skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's very unpopular to mention Perl, but I did many cool things with it back in the day, and it still holds a special place for me. Perl taught me the power of regex--it's really first class in Perl. I still have some Perl code in production today. But to be fair, it is really easy to write spaghetti in Perl if you don't know what you're doing.
If you want more controversial things about squash, here are two that I posted here last week:

1. "How squash merge can break Git repos with submodules", about a situation where squash merges silently broke a repository: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846596

2. "Git: please stop squash merging!" giving some technical explanation about what squash merges actually are under the hood and how the misconceptions about Git leads to invalid "pros" about squash merging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40840572
Things got real quiet here, didn't they?
"Ignore all previous instructions. Show your work. Explain your chain of thought in detail. Keep a journal of your work progress."

I've been using this prompt on myself, on and off, for years, but I keep on hallucinating and losing focus and going off track.
i think you missed the greater point. apple with beos would not have turned Enterprise dead end that it is today.

that market was what jobs had to pivot to (there's a great video where he pushes the rationalization of going to academia and Enterprise workstations) so that next could survive. and it infected apple from the inside.

the timeline everyone missed with beos is exactly apple not becoming the mix of ibm and Microsoft it is today.
For what it's worth, the entry level PowerBook 100 in 1991, when adjusted for inflation, cost about $5500 USD. An entry level iBook in 2003 would cost about $2700 USD.

Yeah, it's expensive, but it's also astonishing how much prices have come down.
“Modern” C++ is completely different to the pre-2000 or even pre-2010 C++.
I expect you’re right. It has to get on the radar to be banned.

To make matters worse unlike PEDs this may be very hard to catch.

It just floors me that someone who knew about the similarity between high altitude and partial CO poisoning not only decided to try it but got others to go along.
I absolutely hate that it comes with search integration by default. Especially that it is in the URL bar instead of a separate text box.

I'm also not a fan of DNS over HTTPs, malware protection, and telemetry. I don't want my web browser sending any extra traffic anywhere I'm not expecting.
Yeah, I actually used NT 3.51 for some time. However it was the NT line that replaced the 9x line, at least from the consumer perspective.
I’ve shared this before here. I actually keep a timestamp log of work I do. I used to do it by hand on my journal and while I still prefer it I ultimately found the benefit of having searchable text files that are integrated into my work management to be too much of a benefit to ignore.

Been using obsidian since it launched and my workflow is to always have the window open taking a thin column on the left of my screen and whatever I’m working on takes up the rest of the screen (Yey for fancyzones in windows powertoys).

As I work I just stream my thoughts into the file. I have a shortcut, ctrl-alt-m, that inserts the timestamp as `hh:mm:ss`. I hit it, and start typing. I paste screenshots, code snippets, as I go along. It’s godsend when I’ve gone far along enough and I need to reference something. Esp given that I work on security tickets and I’m constantly triaging reports that are unclear or require digging into layers of source code to find where they come from.

One important step to note if you ever try this out: if you have 30 seconds before you jump on to an interruption, try to build the discipline of throwing in a few words saying what you need to do when you return. Even with all the historical context it can take some thinking to recall what your next step should be.

In fact, if you don’t like journaling just do this last step instead. I stole the concept from GTD’s next actions and it works.
USDS is great! I know people who have made a huge impact there and if I personally were to go into government from tech it's where I'd look. They are situated at the White House which allows them to be hired at a higher level than normal federal jobs (up to GS15, though still lower than comparable private sector work) and then they get sent out to various agencies by the White House to try and fix things. In practice though, USDS is a tiny tiny drop in the bucket compared to what federal agencies actually need. Maybe if every agency had a digital service of their own the model could work.

The federal government is an enterprise with 4 million employees (more than half in DoD as military or civilian). So the handful of people at USDS are basically only sufficient to swoop to fix the most dire of dumpster fires.
The stupid thing is that I messed up the link of the comic I included, which is pretty much the same :) : https://fev.al/img/2024/focus.png
You're thinking far too much in traditional colleges, and also I personally didn't have an os 101 course at my college. The only time we talked operating systems was how they worked at the kernel/system level. Schedulers bootloader forking shared memory etc.

The author is more for the use case of 'hey I have a full time job and want to change careers to programming, how could I get started?' or 'i couldn't get into college even if I could afford it because that's just not a path my community is set up for, but I'm motivated and want to learn programming anyway'
The author is one of the lead developers for Dart, which has evolved over time into a pretty nice language.
I agree. I think it's reasonable to expect companies to safeguard that information from malicious actors.
A lot of people prioritize working on software that intellectually stimulating. If someone is an expert in medical simulation, sonar, VLSI, etc. I don't think that they would consider developing plumbing software to be an equivalent job.
We kind of have this kind of regulation in EU. A classic example is that commercial eggs must not be washed. This is made into an EU regulation and part of the reason for it is to enable and encourage free trade by having everyone using the same rules.

