skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depends where you are in your life, I suspect.

A person in college on a tight budget might choose a budget-conscious PC, with an average amount of RAM and a modest hard drive. A few years later, component prices will have fallen and the PC will be showing its age thanks to its modest components. Adding a larger hard drive and more RAM will get a few more years out of it.

On the other hand, a mid-career professional programmer has plenty of disposable income, so if they're buying a PC today they can chuck in 128GB of RAM and not need to upgrade for the next 10 years.
There's a story that's been posted on here a few times about someone working at a PR firm who figured out how to leverage networks of sock puppets to control narratives on Wikipedia. It's presented as fiction but also heavily hinted to be based on a real experience. Anyone remember it?
That's really not been my experience when reviewing code. Bad code I've seen has been due to misusing language features, not knowing the principles in these articles, or misunderstanding the principles or blanket applying them to everything.

For example, abstracting every piece of similar code to make it "DRY" because they don't understand that it's about concepts not code.
> And so are more likely to pick up a Mac Studio which

Although price-conscious LLM muckers are most likely to pick any Apple-hardware. You can easily build rigs that are twice as powerful for half the price, assuming we compare desktops.
GoDaddy to face trial for restricting what software its customers can use
Sure, Tom Scott drives it in this (he doesn't talk about it being electric):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWREtcDVBE

Here is a review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2xWbfSz8Ug

Here is all the media:
https://openinverter.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=49051

My video tutorials are linked above.
I think this overstates the interest in drugs among Zillenials and Gen Z.

Most people in our cohort tend to follow a "you do you" philosophy that cuts both ways - if you choose to or choose not to partake in marijuana or alcohol, that's your choice.

Stuff like "marijuana" or "alcohol" isn't viewed as cool or uncool, it's just viewed as a yet another consumable like coffee or sugar.

Same way some people choose to cut down on coffee and others are coffee fiends, it's similar with booze and weed.

Personally, I find that older generations have an unhealthily polarized view on weed and alcohol consumption - they are split between the "weed cures everything" and "weed is the devil's lettuce" camps.

Heck, even this thread has tinges of judgement about how younger generations just don't care one way or the other about weed as if weed consumption is a core part of being young.
I think this is specifically more an IME (input method software) issue than a typing one. Japanese has similar "official" numbers (壱, 弐, 参, maybe some of the few cases where modern Japanese is more simplified than Simplified Chinese).
These numbers couldn't be easier to type. I just type 1, 2, 3 (i.e. the digit keys on top of my keyboard), hit the convert key and select the right character (I also get offered 三, ③, 3⃣,³ and several other options to choose from). That's it.

I tried the same with Google's IME and I couldn't use digits as input, like the Japanese IMEs let you do. I could find the character for 叁 quickly enough, but 壹 was only on the second or third page. Still, I suck at Chinese and I found it.

Now, writing these characters is an entirely different story. I think any character that's rarely written and appears only in one common word runs the risky of being forgotten, even if that word is quite simple and used on a day-to-day basis. A word like 喷嚏 (sneeze) in Chinese or 薔薇 (rose) in Japanese fit the bill.

The Japanese fallback, in case you forgot the character is quite simple: you'd just use either Katakana or Hiragana with different connotations[1]. I'm not quite sure what the fallback would be in Chinese, but I guess that would often be picking another character with a close or same pronunciation, as Chinese speakers often do on purpose as a sort of pun.

I also expect there are still fewer cases of "character amnesia" in China than Japan, since the fallback mechanism is simpler and more standardized in Japan, and children are taught far less Kanji in school than their counterparts in Mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan.

