skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So how were the defenses of the Great Wall of China staffed for two millennia?

There's some description at [1]. At peak, it took a million soldiers to defend the wall. That's huge. China today has a military only about twice that size, and a far bigger population than in the days when the Wall mattered. Staffing the wall was using up a huge amount of manpower.
That article, by an American, says the soldiers spent most of their time farming near the wall. So they were what the original posting calls "military settlers".

How was that huge army kept from taking over the country?

[1] https://www.china-mike.com/china-tourist-attractions/great-w...
If you force encryption in your BT client, will you be safe?
> Does this mean that converting two DateTimes into their POSIX time and subtracting them will not yield an accurate representation of number of seconds between two timestamps?

It will indeed not, and if you care about that difference, you should not do that, and use something like https://github.com/qntm/t-a-i instead.

> Am I naive? It seems like POXIS ignoring leap seconds is a major mistake.

Depending on your needs it can be either seen as a massive mistake or a big convenience win.

In either case it's arguably not a complaint with POSIX, but rather with the commercial and scientific world at large using UTC instead of TAI (and there are indeed people arguing for abolishing leap seconds!). POSIX in turn just followed that standard.
Hard work doesn't scale. If you are already an expert in the field, you need a few months to properly evaluate someone's work. And if there are 100 candidates for the position (which is pretty common), you have to spend decades evaluating them.

In practice, you reject the vast majority of the candidates by reputation, publication venues, paper counts, grants and awards, and similar metrics. And then, if you are particularly interested, you may devote a few days on superficial reading of the works of the shortlisted candidates.
Thank you! Turns out I was missing 'Urban' category, so Cumberland itself still has 99% of households with >100 Mbps available.
Honestly, it sounds like the most reasonable behavior here would be to _only_ support "Z" (optionally with "+<offset>") and none of the 3-letter codes. Unfortunately it would probably a breaking change to remove support for the existing codes, so it wouldn't happen.
SQL doesn't have problems. It's arguably one of the oldest and most successful languages of all times.

Some developers have problems, because they don't understand its abstraction. Periodically they try to re-implement feature to "fix" SQL. Every time it's an absolute disaster.

I realize this is how the world works, but it's just a waste of time.
Easy to imagine but there are so many details to nail down that it's hard to do in practice.

In the words of someone in the industry who tends to be on the laconic side:

"It is not as simple as a 'common connector'. There are different pressures, mixture ratios, comm gear, seat interfaces, etc. A requirement for commonality flows requirements upstream to the suit, seat and spacecraft. "

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=60593.msg2...
I'm on an M1 mac, and I followed the instructions above (cargo build --release && du -sh target) and it took 6 seconds, and the target dir is 35MB. I ran it twice to make sure I wasn't pulling the remote dependencies

go.mod

module json-test

go 1.21.1

main.go
package main

import (
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
)

type Foo struct {
Bar string `json:"bar"`
}

func main() {
var foo Foo

json.Unmarshal([]byte(`{"bar": "Hello, World!"}`), &foo)

fmt.Println(foo.Bar)
}

time go build && du -sh .

go build 0.07s user 0.11s system 348% cpu 0.051 total
2.4M .

I'd say 15x larger and 12x slower "bigger and longer" at least.
One-way sure.
The ability of humans, by inspection, to determine why a program is constructed in the way that it is vis-a-vis the goal/output.
Safari even already has a `useTemporal` flag in their technology preview for the upcoming version.

But yes I agree. There's no way any other standard could resist a standard adopted by the IETF and implemented by the language of the web
Aerospace is great and such a releif for an incoming i3/regolith user. Tried yabai for a while, but switching workspaces still sucks. Aerospace solves this by creating its own virtual workspaces and hiding windows from other workspaces just off the viewable area and behind other windows of the current workspace.
Hydrogels can play Pong by 'remembering' previous patterns of electrical simulat
In its ideal form, an AI can do all the conventional non-innovative writing so you can free up the time to do the truly innovative writing.

That said the current crop of AI isn't that and is overhyped.
Do you have any hard evidence that somehow mandating a "cryptography course" fixes this?

My guess is that it doesn't help and might even make things worse because now they'll think "Don't roll your own" was an instruction to plebs who didn't take that one semester cryptography course at school.
It spent way more money than initially planned, while doing so consistently over decades, and in all the right congressional districts.

It was wildly successful.

You're just under the mistaken impression that the goal was to go to space cheaply or whatever.

But the success of the shuttle program pales in comparison to the SLS and Artemis.

