skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm with you there. Before Stack Overflow, I credit most of my learning to what I picked up from blogs. Even after SO, blogs remained valuable because there were tutorials and code examples for things that would have been rejected as duplicates or whatever at SO. YouTube is similar, although I prefer written articles.

Now? Forget about it. As far as I'm concerned, my notes and learning experiments are private. I didn't create that world, valley techbros did. I'm not big enough for OAI to sign a licensing deal with me, but apparently I'm powerless enough that they can scrape my blog posts and Github packages and credit my work as their own.

If I share my learnings in the future, it will be for a free class or webinar, for an audience of real people. Y'know, the way the internet used to be.
Ask HN: Are there high quality MP3 players with an open ecosystem?
I loved the IPod shuffle but it’s gone now.

I want a high quality portable MP3 player without a screen which doesn’t require a user hostile music ecosystem.

I just want to be able to load and play mp3.

There’s tons of garbage quality devices but I’m wondering if anyone has experience with such a device from a known manufacturer.
I was in China a few years ago, didn't take fingerprints, iris, or face recognition. Just a routine passport check and that's it. I flew from Europe to Beijing, might be different if you fly from the US.
I am both heartened by the fact that there are volunteers willing to help society, but also very sad that this is even needed. Where and how has the American government - both sides i feel - so disastrously failed its people, that it is needed to rely on volunteers to help with something that i feel should have been managed by government.

Before anyone starts rambling on about politics too much on any side, i blame all sides. What i recall from my basic education so many decades ago is that government should help to provide at least some fundamental areas of infrastructure (e.g. roads and such, etc.), and then commerce (private enterprise, etc.) can take place above it, and than things proceed from there, yada yada.

I don't know what is more basic infrastructure than water and its associated management? Where is the NSA in all of this? What about Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where are they in all of this?

Clearly, this story ticked me off, and apologies for that...but, if we're at the stage in society where volunteers is a viable solution for a very fundamental element in life...then clearly lots of other things have severely failed.
This anti-tiger rock only costs $10 billion!
Yes, I do find that a lot of people get caught in whatever race they started running in the beginning of their careers and don't care to stop for a bit and try retrospecting/introspecting.

I recently took a break from work with the intention of working on some side projects and also thinking about what it is I like to do (somewhat along the lines mentioned in the article - do I want to stay on my current trajectory and try to hit senior IC, management etc). I am only about 6 years into my career, perhaps a bit early for a sabbatical but I felt this was the right time for it. I had a pretty good reputation in my job and I could have done the thinking while on the job, yet I felt I couldn't. I am helped by not having any financial concerns or other responsibilities.

I am not sure what I expect to gain from this though most people assume that either I must be starting my own business or chilling at home although neither is true. I took care to put some structure into it so I don't while away the time scrolling HN. I don't think I will get a sudden epiphany but feel if I put in some hours without any external constraints, something might happen. The worst that could happen is that I have to write off this time and go back to running the race in my IC track.
Knowing they alone account for over 1/20th of the climate change effect though is useful information.

Maybe there are other ways we could reduce their methane emissions short of getting rid of all of them.

I agree that other solutions are needed to properly address climate change though.
> Lets be realistic, the UK isnt a free country

There is no such thing as a free country. Ever since the first few homo sapiens pooled their resources and formed a tribe, they had to compromise their freedoms and agree common rules.

I agree that there are a lot of undesirable things about the UK, but I we don't have much worry about being shot. I like it that way.

> and there's literally only 1 reason why. The lack of civilian ownership of firearms.

I don't agree with that conclusion.
Judge Rules in Favor of School That Gave Student a Bad Grade for Using AI
Not every programmer can be a good manager, but no non-programmer can be a good manager on a programming project.
Do you think these errata being published are a good thing?
Not sure, but I think Hangul counts as a second invention of alphabetic writing.

If you count syllabic writing systems (which are not technically alphabetic, but are more so than Chinese, or Mayan or Egyptian hieroglyphics), there are more: Japanese hiragana and katakana, Cherokee syllabics, Pahawh Hmong, Vai (West Africa), and Linear B (and presumably Linear A).

There's also Thaana, the script used for Maldivian, which uses some Arabic script symbols, as well as Indic digits. So while it's semi-alphabetic (partly abugida), and it's derived from existing writing systems, it uses the borrowed symbols in unique ways.

There are other syllabic writing systems as well, like Inuktitut and Cree, but those were created by missionaries familiar with other writing systems.
Lunatic Fringe is a game originally distributed as an AfterDark screensaver
I enjoy traveling to Berlin for vacation, as it's a totally different atmosphere around privacy. Default payment is cash, your entry and exit from train stations is not tracked (surveilled perhaps, but you do not tap-in/tap-out or god forbid tap your credit card every time you step on a train like SF or NYC), and it's against the law to publish photographs of someone without their consent.

