skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My experience actually diverges here. I've had cases where I've done a bunch of optimizations in the 0.5% range, and then when you go and benchmark the system against the version that was three months ago, you actually see a 20% increase in speed.

Yeah, not IME really. First, I don't know how to measure at 0.5% resolution reliably. Second, this would imply that YoY we should be able to see [~20, ~20+x]% of performance runtime improvement of software we are working on and this doesn't resemble my experience at all - it's usually vice-versa and it's mostly about "how to add new feature without making the rest of this ~5 MLoC software regress". Big optimization wins were quite rare.

Amdahl's law says that "overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used" so throwing a bunch of optimizations at the code does not, for most cases, result with the overall improvement. I can replace my notorious use of std::unordered_map with absl::flat_hash_map and still see no improvement at all.

> it really sucks when you have an elegant optimization and you just have to throw it in the bin after a week because the numbers just don't agree with you. :-)

It really does and I've been there many times. I however learned to understand this as "I have a code of what I thought it should improve our runtime but I found no signal that will support my theory". This automatically makes such changes difficult to merge especially considering that most optimizations aren't of "clean code" practice.
`dumpbin /dependents` gives similar information. I use the following PowerShell function to get output that's a bit closer to ldd:

function ldd($ExePath) {
$Dumpbin = gi "C:\Program Files*\Microsoft Visual Studio\*\*\VC\Tools\MSVC\*\bin\HostX64\x64\dumpbin.exe"
$Done = $false
& $Dumpbin /dependents $ExePath
| ? {$_.StartsWith(" ")}
| % {$_.Substring(2)}
| % {if ($Done) {} elseif ($_ -eq "Summary") {$Done = $true} else {$_}}
| % {if ($_.StartsWith(" ")) {$_.Substring(2)}}
}
> So now you have two, entirely separate worlds that don't compose in any way, and you have to create "DTO"s to convert from one to the other and back.

"Now" being what specifically? The technologies I mentioned allow everything to happen on the server. We've got a relatively complex set of applications: 30 deployed apps, composition using SSI (server-side include), collaborative form entry for complex form including sections that appear/disappear, etc, near-real-time comments, etc. We have on the order of 100s of lines of JavaScript and I don't think there is a single JSON API (so no DTOs).

> But there is an entire field dedicated to all the vulnerabilities that have historically been opened up by careless backend devs

This may be part of your problem. The people returning the HTML are front end devs. Rails and the like are front end frameworks. The server is just the server of the front end. This notion that "front end" is just React/HMTL/CSS is a new thing that can be problematic as you describe. It's all front end stuff, always will be. You can tell because of what's happening with React with server-rendered components, NextJS trying to blur the line, etc.

I'm suggesting that if your perspective includes this kind of dichotomy and you see different teams of developers working on client-side than on server-side, you have to first address that as a problem.
Wings (1927)

The Passion of St Joan of Arc (1928)
Enemies, Movement, and a Demo on Real Hardware [SM64 GBA] [video]
Joshua Barretto is working on a port of Super Mario 64 for the Gameboy Advance.
> When you say your own email, do you mean Fastmail?

I assume they mean they run their own server now.
Bernie Madoff and Bitcoin is another false analogy. The closest analogy to Bitcoin is something that people have put value in that is above its material worth. There is no central manager that is taking later profits to pay earlier profits, as in your example Ponzi scheme.

As much as people like to claim that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme it is not a Ponzi scheme. The best evidence of this is that we do not know who created it, and we can track the coins in the early coins movement. Yes early people happen to mine a lot of coins and miners today continue to mine a lot of coin but often early adopters get a first mover advantage.

Bitcoin may collapse at some future date but like any commodity that is trading far above its material worth, they all have the risk of collapsing. If people decided that gold wasn't worth it as a store of value the price would crash because the industrial use of gold would not keep it at the heights that it currently is. As a matter of fact the cost of gold currently keeps it from being used industrially where it might actually provide a useful advantage if it was at a lower price point.

Do I wish I would have paid more attention to Bitcoin early on? Of course I do and I think a lot of detractors continue to harp on the same thing that they missed out and therefore it must be some Ponzi scheme that's going to collapse. Maybe but the current evidence says it's probably not. It's going to be the de facto digital store of value for the foreseeable future.

I absolutely did not see the utility you're usefulness or the future of Bitcoin when I first came out but that doesn't mean that I can't understand having a digital store of value that is useful especially after it's been put into practice. I don't understand why people would would pay $400 for a bottle of shampoo, but people do that as well. My lack of understanding does not negate the company selling the shampoos profit margin.
If you get the chance, it can be quite the experience to watch a screening of a silent movie where the music is played live, like they did back in the day. Sometimes they are played with newly-composed scores.

