skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They still don't make money off of being rail systems, they make money off of real-estate developments.

So, sure, you can have a rail system self-fund as long as you let it build whatever the fuck it wants at stations and funnel all the profits back into the train line.
The further I go into my career, the more see the it the opposite way. I think business people are overvalued compared with most software engineers. If software engineers take the time to learn the "business", they can build their own companies that eclipse those started by the typical MBAs who view engineers as "pampered and coddled" cost centers. I think after the bubble pops, we'll see new companies that led by engineers and creatives conducting orchestras of AI that will allow them end the need for the typical corporate business people.
Avoiding long transactions is also about preventing the transaction from holding back vacuuming. Postgres will not vacuum tuples that are still visible to old transactions (visible as the backend_xmin in the pg_stat_activity table).

Long transactions can also cause surprising locks, because many locks taken persist to the end of the transaction, even if the transaction is no longer doing anything. This can block DDL operations as well as things like REINDEX.
We used to rewrite Python code in C++ "for performance". We stopped when the equivalent rewritten version appeared 3 times slower than the original.

The very notion of "fast and slow languages" is nonsense. A language is just an interface for a compiler, translator, or interpreter of some sort. A language is only steer wheel and pedals, not the whole car, so the whole arguments which one is faster is stupid.

In our case, AOT compilation backfired. We used (contractually had to) support older architectures and our Eigen built with meager SSE2 support couldn't possibly outrun Numpy built with AVX-512.

So we stopped rewriting. And then Numba (built on the same LLVM as clang) came up. And then not one but several AOT Python compilers. And now JIT compiler is in the standard Python.
"Fearless concurrency" yes. In Rust's model we can't make a lot of the easy mistakes. Safe Rust won't let you, for example, try to share an Rc<T> between two threads, because while Rc<T> is perfectly sound and has good performance locally, if it's possible for two concurrent operations to touch the object bad things may happen, so we can't ever (in Safe Rust) see such an object from more than one thread - in this case you should use the (more expensive on some hardware) Arc<T> if there might be more threads.

In safe Rust understanding why all this works isn't your problem, it just does. Hardcore implementation work (say, you're making a new kind of mutual exclusion primitive) will need unsafe and also rely on proper understanding of how to (and whether to) enable use of your type this way.
>I don't expect that to actually stop the new energy projects unless the bubble popping has a massive economic impact.

I can see it going either way. It really depends on how the economy moves this decade, and I feel we're very much at an inflection point as of now. I won't even pretend to guess how 2025-6 will go at this point.
"When do grains of sand become a heap" is a good analogue to it.

"what are your "let's just substitute a different word here" claims based on?"

Being annoyed that even when the comment is "people love to poke holes in obvious truths, especially in well educated spaces like HN." HN commenters begin to poke holes in an obvious truth- that there even is such a thing as processed foods. It'd be like arguing that heaps of sand don't exist because it's not "cogent concept"
Letter to a Friend: Why Write Online
Second-Class References (2023)
Danger Hiptop had a proxy that reformatted websites for their built in browser. Mostly as a way to reduce data transfer amounts.

https://medium.com/@chrisdesalvo/the-future-that-everyone-fo...
> This always seemed wildly implausible to me. A very large number of communicable meanings, sure, but infinite?

This is "trivial" in the boring kind of way. With just digits, we can communicate an infinite set of distinct numbers simply by counting.
This is one of the main reasons why incidents, outages, dev environment breakages need to be surfaces up to the C-Suite. Put a $ sign on all of them. Show that these are increasing over time - which it is always.

The CEO then asks, how can we make this better? The savvy CTO and VP says, we need more engineers and more headcount and retention to merely flatline the increase. Get the headcount and raises.

Do this every year because the nature of software is that it is not a spend == returns. It is a spend to even keep the lights on - it is a bespoke utility that builds your business and gets customers to pay you - thus requiring constant maintenance.
Another page on the site gives 500 RPM on the high end.

https://www.c-motive.com/about/faqs/
Every code base that I've read that made faithful use of OOP artifacts such as inheritance (in all its forms) has been made more difficult to understand because of it, rarely despite it.

OOP certainly has good features (e.g. encapsulation of state), but I think it tends to shine best when programmers are really aware of the trade-offs. Most aren't. The same person that agrees that mixins are a bad idea in React, will then turn around and happily organize their logic as class-based views in Django.

And due to sunk cost, it's nearly impossible to convince someone who's invested time in this paradigm that the acrobatics are often probably unnecessary.

In my opinion, newer languages expose programmers to better mental models than "the class hierarchy" to solve code organizational problems. Work with Go or Elixir for a while and see your Java and Python improve.
Why would you do that? It doubles the workload for the faculty and gains.. nothing? That's the whole point of a lecture: You have one person teaching many. Beyond very small lectures (<10 people) it really doesn't get to direct interactions anyhow (or it's really, really hard to get students to interact with you. I tried..).

