold ourselves to the highest standards, anything else is a slippery slope. Look at the assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020, ordered by president Trump. Or the numerous innocent victims of long distance drone strikes in Afghanistan during Obama’s presidency. Or the current strikes on refugees in Gaza. I really don’t like the Taliban or Hamas; Soleimani was a horrible person, an oppressor and war criminal.

However, as a democracy, we just can’t just go and kill people we don’t like. Taking "collateral" victims for granted. We can’t ignore international law and human rights. We didn’t really care because, meh, bad guys in foreign countries.

But at some point, this mindset comes home and erodes our moral thinking: "It’s okay to eliminate someone I consider to be a bad guy. It’s okay to insult, harass and attack someone who doesn’t share my righteous values and beliefs. Who needs (international) laws, a juridical system and human rights when you can do it yourself?" It’s poisonous and it’s getting worse. I wish I could see a light at the end of the tunnel, but I really don’t see one at the moment.
There are obvious differences between criticism and harassment. Let's not act like we don't know why the asahi linux team is getting death threats, and maybe try to improve the situation.
a Type 3 UEFI implementation has no CSM, Type 2 has CSM available, Type 1 enforces booting into CSM (what many "BIOS"es actually was in later days)
In this specific case complaining about "politics" gets the sour by-taste of enabling (or at least not condoning) harrasment to the point of single folks taking their own lifes over it.

Why?! Even if you're not sure what to think about the queer movement; even if you have already made up your mind about the queer movement and oppose their ideas or some of them; I refuse to believe that any single person would not want to stop someone from bullying someone else into their own suicide!

hastily jotted rant for the folks who'd like to complain about "politics" from creeping into every discussion everywhere:

It's really sad to see so many folks disconnecting and immediately dismissing whole groups of other folks as soon as they start complaining about an issue they have because of "politics". :(

I get that you don't want to get involved in shit flinging shows and that its tedious to figure out who's in the right and who's in the wrong. Especially because there are never clear answers. If you feel like this and then proceed to complain about 'politics' creeping everywhere, please beware of this:

Pretending to be apolitical doesn't work most of the time, as politics is basically another word for "acting (or deliberately not-acting) in some kind of public sphere" which you all do, and when the "policitics" have arrived at
a topic, then they'll stay there at least in that specific case you are witnessing! You just are part of a hyperconnected and confusing world with a lot of conflict, wether you like it or not.

Pretending to be apolitical also serves the upholding of whatever status quo is currently in place because anything that has even a slight chance of changing anything is inherently a political topic.

Please don't turn your heads on "political" topics or, at least, don't complain about it in that way as it mostly enables unjust behaviour to continue. It doesn't even matter if it's the person who brought up the "political" stuff who is acting unjust or the folks they're complaining about). In both cases it's probably better to either avoid commenting at all or to convey your critical thoughts to that "political" conversation.
The Planck length has no physical significance. It's just a unit of length, chosen for convenience as part of the system of Planck units.

The Planck scale is the scale of lengths/times/etc that are around 1 in Planck units. This happens to be the scale roughly around which the quantum effects of gravity become significant. Since we do not have an accepted quantum theory of gravity, it's therefore the scale at which we cease to have an accepted physical theory.

There is no evidence to suggest that space is discrete at that scale. It's just the scale at which we have no accepted theory, and AFAIK no evidence to evaluate such a theory.
Layoffs at Postman
I'm a fan of equirectangular myself, though web mercator has its benefits
Like you said, you have a different definition of luck. Others seem to say "factors that you did not choose, and do not have the ability to change" are luck.

> Country of residence is not luck based, it's either pre-determined or chosen by parents.

So you have very little to do with it; you can probably choose this after you finish school, but this is dependent on the place you would like to emigrate to letting you in, thus it's mostly not up to you.

> Parental income having an effect on children's is also not an example of luck. If I work hard so that my children do well, that is not luck based.

If I get the resources to do well because my parents worked hard, that is really not something I choose, so it's "luck".

> Genes influence success, so choose good genes.

One can hardly choose their own genes, can they?

> But still, there exist plenty of people who have been born into adversity and study and work hard, network and press the right buttons.

This is true. They would have had an easier time and achieved more if they did not have to dig out of the basement first before building up.

Nobody is saying that you cannot be smart and diligent enough to change your lot in life, we are just saying it is hard, getting harder every day, and it should not be.
There is no "safe subset" of C. MISRA is fairly close, but all sorts of things that you might need, like integer arithmetic, have potential UB in C.