Some directors/movies that can be worth checking out are:

Victor Sjöström – The Phantom Carriage

Mauritz Stiller – The Saga of Gösta Berling

Charlie Chaplin – The Kid

Fritz Lang – The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
API testing automation project with Postman and JavaScript
Hundreds of Beavers (2024)
The answer is to require a high percentage of test coverage. Then you skim through the code to get a general idea of what it does and how, then scrutinize the tests to verify they enforce that understanding.

This does three things. First, it prevents people from dropping big chunks of code and asking their reviewers to make it work (if coverage is too low, it doesn't work). Second, the tests spare you the cognitive work of verifying the code does it's supposed to--especially edge and failure cases. Third, this frees you up to think about the bigger picture. Is this the right way to do this, should we be doing it at all, does this conflict with something else in the works, etc
Automotive infotainment displays are almost entirely Wayland now
I fully agree. Moreover usual pattern of software as service is to give for free or appear as if giving free, but later close it and increase the fees. I can already see people decaying in skills,fully depending on AI - in the end they will become useless without it and the prices might become unbearable at that time
React was never intended to solve browser inconsistencies. Of course it developed hand-in-hand with the tools that solved those (transpilers, polyfills, bundlers), but that was not the main reason it was invented or became popular.

The original motivation was to describe UI as a function of state. It sounds trivial, because it is when server rendering, but once you start sprinkling enough interactivity it can get messy. It's of course not the solution to everything, but above a certain level of complexity I really think you should let someone else handle the problem of syncing state with UI, and JS on its own will never do that for you.
Star Citizen Is Nearing a Billion Dollars in Crowdfunding, Still Not Out Yet
Modern times with chaplin, go west with buster keaton.
every movie is a silent movie if you turn the sound off
For me, alarms simply don’t wake me up. I’m literally unconscious and not just asleep. That being said, I only need 6 hours of sleep a night and I can’t sleep any more than that. However, I also have delayed sleep entry. So, I usually stay up until 1am and wake up at 7am, with no alarm. If I want to sleep less than six hours, I simply won’t wake up. Famously, in the military, I was dragged outside, to the morning formation, and slept through the entire thing. It was entertaining enough that I didn’t get in too much trouble, but alarms simply don’t work for me. I ended up getting doctors orders to always get six hours of sleep, if possible, instead of the 4 hour minimum. I was always worried I would sleep through important things in a war zone; and I did. I just never got caught or admitted to it.
My dystopian week. Debanking, crwodstrike, financial privacy
This is got to be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of all time. I am seriously shocked that the government has not started to investigate this. It has become a ridiculous joke. I remember 10 years ago now a person I worked with was all hyped on Star citizen how it was going to be the greatest thing ever and it was going to come out soon. They dumped tons of money into it all the early access stuff, but here it is today just a big old pyramid scheme.
> allow aimbots for counterstrike

I'm not played counterstrike in over a decade, so you got me wondering - are there matches where everyone uses aimbots? What does the game look like then? I suppose there's a new mix of strategies evolving, with a higher focus on the macro movement planning?
But if they hadn’t broken the devices, the devices would have continued to work fine.
You have to ask about the little red button though.

The only thing I find odd is that the dealer didn't notice this and remove or plug it.
An amazing site, a real treasure. The covers are something else: lurid, sometimes very amateurish, but still wonderful. Plenty of pulp but also some very good stories, well written, by great writers. I feel we've lost something over the past four decades.
Runtimes with garbage collectors typically optimize for allocation, not deletion.
>> Plus the complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership.

>I genuinely can't think of one impressive thing Google has done in the last 15 years.

It is strange to see how the "narrative" of Google unfolds. If parents and grand parents said this in 2015 or 2005 it would perhaps be an extremely unpopular opinion. Or I doubt both would have that opinion in 2015 or 2005.

But >complete lack of vision or strategy from Google’s senior leadership > has been a thing since 2003 - 2004 during their IPO. None of their problems happening now is really new. Their "Dont be Evil" BS, their WiFi privacy issues in 2006 - 2007 before Steve Jobs take a jab on stage in 2008. That was before most people thought about privacy. Not developing a browser against Firefox and then Chrome. It took some Firefox developers some 10+ years before they realise may be Chrome and Google isn't what they thought. They basically earn more money than they know what to do with it and had zero discipline on what, how and where to use it. They continue to pay $10 - $20B a year to Apple as default search engine. Apple is very good at extracting value out of Google. While it seems no one at Google cares about it.