Especially something like Linear Algebra can easily have class sizes of 800+ people at big universities. Yes there is typically exactly one lecture hall for that and you have 30+ exercise groups. But still only one faculty
Run to fail, run for success, run to waste time, run for fun. I don't care.

You can live every experience while running, that's the beauty of it.
Yes I've given up on YouTube because of ads. Got tired of fixing Revanced.
We could train a transformer that could predict the next token, whether it's the next sound from one animal or a sound from another animal replying to it. However, we wouldn't understand the majority of what it means, except for the most obvious sounds that we could derive from context and observation of behavior. This wouldn't result in a ChatGPT-like interface, as it is impossible for us to translate most of these sounds into a meaningful conversation with animals.
It mostly depends on the application. If you're doing complex transforms over hundreds of GBs of data- yeah, use a workhorse for that.

But the vast majority of slow JS I've encountered was slow because of an insane dependency tree or wildly inefficient call stacks. Faster languages cannot fix polynomial or above complexity issues.
Wasn't able to find a video of the app working, but did find this Javascript port (?), and it seems to roughly match the appearance shown in screenshots:

https://xyzzy.github.io/jsFlightSim/README.html
Do you mean create a team behind the app? What element of design do you mean? There are things with the Overcast design that I like and dislike, but they fall into multiple categories.

Marco seems like a very independent individual who wants to minimize dependencies on other people. He has mentioned in the past that he does get outside help on things, but this doesn't extend to other people taking ownership. At that point, he is managing people which doesn't seem something he wants to do.
David Deutsch claims in “The Beginning of Infinity” this is a property called universality, and that we have it. A short excerpt:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HDyePg6oySYQ9hY4i/david-deut...

The whole book is worth reading, though, as it lays it out in more detail.
>> Evidently, the software vendors are either ignorant or are lying, and school administrators are believing them.

This is what will eventually happen. Some component or provider deep in the stack will provide some answer and organizations will be sufficiently shrouded from hard decisions and be able to easily point to "the system."

This happens all the time in the US. Addresses are changed randomly because some address verification system feedback was accepted w/o account owner approval -- call customer service and they say "the system said that your address isnt right", as if the system knows where i've been living for the past 5yrs better than me, better than the DMV, better than the deed on my house. If the error rate is low enough, people just accept it in the US.

Then, it gets worse. Perhaps the error rate isnt low, just that it is high for a sub-group. Then you get to see how you rank in society. Ask brown people in 2003-2006 how fun it was to fly. If you have the wrong last name and zipcode combo in NYC suddenly you arent allowed to rent citibikes despite it operating on public land.

The same will happen with this, unless there is some massive ACLU lawsuit which exposes and the damages will continue until there is a resolution. Quite possibly subtle features on language style will get used as triggers, probably unknowingly. People in the "in-group" who arent exposed will claim it is a fair system while others will be forced to defend themselves and have to provide the burden of proof on a blackbox.
Won't run for me on Firefox or Chromium on Debian 12.
You have this with the Remarkable sort of - https://remarkable.com/blog/introducing-read-on-remarkable
Stop posting this to Hacker News.
I can’t use the Vert.x SQL lib for MSSQL because named instances and Kerberos auth aren’t supported, so for a good deal of web calls I use the MSSQL JDBC inside executeBlocking Vert.x blocks.

However, recently I was thinking of utilizing a Vert.x worker verticle with a pool of Java virtual threads that could serve my JDBC calls. Has anyone tried anything like this?
Go for it if ineducable.
Had a good friend who tutored college students and a rich middle-eastern student paid him to do a lot of his work for him.
This article sort of gets it, but misses it in the end. Engineering essentially "works for" product management because the product is the value they provide, and the product people ultimately are the ones who defend the resources required to realize their plans. If you are an engineer, the person who goes to leadership with plans that require you to work is your number one internal advocate.

...and for what it's worth, presenting refactoring as a part of delivering on new development goals is the absolute truth.
The flip side is that when you are small, you probably don’t need all the fancy managed services that AWS offers. Simpler solutions can save you money and time.
> They're physically hundreds of kilometers apart.

That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded and there’s almost exactly zero air resistance to prevent debris from reaching you.
>The desire for stronger duck typing

That's what C++ templates always have been, and got way, way tighter with concepts circa C++23.

Rust's traits are also strong duck typing if you squint a little.

The idea in both cases is simple: write the algorithm first, figure outwhat can go into it later — which allows you to write the code as if all the parts have the types you need.