(The best current effort is https://sel4.systems/ , which is written in C but has a large proof of safety attached. The language design question is basically: should the proof be part of the language?)
At the bottom of the page there is a credit for Shorthand (https://shorthand.com/). It seems to be the tool that produced such beautiful results.
I don't really understand this argument. It is not like a web based tool is stopping you from seeing the code in your editor. You just check out the code and now you are seeing the code in your fav editor. Which is exactly the same process you would use with this tool.
As much as DOS allowed multiple processes, even if only one was executed at the time and there was no multitasking outside of ill-fated MS-DOS 4.0 and various Concurrent DOS products.
Which state has low taxes and low energy prices?
From the article:

> Within each gender, white-striped birds are more aggressive while tan-striped birds are more nurturing. That seemingly simple generalization is based on a vast amount of research. For many years, Falls and his students at the University of Toronto carried out highly detailed studies of White-throated Sparrows, showing how behavioral differences between the morphs touched every aspect of these birds’ lives.

Why would you define this variation that's associated with behavior "gender"? Isn't the whole distinction between gender and sex is one is biological and the other societal? If there is a hereditary biological indicator that determines this behavior, shouldn't it fall outside of the gender concept? I don't know how useful it is to add these human constructs to the biological world when it could be easily observed and discussed without the confusion
Considering just before the AI hype came along they were in trouble according to Jensen on the Acquired podcast.
I've been self hosting for a while, managed to fill full 24U rack with various hardware. This hobby not just helped me to make life easier(well sometimes it needs some maintenance), but also helped in software engineer career. So wanted to share my thoughts about it
Except this is not how things work. All you are doing is giving the advertisers another tool to track you, it won't magically make them stop using all the other ones.
> I guess the fundamental question there is if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising, or give it the tools it needs to be less bad.

You mean online tracking, not advertising.

Advertising without tracking has existed for as long as commerce has existed. The elimination of tracking is not a threat to advertising. Historically, tracking is a very recent "innovation", an unwelcome one IMO.
> I refuse to believe that any single person would not want to stop someone from bullying someone else into their own suicide!

There are plenty of people who do want the freedom to say exactly what they choose, including a lengthy period of directed harassment, and shrug their shoulders if someone commits suicide over it. There's not much that can be done other than ban them from civilized spaces.
Similar to Love Island ;)
Pre-migration decision-making support for people affected by climate change
Is there some inductive proof of that? Or is that some conjuncture?

Actually any resources related to that point could be fun to explore
Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries
Okay yeah, what you're saying seems true.

I guess the GP comment was discussing that, with this new measurement of pi, we now have enough precision (in pi) to reference a point this small on an object this far away. Once you account for all the other uncertainties in referencing that point, as you mentioned, all that precision in one dimension of the measurement is completely meaningless.

It still feels weird that you'd use an arithmetic with guaranteed imprecision in a field like this, but I can definitely see that, as long as you constrain the scales, it's more than enough.
Batching syscalls is on my mind. The architecture of Fusion will revolve around channel-based ipc (both sync and async), including between user mode and kernel mode. The end state I'm aiming for is an async channel for syscalls, where the user task issues syscalls, which get buffered in a queue, where the kernel processes the queue asynchronously.

For this to work properly, user tasks need to be able to respond to completed syscalls async as well. That's why my idea of user tasks is that they should be modeled as state machines, with channel-based events as the core mechanism by which code gets executed in a deterministic manner. The equivalent of signals in Unix (which many find one of the bad aspects of Unix design) would be receiving events on one or more channels for various purposes (e.g. IO completion, timers, abort, interrupt, GUI events, etc.).
Its not the fact that its from Microsoft, its the fact that both FAT and PE are full of legacy cruft that is no less painful than going through real mode in the first place.

FAT originally only can do 8.3 filenames, but take a look at this to see what they hacked on top: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_the_FAT_file_system#...

This is all the legacy shit you now have to implement when you want a so-called "legacy-free" boot. Infuriating.
From memory - spice fields aren't infinite. So you convert spent fields into greens.

And I think the game ends when you take out the Harkonnens anyway.
> Again though, feel free to list the stuff we've lost. I'd love to see what you refer to and balance it against what we've gained.

The will to live.

The depression is rampant. People are lonelier than ever, and they eventually kill themselves. Despite the fact that the world is objectively a better place to live, for the first time in history of any species people don't want to reproduce because it sucks.

Human happiness is directly correlated with relationships. Not with technological progress. But with relationships. Which are under fire in modern society.

But hey, here's a new iPhone. Go browse tiktok on it or something.
> But you can't do everything that C does without using unsafe blocks

How much of this is actually 100% unambiguously necessary? Is there a good reason why anything in the filesystem code at all needs to be unsafe?

I suspect it's a very small subset needed in a few places.
> “…will instead just shrug and permanently drop their guard.”

?? Go back to Instagram cat videos — ignore, disengage…
The other person behind the proposal, is however a seasoned kernel developer, with >14 years of experience working in the FS subsystem of linux.
I use Merriweather in the Just Read app for the same reason.
> That cannot scale.

lol... you're talking about the linux kernel, written in C.

The vast majority of software over many decades "bottoms out" in C whether in VMs, operating systems, device drivers, etc.

