skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get constantly baffled at the amount of technical debt that goes on in civil aviation.

The fact that no one just overhauls the system with backward compatibility and sets a deadline for the migration, is just insane for me. All these specific problems are solved, and in production (in freight for instance) for more than 2 decades now. But aviation just goes on with their 70s system.
The Helical Heart [video]
- Begin transaction

- Do INSERT

- If you get a PK violation, do an UPDATE instead

- Commit

This is not safe in the default transaction mode, other transactions can delete the row between insert and update/select.

Also, as explained by the article, this has the table bloating problem
It’s not possible to expect software to be runnable forever.

We do not expect this for the desktop software (Microsoft Windows), so we cannot expect this from games. Hardware changes, Internet changes, integrations change (Steam may die on one day).

Just have “a minimum of X years” is simple and sufficient.
Yeah, this seems to match up with my observations more. Online spaces seem far less active, while real life tourist destinations and hospitality businesses are absolutely mobbed. Definitely feels like a high percentage of people are trying to 'make up for lost time' after being locked in during the pandemic.
I had assumed most of Europe is getting their gas from Norway, Algeria, and Qatar.

Do you have any numbers on US LNG sales?
I suppose I am the target of this argument, but I would not phrase my dislike of these things in this way.

I would instead say -

I dislike Haskell because when I tried this book http://web.archive.org/web/20190705205338/https://www.cs.yal... about 20 years ago I thought it had been written in an effort to impress upon the reader how smart anyone using Haskell was, at the expense of me getting anything done.

I like various forms of Jazz but I dislike a certain type of Jazz person who seems to be in to Jazz to let you know just how much better they are than you.

I don't think I've ever had anything but enjoyment and admiration for pure math and pure mathematicians.

I'm not sure I like this blog post though.
Authenticated communication between wallets and apps
In my 30s on EXACTLY ONE occasion I was chopping a bunch of peppers and then went to the bathroom to pee.

I have worn gloves each and every time since, when dealing with more than 2 or 3 peppers at habanero heat or above.
The word you’re looking for is speculators. Buffett is an investor. Ponzi participants are speculators.

Speaking of Buffett, Berkshire announced over the weekend that they’ve unloaded 50% of their Apple holdings. So, that won’t help matters this morning.
When is “soon”? Timing the market is hard if not impossible.
As an example I grew up riding horses every day, and grew to know and understand them very well. That’s not something you’ll experience in the city unless you’re very wealthy.
Pure maths is just practical research, for the knowledge we will need for technology in the year 2500.
The argument, in isolate, seems fine to me.

My problem is that it conflicts with how it is being deployed and being trusted. People trust computer systems far beyond what trust they deserve, because they are use to some critical systems being made significantly resistant and most of the others as not having any significant problems. This logic is already a threat when it applied to standard applications built where a programmer, in theory, should have understood each part, at least while building it. This logic works much worse when applied to AI, yet AI are being sold using the common faith that people have in computer systems to give it more responsibility than it can rightly claim given its error rates and the faith people have.

I think the solution is to teach people to doubt expert systems, which will greatly harm their usefulness, but trust should be earned by these systems, on a system by system basis, and they don't deserve the level of trust they currently enjoy.
PHP may have been built for the web (backend) as it was 20 years ago, but JS wasn't built for backend at all, so, if I had only the choice between PHP and Node (or one of the many Node alternatives), I would still pick PHP. Pretending that "you only need to learn JS, and hey, with Node you can also be a backend developer" has led to too many flaky backends already.
3 Degrees More: The Impending Hot Season and How Nature Can Help Us Prevent It
Take me back to the LAMP stack days, good times
In the future, we'll show students posts like this one not as an example of how bad AI was in 2024, but to explain that we once thought that using the right words, the right domain names, and the right formatting was a reasonable way to determine the authenticity of a message's source.
> 1. You will still need to learn JS, and now it may even be embedded in PHP depending on the type of app you are working with!

Yes, you will. But to me this is an irrelevance: JS has IMO very little business near the back end. I have absolutely no patience for the JS-everywhere thing.

(It is never necessary to directly embed JS in PHP; there are always choices. Sure, you might sometimes need to briefly template your JS, but that's true of all web environments; it's fundamental to the problem)

> 2. It still has horrible conventions

It does. But for example JavaScript is still riddled with bad conventions. Look at the mess that inconsistent array/object duality, inconsistent property enumeration, has wrought across the language for a whole generation of programmers

> 3. It was built for the web as it stood 20 years ago, HTML embedded in code, single server sessions, cgi servers, and minimal latency server to server communication.