[1] While Hiragana gives a familiar connotation, writing the word as バラ in Katakana is "more official", if anything, since names of flora and fauna are conventionally written using Katakana in official contexts, especially when you want to use the exact scientific name. This is the equivalent of using Latin names in Western countries, e.g. Rosa hirtula would be サンショウバラ.
If anyone here has an open source project that they want a docs or README review from fresh eyes, please reach out. Establishing what problem your software solves, for who, with no initial context is a fun challenge. I don't pretend to be an expert, but I enjoy looking at new stuff.
It's a similar niche to the LG Ultrafine before it. That also had a webcam, tolerable speakers, 85W PD over the thunderbolt 3 port, and 4 USB-C ports.

If I didn't already have the LG Ultrafine, I would have bought one of the studio displays.
I bet iMacs are some of the longest-average-lifetime computers out there.

But I’m sad that the 27” models are obsolete computers and still-wonderful screens, and Apple removed the use-as-screen mode.
The main issue I run into with this is, if I neglect to charge it, and I go to use the computer and the mouse is dead. So then I need to plug it in for a bit, and can't use it until it is charged.

But that really hasn't happened to me much. In any event, a good reason to keep a wired mouse in hand too just in case.
That's a great piece of HN lore.

Same original article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35103

Tarsnap is functionally unchanged as a start-up and Dropbox is $2.5bn in revenue
Does anyone else want to talk to Siri like a normal human? Like an actual assistant?

It drives me nuts that Siri can't interact correctly when spoken to like this:
'Siri, could you text my wife that I will be home in 20 minutes'

Converts to:

Text Wife:
That I will be home in 20 minutes

Should be:
I will be home in 20 minutes

Drives me nuts. This is what I actually want. It's just so much more natural. This is my biggest grievance with virtual assistants. I want to talk to it like a real assistant. Hopefully after the LLM refactor of Siri this will happen, but on 18.2, still doesn't work with redesigned Siri. I don't know if they have added the LLM integration with her, but I thought they had in 18.2
> Most usages of android.os.Binder will be local to an app, so you can easily replace it with any IPC.

I'd be absolutely shocked if that was even a little bit true. Android's binder & AIDL generated code will absolutely do in-process passthrough to avoid the syscall for local calls, but ~nobody is bothering with AIDL unless it's to enable IPC. So that local pass-through is almost certainly rarely if ever used except on "accident" when components nominally support being passed over IPC, but in some cases aren't. An example would be Android's Surface + SurfaceTexture. Normally you're using Surface over IPC either to the display or to media codec or from camera. But if you're using SurfaceTexture, then in that rare scenario it might be local to the process.

But that's definitely a lot less common than IPC binder + AIDL.

All that said, you could almost certainly make a Binder driver shim that just uses unix domain sockets. Heck, Android itself even has one: https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/...

What'd be a lot harder is handling some of the more advanced graphics & multimedia features. Android's gralloc HAL in particular is likely borderline impossible to implement on Linux as it assumes tight integration between all of the camera, media/video, GPU, and display stacks, and also largely assumes it's on unified memory.
If you're able to look past the "hard-sci-fi" vampires. I know I wasn't.
> Yes, that is annoying. There’s also such a massive price difference between 4K and 5K monitors.

Perhaps check out the Asus PA27JCV: 27" at 5120x2880.
That's based on current estimates. It's impossible to know for certain, but there is a lot of C software out there.

I'm a big fan of runtime mitigations. I use a few in my own work.

WASM can help in some areas. But, bear in mind that a lot of this C source code is firmware or lower level operating system details (e.g. kernels, device drivers, system services, low-level APIs, portable cryptography routines). In this case, WASM wouldn't be a good fit.

CHERI is also a possibility in some contexts for runtime mitigation. But, since that does involve a hardware component, unless or until such capabilities are available in mainstream devices and microcontrollers, this would only be of limited use.

There are other runtime mitigations that are more mainstream, such as pointer authentication, that are in various states of evaluation, deployment, or regression due to hardware vulnerabilities. I think that each of these runtime mitigations are important for defense in depth, but I think that defense in depth works best when these mitigations are adding an additional layer of protection instead of the only layer of protection.

