skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sigh.

About 20 years ago, I suggested in comp.language.c++ on USENET that the committee's refusal to take memory safety seriously constituted material support of terrorism. That really got some people upset, and the posting was removed from USENET, which is hard to do.

Now, of course, C++ is frantically trying to become memory-safe, with heavy pressure from the cybersecurity parts of the US government.

Has anybody even read Marx's 1844 essay in recent years? When the USSR went down, the Stanford bookstore had a sale - "All Communism 80% off".

The 19th century was "The age of questions"[1], a book subtitled "Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond".

The Schleswig-Holstein question [2] was a border dispute between Denmark and Germany, and was a big deal from about 1806 to WWI. That's probably the most famous of the "questions" because there were several wars over it over a long period.

"On the slavery question" is a famous speech by Sen. John Calhoun (D-SC) made in 1850.[3] That's part of the run-up to the American Civil War. (Or the War of Northern Aggression, for those below the Mason-Dixon line.)

"On the bullion question" is a famous speech by Sir John Sinclair made in 1811.[4] It's about the gold standard for money.

Nobody has a unique claim for "On the (whatever) Question". It's historical, but once widely used, terminology.

[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.23943/978140089021...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_que...

[3] https://www.milestonedocuments.com/images/content/handouts/J...

[4] https://archive.org/details/sirjohnsinclairs00sinciala/page/...
Plastic pollution in the oceans has nothing to do with climate change.
Nobody wants to shut down all the farming, just reduce it. For example, the Netherlands produces 250% of its own meat consumption. Since it's subsidized, the net financial gain is very low. You could say reducing the production to 125/150% of consumption would leave enough for local consumption plus a little export in good times or a buffer in bad times.

Unfortunately, big agricultural companies hired a marketing company to start a political party which claims to be pro local/small farmers, but is actually just pro big agriculture.
Why does it so often seem that the people complaining about censorship are the ones punching down?

Why is it so often someone's right to complain and make problems for others but never concern about people's right to be tolerated when they're being decent humans?

Either people need to be banned who insult others and use slurs and those who maliciously push right up against the rules, or they will bully people out. Look at modern X/Twitter allowing hate speech has pushed out advertisers and something like half of the users?

This is basic Paradox of Tolerance stuff, decent people aren't Banning anyone for pointing out actual arguments like discussing if "question" is okay, asking for extra context if this guy did something else or if this is council overreach. But people complaining about wokeness, DEI, diversity hires, or other technically allowable but obviously hostile nonsense are clearly just trying to attack other people and often in ways that are racist dog whistles. If people insist on being hostile up to the amount allowable by the rules instead of just trying to get along then the rules need to keep changing and adjusting and of course the people who are willfully choosing to be assholes will scream "censorship". Before teaming up with someone complaining about censorship be sure they're actually at risk of censorship and not just trying to use Free Speech as a shield to hurt others.
What C compiler would add bounds checks?
In terms of category theory, what we would need is subtraction and division types on top of product and sum types.

So a 32-bit integer is the product of 32 two-state bit types. Something akin to NonZero could be defined as that type minus one state, such that there are now 4294967296 - 1 representable values.

Similarly, pointer types on some machines always have some bits set to 0 due to hardware constraints. These can be represented in the type system as 2^64 / 2^n where 'n' is the number of bits that are not usable, resulting in something like 2^46 for typical CPUs. This would allow extra bits of state to be "packed in there".

This concept is more generally useful, not just for bit-packing.

For example, a database table row might be represented by a struct that contains a field for every column. But then, how to represent the result of a SELECT query!? Either you code-gen this into a new type, create that type manually, or use compiler-generated "unspeakable" type names. (Linq in C# does this.)

Or... the language could natively support type division, so you could use one struct type for "all columns" and then use division on the type to delete columns you don't need for a particular query or REST response.

There's a whole ecosystem of tools that work around the problem of not having this as a built-in feature in typical languages: AutoMapper, automap, Mapster, etc...
I take it you've never interacted with people who build houses, make rope or administer medicine then? They don't read, even today. They learn their trade by watching others. We are quite exceptional in that reading is usually the most efficient way to learn stuff, but it's not like that in other areas. If you needed to change a spark plug or plumb in a washing machine would you be reaching for the books or YouTube?
>Simpson had five to six ounces of Play-Doh in her hands, State Police Maj. Scott Pare said in a press conference this morning. The Play-Doh could have been mistaken for plastic explosives.

From the interview, it wasn't even Play-Doh!

STAR: Sure. That was this little hand-sculpted flower I brought to give my friend at the airport. (holds it up to camera, it's a bright pink rose, hardened clay)

XENI: Well did it look like that, or did it look like a wad of C4?

