skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I wondered why other delivery companies use commercial vehicles instead of NGDVs or LLVs, and the answer is that commercial vehicles are more capable while being significantly cheaper.

Commercial vehicles in fleets are leased - they last anywhere from 2-5 years then they're pushed off to the used vehicle market. After 10-15 years they're so done that they'll end up on the scrap yard or shipped off to Africa or Asia. On top of that they're designed to be aerodynamic at highway speeds because they'll spend a lot of their life time on such streets and speeds, whereas these postal trucks will spend most of their time moving like snails.

These USPS tanks in contrast are expected to last 30, 40 years like their predecessors, racking up insane mileage... and while no one cares if some underpaid gig worker runs over some child because the child happened to be in the dead spot of his vehicle, if the same happens to USPS the government itself is the target for a nice juicy lawsuit. So it makes sense for a custom order at that scale and expected life time, and it also makes sense to stray from what the market has to offer because the requirements are different.

Oh, and commercial delivery doesn't have to take care about its workers. They'll get burned out with their backs and joints ruined, but the companies don't have to pay a dime. In contrast, USPS is a government agency and has a massive financial incentive to keep healthcare costs low.
Kick the habit. For loops are what "goto" was 20 years ago. Error prone and not possible to abstract for example for parallel execution.
Any real-world business semantic model is going to have LOTS of joins. The game is to make them more efficient. But first and always, remember that it doesn't matter how fast you get the wrong answer.
Shitcode Principles (2020)
Good luck finding a metric that isn't highly correlated with IQ.
I'm several steps removed from day-to-day engineering at this point; the team working on this is much better than I am. It's just a very hard problem; biting it off is something you can certainly blame me for, though.

(Also: not a legend, just loud.)
tl;dr i agree

yeah in fact coding / PR-based workflows is one of the few areas where I don't really go super deep. GitHub PRs may have their shortcomings, but IMO it is the undisputed best review/approval queue system in existence by a mile.

i would never encourage someone to make an agent that asks human permission before submitting a PR. the PR is the HitL step
That sounds like the dream. I just need to think of any idea like that
> The standard has nothing to say about calling convention.

If the ABI refers to the standard, the standard can constrain/manipulate the ABI. Specifically, the standard could say destructors and copy ctors must, under certain conditions, be considered trivial for ABI purposes.

But really, account42 has it right when he talks about co-changes to the language and the ABI - that's the better way to think about it.

> I don't know what else you're implying here.

You're feigning ignorance. I said what I implied.

> Where else do you want it?

In struct fields of course. (Also the corner case of restriction of the "this" pointer, but that could arguably be covered by function parameters + fields)
The same happens in android, you get a prompt to select your browser in a new phone (not sure if that is eu or not), similar in ios.
So homemade bread is ultraprocessed because the wheat was processed into flour?
He owed someone money. The point is he hadn't been to Chicago and he hadn't been involved with the heroin trade. The whole point of the stop was fabricated.
Does the xargs -P option also work this way?
I liked Microsoft's OmniParser model so wrapped it in an API
X words is supposed to be a proxy for do enough research that you have something to say with depth. A history of the world in 15 minutes better cover enough ground to be worth 15 minutes - as opposed to 1 minute and then filler words. Of course filler is something everyone who writes such a thing and comes up a few words short does - but you are supposed to go find something more to say.
Latino is widely understood to refer to people descended from the population of Latin America.
yeah the people who reach for tools/automation before doing it themself at least 3-10 times drive me crazy.

I think uncle bob or martin fowler said "don't buy a JIRA until you've done it with post-its for 3 months and you know exactly what workflow is best for your team"
I can respect that. I guess I'm just not sure how to have a discussion around discovery/engagement without also understanding why someone would or wouldn't be interested in discovering more, but hey... that's why I'm not in that part of the industry.

Edit: And perhaps this is more of my ignorance speaking, but failing to understand subjective interests feels emblematic of a broader issue around people being addicted to algorithmically-generated content, or being glued to their phones. There's less interest in understanding what someone actually wants to "discover" and "engage with" and more interest in just ensuring we keep them engaged regardless. That feels... ick? But again, this is ignorance on my part, so perhaps that sentiment is misplaced.
But the point is Go still allows bad patterns. You can always avoid bad patterns, but not everyone will. See C++20.

Perfectly possible to write beautiful code. Alas, hell is other coders, or something.

Edit hot take: I wish Go would just have been Pascal/Delphi rebranded. All language discussions just ignore we had a contender against C for decades.

If you say it’s too weird, don’t come dragging in Go in the same breath, thanks.
Java matches my "taste" much more than Go does. I appreciate the more powerful type system. I also like the verbosity because it's always obvious what everything is - as it's written out in full. Go's compiler can infer types in lots of places, which is cool, but I appreciate being able to see the types when reading code & refactoring Java. People complain about Java's exceptions, but you can very easily create a Result<Error, Value> class for your own code, whereas it's much harder to emulate exceptions in Go. As for comparing the different flavors of the billion dollar mistake: I also found `null` far easier to understand and not footgun myself than Go's zero values & nil.
The idea doesn't have to be special, who you are and how you case can be.
"The AI Reporter That Took My Old Job"

...