So, this verification work should be seen as an added layer of protection on top of runtime mitigations, which I hope will become more widely available as time goes on.
I love the iMac as the main driver for my family of 5

* We want a dedicated space in the house for a family computer, so portability is no concern

* It has a very small footprint

* It looks the most like "furniture" out of all the options I've seen; pretty color & form factor, and no mess of cables. If you're male, think "wife approval factor".

* It does everything the family needs from it; runs Steam, documents, spreadsheet, browser, school, photos/videos, etc

* High interoperability with our family iPhones/iPads
It's also not like the comment was claiming the iMac isn't going to sell well. (And to be fair, it probably won't sell spectacularly well compared to than prior iMacs anyway, given how the MacBooks, Mac Minis, the Mac Studio, etc. have eaten that desktop's lunch.)
If normal people do this, they get arrested.

If rich people do this they get sued.

Oligarchy in the US, a reality.
At the very least, they use them at the front desk of every Apple building for the admin who signs people in. :)

I had one during the pandemic. I got it at a steep discount but it was really nice when I didn't need to go anywhere. I'm giving it to my son to put in his room.

Seems like they're useful for families and kids, and corp environments that use Macs for the folks who work in office and don't move around (admins, lab workers, etc)
I love in Apple product announcements when they show people doing tasks that not only don't require recent hardware, but in fact could have been done without much trouble 20 or 30 years ago. Specifically talking about the ice cream spreadsheet that I suppose was there to show off how small businesses can use the new iMac.

I'm sure it's a fine machine, but it does to me highlight the upgrade treadmill.
One key part is that the crypto wars were around export, lest we forget "PGP Source Code and Internals".

If there was no international business, any-strength crypto would have been and could have been used.
> I disagree with your characterization of what Israel is doing as crimes, at least not in general (I'm sure specific war crimes have been committed). It is a war.

So what is the threshold past which even Israelis would acknowledge that what Israel is doing is both morally repugnant and illegal? What would that look like, in terms of actions on the ground?

The problem is that the crimes do not appear to be one-offs, but systemic, especially when viewed in the context of public statements by senior leadership of the Israeli government explicitly advocating for violence and destruction.

It is not normal wartime activity for a bulldozer to drive over LIVING human beings: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israe...

It might be "normal" for soldiers to pose for pictures in a combat zone, but soldiers committing war crimes while doing so should be prosecuted in accordance with international law....and for some reason IDF soldiers do this quite often, from posing while burning down libraries, to scrawling graffiti such as "Nakba 2023" on walls with a smile, to making instructional videos on how to blow up mosques on TikTok.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/israeli-soldier-burning-bo...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Palestine/comments/1cuujzz/two_isra...

https://archive.is/HTC4J (NYT)

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2024/02/15/exp-amanpour...

It's a pattern of callous destruction that makes the razing of Lidice ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre ) look positively quaint.
+1 to this.

I'm currently almost 6 years into my dream job (20+ years career). My manager maintains a culture/atmosphere where belittling people, yelling, or any sort of overly negative actions towards someone, especially in public, is not allowed. This may seem very lovey-dovey but it does also mean newer engineers or more junior ones aren't afraid to ask questions or even question existing ideas. Asshole behaviors are often used to maintain the status quo and stop people from ever questioning how things are done.

In addition, she encourages frequent, timely feedback that are objective, not personal, and, above all, she is actually rather quick to fire under-performers.