STAR: This is exactly what it was. It wasn't strapped to my chest, it was in my hand looking very much like a flower. It's hard (taps it against desk and against fingernails). It's not play-doh. (taps, audible) It's baked, hard. And this is exactly how it looked on that day, it hasn't changed shape or lost color or anything. They took it from me and kept it from me at the time. It's been about a year since I had this in my possession. But I chose not to show it to people until now.

I remember this incident and how infuriating it was. It's even more infuriating now that I've read the follow-up interview.
This is wrong on so many levels.

No they don't.

I know plenty of people who have had to sit around for 8+ hours because the particular type of doctor is not available. The on call only really applies if you're bleeding out.

In my 20+ years of development and support, there has only been once that I was paged due to an actual catastrophic failure. Most are because shitty "SREs" wants monitoring on everything, even if its stuff that I have no control over.
Ooh, I have an "all ice cream shops in Massachusetts" project for which this would be at least an interesting cross-reference for (the "places humans show up at" bias in foursquare's business works in my favor here.)

Or rather, their former business? https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/22/farewell-to-foursquares-ap... says the user apps go away in less than a month...
Yeah, I guess. I rather enjoyed those days but was always craving more power to just get on with it.

And those build times were nothing compared to waiting for a long SQL process.

It's all really just determining whether the data flowed properly or not. From a C64 BASIC program to an OS component to a database's tables, it's all just data flowing from one place/form to another.
All custom tooling. I should write it up at some point - there's an awful lot to say about the whole thing, both technically and historically. And the data shows that there are several things apparently taught in American schools (like the idea that the final text is a compromise between the Virginia plan and New Jersey plan) that are simply wrong.
>Everything you can write you can say

That's easy to say if you've never written C++ or Perl.

One of the unique golden rules of FORTH is that every word definition must have a well defined pronunciation in the documentation, so you can discuss FORTH code over the telephone without confusion.

That's because FORTH words have no syntax except space as a delimiter, so can mix arbitrary punctuation with letters in any way, so you have many weird words like @ (fetch) ! (store) +! (plus store) ' (tick) ['] (bracket tick) >R (to r) R> (r from) etc.

So you could define an emoticon in FORTH like:

: ;-) WINK NOSE SMILE ; // Pronounced "winkie".
It would take a couple of years at the scale Finnish forest industry is operating.

Large parts of Europe are basically forests that have been temporarily cut down. If you let the land be, the forest will often grow back with minimal effort.
Ah, thanks! I'll fix that up, I didn't really consider the HN link
In my experience one of the best ways to "get ahead" is to give direct 1:1 feedback to someone higher up in your management chain for something that you are obviously right about it (some wiggle room here, but be sure to be atleast mostly right on a non-trivial topic). It demonstrates to them that you have good judgement and have backbone. They will trust you more and start to think of you as more of a peer than merely someone in their span of control (obviously you need to do this tactfully / not be a dick about it but also be firm). This has been a huge unlock for my career. ymmv.
According to the comment I responded to, the senior leader can't be humiliated in public, because there is no such concept as the senior leader losing face.
I noticed the blur only "sees" the underlying pixels directly below the glass surface. Any pixels outside that box, but within the blur radius do not get used in the gaussian filter. Probably the edge pixels are just repeated. You can see this when the light of the moon pops in to view when the edge of the rectangle starts to touch the moon. It would look more real if the light pixels from the moon start to through even when the box itself is still just over the dark area.

Would this be possible to achieve in CSS? I presume having a larger box with the blur, but clipping it to a smaller box or something like that.
I wish they (COP crowd) would talk about TFR and do rollouts under worst case scenario.

Low TFR countries should continue to shrink. But high TFR countries are likely to get less poor. They are the problem. If people are truly fungible like they say, migrating low consumption people to high consumption states despite local resistance is the worst idea ever. I wish they would focus on these points.
Nearly 30 years ago, as a kid with way too much free time and a budding interest in questionable DIY projects, I decided to stroll into a hardware store and try to buy some very suspicious items I'd read about in an online forum.

The saleswoman, bless her soul, looked genuinely concerned as she told me she couldn't sell me what I asked for. Then came the inevitable: "So... what exactly are you planning to do with this stuff?"

Without missing a beat, I launched into an impassioned explanation about how absolutely epic it would be to blow up this colossal ant nest I'd discovered in our neighborhood.

What followed wasn't the cool supplies or cheers I imagined but a long-winded lecture about how ants are living beings too, and how it's "definitely not okay" to blow them up. No cops. No parental intervention. Honestly, that lady could've reported me to my parents or even the authorities, but nope! This was Istanbul, and I happened to be a "local" (Funny because there are no locals in Istanbul) kid with lighter skin and blue eyes. So, all good!

