skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take any problem where the naturals are a good conceptual fit, and there probably exists an alternate reality where you didn't have enough power to push back on insane design decisions, and in that reality ordinals are a good fit. The features you're likely to care about include (a) being able to reference an abstract entity instead of the thing itself (like an auto-incrementing database index referring to the knowledge atom in question) and (b) caring about some sort of ordering on those things (else you'd use uuids or some similar abomination and move on with your life).

For some spitballed examples:

1. You can get low-contention, globally unique database keys for "free" by allowing ordinal indices. Management commands like creating a table instance on a given cluster node give that table instance a unique id through some scheme involving adding infinite ordinals, and that table instance is then able to assign guaranteed unique ids ad infinitum. The sort order on keys naturally clusters time-correlated data per table, which is a hugely desirable property when reasoning about the distributed behemoth you're creating (more applicable to the DB author perhaps than an end user).

2. Priority queues are often a good start for a sequence of tasks you'd like to accomplish. Start with the idea that older things should finish first. We'll add bigger and bigger "low priority" numbers to new tasks. Continue to find that you actually have different task types, and "Bob the ML engineer" has zero access to the TPUs, the general public has mid-priority access through Colab, and Sundar has infinite priority; if he wants to dabble in ML then all the real work needs to pause. And so on. As you add more levels of order to "the next thing that should run," the system gets substantially more complicated. God forbid you need a higher priority and there are none left. Starting in some infinite middle of a stream of ordinals gives you the power to handle all that garbage without much thought. Your task queue can be pretty generic and just care about ordinal arithmetic, not the to/from steps for creating those ordinals.

1a. The database index idea is probably not usable in the real world for perf reasons, but when object counts are in the low billions you have a lot more flexibility. Imagine a VCS using ordinal arithmetic to give you perfect information just from the id of the chain of branching and commits that led you to where you are (in structure, obviously not grabbing the metadata like commit messages while magically not hitting disk).

3. Not a "working programmer" concern, but type checking, SAT solving, theorem proving, ..., tend to be fairly deeply connected. The idea of using ordinals to track and analyze recursive calls has been around for awhile. Similar techniques, even when not explicitly ported to those other domains yet, are likely to end up there eventually IMO.
Congrats on the launch! :)

Apparently I signed up for Instant previously but completely forgot about it. Only realized I had an account when I went to the dashboard to find myself still logged in. I dug up the sign up email and apparently I signed up back in 2022, so some kind of default invalidation period on your auth tokens would definitely make me a bit more comfortable.

Regardless, I'm still as excited about the idea of a client-side, offline-first, realtime syncing db as ever, especially now that the space has really been picking up steam with new entrants showing up every few weeks.

One thing I was curious about is how well the system currently supports users with multiple emails? GitHub popularized this pattern, and these days it's pretty much table stakes in the dev tools space to be able to sign in once and use the same account across personal accounts and orgs associated with different emails.

Looking at the docs I'm getting the sense that there might be an assumption of 1 email per user in the user model currently. Is that correct? If so, any plans to evolve the model to become more flexible?
I think the biggest change with online communication is moving these random encounters into peering into what other teams are doing, or what they're discussing.

For instance we had someone from a completely unrelated team bump into a project thread discussion our firewall rules, and coming up with the proposed changes he was working on and wanting to brainstorm something that could work beyond his team.

You'd need an incredible level of luck to bump into that precise discussion at a water cooler, and it would require a super broad call to get people to gather on that subject the "normal" way. But having most communication in Slack, indexed and accessible cross-team gives incredible opportunities for these kind of interactions that would be just impossible on the previous office culture.
Through most of my life, I have routinely used "they" when describing events to other people, even when I know the gender of the person concerned, because it's either not relevant to what I'm saying or I want to deliberately withhold that information.

For example, if someone mis-dialled and called our phone, the conversation after would always be something like "Who was that on the phone?" "Oh nobody, they got the wrong number."

When I was at university, whenever I talked to my mum on the phone about any of my friends, male or female, I'd pretty much always use "they" unless I'd already mentioned their name, because if I ever made the mistake of mentioning a female friend, it'd turn into an hour long interrogation.
For the kinds of devs they've hired, Windows is the third most common development or production environment. I've worked at startups like this for 20 years and haven't touched a windows system.

I realize yall are out there, but from where I'm sitting, this isn't odd at all. They're likely most familiar with and using Unixes.
"If the code runs, who cares that it was written by a werewolf" may get you better code, but it may also get you more werewolves. If the only thing anyone is doing is writing code, that probably doesn't matter, but here in the real world developers have to work together and it turns out that for some people working with werewolves is disagreeable. Which means that if you invite all the werewolves in, you'll lose the people who don't want to work with werewolves, so maybe you don't get better code after all.