So was JavaScript.

Laravel is, I think, the most sensibly-designed web framework that has ever existed. Every single other framework I have used has disappeared too far into the developers' own biases towards tier after tier of NIH decisions. Laravel doesn't have pretensions.

(I used to love Ruby on Rails but even I remember when the people who were the talk of the developer world with their brand new easy to use developer framework did not know that GETs should be idempotent)
Best similar case I can think of is the EU regulating charging cables (and mandating USB-C for a lot of devices).

It was a common consumer good with a problem that really annoyed some people so much that they made a law to "fix" it. Others said it would stifle innovation. To me how people feel about that probably says something about what chances this proposal has.

How do people feel about the USB-C mandate? Are there other similar recent examples?
Registers and ALUs are sort of already coupled like that in practice.

Longer, less wrong version: modern CPUs have forwarding networks with latches in them. Those latches store ALU results. Those results are (usually) the equivalent of the content-to-be of a specific version of a register -- and by register, I actually mean register name.

So, "registers" that are currently active get to live in the forwarding network where all the routing is and "registers" that aren't as active get to live in the register file, away from the ALUs and the forwarding network.

(And the "registers" used in machine instructions are really just register names. There's a lot renaming going on in order to keep many versions (and potential versions) of register values live at the same time to enable superscalar execution and out-of-order execution.)
I benefit from functional programming without sum types in Elixir.

You also failed to mention immutability. Immutability permits trivial concurrency without requiring mutex lock semantics. I'd call that a massive benefit, especially considering how much load a Phoenix server can handle.
Found it: https://drew.silcock.dev/rss.xml
Free Tool to Mirror Any Website Using Cloudflare Workers
If it wasn't that good for a backend it wouldn't have maintained complete domination of that market for decades, which it has. Incidentally the number of web development projects that have any objective use of async programming or fussy types is a rounding error. Perhaps your interests are pointing in another direction?
A model made a mistake.

So what. It's expected, not a bug.
Can we learn the language of cells with LLMs?
Do cells have a language? With the recent success of large language models and the vast number of curated gene pathways, we visited this fundamental question one more time. We trained a decoder-only transformer model with 120M parameters on >250,000 human pathways, and then asked the model to complete 1000 unseen pathways with 80% masking in zero-shot setting. Remarkably, this simple ready-to-use model was able to complete more than half of the pathways (660/1000) with significant overlap. Our results suggest that even relatively small transformers can capture underlying connection among genes and understand the true nature of cell language.
I think the EU governments simply have much more important things to do than to regulate what are essentially toys. People who call themselves "gamers" especially seem lack perspective to recognise that this is just a silly hobby rather than something that actually matters and urgently needs to be addressed by the government.
The paper is by Bjorn Lomborg. A July 31 WSJ opinion piece by him, "Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions: Activists’ tales of doom never pan out, but they leave us poorly informed and feed bad policy." is at https://archive.is/qeyYB.

'Today, killer heat waves are the new climate horror story. In July President Biden claimed “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.”

He is wrong by a factor of 25. While extreme heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold. Even including deaths from moderate heat, the toll comes to less than 10,000. Despite rising temperatures, age-standardized extreme-heat deaths have actually declined in the U.S. by almost 10% a decade and globally by even more, largely because the world is growing more prosperous. That allows more people to afford air-conditioners and other technology that protects them from the heat.

The petrified tone of heat-wave coverage twists policy illogically. Whether from heat or cold, the most sensible way to save people from temperature-related deaths would be to ensure access to cheap, reliable electricity. That way, it wouldn’t be only the rich who could afford to keep safe from blistering or frigid weather. Unfortunately, much of climate policy makes affordable energy all the harder to obtain.

Activists do the world a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge facts that challenge their intensely doom-ridden worldview. There is ample evidence that man-made emissions cause changes in climate, and climate economics generally finds that the costs of these effects outweigh the benefits. But the net result is nowhere near catastrophic. The costs of all the extreme policies campaigners push for are much worse. All told, politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies prevent each year.'
"Mechanistic Interpretability" for LLMs
Both latest Chrome and Firefox does really well with lots of Tabs. Spending a lot of time to optimise the Browser for Muti tabs environment all while being responsive and causes less Jank. They will freeze and unload old tabs from memory. A List of Tabs that let's you close them with a single click. And Search for Open Tabs.