Ask IBM what becomes of databases full of people's names associated with their movements.
Nobody is advocating for a sudden "cessation of petroleum use". Taking away subsidies from petroleum companies that already make record profits year after year isn't going to cause mass cannibalism, and I'm not sure why you would think that. Replacing petroleum use with sustainable green alternatives also won't cause mass cannibalism - because the energy sources will be replaced with better alternatives. I'm not sure how you jump from "replace petroleum" to "mass cannibalism", it's really quite absurd.
The very fact of calling "computer programmers" as "ICs" is part of this syndrome, I'm not sure exactly when it started showing up, I'd say it was popularised by FAANGs, so maybe 2015-2016-ish?
As someone who has pulled himself back from suicidality, I absolutely abhor the expression "died by suicide".

If I had gone through with it, I would have killed myself - and any euphemisms being thrown around would serve no-one at all (especially not those still living in that hole).

I would much rather have it framed as me having done something unforgivably stupid and completely preventable - but as a society we'd much rather reject that reality and instead refuse to acknowledge that more often than not the signs were all there; that not only was the death an irreversible act of idiocy, but it was also something that we could've and should've stopped yet did nothing to prevent.
US/German manufacturers just do assembly, they don't manufacture parts, so they only need assembly plants. BYD is a vertically integrated manufacturer. They make everything in-house which helps drive down costs. This huge footprint results in having all those different manufacturing lines under one roof. They depend on no one for finished parts, the only supply chain is raw materials.
Marshall Brain also wrote many programming books in the 90s era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Brain#Publications
The current program in limited beta test is called "TSA PreCheck Touchless".

So you need to be in TSA PreCheck, and you gave them your photo and fingerprints when you voluntarily enrolled in that program. They are probably using your passport biometrics if those are available as well.

https://www.tsa.gov/biometrics-technology/evaluating-facial-...
gas turbines last much longer when run at constant optimal RPM than when constantly varying.
It will happen if enough voters make it clear to their elected representatives that they want them to repeal the laws passed after 9/11 that mandate the security screening that TSA does. I agree that's highly unlikely, but it was voters who clamored for those laws in the first place after 9/11, so it's voters that need to push for getting them repealed.
I think all your points are answered by the background section of the RISC-V pointer masking extension spec:

> Doing this without hardware support introduces significant overheads since the pointer tag needs to be manually removed for every conventional memory operation. Pointer masking support reduces these overheads.

> It is worth mentioning that while HWASAN is the primary use-case for the current pointer masking extension, a number of other hardware/software features may be implemented leveraging Pointer Masking. Some of these use cases include sandboxing, object type checks and garbage collection bits in runtime systems.
Gutenberg's press was a modified wine press that was based on a screw. The Romans had screw wine presses. The precursors were available to the Romans.

He used lead letters. Lead was readily available in Roman times - after all, the water pipes were made of lead (and poisoned the people who used them).

The lead letters would quickly wear out, but it was easy to melt and recast them as needed. I've seen a demonstration of it.

I think the Chinese did wood block printing, but it didn't get very far.
Just curious here, how much of this was written by AI?

It seems to me to me to gloss over hundreds if not (tens of) thousands of years of human ingenuity.

Subtract AI, most people will probably be fine. Take away the plow and people will starve and die. AI is a luxury product and should be treated as such.

I would go so far as to say that AI "copilots" and "assistants" should not be allowed to refer to themselves in the first person. Can a plow refer to itself in the first person? Should a plow say, "Woah dude, we just hit a big rock"?

How many technologies came before the plow? How many people does it take to make a plow? How many people does a plow feed? How many technologies is AI contingent upon? A plow is a simple tool that has far more impact than AI has shown. It addresses a basic human need. AI, does not.

There are so many logic gaps in this argument. I don't want to go on.
How much thrust does a ceiling fan produce? [video]
I feel the discussion needs to be opened up to other ends of careers.

My favorite career end that I'm naturally working towards to is the ability to jop hob to different roles without having prior experience. One way to do that is to be able to show in an interview that you have transferable skills and learn crazy fast. Another facet of that is that you need to identify companies that are open to this sort of thing.

Another career end is to become rich and not work. It's not achievable for everyone of course. But it is a type of career end.

Other career ends that one becomes disabled and live on disability checks or welfare. To me, it seems that this is a career end that people want to avoid.

I feel digital nomads aren't really represented in this career end. You could put it under independence, but the characterization of independence in this blog post was quite narrow which is why I feel the need to state it explicitly. Some people are in their career end when they can just work remote 4 days and have a decent salary.