This is easily the most productive engineering team I have ever been on. A team can have both high standards and have high psychological safety. I think that's just good professional behavior -- there is never a good reason to get personal or publicly humiliate someone.
I rewrote the same web API in Javascript, Rust, C#, and Java as a "bench project" at work one time. The Rust version had smallest memory footprint by far as well as the best performance. So, no, "any other language" [than JS] is not all the same.
From a comment on the article:

"There's a page at Regia Anglorum that tries to give some examples. The "d" indicates a silver penny. It [a silver penny] might buy 15 chickens, but it also might only buy half a knife (because metal is rare in comparison to chickens and requires a bunch of skilled labor to work it.)"
The missed opportunity was to provide privacy protection before everyone stepped into the spotlight. The limitations on RSA key sizes etc (symmetric key lengths, 3DES limits) did not materially affect the outcomes as we can see today. What did happen is that regulation was passed to allow 13 year olds to participate online much to the detriment of our society. What did happen was that business including credit agencies leaked ludicrous amounts of PII with no real harm to the bottom lines of these entities. The GOP themselves leaked the name, SSN, sex, and religion of over a hundred million US voters again with no harm to the leaking entity.

We didn't go wrong in limiting export encryption strength to the evil 7, and we didn't go wrong in loosening encryption export restrictions. We entirely missed the boat on what matters by failing to define and protect the privacy rights of individuals until nearly all that mattered was publicly available to bad actors through negligence. This is part of the human propensity to prioritize today over tomorrow.
Microsoft Excel's bloopers reel: 40 years of spreadsheet errors
Eh, they start at $1300 (I suspect pretty much all non-commercial purchases are the base-line one) and last roughly forever (like, a decade is not an exaggeration; you see old ones around a fair bit). There’s a market, there.

Not sure what it’s like these days, but last time I checked cheap PC laptops were basically disposable; in an old job we had plastic Dell laptops for non-eng roles, and I’d be surprised if the median lifespan was much more than a year. They just broke _all the time_. Possibly things have come on, I suppose; this was a while back.
For professional use, the idea of "opening up and upgrading a machine" feels wild. You're either given one by your employer or buying one yourself, and either way, it's on a 5 year deprecation schedule. It's a negative ROI for me as a solo or for my employer to ever do anything with a device that isn't "oh it's broken? too slow? new one being UPSed this afternoon".
Speed wins for dev tools.

I had worked out that math for “like pip but actually works” but few people were conscious that pip didn’t quite work reliably for large and complex projects — I didn’t think it was possible to sell it.

Uv won hearts and minds because it was uncompromisingly fast: people did not really care that it had a correct resolving algorithim or that is was really reliable because it is not written in Python and thus can’t trash it’s own dependencies (maybe a solvable problem in that the build tool can have its own virtualenv but isn’t it nice to for your package manager to be a binary that can’t get dependencies screwed up no matter how hard the users try?)
I do wish it was higher resolution for sure, but that isn't feasible this year. I would have to squint at a 27" 5K monitor to read the fonts if I put this much on screen at once.
The long support length lowers the effective cost. We only upgraded my parents' computer after ten years due to software support. It was so old it was soon going to lose even Google Chrome updates. But it ran like new.

The total carrying cost over ten years is quite low. And my parents have needed much less tech help with a mac. The day to day ease matters and is worth money.
Trump Media Is Now Worth Almost as Much as Elon Musk's X with Stock Rallyi
Writing server API'n'co is not unknown path that needs rapid prototyping.
I just saw this. yep, totally promoted my project instead of following this guideline.
I also got it around 40 minutes later!
Oh, if you think that is bad, wait until you're looking for educational apps for them. What a total hot mess in a sector which should by rights be amazing.

Fortunately this is one of the killer apps of LLMs IMO - I have built multiple small tools to help educate our daughter, like this guy: https://x.com/random_walker/status/1848388462782673340
DELL has a 32" 8K monitor if you’re interested. Personally I’ve gotten bitten by both the pixel density and the high refresh rate bugs. So now I want a 27" 5K 120hz monitor, or none at all :P
In fact, to be precise, it takes time. Now I trade my time for money to support my family. If there's enough time, I'd like to write a game engine in Rust that's good enough to take out cocoscretor's game engine. Use this engine to realize the Sutra of the Mountain and the Sea, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Feng Shen Ban, the Romance of Sui and Tang dynasties... all kinds of scenarios as well as interactions I dreamed of.
Ah got it. I think the idea of knowledge management is maybe misguided when applied to economics.