Compared this to Safari. Not only does opening Tab Overview will reload most of your Tabs, meaning you will either crash your browser due to memory pressure, or you create so much paging Data you write from 100s to 1000GB to your SSD. Quite literally killing your SSD. It also does not freeze old tabs or unload tabs. The only way would be you quit Safari and reopen it often. It is also the slowest browser once you have multiple tabs opened.

These issues had been with Safari for at least 5 - 8 years and even in Safari 18 it doesn't seems to be improved.
> trusts this specless tool will be maintained forever

As per the third sentence of the readme there indeed is a spec[0]. There is also an alternative implementation in the form of rage[1], as well as numerous others listed on the awesome-age page[2].

[0]: https://github.com/C2SP/C2SP/blob/main/age.md

[1]: https://github.com/str4d/rage

[2]: https://github.com/FiloSottile/awesome-age
> fact check

That's funny, because I was using forum debates as LLM reference precisely in order to reduce errors. People usually debunk stupid articles, the discussion is often centered on fact checking. A LLM referencing a HN/reddit thread is more informed than one reading the source material.

There is a fundamental conflict of interest in press. It costs money to run a newspaper, and then you just give it away for free? No, you use it to push propaganda and generally to manipulate. Forums have become the last defense for actual readers. We trust other people will be more aligned with our interests than who wrote the article.

I trust my forum mates more than press, and LLM gives a nice veneer to the text. No wonder people attach "reddit" to searches, they want the same thing. The actual press is feeding us the real slop. LLMs are doing a service to turn threads into a nice reading format. Might become the only "press"
we trust in the future.
I had a pretty good streak, but due to hospitalised sickness I lost it by a few hours. Couldn't face picking the app back up and starting again from a zero streak.
I doubt it'll change much, but I do agree with it. If you buy something, it shouldn't be pulled out from under you.
My theory on Jazz is that it is the coffee palette cleanser for people who work too much with regular music patterns. The appeal is that it is not appealing
Exactly right. I would not call myself a PHP "proponent" because at fifty I have too little time in my life left to tell people what they should or should not choose, but I do think it is rich to see this criticism from the JS side. Everything bad about Node is bad because JS is also a "fractal of bad design".
I do not like this line of argumentation even though I think it would likely generate the result I want in this instance. You mentioned seatbelts and airbags, but that train keeps on pushing and now we have calls for mandated kill switch[1] and automatically limit car speed[2]. It is so easy to keep pushing, because who would argue against safety.

The funny thing is, I agree with you, but in a narrow scope. I am adult. I can and do make decisions that are not fun long term, but could be considered stances on issues ( Doom whatever refund after DRM update ). I am not entirely certain 13-year old demographic playing current crop of always on games have the same perspective. There is a reason we try to protect kids from predatory behavior. They tend to not know any better.

But then, it unfortunately starts being about parents not doing their jobs.

<< People shouldn't be punished for being imperfect and businesses shouldn't be able to weaponize human psychology to take advantage of people.

tldr, i agree in general, but i hesitate on specifics

[1]https://mccaul.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/mccaul-...
[2]https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/24/california-car-spee...
> Well obviously, you just write tests for the tests. :3

I had a friend whose first job out of school (many years ago) was part of a team at Intel assigned to write tests for their testing tools. When it matters enough economically, it will happen. As you can see from recent news, that is still not enough to guarantee a good result.
There used to be a lot of smug Haskell users here 10 years ago. Not sure what happened to those, you don't see it any longer as you say.
> Jazz and pure math are far from hated.

Here you go, 37 minutes of free jazz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bRTFr0ytA8

Free jazz being unusual and difficult to listen to is sort of a meme. I recommend reading the comments under the video for examples.
Nice - btw curious how much it costs to run Llama on this type of side project? I can imagine the cost goes to some reasonable amount when things like this get shared on HN. Does Fly.io give a flat price to use their inference? Curious how it works
Yes since version 1.0, it is quite good. I hope we can turn off these "AI" functionalities. I like my email chronology. I have my own filters to move emails etc... don't need or want an "AI" to do that for me.
If you look at EU laws you'll still find plenty of examples of primary legislation setting out general, high-level concepts, which are then given more specificity in delegated regulations, regulatory guidance or court decisions.
Cool idea!

It’s strange to list “Up to 10 customers, free” as “free” when it’s one of the features of a paid tier. It’s not free it’s part of what you’re paying for.
It is also funny to see a JS developer criticise the architecture of PHP arrays specifically.

It does hint that perhaps bearjaws is (lucky for them!) too young to remember the mess that incomplete implementation of array/object duality got the JS world into.
IPv6 was the worst idea ever and no one can prove me wrong.