There are many more career ends, what could you come up with?
Not the hemispheres, but:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
fwiw

'what matters about an object is its protocol: the set of messages that it understands, and the way that it behaves in response to those messages. Nowadays, this is sometimes also referred to as the objectʼs interface. The key idea is that when we use an object, we focus on how it appears from the outside, and “abstract away from” its internal structure: more simply, that the internal structure of an object is hidden from all other objects. Thatʼs why I said “the set of messages that it understands,” and not “the set of methods that it implements.” In many languages they are the same, but I wanted to emphasise the external rather than the internal view.'

"Object-oriented programming: Some history, and challenges for the next fifty years" Andrew P. Black

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ic.2013.08.002

So, a matter of emphasis?
This is why it's important to test your backups.
I don't find that to be true. I remember many of my co-workers... some fondly, some not, but they are remembered. They added as much flavor to my life as my family and friends, if not more, because we spent more hours together. Their work influenced mine and I learned from them. And their insights helped direct which directions we took the projects.

Now, did our presence impact the company? Did our code survive? Or documentation? Do people who work there today have any idea we ever existed? No, perhaps not. But really... who cares? The relationships we have with people in our lives matter, as do the impacts we have on each other, regardless of what our impact was on some rando corporation I earned a check from some number of years ago.
I find the "Can you ..." phrasing used in this demo/project fascinating. I would have expected the LLM to basically say "Yes I can, would you like me to do it?" to most of these questions, rather than directly and immediately executing the action.
> I still don't quite understand the pricing during emergencies or shortages, though.

Unpredictable supply shortages (almost always from emergency shutoffs at fossil plants) happen on the grid all the time. To deal with this, grid operators contract with "operating reserves", which are sources of supply that stay ready to make up for a supply shortfall. Often this takes the form of running natural gas turbines (hence the subcategory called "spinning" reserves).

This is very expensive electricity because usually you must pay for the fuel spent while the reserve isn't being used also.

As more battery storage is added to the grid, this service will be increasingly provided by batteries instead of natural gas turbines.

It can also be provided by voluntary (and compensated) demand curtailment programs.

None of this can make up for a grid that is under-invested in resilience (in exchange in the short term for extremely low electricity prices), which is basically what happened in Texas.
Show HN: Hydra, a code counting program written in Haskell
Charities like GiveDirectly empirically disagree. At least in some situations, giving money directly seems to be effective. Poor people are poor, not stupid.
>Now, I’m earning 2-5x more than my peers (that were more senior than me) that chose to live in those cities.

Salary or takehome? Sure, your net in SF will be higher than Orlando or London, but looking at resources such as levels.fyi, internal salary sharing sites at large companies, etc. the math for Seattle comp with no state income tax is pretty close to bay area minus tax.
torvalds/linux//kernel/hung_task.c :

static void check_hung_task(struct task_struct *t, unsigned long timeout) https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/9f16d5e6f220661f73b36...

static void check_hung_uninterruptible_tasks(unsigned long timeout)
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/9f16d5e6f220661f73b36...
I expect the only viable solution left is to go around the meter using an aggregator like Tesla Autobidder. A large entity consolidates many home batteries as one "virtual" battery, handles the grid futures prediction and dispatching for a cut, and re-distributes a majority of revenue back to the battery owners.

This effectively uses the existing behind-the-meter grid market to make an end-run around current perverse (non-local, non-instantaneous) end-customer pricing schemes.
I finally got around to trying this out right now. Here's how to run it using uvx (so you don't need to install anything first):

uvx --from open-interpreter interpreter

I took the simplest route and pasted in an OpenAI API key, then I typed:

find largest files on my desktop

It generated a couple of chunks of Python, asked my permission to run them, ran them and gave me a good answer.

Here's the transcript: https://gist.github.com/simonw/f78a2ebd2e06b821192ec91963995...
Exactly. If making good money without taking on too much stress was the goal, my advice to everyone would be to become a senior/staff IC at a decent company and stay in that role till retirement.
I've heard the term (or "individual contributor") since at least the first dotcom boom in the late 90s.
It's a real shame damage to privacy isn't acknowledged as self-evident.

Of the 87 million or so individuals who were impacted[1], only 270,000 gave their consent[2]:

The first step for those filling out the questionnaire was to grant access to their Facebook profiles. Once they did, an app then harvested their data and that of their friends."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-ana...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-ana...
async is just parallelized waiting and LLMs make CPUs wait ages for responses to async calls to LLMs allow for much higher CPU utilization.
Software is steal eating the world, just not for employees.

