skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nuclear waste only slowly leaks if its stored improperly. The better option is to use it, reacted fuel is still super useful stuff. N breeder reactors have been developed to decrease fuel requirements by a factor of 100. Instead of one egg of "spent fuel per person... one egg per 100!
The type system cannot capture 100% of the semantics of the function. You put what you can in there, but you also need documentation. You could provide a bespoke error type for every single function that returns an error, but that's a ton of boilerplate, and you're effectively just moving the documentation from the function to the error type (enum variant names are not sufficiently descriptive to avoid having to write documentation).

Even in cases where the error does already precisely match the semantics of the function, you still need documentation. std::sync::Mutex::lock() returns a `Result<MutexGuard<T>, PoisonError<MutexGuard<T>>>`. What's a PoisonError? That's a precise error type for the semantics of this function, but you need the documentation to tell you what it actually means for a mutex to be poisoned.

You cannot get away from having documentation. And you're free to make custom error types for all your functions if you want to, it just doesn't really get you much benefit over having a single unified error type for your module in most cases. If you have a reason to believe the caller actually does want to handle error variants differently then sure, make a new error type with just the variants that apply to this function, there's plenty of precedent for that (e.g. tokio::sync::mpsc::Sender has distinct error types for send() and try_send(), because that's a case where the caller actually may care about the precise reason), but most error values in Rust just end up getting propagated upwards and then eventually logged.
>A mediocre graduate science student, especially of the sort who graduates and doesn't quit, is a very impressive individual compared to the rest of us.

Incorrect. University graduates shows a good work ethic, a certain character and a ability to manage time. It's not a measure of being better than the rest of humanity. Also, it's not a good measure of intelligence. If you only want to view the world through credentials. Academics don't consider your intelligence until you have a Ph.D and X years of work in your field. Industry only uses graduates as a entry requirement for junior roles and then favors and cares only about your years of experience after that.
Given that statement I can only assume you haven't been to University. You are mistaken to think, especially in time we are in now that the elite class are any more knowledgeable then you are.
If you ask a student to solve a problem while admitting when they don't an answer, they will stop at generating gook for an answer.

LLMs on the other hand regularly spew bogus with high confidence.
Also, the vast majority of software bugs are annoying at worst, with no death potential. Powers that be would react a lot more aggressively if stack overflows routinely led to bodies on the pavement.
We went down due to some tomfoolery but we're live again!
I do think one day we’ll look back at the “best practices” of the processed foods industry as being fundamentally at odds with the best practices of nutritional ensemble signaling for our bodies.
That sector size change is interesting. I got warned off of doing that for my SSDs with some vague statement that lots of software expects 512 byte sectors. Can anyone further comment?
No, almost everyone who gets funding for a business already belongs to the monied royalty and gets it either directly from his family, via friends of the family or laundered through a VC.

There are exceptions of course, but that's how the bulk of businesses, especially those with stupid ideas are funded. In the latter category success does not even matter, the trust fund baby just has to have the appearance of a leader position.
> 2. Nationalize failing industries rather than providing them loans for no reason. Banks fail in 2008? Well, you belong to the state now. Just like the FDIC does with failing banks.

I kind of agree with this, but as a taxpayer, I don't necessarily want the government to have an equity stake in a failing or horribly-run business.

We need the government to grow a backbone and allow large businesses and even entire sectors of the economy to FAIL when they suck. I hate the narrative "We have to keep ShittyCo alive because it provides 10,000 jobs!!" as if those jobs would just disappear if ShittyCo got flushed down the toilet like it should be.

Taxpayers should not bail out GM and Chrysler and AIG and US Airways and these shit companies. We should have let them fail, let their careless shareholders eat it, and created a regulatory environment that allowed better-run competitors to spring up.
Wow this article misses many TSDBs that predated those listed. Victoria seems to be basically a rewrite of Prom.
All browser engines are cross-platform. Safari may be Mac-only (though there used to be a Safari for Windows), but the rendering is done by WebKit.
This is really a weird requirement and most other places in the world don't have it, without suffering any setbacks when it comes to outcomes of treatments.

Imagine that every programmer would have to study, say, Latin for 4 years before being allowed to code.
Craig is still Satoshi, no matter what a court has (temporarily) ordered him to state. Craig has followed the legal process 100% for years at this point, paid every (massive) court-ordered payment. The majority of cases feature him as defendant because Bitcoin ultimately threatens the establishment and must be controlled at any cost. This is the true source of the negative sentiment and constant attacks.