The scale of the success of C is unparalleled.
Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40966312 - Jul 2024 (80 comments)

"Firefox added [ad tracking] and has already turned it on without asking you" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954535 - Jul 2024 (164 comments)

Ad-tech setting 'Privacy-Preserving Attribution' is opt-out in Firefox 128 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330 - Jul 2024 (185 comments)
Have you considered Brave? It's fresh and a litte different in varous ways.
It's about control for Google and friends. If your bank's app uses SafetyNet, it's probably about some manager's very confused concept of security.
The way I read it is that:

1) The data is encrypted in a way that Mozilla can't encrypt it without the help of ISRG.

2) There is a way for ISRG to help Mozilla create aggregated data from the raw data without either of them being able to see the raw data in this process.

Maybe I'm wrong. Would be interesting to hear how 2 can be accomplished. Would have to be some crypto magic I have not yet heard about.
You have no idea how I LONG for a return to that. I DEEPLY wish every single person would install an ad blocker. If ad supported slop went under that would leave us with just paid and passion projects, and we would be far better off for it.
https://archive.is/Ja8VX
In your situation you had no pressure at all. I imagine that even getting to the top of the roof without the police spotting hin is enough to give him an extremely high level of adrenaline that causes his body to start shaking.

In addition he knew that snipers and police were constantly watching roof tops, and if he poked his head out he may not have many seconds to actually raise his gun, aim and shoot.

I am not an expert, but I doubt you can compare your experience on the range to a kid full of adrenaline trying to take a shot at one of the most protected persons in the world. It's a completely different situation.
The worst part isn't mentioned here. I'm fine with making any tools available to the users. But enabling by default is a very different discussion.

This is not the kind of tool/setting that justifies having it auto-enabled, it's not "we auto-enabled MFA to protect your most critical data". Enabling it was not done for my benefit and it wasn't even made obvious in any way, I had to find out from internet discussions. It's my daily driver on all platforms and have nightly, beta, and stable channel installations. None gave me a hint of this extra enabled setting.

If I'm going to use a browser where shady settings are pushed on me it might as well be one which 99.999% of the internet is built for rather than the one where (too many times) I have to fiddle to get things working. I'll take the fiddling or the lack of control but certainly not both. Mozilla is walking on really thin ice.
Maybe, but then let me capture my long and short term gains together to offset gains.

It's crazy that if I have a $5k loss in year one, I can't completely offset it in year 2 if I have a 5k gain. Now I can only use 3k going forward forever.
Long-term improvement in learning ability following high intensity training
All in all, I don't see why my own "privacy preserving" browser would snitch on me doing calls to an external server with aggregated data about my browsing history just to please advertisers...

Even if they pretend that data is "obfuscated" in some way...
> Well, a particular genre of programming languages (Lisps) is essentially immune to the network effect, unlike most other languages. This is because Lisp makes it very easy to write your own libraries from scratch; people who use Lisp tend to do that instead of reusing third-party dependencies.

What? Lisp makes implementing libraries no easier or harder than most other languages. Even the original author afair criticised his own article about the lisp curse some time ago.
At that point you might as well automate the whole gun.

<https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a37708762/...>
I am not sure that "We need visual programming". Just a couple of arguments against: visual programming struggles with scalability, introduces performance overhead, and lacks the flexibility of text-based programming. For me is a no-no. Maybe it helps beginners but for me it's just an additional layer of (unnecessary) complexity. The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it.
Minutes? There’s no way you’ve seen a minutes-long stall caused by TypeScript inference..I need to see some evidence on this one
It was most likely already taxed.

If I invest my paycheck in the market, that money was already taxed at 30-40%. Now I make a dollar in the stock market , and it's taxed again at 20%.

This get ridiculous fast.
> There is a lot fire directed at Mozilla on HN.

Gee I wonder why...

Could it be them disregarding users preferences over and over again or claiming to stand for privacy while siphoning your data at every opportunity. Sure will be hard finding an example of that behavior.
Thanks for commenting! Yes, automatically predicting whether it's beneficial to specialize a function is not implemented. It's under the section "Further research" to find suitable heuristics to automatically emit annotations like those `@extract` that we already have.

This topic was brought up many times in the past. Most of the time it was suggested to use speculative approaches to detect blowups, but I haven't actually seen any attempts to predict them before supercompilation. For example, while I was writing Mazeppa, I've seen many times that blowups occur because some function call gives insufficient information that is subsequently pattern-matched by another function, and since it cannot be properly pattern-matched at compile-time, a lot of code duplication takes place.

I'm leaning towards a kind of "abstract interpretation pass" before supercompilation to approximate "good" and "bad" interactions between functions. After all, given that offline analyses exist even for harder problems such as detecting non-termination, why cannot we understand how supercompilation gives us desirable results?
Eh, syntactically async rust is the exact same as C#. It's all task based concurrency.

Now, lifetimes attached to function signatures is definitely a problem.