But then, have the compiler examine the ducks before the program runs, and if something doesn't quack, the compiler will.
> This is an absolute disgrace. And then these are the people who lecture you on "inclusion".

Are they? Is there any evidence of correlation between these two groups of people?
I think this article is not really correct, but I have been programming since the late 1960s, so my perspective may be different.

There have been many new tools. The simplistic DWIM AI coding assistant on my Lisp Machine seemed like magic 40 years ago and perhaps LLMs seem a little magical now.

However they are just tools to get work done faster. I love coding with assistance from Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.
Huh didn't know that, guess I never assummed they would bother with it, I'd think about a published work in kindle like a product page in amazon therefore doesn't make sense to have 0$ items

Are they an amazon offer or do third parties take the time to set that up?
Well i mean if your natural talents and interest are enough to get you to, say 5th place on some stage how likely are you really to just give up at that and not push to place higher, what if you got second and knew you'd have a chance again next year. I bet sacrifice could describe a lot of the consequences of attempting to place higher.

Also, isn't literally every sacrifice just an opportunity cost? That kinda what makes it a sacrifice. Sacrifice your first born and give up the extra productivity possible. Sacrifice a lucrative but over taxing job and lose out on the money. Sacrifice a meal for someone and you go hungry. Sacrifice is always about the opportunity cost of the thing you're sacrificing. If it doesn't hurt, if it doesn't cost you something, it's not a sacrifice.
I've seen hundred of college students successfully cheat with mobile phones in class.
Well that remains to be seen. Companies did not get in the position they are in today because of the leadership principles of today - it was past workers and leadership.

This trend of spitting on the legacy of those who built it up will quickly reverse the second they get disrupted themselves due to their complacency.

I've seen this at my last company. They treated workers well and built a great product. Soon the employees were hampering "profits" and only got contempt. After everybody quit the situation is perfect from a business POV - zero expenses and a selling product with happy customers. Except there is total stagnation and customers are excitedly waiting for the next "big update". The company does their best to keep the facade up but how sustainable is it really? You can only milk so much until your core product is outdated or no longer fits the market.
CPX machines at Hetzner use EPYC also
The RESOURCE_LOCAL JPA Transaction Type
Yes, it's better to fail spectacularly, like in the case of Lane-merging on the highway, parenting your children, or when cooking for an allergic friend.

/s
For people with large numbers of podcasts as well as many paid subscriptions there is a lot that can be done to better manage the situation, including deduplication. This falls into the power user bucket so it's less valuable to these apps than the basic and mid-level users.
Supplementary Video 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gGNWxLYPhM

Supplementary Video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPZe_UDtseM
It's maybe 90% right in general, but it's 10% right (90% wrong) for the workload of language processors in particular. Lots of tiny objects are terrible workloads for JavaScript and Python.

Related comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35045520

Direct comparison I did between Python and C++ semantics - Oil's Parser is 160x to 200x Faster Than It Was 2 Years Ago - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/parser-benchmarks.html

This is the same realistic program in both Python and C++ -- no amount of "optimizing Python" is going to get you C++ speed.

---

FWIW I agree with you about the debates -- many people can't seem to hold 2 ideas in their head at once.

Like that C++ unordered_map is atrociously slow, but C++ is a great language for writing hash tables.

And that Python was faster than Go for hash table based workloads when Go first came out, but also Python is slow for AST workloads.

Performance is extremely multi-dimensional, and nuanced, but especially with programming languages people often want to summarize/compress that info in inaccurate ways.
I agree, but that needs to be clearly communicated by the faculty in their syllabi, in alignment with college and university understanding. I think it's an under-discussed topic.

Saying "AI" becomes meaningless if we're all using it to mean different things. If I use computer vision to perform cell counts, or if an ESL student uses deepl to help translate a difficult to express idea, would we be in breach of student conduct?

The real answer is "ask your professor first", but with how second nature many of these tools have become in P12 education, it may not occur to students that it might be necessary to ask.
I’ve done this but then you end up with students who are not used to “thinking”. They do bad on the test. Now I’m known as a hard teacher. Now people avoid my classes. Administration hounds me for having s low passing rate. I need a job. I now give easy tests.

The real issue as I see it is that no one wants to face the reality that far too many incapable, incurious people are going to college. So I pretend to give real tests and pretend to give real grades and students feel good about themselves and my classes fill.
Totally agree.
"Your paper is flagged for plagiarism. You get a zero."
"But I swear I wrote that 100% on my own. What does it say I plagiarized?"
"It doesn't say, but you still get a zero."

In what world is this fair? Our court systems certainly don't operate under these assumptions.
I am eagerly waiting for my Dishwasher, Washing machine, Smart TV, electric stove and everything household electronics becomes AI powered. At least my phillips Hue does not yet have an AI and I am very happy about it.