"James and Rose did not actively supplant any existing newsroom jobs"
The Map interface pre-dates Optional and does not return Optional, so it won't return an empty Optional but rather null.

To be more clear:

Map<K, V>.get(foo)

returns a `V`, not an `Optional<V>`. If your `V` is `Optional<WrappedV>`, cool, but that doesn't change that `Map` either finds or doesn't find a V.
I find v0.dev is remarkably good at this. But deploying straight from there is not frictionless atm.
As usual when you take a dismissive stance ("this is obviously a waste of money!") you are ignoring lots od details. The use case of a mail carrier is not well suited by a massive eSprinter. They have no need for something so large. They want to be seated at the height where most mailboxes are so they can make many deliveries without getting out of the car.

Whenever you find yourself going "why would they make THAT decision?" assume it is yourself that is ignorant and take it as an opportunity to learn, rather than dismiss the choices of people who specialize in the area you are puzzled by.
Did you not read the article?

The NGDVs aren't Sprinter vans, they're purpose made mail delivery vehicles, with ergonomics and cargo space setup for that, which makes a massive difference for the drivers, especially when it comes to repetitive motion injuries, which is a huge cost for USPS.

Amazon went away from commercial vans to purpose made vehicles built by Rivian for many of the same reasons and they've been widely praised by the drivers.
new in 0.6.3 - manipulate_human_to_potentially_unsavory_ends()
I have an understanding of static site generators, I've used several of them and even written my own. But I simply don't understand what this is or what it's doing. You're using a sqlite database during site generation time instead of .md files? You're definitely not querying the db at serve time right? I'm so confused...
Dangerous by default is still a pretty bad design choice.
Truly a rebuttal for the ages.
Maybe I'm just not understanding the novelty of the concept. No one has done this before? That's very hard to believe.
Algebra as we know it today has its roots in the Islamic world. They took prior works and formalized them into a discipline.

From the History of Algebra Wikipedia link:

> "Al-Khwarizmi's text can be seen to be distinct not only from the Babylonian tablets, but also from Diophantus' Arithmetica. It no longer concerns a series of problems to be resolved, but an exposition which starts with primitive terms in which the combinations must give all possible prototypes for equations, which henceforward explicitly constitute the true object of study. On the other hand, the idea of an equation for its own sake appears from the beginning and, one could say, in a generic manner, insofar as it does not simply emerge in the course of solving a problem, but is specifically called on to define an infinite class of problems."
Seems like most people work? Who do you hang out around?

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.NE.ZS?locat...
> The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving.

No, the prevailing counter argument is that the prevailing argument in favor of AI taking over everything assumes that the acceleration will remain approximately constant, when in fact we don't know that it will do so and we have every reason to believe that it won't.

No technology in history has ever maintained an exponential growth curve for very long. Every innovation has followed the same pattern:

* There's a major scientific breakthrough which redefines what is possible.

* That breakthrough leads to a rapid increase in technology along a certain axis.

* We eventually see a plateau where we reach the limits of this new paradigm and begin to adapt to the new normal.

AI hypists always talk as though we should extrapolate the last 2 years' growth curve out to 10 years and come to the conclusion that General Intelligence is inevitable, but to do so would be to assume that this particular technological curve will behave very differently than all previous curves.

Instead, what I and many others argue is that we are already starting to see the plateau. We are now in the phase where we've hit the limits of what these models are capable of and we're moving on to adapting them to a variety of use cases. This will bring more change, but it will be slower and not as seismic as the hype would lead you to believe, because we've already gotten off the exponential train.
sounds cool, ping me when this is out i'd love to check it out
> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.

It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.

Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.

> Then again, his parents also had him integrate tightly with athletics for the decade before this over precisely the concern about socialization we're discussing. Perhaps there's a critical time in development when socialization is necessary and there are other venues than public school to remediate this.

I'll add to your anecdata - most homeschoolers I knew did sports and other extracurricular clubs, outside of the co-ops they may be participating in.
The phrasing "any known living organism" already excludes that.

Even if it didn't, a guarantee in product marketing is a promise and quasi-legal committment, not a certification of objective universal cosmic truth.

In some cases, everybody knows that statistically there will be at least one case where the guarantee is broken, but that doesn't void anything.
We don't care about productivity. We care about controlling labor. The more control you have over your labor the more you feel like you're doing things. Zero trust. Zero verification. That's just how it works.
> According to Tom Davis, the Bush administration threatened to veto the legislation unless they added the provision regarding funding the employee benefits in advance with the objective of using that money to reduce the federal deficit.