But as I got older, I realized how lucky I was. If I'd been darker-skinned or Kurdish (which, back then, was basically a surefire way to get labeled a "terrorist" in the media), things could've gone very differently. Today, it's Syrians who face the brunt of the suspicion. Tomorrow? Who knows!

What I've come to understand is that this kind of dumb, knee-jerk profiling based on race and appearance is everywhere. Humans are exceptionally good at spotting patterns (real or imaginary) and we'll keep doing it as long as we're fed bad (or any, really) information. Even now, living as a migrant in Europe, I get my fair share of this nonsense. Some things, unfortunately, never change.
You can do it easily in any language with functions and flow control. Restarts and coroutines are just if-errs and CPS-natured code in disguise. The difference is only syntactic, and there are ways to reduce the noise to manageable levels.
Most of the stuff in that dataset has apis you can use live. They sent notification that they were turning off citysearch towards the end of this year and beginning of next year. The api behind citysearch was the only way I know that an individual could keep a categorized list of places like bars and restaurants under control. I would take their api and convert it to kml to build my own google map of places without all the google ad crap.
As well as having a full featured api it would also mark places as closed so your lists could autoremove the old places and you could sometimes find what took over the location. I would also subcategorize places into favorites, new and notable, hidden places, types of bars, etc….

I will miss Foursquare citysearch and its predecessor, a little palmos app known as Vindigo. Google and yelp let you tag places in their apps but don’t have as good of api, so going forward it will be hard to maintain a private list of places that can be categorized, rendered, filtered, maintained, and exported. Google and yelp largely keep your poi info captive.
> Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then.

This is not "interesting", this is common sense.
You might want to read the comments before you decide what they mean. It doesn't say "face can only be lost in public". It says "face can only be lost among peers and superiors".
Fires, first aid and guns: meet the Finnish women training for war with Russia
But that a general problem, having a html only page with a form is the same problem. Only transfer what the user should see.

You need server verification for data that's important.
Native programs can be changed with over programs or hex editor.

The talk was about data that is stored into cookies as json and csrf. (Cookies can be changed with devtools or extension)

Csrf is always an attack from third party against the user, if the user extract the data itself that's no csrf problem.

Because of this I thought you distrust js that can get attacked from third party, but yes js is as easy to change like .net or java programs.
It seems like they are. Look at how migration works too. For some reason, moving humans from low CO2 regimes to high CO2 regimes is seen as "good" or "human rights" but also everyone must cut CO2. It's incoherent actions all around.

TFR is the big thing that is ignored. Look at 50-100 years out. Low TFR stable CO2 countries will solve themselves. One high TFR country that becomes less poor (produces more CO2) dominates future CO2 paths.
I imagine this kind of algorithm are like a derivative, they give a unit response, so you would need another filter to stabilize your system, that is some drop out to remove spurious revived latents.
I had on-call jobs at one point in my career. It roughly doubled my salary, and I put most of that into assets that rose about 20,000% in 10 years. So that was nice.

The job can be excruciatibg though. Don't do it without proper compensation.
I agree strongly - if I worked at an organisation where the linked article was the 'necessary' way of communicating I would look for a job at a less dysfunctional company. The context of the article seems to be a workplace with a sense of hierarchy that is inimical to honesty if it threatens insecure managers' egos or social standing.
Do browsers really use a box filter to approximate a gaussian blur? That seems implausible to me, as they produce pretty different looking blurs.
> 2) the earth being a sphere is an objective fact that can be proven by multiple means.

Thanks for telling me the point I was trying to make. It's very useful -_-'

> There is a fundamental difference between stating a fact and an opinion

There is, but often people mistake their own opinions for facts.

I'm sure Linus knew perfectly it was an opinion and not a fact because when he spoke about the issue we were having at a conference he kinda glossed over the bits that would have made it at least doubtful he was correct.

But of course people who hadn't read the mailing list and had no context had no choice but to believe he was absolutely right and forced to deal with very unreasonable people.

Had he said the full story, nobody hearing him would have thought he was completely right.
Less than half the US military budget
For a short period I looked into carbon stuff and while forests were good, wetlands were deemed much bigger sinks.

It feels like wetlands is a huge ignored area. If what I read at the time holds (I think it was like 6-12x sequestration rate in some regions), a simple thing like rising sea levels would have a huge impact.