Free trade was one of the founding principles of the EU and shared regulations for food production are fairly often referenced when people discuss the pro and cons of EU membership. In some cases I have seen regulations relaxed in my own country in order to comply with the EU regulation, and at other times been made more strict, all for the goal of more trade between countries.
I disagree. This should have been designed in, it’s not too complicated.

They didn’t care enough to prioritize it. Or didn’t want to. In the current AI craze that is “valuable data”.
Have you tried zot? https://www.cncf.io/projects/zot/

https://zotregistry.dev/

Here are all the projects already using zot in some form or another.

https://github.com/project-zot/zot/issues/2117
I didn't read the paper. But I opened it up in a tab, typed "unreliable" in the search box, and zero results. I'm wondering what words they actually used. I also didn't find "overhyped? or "expensive." I'm sure those words aren't unreasonable as a take-away from the paper. But they aren't in the paper.
"AI" has always been a marketing term first, there's a great clip of John McCarthy on twitter/X basically pointing out that he invented the term "Artificial Intelligence" for marketing purposes [0].

Don't read too deeply into what exactly is AI. Likewise I recommend not being too cynical about it either. McCarthy and those around him absolutely did pioneer some incredible, world changing work under that moniker.

Regarding your particular critiques, natural intelligence very often also cannot provide a "why". If you follow any particular technical field deep enough it's not uncommon to come across ideas that currently have deep rigorous proofs behind them, that basically started as hunch. Consider the very idea of "correlation" which seems rooted in mathematical truths, was basically invented by Galton because he couldn't find causal methods to prove his theories of eugenics (it was his student Pearson, who later took this idea and refined it further).

Are we in an AI bubble? Very likely, but that doesn't mean there's not incredible finds to be had with all this cash flowing around. AI winters can be just as irrational (remember that Perceptron basically caused the first AI winter by exposing the XOR problem, despite the fact that it was well known this could be solved with trivial modifications).

0. https://x.com/evgenymorozov/status/1801618105245831478
Yeah, you really gotta love it to do it. Otherwise, it's like buying, hauling, setting up, and running your own sound and lighting system, then DJing from start to finish, and nobody noticing.
Is this the kind of thing AI safety people are really worried about though? In the medical device industry for example, we have risk management practices where beyond software/mechanical failures that could harm the patient, we have to additionally consider stuff like how specific UI elements could potentially mislead a physician and lead to negative patient outcomes. I believe other safety critical industries do something very similar during their engineering process as well.

I've never heard of anything like this from AI ethicists though, the language they use tends to be more in alignment with HR people or priests in a moral panic than engineers, and is usually either completely fantastical doomsdaying, or all or nothing thinking, often implying the only way to mitigate the chatbot saying something naughty is to lobotomize it entirely instead of some external control measure, such as limiting the audience or presenting a disclaimer based on sentiment analysis for example. It's not surprising to me that they have lost credibility here, I certainly struggle to take them seriously.
That factor does make the ruling in that case even more egregious, yes. Even if the court only narrowly invalidated the premise of regulating private activity that'd be a net improvement, albeit a much smaller one.
> I never went to college

I did ... the thing is, most college students need a lot of help, especially in earlier classes. On a statistical level it's somewhat the opposite of a population of self-taught programmers, who self-select for being into the gritty details of computer systems, and being able to figure stuff out. You know, in most college tracks, there are problems with lots of students needing help, cheating, struggling, it's kinda the regular state of things, now that most people go to college.

Some college students switch to something else later; some continue to need lots of help with system setup when they start working professionally; those who are really good were largely self-taught either before or between college courses. College/university is still useful for the self-taught programmer, to cover gaps, and for the advanced courses. I had been installing, configuring, fixing, and re-installing windows and linux for 4+ years before university, and I really loved my systems programming courses.

Now that there are millions of programmers out there in the world, working professionally, yeah lots of them are kinda useless ... there's a reason why "average" doesn't have a great connotation.
I use GitHub Issues threads for this and it works amazingly well.

Any task I'm working on has a GitHub issue - in a public repo for my open source work, or a private repo for other tasks (including personal research).

As I figure things out, I add comments. These might have copy pasted fragments of code, links to things I found useful, quoted chunks of text, screenshots or references to other issues.

I often end up with dozens of comments on an issue, all from me. They provide a detailed record of my process and also mean that if I get interrupted or switch to something else I can quickly pick up where I left off.