Now they're spending more money in all the right places, without that pesky distraction of launching the thing into space.
>“Starliner is a very capable spacecraft and, ultimately, this comes down to needing a higher level of certainty to perform a crewed return,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. “The NASA and Boeing teams have completed a tremendous amount of testing and analysis, and this flight test is providing critical information on Starliner’s performance in space. Our efforts will help prepare for the uncrewed return and will greatly benefit future corrective actions for the spacecraft.”

"we think its gonna blow up"
The article is not that different than "don't invent your own cryptography".

It's hard to understand for non-crypto specialists. It uses notions which are unknown to most programmers like MAC or other *MACs.

So not sure who is the target audience for this.
I find it weird that people talk like that. Did you even try to make something (e.g. a side project) with the help of AI?

AI is doing amazing things for me. If i feel i'm out of control because some parts of the generated code i don't understand, i just let it explain me, even ELI5 if that would be needed. If the explanation doesn't make sense,or it does make sense but it is not where i want to be heading, i point that out and the AI corrects the problem, or explains what the options are.

Together we come to a more concise solution.

I'm really amazed/confused why people talk like that about AI.
Bold words from captain Kubernetes. Meant in good spirit, just having fun
> The shareholders literally own the company […]

They do not actually.

* https://archive.ph/VCUp4 / https://www.ft.com/content/7bd1b20a-879b-11e5-90de-f44762bf9...

* https://www.pqmagazine.com/the-myth-of-shareholder-ownership...

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2021/07/21/the-s...

* https://edwardslaw.ca/blog/shareholders-agreements-in-canada...

* https://www.ippr.org/articles/who-owns-a-company

* https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-instituti...

They have certain claims, but so do customers, suppliers, employees, governments (taxes), bond holders, etc. The claims of shareholders come last, which is why owning stock gets you higher returns (than, e.g., bonds from the company): you're at highest risk of losing money from being last on claims, so you should be rewarded for that higher risk.
We can call it "Linq2SQL" and what a disaster it was...
Of the ones I learned about, it was because they were going to replicate Skunkworks "only better". The latter broke it every time.
on interesting thing to realize is that some small string types go beyond just the basic small len storage optimization

- compact_str e.g. depends on the string being valid utf-8, and in turn has larger short strings

- smol_str e.g. is a a enum over `[u8; CAP] | &'static str | Arc<str>` this means it avoids any allocations for static strings and has very fast clones, leading to similar perf. characteristics as string internalization in some use cases (like the use-cases it was designed for). But at the cost of it being immutable only and the heap allocation being slightly larger for the Rc.

Other interesting differences can be the handling of shrinking mutable Strings, do you re-inline it or not? What is better here is highly use-case dependent.

In the end there are many design decisions where there is no clear winner but it's a question of trade off with use-case specific preferences.
But isn't it just the natural progression of innovations like interchangeable parts and assembly line manufacturing?

And isn't it already a thing that we're progressing to with increased industrial output and reduced labour requirements?

This is where we're going, we just need an driver to push us to do it. Space exploration and resource extraction from the asteroid belt/moon to prevent the complete destruction of our environment seems to be as good a driver as any.
> Does this mean I will no longer have to suffer with so many sites only offering relative times in lists without even hover for absolute date & time?

Why would it mean that? It seems tangentially related at best. The sites you’re complaining about don’t use the presentation you’re complaining about for lack of more precise Date APIs, they use it intentionally as a feature (even if you consider it a misfeature).
Safari even has a flag already. I'd expect it to officially land in 2025 though. It's not a focus of Interop 2024 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024
I don't know why custom elements never became common knowledge. I've had PR's blocked by people convinced I was doing arcane black magic by using them.

But they've been worked this way for decades. Now they weren't officially added to the spec until browser support for v1 of custom components, but that was still back in 2016.
There is also Msty (https://msty.app), which I find much easier to get started with and it comes with interesting features such as web search, RAG, Delve mode, etc.
They should at least cancel their Netflix subscription.
They will leave the light on. ( Its called mirrors ).
That is quite the analogy. Not sure if it says more about the insane dangers of space or the insane reliability of airplanes.
https://github.com/man-group/arcticDB
Are you suggesting that you don’t learn as much when you figure our the puzzle as oppose to being told the answer?
Check out Substrait, it sounds like what you’re describing.
This actually happened on Apollo 13. Backup pilot Jack Swigert was assigned to Apollo 13 two days before launch because the expected pilot, Mattingly, had been potentially exposed to rubella. The flight launched on April 11, just a few days before the April 15 tax deadline and Swigert realized in flight that he had forgotten to file his taxes. Flight controllers thought it was a joke but Swigert was serious: "It ain't too funny. Things kind of happened real fast down there and I do need an extension. I may be spending time in another quarantine besides the one that they're planning for me." (I.e. besides the 21-day astronaut quarantine, he might end up in prison.)