Knowledge in economic terms is much less definite because prices reflect subjective value.
Regardless of the parser if you're using a 4XX status code when you should be using a 5XX status code then you're simply doing it wrong.
That's fair, in December last year we realized that we'd need to implement our own transport layer after discovering that the off-the-shelf library we planned to use wasn't flexible enough for our needs.

But the new transport layer is done, unit tests pass, simulations are working, and we're now cleaning up loose ends so this time I think we really are days or weeks away.
"Amy Edmondson of Harvard, the leading researcher in psychological safety, defines it as the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It encourages intelligent risk-taking by reducing interpersonal anxiety."

This hasn't been the reality in the "woke" SV companies at all. On any political or social issue, the only allowed perspective was the party line. On technical issues, you had to walk on eggshells or better not criticize at all to avoid backlash.

The actual company hierarchy was always clear and just camouflaged by warm and fuzzy rhetoric. What causes psychological damage here is the constant uncertainty between the empty words and what is actually happening. What also causes psychological damage is being forced to report to DEI grifters without any technical or social competence.

Some people prefer Musk's (Musk is used as an example in the article) style precisely because the hierarchy is clear and there are no fake pretenses.
> Where are the criminal penalties for reckless security lapses.

For criminal fines to send a worthwhile message, they'd need to 1) be of a worthwhile amount and 2) equal a reduction in investor returns + executive payouts.

Without that, the people in a position to make changes are soundly insulated from their consequences.
When there's no bridge, it leaves the impression that people prefer to swim!
> Compared to dying in millions

Must be fun coming up with imaginary scenarios and basing your "arguments" and claims on them?

That's just a bizarrely absurd thing to say... Under what circumstances or what chain of events could lead to millions of Russians dying for American interests?

US was/is perfectly fine with ignoring Russia as long as it didn't go overboard with its imperialist ambitions and engaged in (mutually beneficial) economic relations with most of European countries.

Bush, Obama and Trump tried pursuing a policy cooperation/appeasement for years. Where did that get us?
I was going to mention Cue, but I’ve only read about it, not used it, and couldn’t actually say whether it’s better.
XPS are horrible though. Native linux support is almost literally the only redeeming quality.

> all because other companies can't make a good keyboard or touchpad.

The whole point of a laptop is to have integrated input and display. Why wouldn't you expect the laptops with the best displays and input devices to be the most popular?
Low number of cables has also been one of the points of appeal for the iMac, to the point that it was a focal point of marketing for the original model. For the average person's setup the current model only needs a power cable.
Downside of trading privacy for security: anything that makes a network connection creates metadata about you, and the metadata is the real danger for analyzing your social connections: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

The problem isn't about the big corporations themselves but about the fact that the network itself is always listening and the systems the big corporations build tend to incentivize making as many metadata-leaking connections as possible, either in the name of advertising to you or in the name of Keeping You Safe™: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

Transparent WWW caching is one example of a pro-privacy setup that used to be possible and is no longer feasible due to pervasive TLS. I used to have this kind of setup in the late 2000s when I had a restrictive Comcast data cap. I had a FreeBSD gateway machine and had PF tied in to Squid so every HTTP request got cached on my edge and didn't hit the WAN at all if I reloaded the page or sent the link to a roommate. It's still technically possible if one can trust their own CA on every machine on their network, but in the age of unlimited data who would bother?

Other example: the Mac I'm typing this on phones home every app I open in the name of “““protecting””” me from malware. Everyone found this out the hard way in November 2020 and the only result was to encrypt the OCSP check in later versions. Later versions also exempt Apple-signed binaries from filters like Little Snitch so it's now even harder to block. Sending those requests at all effectively gives interested parties the ability to run a “Hey Siri, make a list of every American who has used Tor Browser” type of analysis if they wanted to: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/ocsp-privacy.html