He just today waived privilege on X and began outlining accusations against his previous legal representation for not following his explicit instructions, and instead followed orders from a man who has been recently convicted in a UK court, is facing bankruptcy in that country, and has fled as a fugitive from justice. The rabbit hole goes deep.

Craig and the BSV Association have worked together with AWS and Aerospike to conclusively prove the Bitcoin protocol is capable of scaling to at least 120GB sized blocks, at over 1 million P2PKH transactions per second. The BTC core team said this was impossible, yet BSVA has provided data from a public cloud provider, with geographically distributed nodes to prove it is. What's more, it's been stated that it does so at an initial cost that is drastically less than most anticipated. These costs are highly likely to be lowered through optimization.

The majority of opinions expressed in this thread will most certainly be abandoned in time when the full body of work can no longer be ignored. One only needs to perform a simple patent search to discover the depth of research and innovation established on blockchain, and then realize that the sheer number of applications and grants are not the work of someone attempting to pull a con. It is true innovation, the same way Bitcoin was and is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Scarfe

also did drawings for Pink Floyd's The Wall.
What are the other tools needed for the focus economy? And why don't we use these tools?
These are thought provoking counter examples.

So, on a micro-level, let's say I have a function that expects x to be a float between 0 and 1, and there's some math and logic built on this assumption. Of course, in development if this expectation is violated, we fail fast and loudly and then fix the problem. In production it's not quite so clear. But still, is it ever the right thing to ignore that an invariant is violated and just hope that things somehow work out?

> Make defects obvious during development so they don't exist when you deploy to customers.

I agree with this phrasing. From another viewpoint, I would say:

If your code checks an invariant, and that invariant is broken never (never!, not even in production) just continue on and hope that things will work out.
I think the post title is understated, since I had a related thought: it's not hard to install most Linux distros on a laptop, and this post will intimidate people.

This post is about how one person did it on hard mode, to get it just how they want it. That's fine.

I suspect that most of the people on HN could pretty easily install Debian, without documentation (just write this file raw to a USB flash drive, boot the laptop from it, and mostly accept the defaults from the menus):

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/d...
“Modern” is an utterly meaningless word and this blog uses it a lot.
maybe you could just send a reference light beam between the receivers over an optical fiber to provide a phase reference?
The design decisions around AUR befuddle me to this day. It's utterly arcane in how to use it. Or rather it feels like it wasn't designed at all and simply evolved.

I highly recommend people to use "yay" and similar helpers that make a lot of the problems simply go away.
>reproducibility isn't just on your deployments, it's for development too

Absolutely. Adhoc configurations should be forbidden! It is easy to ensure dev env reproducibility when you run Linux. If you have config management your devs can have VMs that subscribe to the same exact configuration that the staging prod and dev environments have. They can literally have a deplpyment server in their machine, as a VM. Since the configuration is stored on a server and applied continuously, it is hard to screw it.

You can achieve this with Docker as well, if the arrangement is not too complex.

The problem, at least in my experience, comes when you start depending on several cloud native components where local emulations are always different from the real cloud env in tiny details that are going to screw the deploys over and over.
Seriously. If you have enough time and self actualization to complain about the content of online ads, then you have more than enough time to install an ad blocker and be done with that particular form of malware.
You don't think about things from the perspective of someone who actually owns or starts a business, you think about things as someone who is an employee and wants to promote skills that help others get employed: accountant, engineer. Something great about engineers and accountants is that they don't ask too many questions, because many have bad social skills: many of them would never, on their own, be able to run a business or make deals or do the most important things involved in managing relations between large groups of people and making sure a product and/or service is delivered to happy customers and shareholders get paid off. Therefore, they don't constitute a threat to a business owner.

A student who studies English, on the other hand, is given skills specifically to critically engage with a text in such a way that they can ask these kinds of questions about why they are doing what they are doing, why they are talking to certain people and not others, why, even, they ought to study one thing or another, why one guy runs the show and they do all the work. None of this is very helpful if you want to be a good worker bee who meets all their deadlines and collects a pay check and goes home at the end of the day and never thinks about doing anything more with their life, but, if you want to have more in the world, you need to know how to question it.

I hate to use an example, but look at Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir. He has a PhD from the Institut für Sozialforschung, also known as the Frankfurt school, which is a research center whose members feature quite prominently on the syllabus of many English classes at the university level. Not exactly the same, but his education bears a remarkable resemblance at an advanced level to what many students with undergraduate degrees in English would have. But you wouldn't know that as an engineer; you would just be some employee, entirely replaceable.
> I'm pretty sure I really want (the illusion of) exactly-once delivery

Do you know what idempotency is? This is exactly what he described.