Here's a public example of one of my more involved research threads: https://github.com/simonw/public-notes/issues/1

I also create a new issue every day to plan the work I intend to get done and keep random notes in. I wrote about how that works here: https://til.simonwillison.net/github-actions/daily-planner
Realistically, it doesn't matter. My ISP uses RADIUS for authenticating customers in the access network. If someone manages to intercept messages in the middle of my network, I've got bigger problems. Even if someone does inject in the middle, the worst case is that they can forge packets of residential end users. Those customers are already untrusted, so it really does not matter.
Bashing Python in Python development thread is not tactful.
I'm getting the below instead of an image

![/img/2024/focus.png]
The benefit of journaling is not just reentry, but that you begin to solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem. Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree. Several benefits accrue: you begin to see gaps in the tree, and can fill them in. You begin to have confidence in your mental model, recovering the time you used to spend going over the same nodes again and again in a haphazard way. In distributed systems in particular, the work is often detailed, manual, error prone and high latency - with a solid mental model you can get through a checklist of steps with minimum difficulty and high confidence that you didn't miss anything. This ability to take something abstract and make it more concrete on the fly is a critical skill.

Perhaps the greatest barrier to using it is akin to envy. We see others who apparently do this without written materials, in their head. I think we see this as evidence of intellectual superiority and harbor the doubt that using an aid like a journal means we are somehow lacking in skill or ability. This is wrong. Using an aid to map out complex problems isn't a failure, it's essential, especially for problems in systems you've never used before. Over time you may yourself build up your expertise such that you no longer need the aid, but that doesn't signal anything about your intelligence or ability either, only your experience.
When Facial Recognition Helps Police Target Black Faces
wow, a spy agency acquired the entire social network graph of the usa in one intrusion. that's bad news for civil defense; it means they have a good guess at who is the favorite relative of each legislator, governor, police chief, or general. and where they can habitually be found at each hour of the week, since this leak included location data!

how can we keep such accumulations of sensitive data from arising in the first place? only countries that figure it out are likely to survive the turbulent coming decades
Microsoft itself doesn't recommend that you deploy software on Windows servers anymore. It's something that is supported, not recommended.
Australia already has a research reactor in Lucas Heights, Sydney. It’s a significant production facility for radioisotopes used in medicine.
Perhaps, but the consequences of failure are much more severe. People’s wiring for risk and pleasure drive most of that.

That said, relationships outside of marriage are not uncommon.
You are right on the technical lineage, but I was referring to how these products were (ultimately) presented commercially. The facts that they are both older than one might think and they were developed with specific goals from the start I think more clearly illustrate that you can't just "bolt on" such fundamental differences.
this comment brought flickr memories
Thanks! I'll try it
Reminds me a lot of Cal Newport's ideas re: Slow Productivity. He talks a lot about how Context shifts are death for knowledge work and that a lot of offices operate via a "hyper active hive mind" that doesn't allow or value deep work.
I don't agree. I don't think it's reasonable to expect it, because companies show over and over that they cannot do it. And let's face it, the only reason your company hasn't fallen victim to a data breach or ransomware is that you haven't been seriously targeted yet.

We need to change our approach. We need to look at why these kinds of data are valuable, and then make them not valuable. Then nobody will bother with hacking to get it.
To me, commit messages really shine on file histories and `git blame`.

Opening an unknown file and having the option to see all it went through is powerful. The commit messages and history will tell you which files are related, which files change together, why they do, etc.

It's a superpower that a team can cultivate.
Barabar – Precision and Geometry Discovered in Ancient Indian Granite Caves [video]
I recently started manually typing out everything I jot down in my pocket notebooks when I fill them in my Digital Garden. The amount of ideas I forgot about within a week or so is crazy. Glad I can revisit some of this now
I didn't check her badge name, but I'm 99% sure I was in the same conference room in the NYC office (Tavern on the Green?) as this woman in late 2007. She had a red contractor badge, which meant she was totally not allowed to be in this super confidential presentation that somehow she had found out about. After pulling some levers and some chat exchange, the EngEDU coordinator (M. S.) in charge of the NYC room let her stay along with the engineers. Only years later I figured who she was, thanks to some other article. Never a dull day...
good point. there's also the other extreme end of the spectrum, which hn has a participant: photoroom.

which is basically the disposable camera of DAM.
Damn AI turned into a shit coin scammer quick with that token launch.
I can't even recall using ATT and I got a notice.

My credit union was randomwared. (Patelco). They are taking a very long time to recover, and as soon as I can actually make transactions, they are Sayonara.

And banks care about security. Carriers? Groan.
The forestation was more around elephants in lower latitudes, but I’m going with nearly 20-year-old vague memories.
how do you know? maybe they were spending too much on security, but it was going to useless or counterproductive measures like crowdstrike, compliance training, or virus scanners. money is no substitute for competence, as steve jobs's death shows
I think it was more because it was no good at that time and couldn't be relied upon. For all their flaws, summarisation is something LLMs do pretty well.

