skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for sharing this. It’s some food for thought! So much thought and effort went into how the site would feel to use, but it’s very hard to convey the importance and value of that to investors who are not in the primary audience. I still haven’t let go of the idea that we could make it work some day.
Has the Capacitor plague inspired the recent pagers explosions?
Japanese Rubycon Corporation's formula was stolen, between 1999 and 2007, thousands, perhaps millions, of computers and electrical goods in the West begin to burn out or explode.
I instictively know that makefiles would make a lot of things easier, but I've never found the right tutorial that would help me understand them. I'm not a 'C' programmer, and so much seems weighted to the idea that you're generating object files and linking and producing a.out.

Any good tutorials or resources for learning that show a broader applicability for makefiles?
It’s still possible to take one’s own passport photos with a plain old digital camera.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/how-app...
If only the AI could get to the point quickly instead of running its mouth on and on...
I feel much the same way about food recipes as I do about tech how-to's which describe steps but not reasons.

A simple statement of ingredients, processing, times, temperatures, etc., should get you something serviceable. But a guide which tells you what each ingredient, step, etc., is doing to the finished product is far more informative. Also those which let you know whether a value is a minimum or maximum, and how much flexibility there is to it. Much the same as a step-by-step systems admin guide works if everything goes right, but is entirely useless if you run up against a problem, in which case what you desperately need is troubleshooting and compensation/correction guidance.

For example, if a sourdough bread-making recipe gives an instruction "autolyse for 30 minutes", is there any indication that going shorter or longer is possible, or even preferable? (In practice you can autolyse for hours if you choose to do so, 20--40 minutes is a minimum.) How sensitive is dough to overfermentation? What will more, or less, salt do? How does starter change its behaviour in warmer or cooler conditions? What's too warm? Is there such a thing as too cold? How should you adjust hydration for different doughs (whole wheat, rye, spelt, einkorn, semolina, etc. --- something I'm still learning FWIW, though generally WW more, rye less, spelt about the same). How does dough change with a longer cold ferment (1 day vs. 2, 3, or more)?

A recipe is is a sequence with no flow or feedback logic to it. Techniques give you tools to control the process.
It's worth remembering that the anti-nuclear crowd was always backed by big oil, and even in the age where solar and wind are being pushed, big oil benefits as the unmet demand for base load power, in the absence of nuclear, means that they get the business as there is no alternative.

They pulled the green crowd along for the ride hook, line, and sinker.
Why would failing to write software successfully mean that they sucked at marketing?

Couldn’t a great marketer be bad at something they’re not skilled at?
> Inngest, as far as I know, does not do its own compute, it piggybacks on your own, so if you're not careful you can go hard with inngest but you'll see the impact on your hosting bill; especially with Vercel.

Disclaimer: CEO of DBOS here (Ingest competes with some of what we do).

DBOS provides compute and we don't charge for CPU wait time, so bills are a lot cheaper with our solution.
That statement might not have been clear. I meant in my entire career there are only three people I keep in touch with that I have ever worked with (well actually five) including my wife.

I started dating my now wife in 2011. I wasn’t working remotely then.

But at 37, I had an active social life and a large friend group of people outside of work from the gym. I was in the fitness industry as a part time fitness instructor. In an alternate universe I might have gotten serious about someone in my friend group.

You would be amazed at how easy it is to meet woman as one of the few straight male fitness instructors.

My wife and I moved to a new city last year. I make it a point to fly back to our former city around once a quarter to hang out with a group of friends to play cards, we travel together with another friend group at Least once a year and we end up in each others city for random reasons throughout the year and I go to my childhood home/where I went to college to go to football ganes with some of my college friends
IIRC my phone uses a MediaTek chipset. And I vaguely remember the vendor has moved away from MediaTek since because of the ahem quality of those products...

No idea how WiFi is done on a phone though. Is there a way to find out whether the phone is affected? I hardly ever use WiFi because I have unlimited cellular data and good coverage, but would still be good to know.
M-xing https sites on Emacs, altering the format of text queried, is a means of inferential consumption of news. Parallel strains of information and thought, inhabiting the same site may be recollected if the medium is altered.
No, it does not imply that. Ignorant simply means "lacking knowledge". You're implying the separate term "willfully ignorant" means the same thing as ignorant. If it did, then willfully ignorant would be redundant, which it is not.
Is there no Allow-read? Edit: Yes,

allow read, update, delete: if request.auth != null && request.auth.uid == userId;
The hard drive was running so slow I exclaimed “it’s almost like this drive is running in PATA mode.”

It was. Motherboard and CPU were newer than the VxWorks version and it was running in compatibility mode. We treated it like the previous hardware revision it was backward compatible with and 30% more throughput like magic. Exactly as predicted.
Again, read the question I asked closely.