Idempotency is important to prevent unwanted behaviour for duplicate actions. If you have "exactly-once", and accidentally execute the action twice that could cause problems.
That perfectly describes my behaviour. I don't care for video content. (I similarly don't open tiktok or instagram reel links.)

For a few things I've found where youtube has some specific content I'm interested in, I'll use yt-dlp to download and archive it to watch outside of youtube.com.
Reddit's mobile website also kills my battery and makes my iPhone hot. I have no idea how that's possible when they just display text.
FACT: The technology is inherently unreliable in its current form. And the weakness is built in, its not going to go away anytime soon.
Yeah, there's lots of half-fact nonsense going around in this space.

But really that's the real takeaway here: the reason that "everyone knows" something that was false[1], because no one actually cares about the facts. Modern laptops do extremely well with battery life, Macbooks best among them, and frankly no one is away from a charger for that kind of period in the modern world. You know the thing will always have power, so you never bother to notice or measure what might affect it.

But you still want to argue anyway, if for no better reason than justifying the $3k you dropped on the device, so... "Chrome hurts battery life!" becomes a shibboleth denoting your membership in the right subculture. It doesn't have to be true to do its job.

[1] And, yes, there is a direct analogy to be made here about the current US political debate about immigration. I won't elaborate but I'm sure people see it.
Crowdstrike like many EDRs uses mutually authenticated TLS to send the data over the network to their cloud.
Why are you saying this as if it was a bad thing? Just because software becomes better at us at something doesn't mean we can't do it out of fun (e.g. see chess community for example).
Yes, but its reasoning ability is extremely poor in my experience with real world programming tasks. I’m talking about stuff that Claude3.5 Sonnet handles easily, and GPT4o can also handle if it can fit in its smaller context window, where Gemini 1.5 pro just completely fails.

Bigger context is definitely helpful, but not if it comes at the expense of reasoning/analytical ability. I’m always a bit puzzled why people stress the importance of these “needle in a haystack” tests where the model has to find one specific thing in a huge document. That seems far less relevant to me in terms of usefulness in the real world.
But the cloud is just some other BOFH's computer.
> debt instruments that cannot be discharged

Your regular reminder that debt bondage is a form of slavery, and is illegal in most countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage

There are only two options with debt: bad debt are written off, lender takes a hit and the lender must be careful who they lend money to.

Or bad debt lingers forever and accrues lucrative interest, in which case giving out bad debt is the whole point for the lender’s operation. The only risk is that the debtor might die. If the debt also passes to the next of kin, you have full-on, real slavery.
> Years ago, a project idea I was really interested for a while was to try to write a shell in Rust that works more like PowerShell.

Today's your lucky day!

https://www.nushell.sh
This might be a fine solution for individuals, but of course won't help the ads/publishing industry recover from its current death spiral.
The problem with Excel is that it tries to do almost everything in one software tool: front-end (editing, presentation), analysis, semantic modeling, data storage/database.

Almost all reasonable engineers see that there is something wrong with such an approach. But almost all everyday computer users think that this is the way computing has to be.

Sometimes I wonder why even I voluntarily open it for certain tasks - anyway, despite all the criticism, Excel has reached the Lindy[1] threshold for me and is here to stay.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
I think another factor is that the spreadsheet model has basically zero barrier to entry from a users perspective. You can have elementary school students punch data from a classroom experiment into an excel table, which is great!

Any replacement system which, for example, enforced a strong separation between operations, input reference data and output result data would require users to learn the model before attempting to use the software. This is a pretty big ask, especially since lots of small-scale users wouldn't see an immediate benefit. I think of it like the tradeoff between dynamic and static typing when programming- it's the same "upfront mental overhead versus long term maintainability" question IMO.
Careless as in they type in "MARCH1" or "SEPT2" in a cell and these get turned automagically into 1-Mar and 2-Sep dates after pressing Enter?
maybe he has personality problems that make it hard for him to interact with people more knowledgeable than himself; that would explain why his videos are so filled with errors stated with absolute conviction
> In my experience, humans are at least as bad at it as GPT-4, if not far worse.

I had an argument with a former friend recently, because he read some comments on YouTube and was convinced a racoon raped a cat and produced some kind of hybrid offspring that was terrorizing a neighborhood. Trying to explain that different species can't procreate like that resulted in him pointing to the fact that other people believed it in the comments as proof.

Say what you will about LLMs, but they seem to have a better basic education than an awful lot of adults, and certainly significantly better basic reasoning capabilities.
> Google has been caught in the past letting their sites run worse on Safari than Chrome

Is that... actually true? Or is this just a way of spinning something like "gsheets used a chrome-only extension before it was standardized". Has there been coverage of divergent power draw between chrome and other browsers on google sites?
The install wiki is full of outdated information that causes people to install outdated and old methods of doing things. So I wouldn't advise people to use it, other than the fact there's no other option.
It kind of depends. You do get some weird stuff to debug, and more connections = more likely that one of them is broken.