Needless to say I have been ringing the alarm bell on google for 20 years. I wished Mozilla take notes earlier. But they have their own sets of problems.

If there is one thing other than search that Google has achieved was they managed to lift up the salary of the whole Tech industry. They single handedly pulled the average salary of programmers up 10% YoY for many years since IPO. To the point in ~2018 - 2022 many really thought Google's starting salary for a new Junior Dev is $200K.
It's Time for JavaScript to Step Aside
False equivalence. The sole reason for counterstrike and chess to exist is competition. Programming is about solving a problem. If you want to turn programming into a competition you shouldn't take away tools from the programmer.
Only if you profoundly misunderstand what GC is.
The code samples in Hackers Delight are awfully pretty, but by no means readable.

Pretty definitely does not mean readable.
W3C and WHATWG need to take a long hard look at what functionality is common to most frameworks that's missing from the default HTML/CSS spec and add it. It's literally their job and the existence of such a mass amount of frameworks that implement mostly the same things in slightly different ways means they're not doing it well.

There's bloat and then there's sending the exact same thing over the network quadrillions of times at every page load because it's not standard and everyone needs it.
In minority report there's a scene (https://youtu.be/NwVBzx0LMNQ?t=43) in a forensic/detective office in which MC swipes data and info on the screen (hologram ?) with their hands. Then at some point another character moves a physical object (data drive ?) from one desk to another and at first I am thinking "yeah, right.. no network to move data from one screen to the other, uh ?".

But then I remind myself of this passage from Virtual lights (Gibson):

> Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous-in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication.

> Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data.

> With your memo in the girl's bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.
She should have issued a crypto currency instead. Funds from crypto can be used for anything.
Dawson City frozen time is profound:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson_City:_Frozen_Time
A twice-yearly shot could help end AIDS
Had a look for updates there - it seems to be in stasis yes. Fingers crossed that it's only temporary, and that the developer is doing alright. He was a very exciting writer anyway, I found.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut.

It is about scientists that are fully consumed by their work, going mad somtimes. Their work is making a world a better place, but at the same time is used to kill lots of people.

This is the first book for me that I can say is beautifully written. Even though the subject was heavy at times, I couldn't stop reading it.
> We don’t actually have any computer science for DELETE optimized databases.

There is actually a fair amount if you consider databases with fixed length records. Which used to be the dominant form.
Main thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42284202
Japan is a sovereign country. They are closely allied to the US now but that doesn’t mean it will always be the case nor that they have to silently agree to every stupid mandate the US tries to impose.
Wasn’t expressing UIs declaratively the original purpose of react? “The V in the MVC”. IMO it helped advancing the industry with declarative uis and Jsx
This appears is a direct write on wafer machine. Is it likely way way slower than a lithography machine?
Foams Made Out of Felt
Without condoning cheating, I am impressed with the automation aspect of it. 9 seconds sounds more or less like the inference time of the LLM, so this must have been automated. Login at midnight + lots of C&P may not have done it.

Perhaps there is a scope for an alternative AoC type competition aimed at AI submissions...

...though of course that would be experimenting to get us all out of work. Hmm.
Turning bogs from wastelands to nature-scapes
Buster Keaton
I have a 3 year old Samsung mobile. Over the past few months Samsung have been bombarding me with targeted ads and emails begging me to upgrade to their new-shiny latest-greatest mobile. Much of their effort leads on all of the wonders that the new AI capabilities they've added to the phone would bring to my life.

I haven't bought a new phone. I was thinking about it but, at the end of the day, what I want is a phone that's my tool, not my new best friend.

Don't get me wrong - I've got nothing against AI. I love phone apps/functionality that will, for instance, allow me to point my camera and click, then show me a lovely hi-res, non-blurry image of the people/scene I want to capture. Getting rid of the shake in my short video clips will, I'm sure, be fantastic! But don't tell me that this was achieved with AI - just go do it in the background and leave me in peace.

But I don't need a phone that boasts about its capabilities. And I don't need a phone that will nag me to do this thing or that thing to improve my life experiences. I've got a perfectly serviceable mother who's more than happy to do that sort of nagging!
Thank you for this - I had the same experience with Strang’s book/style when I tried to learn linear algebra, maybe I’ll pick up Lay & McDonald!
> I don't know what it's going to take to get us back to a reasonable place, but I am frankly kind of hopeful for like some sort of AI note taker so that the doctor could be the human in the room again

Doctolib (premier healthcare startup in France, expanding into Italy and Germany, the vast majority of healthcare appointments happen via them) have an AI scribe project in public beta which seems to be working very well.
I really like Safety Last! - many people here recommended Buster Keaton and I’m here to say “don’t overlook Harold Lloyd!”.