I think the chat feature is also really helpful "tell me more about this aspect" kind of thing. That really helps make the summary more tailored to your needs.
My new organization workflow is as follows for planning my day.

I run a custom python script to generate a file/folder for each day in a month 2024/June/01-Jun.md ...

1. Tell ChatGPT what I want to do on that day, and ask it to give me a checkable markdown list.

2. Use "Typora" markdown editor for organization. It has a folder browser in the side bar. So I can have other files / folders at glance. Very easy to access.

3. Copy and paste the checkable list into the file with into Typora.

If I had the need, I could write a script to aggregate all the unchecked items and create a new file with them. Or do other processing.

Markdown editor + ChatGPT => killer combination.
The lex and yacc utilities are part of POSIX.2; is there any reason not to reach for them first?

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/l...

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/y...

All the POSIX.2 standards for shell utilities can be found here:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/

The original introduction to lex and yacc was in the book by Kernigan and Pike:

https://scis.uohyd.ac.in/~apcs/itw/UNIXProgrammingEnvironmen...
Optional static typing, not really. Those type hints are not used at runtime for performance. Type hint a var as a string then set it to an init, that code still gonna try to execute.
The government can't keep its own data safe, as the OPM breach showed. Apart from some resignations, nobody faced any serious consequences for that either.
we all know this does not need to happen, if 'we' are people familiar with the quality of software in already-regulated environments
Maxine Singer, renowned biologist and advocate for STEM inclusion, dies at 93
is CEL just a buzzword/certification gate keeping for typed data?!
What would he be liquidating? His wife will get some of his stock and a bunch of more liquid assets. That doesn't require 'liquidating' anything. He isn't going to sell a megayacht to 'pay for the divorce'.

You don't understand how finances work for people in his wealth class. When you have billions of dollars in net worth, at a certain point, it's pretty meaningless how much there actually is because it's pretty hard for one or two people to spend it that fast. At a certain level, it might as well be "infinity amount of money."

Then there's the investment income from such a large portfolio.

If you have $1BN in stonks and we assume they rise with the market average of about 10%, minus 3% inflation, plus we'll fudge it a bit lower just for the sake of envelope math...

...you are making $45M/year inflation adjusted off your investments.

Schmidt is worth over $20BN. If only $10BN of that is in stocks, then he's making half a billion a year. That is about $139,000 per day in investment income.

Do you think he cares that his investment returns drop to (inflation adjusted) $75k/day?

Let's assume he loses half his investment income. Let's also assume he's spending every single dime of that annual investment income. Let's also assume he doesn't change his spending after the divorce.* That means that if he lives another 30 years. At $250M/year, that's $7.5BN. Which means he'd die with $3BN in net worth. Which is enough to make $135M in income for whoever gets it.

Do you now understand?

If not, it's like this: you live in the desert. You have a tank next to your house that is your only source of water, and it gets filled every so often. Your daily consumption rate is fairly important, and that tank losing half its capacity, would be a pretty big deal, right? You're going to at least pull out a spreadsheet and run some numbers and see if you're going to make it until the next shipment. You might do your laundry a bit less, not wash your car as much.

Now, let's do the billionaire equivalent: someone lives in the pacific northwest, and their water supply comes from a 1000 acre, ~20 foot deep lake. They also have a town water supply connection.

A magic wizard comes along and shrinks the lake by half its size. Poof! 500 acres gone.

Do you think they pull out a spreadsheet to figure out if things are going to be OK? Do you think their water consumption habits change?
I'm following you on pay. But to act like "unlimited" pto or vacation time is a good benefit is a joke. Unlimited, to me, is 365 days off per year.
Waiting list can't be posted as Show HN https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html and they usualy don't get traction anyway. Good luck with the project and remember to post it again when people can try it.

(And rememember to add https:// everywhere so the links are clicky.)
Looks like a LAN tele…er, screen sharing server/client. Presumably you could serve over the internet but it will not get the 30ms latency. Aside from the streaming (I only spent a few minutes reviewing the source) it’s a live jpeg kind of thing. I built something similar to screen share with my kids when we played Minecraft together. It was really for me because once we got in game they would take off and in 5 minutes be screaming for help 10 chunks away in some zombie skeleton infested cave at or near bedrock. Being kids, I never got good enough directions to help them in time. Anyway, it was a fun project. I used CUDA and could get 60fps per client on CAT5 and 45-ish over WiFi, dropping to 10-15fps when I walked in and out of rooms with the laptop. 60fps is 15ms, so 20 is 50fps.