Otoh, if you ever do any scheduled maintenance on your switches (which is likely if they're doing anything fancy), having properly setup redundancy means you can announce a likely brief loss of redundancy, rather than a likely brief full loss of connectivity. If you have the right knobs, you can gracefully fail out the switch under maintenance and everything goes smoothly. Of course, sometimes you reboot the redundant switch and it confuses the other one and servers lose connectivity anyway.
Just another example of technical leadership being completely irresponsible and another example of tech companies prioritizing the wrong things. As a security company, this completely blows their credibility. i’m not convinced they learned anything from this and don’t expect this effect to change anything. This is a culture issue, not a technical one. One RCA isn’t going to change this.

Reliability is a critical facet of security from a business continuity standpoint. Any business still using crowdstrike is out of their mind.
Uhhh....how does the screen show black?
Depends on your definition of not well off.

I think the age of $1000 beaters is going to disappear. Just the raw metals in a completely dead EV battery are worth more if you recycle it.

Even more if it's only "dead" for EV use, there's still dozens of kilowatts of usable capacity for other uses as-is.
I just use archinstall, which is similar in difficulty to GUI installers, i.e. not at all difficult.
> you can't type cons-based lists/trees (arguably THE Lisp data structure) because deftype can't be recursive and you can't create parametric types

(deftype list-of (type)
`(cons ,type (or null (list-of ,type))))

(typep '(1 2 3 4) '(list-of integer))
=> T

Most of the standard types from which derived types can be made are parametric types, which specialize on their arguments in different ways. They work the same way as macros. One upon a time I wrote a type specifier that allows you to specialize on a lambda expression, using the ordinary 'satisfies' type that only lets you provide named functions:

(deftype satisfiesp (function)
(let (predicate)
(cond ((symbolp function)
(setq predicate function))
((functionp function)
(setq predicate (gensym))
(setf (symbol-function predicate) function))
((and (consp function) (eq (car function) 'lambda))
(setq predicate (gensym))
(compile predicate function))
(t (error "~S is neither a lambda expression, function or symbol." function)))
`(satisfies ,predicate)))

Now you can even type-check on lambda expressions, and quasiquotation can sidestep the issue of capturing variables.

(defvar foo 'bar)
(typep 'bar `(satisfiesp (lambda (x) (eq x ',foo))))
=> T

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node44.html
> I do turn to YouTube if I need some kind of visual guide, like for auto repair sometimes, but it's rare.

My current car has a particular enthusiast that has a personal site with detailed text-with-photographs guides to most of the common repairs, and it's awesome.

When I buy my next car I'll probably buy a repair manual to go with it.
I've made a bunch of stuff in OpenSCAD and it can be really nice to work with but... it does have a bunch of weirdnesses like not being to find the size of a compound object, having to micro-manage your objects to avoid the spinning beach ball render, fillets/chamfers/rounded edges/etc. are dark arts, etc.

If you're basically sticking simple shapes together or cutting simple shapes out of other shapes, it's fine enough.
If those students/graduates move to other European countries (which they mostly do), they'll be counted in their destination country, evening things out.

Where did you get the idea most Europeans get a degree?
> The typical web user is not on a laptop unplugged from the wall, which is the scenario where battery life matters.

I’m sorry, what? The typical web user is on a phone unplugged from the wall.
And yet kids from foster families tend to have massively worse outcomes than others.

The US is obsessed with racial inequality, but from your life's perspective, it is better being black than being a foster kid, and no one bats an eye on the latter. Harvard won't certainly introduce any pseudoquotas on foster kids anytime soon.
At least they're using the oil exports to break their own dependence on it. They'd be even more foolish to double down on it.
I think it's about whether the expectation to log is within reason. Though that is of course subjective.

The difference between your examples and logging proxy access is that logging proxy access is the standard behavior (for proxies which aren't tor).

Tor proxies deliberately decide to behave in a non-standard manner. And with what tor is about, it is clear that this is not for technical reasons but for hindering law enforcement.

I will claim that if the tor project did not openly intend to make government surveillance more difficult, it would have implemented logging long ago.

But that's just a claim, not a fact. Maybe I'm wrong.
There are many many universities and colleges and students/parents can make decisions about the curricula they choose, Which will in turn, over time, lead those schools to focus on what the market wants. Obviously you disagree about those choices but there you go.