Which is a better tradeoff? That depends on how many werewolves you have, and whether they're Fenrir Greyback or Remus Lupin, and how many anti-werewolves you have, and whether they're actually in danger from the werewolves or just prejudiced against them, and all sorts of other complicated things.

In the present instance, my own prejudices say that it sure doesn't look to me like Tim Peters is a werewolf, but unfortunately the following three situations look exactly alike from the outside: (1) Tim Peters is guilty of nothing other than talking in a way that's perfectly harmless but that some officious busybodies don't like; (2) Tim Peters has been privately accused of some genuinely awful things that are hard to prove or disprove, and the powers-that-be have gone after him for technical offences in order to avoid a messy argument about those awful things, and either (2a) he's innocent of those awful things or (2b) he actually did them.
People are edging closer to figuring out how to burn CDs that can boot on unmodified hardware but it's still unsolved for the average person. I used a modded PS1.

It's still very stock other than the bypass.
"Upon inspection, they found that instead of `Paul's Boutique', the vinyl contained piano versions of songs like Barry Manilow's music and Morris Albert's `Feelings'."

Sounds like a practical joke.
even read and helped patched the GNU Compiler.
I used to cache a ton; but, have only found a handful a year (outside of an annual guys trip with caching friends that has become more about chasing states where we’ve found caches (49 for me; just missing AK)) and hitting breweries.

Good times.
By default, LibreWolf clears cookies and browser history when it closes. I understand why, it's a bit too aggressive for me (and I use temporary container tabs, so cookies hanging around doesn't bother me).
That is some of the worst advice I've ever heard. Cheap tools are always cheap for a reason.
The court is already stacked through blatant obstructionism during Obama’s term.
The databases use NUMERIC/DECIMAL data types almost exclusively. Once in a while you will find a floating point type but it's pretty rare.

The code they write is not generally available to the public so I'm not sure what they are doing inside their code. Some probably use java's BigDecimal, some probably wrote their own libraries to handle data types (e.g. SAP).

> If ALL you do is addition, then fixed point could work. But it fails at every other basic accounting task that it would be ludicrous to do any modern or even toy programs in it any more.

How about the basic task of storing 0.1 or 0.01, it seems pretty good at that and float (binary float) struggles.

Decimal float works, which is why IBM but the DFP units on the Power and Z cpu's.
The Evolution of Cooperation (2004)
"The people who disagree with me have no good reason to" is prima facie a strawman.
The website mentions in FAQs that it will cost less than $1000. But stay tuned for the MSRP unveil late Oct :)
That would be really cool, but also really expensive - gyms have thousands (tens of thousands for some) of holds and they're usually cleaned by power washing and otherwise constantly abused. Maybe a middle ground would be computer vision? Not nearly as accurate or comprehensive of course, but a lot less hardware. (Most gyms in my experience have comprehensive camera coverage already for insurance purposes so I don't think there would be any additional privacy concerns).
I've enjoyed your critique of Drakon and its proponents so far, but it's very typical for real-time safety-critical systems to have coding standards in place that prohibit recursion; one example is MISRA.
Would you mind sharing what you personally use in place of pip now?
> theoretical stuff and don't care whatsoever about what happens in reality.

Just an aside: I think this is an oft-repeated misconception. It’s not so much that pure mathematicians ‘don’t care about reality’ — it’s more that they consider the mathematics itself to be reality already. If mathematics isn’t reality, I’m not sure what is.

As soon as you’re doing any kind of ‘modelling’, it would be reasonable to say it’s no longer ‘pure’ mathematics. Of course, the divide between pure and applied is somewhat fuzzy.
Hello, Akira here.

Thank you so much for taking an interest in this project and for your thoughtful comments.

First, regarding the use of \, VirtualStorageLibrary is designed to be platform-agnostic, and there are no plans to tie it to any specific OS in the future. Therefore, you won't find any code like os. in this library. It’s a purely logical hierarchical object model inspired by file systems.

While the default separator is /, it's fully customizable. You can set it to any character you like, such as : or -, and of course, you can also use \.

Regarding the relationship with PowerShell subsystems, as of now, there is no functional integration between VirtualStorageLibrary and PowerShell. That means there’s no capability to import or export data handled by cmdlets—yet. However, there are indeed ideas for future versions that could involve collaboration with PowerShell. Although this is not yet detailed in the roadmap, I believe that being able to manipulate VirtualStorageLibrary via cmdlets would be a highly useful and interesting feature.

When designing VirtualStorageLibrary, I carefully examined the culture surrounding file systems both in Linux and in PowerShell. Although I’ve primarily been a Windows user, I’m also familiar with Linux, and I’ve always found its file system to be simple and elegant. That’s why I chose / as the default separator for this library.