I asked about a marketer who had no personal success writing software. Why might that be? Perhaps writing software is a skill they lacked? Why would they believe their skill in one area would transfer to another?

Maybe I’m being too obtuse.

> I personally have never had any kind of positive ROI from online ads

Maybe you personally (despite, presumably having other skills) just really suck at running online ads? But I’m sure you’re confident that definitely can’t be the case.
> everything that can go wrong usually goes right, and then we draw the wrong conclusion.

I currently have this with my 6yo. he thinks "mommy said this toy breaks when I whack it but it doesn't. so mommy is wrong!" He argues with me intensely.

we call him "little kamikaze" and hope to get him to and through puberty...

I wonder at which age humans learn to trust their "uh oh careful here" brain more than their "nah it's fine" guts.
This seems like a very different scenario -- don't be part of a hobby business that's so low on the owner's radar that they aren't willing to bleed for it.

Because if they lose interest and everything explodes, you're out of a job and they're still a billionaire.
After five years of the greatest conflict the world had (and still has) ever known, this seems not so surprising.
I think you could 3d print TPU half shells w/ some reasonable infill (i'm sure there's one with good force transmission characteristics for this?), and then seal the magnet array inside of the two halves.
That 50-person breaking point for informal/humane treatment is what I have observed as well. By the time the company reaches that size you can’t help but hire a couple “politicians”, and they begin to metastasize, and bring their mafia in. If I ever do a startup again, I will aim to stay fairly small, and politicking will be a fireable offense with very low tolerance threshold.
Gotta love the passive voice they keep using. Can't be bothered to say that the pagers didn't just blow up themselves, but were actively armed and detonated in a large scale international terrorist attack by a regime actively engaged in a genocide whose leadership is wanted by both major international courts. Way to go Reuters, meeting expectations exactly.
You really don't need them to be in person. Have you scheduled any lunchtime catch-ups? Got any regular group calls around interests? Just random banter? My work group online is a better experience than I've ever had in the office. It may vary for other people and environments, but "something missing" is not a given just because of remote contact.
That's a really good reason, but could you elaborate on the other issues? Just curious.
In 2024 it is considered normal for an _operating_system_ to require an account, an information that is potentially passed around to any app running on it.
Do they?

This is about research and papers published - but Chinese academia is amongst the most corrupt in the world, so without the technologies being utilised (or at least peer reviewed by more trustworthy people) this really doesn't mean all that much.

Honestly, if the Chinese were that far ahead they wouldn't depend on industrial espionage to the extent that they do.
Dmitry talks about compiling the kernel in years. While I haven't done that, I have built NetBSD-vax and NetBSD-mac68k natively on a VAXstation 4000/60 and on a Mac Quadra 610. It's on the scale of multiple months instead of years, but it's enough to give me a feel for it.
Here’s a one-line horror story for you (from a real project I’m working on):

.PHONY: $(MAKECMDGOALS)

> The author could have replaced it with a shell script that read $1

Sure, but `./build.sh dev` is a bit less obvious than `make dev`.

Another reason to use Make even if you don’t have any non-phony steps is that you can add those later if needed. (I agree that the author should mark {dev,build,deploy} as phony though.)
It's a little worse than that. From now on, blackhats will have a favorite #1 browser to pentest, at least for the next few weeks.

And who's going to take the bet that they'll find nothing? Not me.
While you're technically correct, what I gathered from their experience is the consistency of usage, between not only their own projects but third-party projects too.

They could make technical improvements to their own Makefiles, sure. But it's more about being able to enter a project and have a consistent experience in "getting started".
It is a sad time for industry when with sufficient funds can buy anyone to back up your product, even your product is actually irrelevant in the actual process.
Ever noticed that HN commenters are quick to point out the tiniest errors in articles that they disagree with yet won’t even give the slightest effort to consider the validity of something they’re agree with?

Office work is good = “There’s an issue with the sample size and methodology plus I think this was written by a marketing person”

Remote work is good = “Go off king”
Do you expect your iPhone 16 battery press tool to still be useful in 2 phone generations ? How many times do you see yourself replacing the iPhone 16's battery ?

If Apple was also promising to keep the same process for the next 7 years I'd see a point to this, but this of course not the case.
Yes, a Macintosh LC II :)
yeah just is really cool but it's not really commonly installed so that's kind of annoying.

i feel like we're due for some kind of newfangled coreutils distribution that packages up all the most common and useful newfangled utilities (just, ripgrep, and friends) and gets them everywhere you'd want them.
I made an app to use Podcasts to learning languages
Why choose podcasts to learn languages?

I asked claude.ai about this question and this is his answer:

1. Learn real conversations from native speakers - You'll be exposed to natural English expressions rather than dialogue from textbooks.

2. Unconscious Learning - You can listen to podcasts while commuting, exercising, cooking, etc. Easy to integrate into daily life.