The IRS stated that they could resolve the problem since anyone outside the United States on April 15 automatically gets a two-month extension. (Even though "legally, no one has ever decided whether a journey into space technically counts as leaving the United States.")

Of course, Apollo 13 soon had problems that pushed aside any concerns of tax filing.

NY Times report: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/13/archives/apollo-13-coasts...

Mission transcript: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/static/history/alsj/...
Greene and Woit are colleagues in the same department (Greene is in two departments) of the same university. This kind of public airing of grievances (at one point Woit calls something Greene writes "highly offensive") seems like not the appropriate mechanism for hashing out academic disagreements? Unclear to me.

I'm also having a hard time understanding Woit's position given that he's a math department guy. Sure, string theory doesn't look exciting from an experimentalist's perspective. But from a mathematical perspective it is an incredible achievement and valuable even if it turns out to not actually describe our universe.
I believe that's still the contingency plan in the unlikely event that they have to evacuate the ISS in the period between Starliner undocking and Crew-9 docking.
The Marc drops you off in the DC Metro (the subway).

Which on first reading I thought you were referring to with "DC metro," and I got very confused.
I found the fragmentation of desktop environments frustrating, with lots of gotchas that I felt likely to lead to problems later on. A couple of days later after trying out maybe 10 distros in vmware, I eventually settled on ZorinOS. PopOS looks like it might be good with the cosmic desktop in the future. If I was going all-in on linux for work, I'd probably end up with arch and hyprland or something, but what I was looking for in the desktop environment for secondary general computing needed to be a bit more well rounded.

Tried out GhostBSD with Mate for a while, but as expected the hardware support makes it more work, e.g. USB wifi and missing drivers.
It does not matter - all the ports are closed.
Smelting is for extracting metals from oxides or sulfides. It can be used on the Moon or on Mars.

It does not work for asteroid mining.

There you have just pieces of iron with a low content of alloying elements.

Among the alloying elements, nickel is the most abundant (17.3 times less than iron), then cobalt (20.9 times less than nickel), then germanium (20.4 times less than cobalt).

The precious metals that would justify the mining operation are present as a few grams each for a ton of iron.

Melting the alloy will never separate the metals by itself.

However perhaps some kind of floating zone melting could enrich the proportion of precious metals in a part of the iron, but it is very unlikely that a high enough enrichment could be achieved by a reasonable number of zone melting passes.

On earth the cheaper metals could be dissolved by an acid solution, but on metallic asteroids you have neither water nor acids.

The SciFi solution would be to vaporize and ionize the metal alloy and separate the metal ions by their specific charge, like in mass spectrometry.

This would need a lot of energy, but at least it does not need reactants and it is the only method that achieves almost perfect separation.

However for now, the throughput of such a ionic separator is extremely small, too small for industrial production. Perhaps it will become possible to scale such ionic separators to acceptable productivities.
Here's a nice modern Python library in this space that claims to take influence from Temporal and Chrono - https://github.com/ariebovenberg/whenever
For once, an article on the internet has commas in the right places. Well done.
The Pokémon Themed Text Editor – PokéEdit – Built with React and Lexical
PokéEdit is a fun text editor built with React, TypeScript, and the Lexical editor library. It's designed for Pokémon enthusiasts who want to create engaging stories, articles, or even just fun notes, all while featuring their favorite Pokémon via the PokéAPI.
Many are ground-breaking innovations that make LLMs much faster and not prone to hallucinations. They reduce the cost, latency, and amount of computer resources (GPU, training) by several orders of magnitude. Some of them improve security, making your LLM more attractive to corporate clients. I introduced a few of these features in my previous article "New Trends in LLM Architecture". Now I offer a comprehensive list, based on the most recent developments.

Read full article, learn about agentic LLMs, LLM routers, contextual tables, fast search, and more, at https://mltblog.com/3Aq9iAb
Or South America :)
Juicero vibes here...

(Good idea, though)
Biggest advancements ? Give me a break. Voyagers, Hubble, ISS, James Webb, upcoming Europa mission - SpaceX has nothing on that level of sophistication and cooperation between dozens of countries. I'm very much fond of SpaceX, but giving Elon too much credit does not feel right .
From Cumberland, you can take the Amtrak. It's a 3 1/2 hour ride, you can eat on the train, and there's no traffic.

$38 for a round-trip ticket.
I also hate having SELECT before FROM because I want to think of the query as a transformation that can be read from top to bottom to understand the flow.