For more information on customizing separators, please refer to the documentation here:
https://shimodateakira.github.io/VirtualStorageLibrary/intro...

Please feel free to reach out if you have any more questions or feedback!
I can't speak to it's utility, but a decent implementation of an idea that i suspect will have a lot of potential. The simplicity is the sales pitch here for me. Iterating within the UI by mere conversation.

edit: can you not iterate design off a "Prototype 2d" node? it seems typing the "enrich" box makes a new adjacent node - i'd expect to beable to iterate off a design infinitely by creating child nodes. I can freely arrange the designs so i can write my narrative that way. Maybe at least have the iterative prompt recorded?

edit 2: sharing doesn't work - the url gives an empty workspace

My design: https://supercraft.ai/public_board?boardId=66c7de41614fe5ecb...
The Airport Security Liquid Rules That Refuse to Go Away
>Your comment elsewhere about NetApp solving all known problems with WAFL. Hahahaha.

I guess it's a good thing I didn't say NetApp solved "all known problems with WAFL" - but critical reading would've required you to respond to the content of the post, not provide an inaccurate summary to make a point that wasn't there.

What I DID say is that NetApp solved the issue of spewing random small writes all over the disk, resulting in horrendous performance on subsequent reads from spinning disk.sace reclamation takes a while. What's your point, assuming you had one? Because deleting a 5TB file on a filesystem 95% full with lots of snapshots is a daily workflow for... nobody? And if it is: there are countless ways to avoid that situation, but I assume you knew that too?
> the web stack was a joke

it's a comment about the thinking behind the design of the web stack including js
Synchronized network traffic can cause incast or other buffer overflows.
Two stories:

1. Shortly after I started working on Tarsnap, I was introduced to a "serial entrepreneur" who expressed an interest in getting patents on Tarsnap's technology and licensing it out to other companies. I wasn't interested in doing this myself -- I wanted to provide the world's best secure backups, not sell patent licenses -- but I agreed that if he covered all the costs and paid me an up front fee plus a share of royalties then he could resell the "spinoff" IP.
Distracted me for about a year before he backed out. And then he asked me to pay for the money he had spent on lawyers (I laughed).

2. About five years after Tarsnap launched, I got a phone call from a YC company saying they were interested in "working together with me". The conversation went around in circles for half an hour before I figured out that was a euphemism for them being interested in acquiring Tarsnap.
Clearly spoken by an American, still stubbornly using ancient technology like paper checks.

>if you have a significant other, do you never call them?

Sure, using a chat app. Not voice calling with an old fashioned "telephone number". Lots of people outside the US never use voice calling for people in their personal circle.

>you never call your parents?

Same as above. Using traditional telephone numbers is extremely expensive for international calls, and chat apps like Messenger are free and also have video calling.

>You never need to call to schedule appointments?

You can do that on websites these days.
More people in e.g. China alone rely on data based communication apps for these things than there are people who use traditional calls in all of Europe and America combined for a given month. Your personal experience is not the cultural norm for all humanity, nor is it the example of how someone with responsibilities must be like.
I donate to projects that make software that's important to me, too (LibreOffice, Signal etc). I'd actually donate to LibreWolf but I can't see a way to do so.
[Ask Help] Recoll Index Mac Permission Issue
I mean sure, you’d definitely use a scoped address to talk to the next hop, but it still doesn’t solve how the router/switch knows which port to send the packet to for its next destination.

Say I have a global unicast address on my desktop, 2 hops from my router, and I want to allow traffic to it. My router gets a packet sent to it over its link-local address, with a destination header of my desktop’s IP. Say it has 4 ports (each going to another router/switch, each with its own link-local address.)

How would it know which port to use as the next hop? It would need a routing table, and that would need to be configured automatically if we want to work as well as switches do today. What would be the protocol for this auto configuration? BGP or something like it? How do the routers know the available address space? Or are we just stipulating that we’d invent a protocol for this, if it had ever happened?

In ethernet we have the Spanning Tree Protocol for this, to discover the topology of an Ethernet network and know which links to use for which MAC addresses (including the ability to detect cycles.) I feel like something like spanning tree would still need to exist in an all-unicast, no-ethernet, L3-only world. Does such a thing exist already, or would we need to invent it in this counterfactual universe?
> I don't understand how you reconcile your argument with the fact that many people insist that using terms like, say, "patriarchy" to describe all that is wrong with the world - or "toxic masculinity" to describe the supposedly harmful effects on men of behaving according to their social stereotypes, but "internalized misogyny" to describe the supposedly harmful effects for women doing the same - is not evidence of bias against men.

I don't know how you ascribe some particular uses of language that are outside the mainstream with my descriptive note that language has moved towards mostly using gender-neutral terms. I'm not blaming a lot on patriarchy; so it's not really fair to point out that a small minority of people who share my viewpoint that neutral language is preferable do.