3. Improve listening - Listen more and your brain will adapt and understand fast, everyday English conversations.

4. Learn contextual vocabulary - words and phrases are used in real-life situations to help remember them.

5. Voice and Topic Diversity - Find podcasts from native speakers from different countries on topics that interest you.

These points basically summarize the benefits of using podcasts to learn languages, but the reality is that I encountered a pain point in the process of practicing podcasts to learn languages, that is, my vocabulary is too small, and many podcasts do not provide text, even if they do. The text and word search process will also be very cumbersome, so I made this app, hoping to make this matter simpler.

I can't prove to you that this learning method is scientifically effective, nor can I give you any commitment to learning outcomes. I think this may just be an attempt. I hope to find users who are interested in this "method" and can learn from them. I got some recognition or suggestions there, and I hope it will be a useful tool for those friends who are already trying to learn languages in this way.

Plus you can not only listen podcast but also import any audio/video files to generate transcripts locally.

Hope you find it useful!
I don't see how "return (key, value)" is less readable than it's list counterpart. Now, why using a list that can grow, and so takes more space and maybe less efficient, for something that should not?
I see it as the opposite: as ex Deputy Head of TAO Easterly is no retard.

And there's a difference between defective software that leads to vulns exploited by crime gangs and NOBUS backdoors that the good guys use to keep you safe. Sounds bullshit, right?

That's how far the public discourse on cyber has diverged from the reality, which is part of the issue. Easterly's push for renaming cyber actors and flaws is smart. Bad quality comes from mindset, attitude. And names are important, as programmers should know! :)

I would prefer it if she had a GitHub profile tho. Always cool if you do that.
I got an even better one for you: `./dev.sh`. The author is doing it wrong, and giving Make a bad name.
Nothing solves for data loss except a half decent backup strategy.
> My coworkers are not my family nor are they people I need to “bond” with. We work well together, I do a lot of mentoring and teaching, etc.

What you’re describing is literally bonding.
I havent read about workplace interactions as an intervention for loneliness and depression. It would be hard to run a RCT on that, so you would only be left with correlation.

I dont know why making it a more pleasant experience during work has anything to do with how much someone thinks about it outside of work.
I kinda like these make-ish systems, but they all have one problem: Make is already on any Linux and Mac, and is pretty easy to get on Windows as well. (It’s a real pity they don’t include it in the Git Bash!) Just using the lowest common denominator is a big argument for Make IMO.
make as a task runner is not too bad, but there are better alternatives today like just (as others have commented).

make as a build system is ok until you hit the warts.

- make/Makefiles aren't standardized, which is why automake exists. So now you're not writing Makefiles, but templates and generating the actual makefile. This doesn't matter if you own the whole toolchain, but most people don't, so this is what some folks do to guarantee their Makefiles are portable.

- make cannot do any kind of dependency resolution, it assumes that whatever you need is right there. That leads to configure scripts, which like makefiles, are not standard, so you use autoconf/autoreconf to generate the configure script that runs before you can even run a target with make.

- make (and adjacent tools like automake/autoconf/autorefconf) use mtime to determine if inputs are out of date. You can get into situations where building anything is impossible because inputs are out of date and running autoconf/autoreconf/automake/configure leaves them permanently out of date. (fwiw, many build systems can get away with using mtime if they can do proper dependency tracking)

All in all the fundamental design flaw with make is that it's built with the unix philosophy in mind: do one thing well, which is "rebuild targets if their inputs are out of date." However this is an extremely limited tool and modern build systems have to do a lot of work on top to make it useful as more than a basic task runner.
Jax is, as far as an outsider can tell, Google research/DeepMind’s primary computation library now, not Tensorflow. So it’s safer than most Google projects, unless you think they’re secretly developing their third tensor computation library in 10 years (I suppose if anyone was going to do it, it would be Google).
"The author could have replaced it with a shell script that read $1 and matched on it to determine what to do."

Or just with a simple command runner like just.

https://just.systems/
> Make is just a DSL saying "files like this, are made into files like that, by running this command or two".

Nicely put.

Decades ago i wrote a testing framework in java where you could specify your tests and their dependent classes using make-like syntax. So you could have a set of test classes which define the "baseline suite", then another layer of test classes which is dependent on the above and only run if the above is successful and so on.

I really do not understand why folks today make everything so complicated. My advise has always been, stick to standard Unix tools and their way of doing things (tested and proven over time) unless you run into something which could absolutely not be done that way. Time is finite/limited and i prefer to spend it on System/Program Design/Modeling/Structure/Patterns etc. which are what is central to problem-solving; everything else is ancillary.
I don't understand how this is legal or even just OK?
I too find the domestic TSA photo opt‐out to be quite painless. I recommend simply saying “I’d like to opt out of the photo” as soon as you walk to the platform, because saying so as soon as possible minimizes the chance of holding up the line and irritating the agent. The only observable difference in processing is that the agent takes my ID, holds it up, and compares it to my face.