But I assume that that’s part of why they didn’t set it up that way — it’s just a little thing to make the query feel more declarative and less imperative
duckDB is what sql should be in 2024

https://duckdbsnippets.com/
Golly, QUALIFY, a new SQL operator I didn’t know existed. I tend not to do much with window functions and I would have reached for a CTE instead but it’s always nice to be humbled by finding something new in a language you thought you knew well.
> Generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini can now generate realistic text and images that are often indistinguishable from human-authored content

We are fortunate that it currently is possible to identify AI generated content. It’s generally written too well, repeats clauses and phrases, and doesn’t always sufficiently summarize.

I’ve observed a growing trend of using AI to generate comments on LinkedIn posts. This technique is presumably utilized to increase impressions or followers. Currently, it’s very obvious when the comments are AI generated.
Nobody automatically knows everything, and we have limited energy for drawing inferences based on what we do know. So the material covered in this post isn't obvious to everyone in its target audience, especially since Rust has had some success in making systems programming more approachable to inexperienced programmers, which is a good thing.
So when is the uncrewed flight back? I wanna watch.
Cumberland has more in common with everything west of the Shenandoah than any part of Maryland you likely drove to.
"NASA Decides", not "Shitty Boeing Engineering Results In".

Come on NASA, place the blame where it's due.
It is a source of wonder to me that every programming language I know has to go through this process where the design half-asses time handling and end up coming back decades later with a whole new API which, inevitably, fewer people use than the older, footgun-friendly API.
A fee schedule would help, but I think what may end up happening is what happened to spamcop. The realtime black hole list at one point shutdown open SMTP relays, but how spammers got around it was Spam As A Service providers like mailchimp, sendgrid, salesforce, maropost, and others. Someone will come up with a fee based reddit spam service one can buy to flood reddit with spam drowning out real people (the 'reals' or 'non-bots').

It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless.

So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money.

I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate.

Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.
If you're truly using Julian dates, the switch to the Gregorian calendar in the UK and US in September 1752 shouldn't affect you.
No, it’s the whole argument. You could imagine a probabilistic gate splitter that outputs two bits. Such that bits AB are either 01 or 10 with a probability distribution. That is you don’t know which of the two states you’re in, but you do know that bit A is always opposite of bit B. You can then take the bits as far apart as you want. And then measuring bit A will tell you the state of bit B. Nothing collapsed across interstellar space. Bit A and B were always in a certain state. We just don’t know which until we take a measurement. And since they’re correlated, we only need to measure one of them.
Since there are no people on board…… I hope it blows up
How to make good small games (2023)
Another thing worth pointing out is that technical texts are rarely read entirely as a literary piece, so repeating things is a welcome thing. As someone who spends great part of the day reading datasheets it is specially annoying having to scan through the entire piece to see what something means like for example acronyms:

“The setting of these bits is only valid if the BCST bit in FBCSTAT is 1, while the FRDY bit in FSTATR is 1.”
NK and China work very closely together on their hacking efforts. North Korean’s go to China for training.
well maybe people dont want to suffer for 20 years
I've personally enjoyed that kind of offer. My work is remote, my family isn't.

Not living in the US myself, but done similar in EU.

Living outside large cities is a plus factor these days. You can afford a house, commodities tend to be cheaper or you just grow them yourself. Kids go to a local school where you know everyone else, they make strong friendships and grow healthy in nature.
Why did you rename your company AntiWork?
It’s strange to me that the interop story here only considers compatibility with GoogleSQL.

These days, we have tooling that can generate an IR for SQL and transpile it to any dialect (see: sqlglot).

Doesn’t coupling SQL syntax to dialect-specific SQL semantics throw a wrench in this?
Tried to sign up. When I moved away to get my verification code your site threw an application error. Now I can’t log in and can’t create an account because I’m already registered. Apparently there’s no password reset option. sam@p~d should help you find the domain if you need to check what happened.
Fair point. I guess I conflate the two, because what's interesting to me, most of the time, is where does the control flow switch.

I never rely on synchronous IO being non-blocking when writing regular code (ie not embedded). As such reading from cache (non-blocking) vs disk (blocking) doesn't matter that much, as such. It's synchronous and that's all I need to reason about how it behaves.

If I need it to be non-blocking, ie playing audio from a file, then I need to ensure it via other means (pre-loading buffer in a background thread, etc etc).

edit: And if I really need it not to block, the buffer needs to reside in the non-paged pool. Otherwise it can get swapped to disk.
Dostoevsky's Bobok–Or the Banality of the Dead (2022)
IMO, the pattern that Joda popularised is the most robust option for managing dates we've seen so far. If I'm evaluating date/time libraries in a language I'm not used to, ones that looks like their authors have looked at and understood the API of Joda or derivatives are going to be strong leaders.
He’s our generation’s Howard Hughes. One Ket trip away from becoming a recluse, shuffling around with kleenex boxes for slippers muttering about being unclean and denouncing conspiracies against him.