And anthropogenic destruction of wetlands is also a huge issue and one that is relatively easy to reverse in a lot cases (dams, rerouted rivers). And in some cases, water can just be rerouted occasionally to create temperarly wetlands that are good ecosystems as well. Mossy Earth I think is doing some of these.
Ask HN: What's your new computer/VM bootstrapping approach?
I'm finally feeling that I've gone through the setup process for a new computer enough times that I'm ready to setup a repo to host some install script I can just curl into bash. Some thoughts I have so far:

- goal is to have something like `curl https://somesiteorgithub.com/myscript | bash` which will bring a given computer up to date with whatever the latest changes are that I've made to my setup
- script should be re-runnable without causing issues and to install anything new on machine x that I've added on machine y
- dotfiles should be updated too
- will probably have the script checkout a setup repo I'll use to store everything and then have the script pull if the repo is already there
- will symlink dotfiles from the setup repo
- sharing shell history in some way might be nice.. haven't looked into how that might be done yet though

For those that have already gone through this process, any recommendations? Any unexpected obstacles to getting something working? Any good publicly shared references for something like this?

edit:
Claude provided the following in response to a similar question:
```
Yes! These are often called "dotfiles," "bootstrap scripts," or "system initialization scripts." Several notable developers and organizations maintain public versions. Here are some popular examples:

Popular Individual Dotfiles:
Mathias Bynens' dotfiles - One of the most starred dotfiles repos
Paul Irish's dotfiles - Frontend-focused setup
Thoughtbot's laptop - Professional development company's setup
holman/dotfiles - Organized by topic, very well structured
Companies' Setup Scripts:
Github's codespaces dotfiles
Thoughtbot's dotfiles
Tools/Frameworks:
mac-dev-playbook - Ansible-based setup
Homebrew Bundle - Brewfile approach
mackup - Keep application settings in sync
Dotfiles Managers:
dotbot
chezmoi
yadm
Resources to find more:

dotfiles.github.io - GitHub's guide to dotfiles
awesome-dotfiles - Curated list of dotfiles resources
```

I'll check out the references later. Curious if anyone has some experience with any of the above that's worth sharing.
Forget Pixel Art: Try Subpixels
I think most of these are extremely poor. They can only be interpreted in many cases if you already understand the data, such as by reading the table first.
> it's not clear if that was the author's actual intention

The paper[1] doesn't appear to have any other connections to the book/response/memes. A clear distinction is that the UB paper very directly and prominently states the question, rather than cloaking it in allusion or having a lengthy preface trying to contextualize it.

[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2024/p34...
From Season 3 Character Will Be Safe in the Finale
Heh... A nice allegory of how our real world eventually comes to resemble the tech we build in the "non-real" internet. :)
Last year I had just started learning Rust so used that. That turned out to be a mistake, I was spending most of my time figuring out what the borrow checker was complaining about rather than looking at the actual problems.

Hopefully that's behind me now so I will use Rust again.
Greek society switched alphabets between 750 and 950 BC, and adopted a number system. There were writing collapses. There is still a lot of history to uncover from the end of the Bronze Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
This is common in the Bazel community.
To anyone considering going to all this effort, consider doing this work on OpenStreetMap. 50K contributors make OSM a bit better every month but a good map is never finished. https://rapideditor.org/edit
> One of the bigger problems I have with Doom is reading the docs for Emacs packages and the keybinds don't match.

Did you try `C-h m`? It will generate interactive keybinding descriptions for your current context, including say Magit + Evil.
I think it's important context that this huge issue is being silenced on the largest c++ community
I used these in a distributed sync in about 2013-2014. When Postgres got JSON support we ended up going centralized for that product and a simple logic clock was all we needed. Nevertheless, I still think they’re very cool.
math :)
You were clearly banned for the comment where you used offensive slurs in reference to the author of a previously discussed blog post. I was happy to report the comment.
Michigan invokes new dispute with Air Force over Wurtsmith PFAS cleanup
I suppose the whole point of this exercise is to show different ways to tell _different_ stories? (real time edit: “how we can tell different stories” from the source)

#54 is good for showing comparable increases in sites between years, right? But if the story you’re telling is primarily “how many sites were there then? How many now?” you kinda have to squint and guess. (One could improve on this one, as you suggest. But the primary story would still be rates of change.)
I’ve found a lot of new authors via Substack, which is interesting in the context of blogs, as newsletters largely predate blogs, but never caught on for most people in the way that blogs did, but now with apps, push notifications, and social networking components and recommendation algorithms, newsletters are making a big comeback.

Also, newsletters and blogs are not so different in the end, as prior newsletter editions are easily available on modern platforms like Substack and others, while also allowing for easy monetization of any or all posts, a feature popularized by Patreon that has percolated through the industry.

You might also look into so-called starter packs, a new-ish feature of Bluesky, which, along with Mastodon, has been another new source of authors for me lately.
I concur. Sonnet is great at starting projects, but eventually gets 'bogged' down and starts losing the plot. o1 is then useful to sort out the issues and painfully pull things back on track.
I'd say it's more like wearing a life jacket while building and testing a ship, but not imposing to every passenger to wear one once the ship is certified and put in service.
Right at the bottom: “HIRE US” :)

I suspect these are all so hand crafted that there’s not much in the way of code.