The folks that invented it must’ve never had to deal with a mission critical task during a DNS outage, for example.
There's proof of work schemes to slow the requests. People point out these would drain mobile batteries to fast but don't mobile devices usually leak so much data they don't need to solve captchas as often anyway?
> I've worked on two MMOs as a Tech Artist and the way artists, designers, etc worked on the game was with a local only build! One of these companies actually barred WAN access from our dev machines so LAN only also worked for internal playtests! Trends to make dev builds online only are quite awful for developers in the trenches and are more about exec control than any usefulness added by such requirements.

I'm an online dev for multiplayer games, and I disagree with your take. In my experience the sheer number of bugs we've seen from "I tested it in the local only build mode so it's fine" and the impact that has on the project makes it worth _not_ supporting an offline mode. I'm not an exec, but practicing good habits during development (there's a phase where it's not worth it sure, but by the time you're on a live project...) makes actually building a game easier.

> As an example, compare Helldivers 2 and WoW. WoW is vastly more complex but Helldivers 2 uses more modern cloud "tech" that didn't exist 20 years ago. Both had issues keeping up with player demand on launch. So what's the point of this newfangled tech?

https://x.com/Pilestedt/status/1760077808146014340 - helldivers backend team was 4 people. _That's_ the point of this newfangled tech.

> Those licenses would adapt just fine.

Handwaving away this problem doesn't make it just og away.
Botulism is a risk in the home canning of low-acidity foods. It is virtually unheard of in the lacto-fermentation of foods not containing animal products. I'm not aware of a single confirmed case in the US, ever.

If anyone is concerned about it, the simplest thing to do is buy an inexpensive pH tester and confirm the brine's pH is below 4.6
> I didn’t mean to start a language war.

Lot of that going around; especially in venues like this, which has a lot of "Ooh! Shiny!" going on. I tend to be a bit more conservative than many; but not to any kind of extreme degree. I like new stuff, but I also like shipping, which doesn't come from the bleeding edge.

Personally, I use PHP on my backend work, mostly because it's a known quantity, and is an industrial-strength, massively-supported system, that is not going anywhere but up.

And I don't feel like learning a whole new language and API, just for some relatively minor-scale server work (I spend most of my time, writing native Swift frontends).

If it's good enough for PornHub, it's good enough for me.

That said, if PHP were, as is often falsely claimed, going away, I'd probably learn something new. I doubt it would be the tip of The Shiny Spear, but it would be a more modern system; maybe Python. I've never actually liked working with PHP, but the same could be said for most languages I've used. I like Swift.

As it is, I would still want to learn Laravel, before moving away from PHP. From what I understand, it's a fantastic framework, that makes PHP a much more effective server system.
Sure, I think we agree in semantics but the wording is difficult. The bar for secure you’re referring to is quite high, a lot of commercial products that brand themselves secure would be much less secure than something like age. These days I think it’s fair to use “secure” in the sense of “made a serious effort to provide certain security properties”. It’s too hard to define, let alone agree, to what secure should mean for everyone.
> 1. World of Warcraft in 2004 is very different from World of Warcraft in 2024. Do future versions "destroy" previous ones? How do you deal with this?

I think it's more about the right of the consumer to be able to play what they paid for than keep the original version intact.
I have a confession to make. I was working in a company where the main development center was located in a different country. The main development center wanted to centralize all code on a single SVN server and move the build process to Jenkins

I said we already had source control (CVS) and a a working build process (a script on a server that pulled from CVS, built a jar file and deployed it to X servers). We were too "busy" at the moment but would look into it in the future. This never happened.

The real reason was that I was concerned that the central development center would take over the project, as they had tried to do so in the past. Looking back, I should probably have let them take over as there was more than enough work for everyone.
We'd be most likely to fall for phishing scams if there was no system filtering out bad emails. No model is perfect, but some are useful.
> Imagine if you could only sell stocks at the end of each quarter.

how would you prevent people from doing that outside of the stock markets? Possibly on markets in other countries or with derived instruments?

The only effect would be the loss of transparency.
There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.

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

Edit: Reading the article, I'm surprised they don't seem to have done any computer-based textual analysis of the authorship. We have other plays attributed to Euripides so matching 98 lines of text shouldn't be too difficult.
> The 1980s were some of the most efficient NASA budgeting years

Strange and funny stuff.

Somewhere between when NASA estimated the cost of a shuttle flight would be less than ten million dollars and when it became apparent they cost well over a billion dollars, the country should have chosen a different approach.