> Historically, singular "they" was used to describe an indefinite, hypothetical or otherwise vaguely described person (e.g. the perpetrator of a crime before being identified) - not a definite person whose gender was simply unknown (e.g. someone unseen, known by a gender-neutral name). Further, its use is quite restricted - it doesn't admit all the inflections and noun-verb agreements that "he" and "she" do.

You're right that most of this historical usage of singular they isn't the personal singular they, but you still find plenty of it-- e.g. the King James Bible has quite a bit (perhaps influenced by translating from languages that tend to use equivalent devices).

"vnto thy gates, euen that man, or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones till they die."

> It seems to me that you propose entirely unnecessary constraints.

I think that if I talk about the "mailman" it could be misleading. Ditto for singular "he/his" for indeterminate gender. It seems more useful to use gender-neutral terms-- no need to edit it based on the actual gender that shows up.

The inclusiveness isn't even the primary reason why I feel this way. However, I have heard people say that they thought that it wasn't societally permissible for them to do something based on the way the nouns and pronouns used in sentences; avoiding that seems desirable, too.
Whenever I rewatch one of many of Maciej's talks (including “Haunted by Data”, “The Website Obesity Crisis”, “What Happens Next Will Amaze You”, “Superintelligence”, etc.), he always strikes me a bit as a digitally-relevant, modern reincarnation of Cassandra...

I cannot recommend all of his talks enough.

All the best,

-HG
Half a dozen - personal site, some projects, and some alternate TLDs for those projects which just redirect.
And my point was that immutability isn’t granting any performance here. It is, in fact, causing a performance detriment for no reason other than “a medium dudebro wrote an article that included the words beautiful and elegant, and our engineers are idiots that eats that brain dead nonsense up”.

The whole article is, hilariously, about how shitty immutability is, so they hack and slash and bend over backwards to make idiotic nonsense comport to their needs, when had they just fired all their medium reading seniors off the bat, they wouldn’t be in a position of spinning up 10x the CPUs to mangle their data around this bullshit.
Interesting speculation based on a render of a square antenna.
The answer to why your strategy most likely would have been a failure lies outside of technology domain
As sister comments are pointing out, it's a pretty common thing ("zoom fatigue")

Personally the best improvement was closing the camera feed, and that has been my team's experience as well.

There will be extremely few meetings (mainly HR and meetings with external vendors) where we set the camera, and even for those you can do the opening and presentation with camera on, and just shut it after that for the meat of the discussion.

The biggest part is we're presenting documents and slides either way, so seeing the person's face somewhere just doesn't help. In particular we want to check the meeting transcript realtime to be sure it matches what we're talking about.
Overall I've seen no downsides doing it since the pandemic, and don't see going back to camera on meetings by default.
I worked with someone who dropped out of a physical chemistry graduate program at one of the most prestigious universities in the U.S.. His epiphany: This has nothing to with people. He is now a physician.
I don't live in either one.
This is clearly written by someone who is way too attached to their phone and worries too much. I don't understand what any of your points have to do with the user having the choice to remove the phone app.

Society did survive for a long time without carrying a device that constantly tracks you, bothers you, and causes you problems.
Shouldn't EVERY app be deletable by law, everywhere? I don't care if it breaks the phone, it's my right damnit.
Yes, theocratically a phone app can do it. But, practically, using phones in the kitchen is a no go. Sauces, oils and garlicy smell are hard to get rid of...

A robotic mechanism to flip, stir or toss is definitely on the future roadmap ：）
Ah I’m glad it ended up being fruitful then.

To your question, consider that console games ship precompiled shader libraries that target the known GPU of that console. This prevents shader compile hitches etc.

So the PS5 is effectively a superset of the PS4, with a significant new set of capabilities. There’s no opportunity to take an intermediate language like Proton etc does to transpile it first.
You could give my email client https://github.com/d99kris/nmail a shot. It does basic html email parsing (leveraging w3m and pandoc) and its user interface is inspired by pine.
And yet somehow our new policy at a huge R1 university now forbids Firefox but installs Chrome by default.
Try to search on recoll.org to see how to grant permission on Mac. So little information on the website.

The indexing process ask permission for each directory. It's getting so annoying.
Need help.
I think if raycast came out for linux, I would be able to switch to linux
I think this should come to the USA too. We don't have any browser choice.

What choice do you have if you want and adblocking and syncing with a Windows computer?

Firefox has Firefox Focus, without sync, but Firefox itself has no built-in adblocker. Makes you wonder whether that's because of their contract with Google?
I feel the same as you - they're mostly a distraction to boost morale. They're also extremely political.

There's sort of a silver lining. Sometimes the ideas that don't get fully built or selected as a winner do end up evolving into features in the future.