But we will integrate with tech more, as a society.

I wonder where brick and mortar stores will be in 20 years.
The Quipu were definitely not an alphabetic system, and probably not a system for transcribing words.
Well said: I think in this sense, flexibility is key.
Heat pumps reduce electricity usage by at least 3x and also provide cooling.
Draining but also rewarding? I think work is supposed to be hard and tiring - seems like most things of value are - but if it sucks your life force permanently that's not a good thing. I've found management is a bit of a muscle that can be worked and you increase your energy reserve with time & practice. Similar to being an IC I've found it's fear that drains the most, and building a perspective of "I don't know exactly how to do this (nobody really does) but we'll figure it out." has been immensly valuable.
# decode next bytecode opcode
movzwl 8(%r12), %eax
# advance bytecode pointer to next bytecode
addq $8, %r12
# load the interpreter function for next bytecode
movq __deegen_interpreter_dispatch_table(,%rax,8), %rax
# dispatch to next bytecode
jmpq *%rax

You may reduce that even further by pre-decoding the bytecode: you replace a bytecode by the address of the its implementation and then do (with GCC extended goto)

goto *program_bytecodes[counter]
People still survive that way.
> Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there.

The exception is if you build a fundamental component of the system, and that component is so unique in what it does that nobody who comes after you will even consider the idea of ground-up reimplementing it, but instead just has to immerse themselves into your mindset, trust your docs, etc, whenever they're maintaining that component, forever.

---

The bad/painful version of this, is when the component relies on unique hardware (e.g. a mainframe's native IO-acceleration capabilities), and was designed by someone who was immersed in that ecosystem and understood how to write code to take advantage of it. So the code is incredibly non-portable, written in terms of the low-level abstractions of the hardware, that nobody else in the company will ever understand to the same level the original programmer did. This is e.g. flight booking.

You should hope to never encounter these, since they make the rest of your service that has to interact with this thing into a tar pit of low momentum, from your lack of ability to effect change on this component.

--

There is a good version of this, too, though: when the component relies on unique concepts and math (say, doing static analysis by generating constraint statements and solving/simplifying them using a prover) that are portable, and could in theory be reimplemented in a new codebase if desired... but which were literally invented by the programmer in the process of implementing the code, at the climax of months of lateral thinking about how to solve the problem. This is an engineering True Dweomer.

There's usually nothing wrong with codebases containing True Dweomer code; they're not any less maintainable than usual. And they solve a problem that isn't solvable with simpler solutions — that's why such a weird solution was arrived at in the first place. So they usually tend to stick around.

But everyone who arrives at the company will nevertheless be slightly afraid of touching the True Dweomer code. They don't understand it, even though they know they could understand it given enough time (and prerequisite textbook reading.) Unlike mainframe code, people might look fondly on the code, looking for opportunities to be assigned to a project that requires that they come to grips with it... but the project usually ticks along by itself, not requiring much maintenance.

(What you'll actually hope for, is that whoever writes the True Dweomer code requests to lift it out, out of whatever project it's a part of, out of the company itself, into an open-source project. Because that way, that person who does understand it, can keep maintaining it, even after they leave.)
They etch holes in the oxide for the vias and then use CVD (chemical vapor deposition) to put a tungsten film over the surface, filling the holes. Then they polish off the excess tungsten with CMP (chemical mechanical planarization). I think there's also an adhesion layer of titanium. I think tungsten vias replaced aluminum vias because tungsten with CVD filled vias better than sputtered aluminum. But then copper vias were used because it has better conductivity and better electromigration characteristics.
I wondered. How dark.
At Google, HR has dictated to our team "no Bay-area hiring" for over a year now. It seems at least one company agrees with "There’s no surplus value in hiring in the Bay Area".
The end of my career is uncertain. My entire career has been uncertain. Not completely unplanned, but rather has progressed in ways I could never have predicted.

I had luck and opportunity to ride the cloud computing wave and it carried me into software development and distributed analytics systems, from a B.A degree in business. 20 years of lateral moves up to Sr. Level, but never outside of IC, yet.

I daydream about turning my DIY skills into some type of construction trades business while I am physically able. Or testing the waters with software consulting.

Manager role is not appealing working for someone else's company although just like construction trades, being an apprentice in that role is probably going to be the best way to learn it. I dread the meetings and politics and employee reviews. But if I really want to run my own business, at some my point I may need to be a manager on someone else's payroll. Even if just for a year.
Strategies for Balancing Work and PhD Studies: A Practical Guide
Because looking up a macro name for each library is easier than adding a c file to your makefile? You could still always do

#include "impl.c"

and this would still be nicer than

#define XZUGG_IMPL
#include "impl.h"