I also enjoyed People On Sunday, if only to see what Berlin was like in the 20s. It was Billy Wilder’s early works, before he made some waves in Hollywood.
If I needed to build a Single Page Application, personally, Elm is the only tech I would use.
You’re saying programming isn’t not equivalent to chess here because programming isn’t a competition, but the Advent of Code leaderboard very much is a competition.
I ended up training a bert on nothing but python for the embedding search. The results were crap. Then I used an llm to write a new docstring for each class/function definition in the training data and the results were better than state of the art.

There's so much wide open space to explore. It's a shame that everyone is wasting their time with the biggest possible models they can afford.
The basic landscape "changes" so rapidly because although we keep talking in circles, about the same things over and over, for some reason we give them new names each time we go around.
> Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all

What are you basing this on?

> Theranos' investors didn't consult experts at all

This isn't someone consulting experts. It's the experts themselves staying away.

My point is that VCs consulting tech experts isn't a great signal per se. I believe it should be done. But I don't have any evidence that it works, given that it's properly ignored almost as frequently as it's followed. (It's difficult from a distance to distinguish something that can't be done from something the person you're talking to can't do or believes they can't.)

Outside biotech, which has a parallel funding pipeline, the funds that obsessively consult experts don't do significantly better or worse from those who seem to YOLO it.
Are we using enshittification for everything we don't like these days? We invented calculators, those really enshittified manual arithmetic puzzles.
Private boards for this stuff makes sense anyway, it's the Internet afterall.
I was too right, they already selected a slick sounding half baked platform: https://accscheme.com/
To watch silent film in a live setting with a live audience in the SF Bay Area you can go to Niles Canyon Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, CA. They apparently still have live film screenings on the weekends. I used to go once in a while when I lived in the area.

The Niles Canyon section of Fremont was an early nucleus of the film industry in the USA, before Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin's "The Tramp" was filmed there. During WW1 the film industry shifted to Hollywood.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niles_Essanay_Silent_Film_Muse...
There's no language rule that a phrase can have only one meaning. You seem to be taking this too precisely, as the earlier explanations of there being two interpretations are quite entirely reasonable.
If real life problems were as easy and defined as AoC problems we might be able to be replaced at some point. I highly doubt you can replace software devs otherwise. Who else is going to take the blame for software issues?
It does if your key is an auto increment or random unique identifier. But if you had a key that is also data, say a "Genre" colum, it starts to make sense that you'd want to cascade updates
"what I want is a phone that's my tool, not my new best friend."

added to my quote book.
I have several midi controllers. They are not instruments. I have many instruments (including vst's) that have controllers on them. Apart from my old rackmount Korg Wavestation a/d I have several instruments without controllers.
This is stupid though. Advent of Code Leaderbords were always full of cheaters. At least since 2020 when I first started. If you want competitive programming, AoC is not the place for that.
Nim, but whether the syntax is modern is questionable.
kill all quants
You can hit the "Reader" button on Firefox (ctrl-alt-r), I think Chrome also has that? Or an extension that does the same thing would probably work.

Bit simpler than writing an override or fetching the HTML.
There are CLI tools to fetch and submit solutions. At least one of them allows you to download the puzzle description as markup: https://github.com/scarvalhojr/aoc-cli
> are there matches where everyone uses aimbots?

Yes

> What does the game look like then?

I have only observed the games, it requires a lot of hiding.

Most of the time the winning method is to act at the very last second and hope the other player is distracted.
Don't we already have a shader language with Rust-syntax in WGSL?
It also works everywhere, given that WebGPU works wherever Vulkan, Metal & DirectX do...
I think the hub thing is where the local storage is? I don't know if they are just open RTSP things or not that you could use with any random NVR?

I have unifi WiFi APs so have all the rest of the hub/controller anyway and trialled one camera but ultimately opted for Nest cameras instead.
It's a simple webpage. If you don't like it, you can customize the CSS with a few custom rules in your browser.
“For _some_ people” is at odds with “_completely_ worthless”, don’t you think?
All combustion engines, generators included require maintenance. Having n+1 requirements doesen't sound like a benefit to an apocalypse. In general consumer cars really don't fare well without well-mainained roads though, so they'd not be that useful to begin with.
I think your comments would be improved if you learned from LLVM first.