Honorable mention to the IoT, SmartHome, ConnectedHome and other old hypes which we all forgot. May be, SmartHome will become an actual reality, if we can somehow get the LLMs to make autonomous decisions to keep a house maintained and comfy.
> The OOP model fits nicely into most people’s heads because of the analogy to the real world

It also has been the default programing language paradigm for a while now, which I think explains why experienced programmers can cling to it despite its drawbacks. Try to teach object oriented programming to a beginner and it becomes clear that it isn't as natural as you are suggesting.

> generally seem to give better signals when you are doing something wrong.

Better than what? Functional programming is a far simpler abstraction: a function. Data in, data out. That's about as simple as it gets. Also, culturally, functional programmers generally understand the downside of distributed state, and actively try to minimize it. That's a good thing.

Bad code is bad code, but OOP gives you unique weapons to hurt yourself with. Inheritance allows one to change an unbounded number of objects without you even knowing. Modeling everything as a collection of objects with state tends to lead to programs that need to synchronize distributed state rather than a central state that is easier to keep consistent.
My unorthodox, branchless Git workflow (2020)
I don't know all the details so Elon might have been uncharacteristically well prepared, but it looks like what he's doing is borrowing the illegal lottery playbook from Mr Beast.
It’s pretty twisted. I went to open an office in a different country and help the engineers there. The country had an exchange rate favorable to the usd and a much lower cost of living on the low end, but if you wanted to live like I did back in California the cost was almost comparable. Maybe I was saving like $1k a month.

But the ceo and management threw a fit that I was “living like a king” because I wasn’t living in squalor.

I just was renting a decent apartment in a decent neighborhood. My apartment was still not as nice as my place back in the bay if I count all the furniture, amenities, etc

Meanwhile the ceo back in San Francisco was the one living like a king with multiple assistants, private chefs, and chauffeurs.

They were enraged that my life was too good for their standards while paying me the exact same as they had been.
This is because 100-200 level math courses are not about teaching anything, but about filtering out students who can't do the work.

This is 100% incorrect.
Also discussed at the time

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22793512
Types in the end are contacts you make with yourself, enforced by the compiler.

A weak type system gives you the freedom to trick yourself.

I don't feel it's a feature.
What would be a spectacular way to fail a marathon, though? Because you can aim to win, but pretty much all versions of "not winning" are just... not winning? That's not particularly spectacular.

Maybe accidentally forgetting you're in a marathon and bootstrapping a billion dollar startup sometime between starting and forgetting to finish?
Maybe. But it's probably just Boeing :) This was a fairly young satellite, launched in 2016, and beset with propulsion problems from the start. It was also the second of a new series, and the first one has already failed as well.
"We have to get them off the shop floor, they get everything wrong, break things and are costing us millions - lets promote them to management."
I haven't seen this discussed as much as I expected - is this even possible? Can a tool be built to - in general - determine if an LLM was used to generate text? Can a human even do it in every case?

_Maybe_ you can detect default ChatGPT-3.5 responses. But if a student does a bit of mucking around with fine-tunes on local llama or uses a less-common public model, can you still tell?

I have a similar question for AI art detectors. Can it actually work? Maybe it works for Midjourney or whatever, but the parameter space of both hand-drawn (on a computer) art and brush-stroke generating models like NeuBE must overlap enough that you could never be sure in a substantial number of cases.
It's too expensive for what you get. I'm not sure if that is fixable.

But all the other problems are, and nobody should even think about buying one until they do. VW admits that the UX is awful and have promised a fix. There will be new hardware; early adopters are screwed. You've been warned.
Homework caused major educational inequalities anyway, I'm not sad to see it disappear.
The more interesting part for me is that a satellite just exploded, that it's made by Boeing is just the cherry on top.
Global internet freedom declined for the 14th consecutive year
IC has terrible technical skills --> make them a manager so they stop screwing up the codebase.

Project is behind schedule because of mismanagement --> give them a bigger team because that's what they claim they need to get back on track.
Manifest v2 → v3 isn't really about allowing or disallowing adblockers.
https://textslashplain.com/2024/10/13/content-blocking-in-ma... has a 12-line ad blocker that's pretty effective against Google's own ads.

Ad blockers suffer more or less by accident. v2 was too easy to use for evil extensions.
The post's conclusion looks like the author has an axe to grind:

> I think it would be beneficial for the functional programming community to stop dismissing OOP’s successes in the industry as an accident of history and try to understand what OOP does well.

But the author has spent enough time in the haskell ecosystem, and probably has some cause for this statement. I would personally have liked to hear more about that cause, and the perceived issues in the community, rather than code examples.
I particularly like the confidence in the succession diagram.

Pythagoras->Da Vinci->Descartes->Pepsi...obviously...