CBP is another matter. When returning from abroad I find their agents to be more aggressive or snarky when I (politely) opt out, although I wouldn’t say it’s gone as far as retaliation. I often get asked why I’m opting out, and sometimes they follow that with additional questions. Several times I’ve received a standard spiel explaining that the photo is not stored permanently or transmitted; the vibe I get is that they’re trained to respond this way to “kooks.”
> Most enterprises don't even have a budget line item for open source project donations.

But it's common that they have employees who are assigned to working on the open source project. That's an item in the budget, it just isn't labeled "open source project donations".
Those were very nice machines for the day...
You’ll also want ./build.sh and ./deploy.sh then. If each is 1-2 commands, I’d argue it’s a waste to use separate files here.

> giving Make a bad name

How so?
Reorganizing the combined correspondence on an excel spreadsheet through an arbitrary numbering system years later, and experiencing the Spinozan "pang of bad conscience."

Did you write the PIC12F1840 HEX file in 4004 machine code for your PIC-based one-chip sound player?
Yes, either all that above or just GUI for rare occasions.
> "It makes no sense to write amazing software, used by large corporations to generate billions, while you end up poor and bitter."

Lots of us said this in the 1990s by the way. Even back then, the belief that many developers and businesses would reciprocate by freeing their own source or even that enough would reciprocate for FOSS to be self sustaining was clearly, ahem, unrealistic.
From my own experience at a hybrid company, sample size 1, there's a marked difference in interaction between me and other devs when we meet in person. It's basically like I don't exist and am worth 0 to them before we've met in person.
After meeting, even if only briefly, it's completely different: suddenly they respond to messages, are willing to help with questions, even willing to prioritise work if I ask.

Now this could be for various reasons - company culture, me being a juniorish dev, confirmation bias. But it really seems like humans don't account value to something/someone unless they interact with it in person.

Personally I am completely for remote work, although I think it's wrong to say it's strictly better for everyone in every scenario.
I think you have invented the most cursed form of virtualized cloud computing where the memory is connected by a very slow network.

Bit of course you can solve this by sending letters speculatively, and having Dave keep copies of his letters back to you so he reference them for recently set values, that way you can at least keep Dave busy while the letters are in flight.
What is clickbait about it? There are a lot of Americans who are out of jobs and having hard time pay their bills, maybe you’re not in that situation but there are millions of people who are in that position.
The vast majority of consulting engagements work like this. Someone wants something to happen and brings in a consultant to explain why it’s a good idea to cover themselves and sell to the rest of the business.

A consultancy wouldn’t last very long if they disagree on strategy with the person signing the cheques.
Professional engineers have been stamping and signing off on safety-critical software for decades, particularly in aviation, space, rail and medical instrumentation sectors. Whilst less likely to be regulated under a "professional association" scheme, there has also been two decades of similar stamping of security-critical software under the Common Criteria EAL scheme.

The question is whether formal software engineering practices (and associated costs) expand to other sectors in the future. I think yes, but at a very slow pace mainly due to high costs. CrowdStrike's buggy driver bricking Windows computers around the world is estimated to have caused worldwide damages of some USB$10bn+.[1] There will be cheaper ways seen to limit a buggy driver bricking Windows computers in the future other than requiring every Windows driver be built to seL4-like (~USD$500/SLOC) standards.

If formal software engineering practices are implemented more as years go by, it'll be the simplest/easiest software touched first, with the highest consequences of failure, such as Internet nameservers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident
So "eventually OSS"? That's certainly better, especially so for some use cases (company goes under), but it isn't OSS either.
Scrolling through here I get the sense that these answers are from people who’ve never actually done 0-1.

The truth is when you’re as tiny as you are you almost certainly won’t have any scalable channels. What you need to do is hand to hand combat to secure each customer. Focus on getting 1 paying customer first by any means necessary. Call them, email them, just get in touch and see if this solves a problem enough for them to pay for it.

What’s going to happen is the face to face of actually finding someone to use your product is going to teach you a ton about: the problem and how painful it is, how well your solution solves it, who your customer is, how much you can charge, and how to get to them.

After you’ve gotten 1 paid customer (by any means necessary), now try to get a second one (by any means necessary). Keep doing this.

After the first few you’ll start to notice a pattern in the ways you capture customers: the way you reach out, the medium you reached out with, the types of customers and triggers in their life that made them receptive, the messaging that convinced them to buy, etc

You’ll stumble upon the ways to scale your customer acquisition.

Focus on getting that first customer doing whatever it takes. Get a customer to pay you TODAY. Then repeat
The 6502 has shift left and right.