Bush was responsible for the provision that kneecapped USPS to prevent them from ever funding their EV ambitions (until Biden funded NGDV in 2022)
This is definitely a problem that can occur, but for the one I was thinking of originally when writing the comment, we had pretty much all the resources available: the company sold internationally, so already had plenty of access to high-quality translators, and the application we were building was in-house, so we could go and ask the teams themselves if the translations made sense. More importantly, the need was also clearly there - many of the users of the application were seasonal workers, often older and less well-educated, in countries where neither English nor German were particularly relevant languages. Giving buttons labels in our users' languages meant they could figure out what they needed to do much more quickly, rather than having to memorise button colours and positions.

You're right that sometimes translation for technical terms is difficult, but the case I experienced far more often was Germans creating their own English words, or guessing at phrases they thought ought to exist because their English was not as good at they believed.

I agree that high quality translations are hard, and particularly difficult to retrofit into an existing application. But unless you have a very specialised audience, they're usually worth it!
shoot me an email or find me on linkedin and lets catch up
You're not supposed to talk about it because the people who talk about it don't want to talk about slavery and Jim Crow. There were laws prescribing the death penalty for white people caught teaching black people how to read. Slaves were released into debt peonage while their owners were paid reparations. Control things for wealth, and the wealth of relatives, and all of the statistics start to favor the descendants of slaves.

Slaves never discovered the philosopher's stone, so they never managed to turn lead into gold, but since nobody cared about entertaining us, we had to entertain ourselves. How did that turn out?

IQ is an obsession of low-IQ people. Smart people understand that you can become smarter by learning rules that allow you to process the information you receive in a better way, and that this process is endless. Dumb people think that smart people are magical, and were born with special powers that you can measure by looking at them really hard.

If the race IQ people were serious, they'd be making arguments that the low-IQ races should have disproportionate interventions. Instead, they're just trying to retroactively justify the selfish brutality of their disgusting ancestors.

worthless addition: I have to mention that I got into Mensa, or else people think comments like this are sour grapes. They love speculating about people's internal states over a good argument, as much as they love a simple scalar over a complex nonlinear process.
You mean they're just a bunch of people working on a complicated problem? Why, I never.
Do you have null dereference bugs that you occasionally solve, even if only during development? The "billion dollar mistake" is a reference to the economic cost of all bugs it created as a concept. That doesn't mean you don't build techniques to work around it, but it does mean that that's the economic efficiency left on the floor.

In other words, the cognitive overhead you spend on worrying about nulls (however you do that), programmers in other languages spend on other things.
Calculating GPT-2's Inference Speedups
But that never shows up in the data? Seriously, people always like to bring this idea up like it's not been studied to hell and back. Socioeconomic is not a stronger factor.
SWE Agent coined "agent-computer-interface" based on HCI. I think if there's a category here, we're building the agent-human interface XD
Which is odd, because it still hasn't actually ended in africa....
Kotlin feels like the Go 2.0 that the author is looking for in many ways. It is interesting that Kotlin hasn't fully taken off in the way you might expect.

Reflecting on my own reasons : it comes down to that I'm not particularly fond of IntelliJ and even less fond in principle of being critically dependent on a language that is only so controlled by a single vendor, and has poor IDE support outside that vendor's IDE. If I loved IntelliJ I might not care.

However I also find that there is still impedance mismatch with Java and it's just enough that I always just prefer to accept the warts of Java rather than use a language that is less known and supported.
ha yes native apps / push notifications are coming someday - love this idea
Unlike Dotcom, NK Kim is going to achieve his goals by uniting the Korean peninsula when SK becomes a ghost land due to a collapsed birthrate.
Because the problem is that "AI generated" content is vapid slop. The problem is that most "human generated" content is also vapid slop.

My problems on the modern internet are simply that I can't find interesting things through the slop, period--human or AI generated.

It will be interesting to see if "curation" can actually find a business model this time.
You're trolling - I never "argued in favor of the gestapo". I specifically called out the reason why it's not great to carry around $80,000 in cash is that anyone can steal that cash from you if you're carrying it around, not just "the gestapo".
The "unpaid" volunteer in question was raking in $100 per attempt for an arguably impossible task. That unquestionably moves the situation from a bounty/prize to a gambling house taking rigged bets and it's pretty clear by his language in the emails that he took pleasure in his position. How many fools did he part from their money before getting one upped by Patrick? And how did he act when he finally realized he wasn't as clever as he thought?

I'd agree that if this was a free entry situation he'd be fully within his rights turning down trolls, rules lawyers, etc. for the same reasons you mentioned. Trying to scam a well intentioned but naive bounty post would be sad behavior. But this guy was clearly taking money on a position he never intended to pay out on and not losing any sleep over it.
I have no magic window into Microsoft, but they've been saying they need to stop writing C++ for genuine decades now, and it's still prominent on their jobs site with new projects.

I'm aware they're trying, but I just don't believe their statements from the evidence available.
Thanks for that link. I haven't had a video resonate with me that much in a long while, possibly because I too have spent time in Utrecht.
Spending per student isn't really that related to test performance so I don't really understand the link?
> Java is very “simple” precisely due to its verbosity.

The author and I clearly have different definitions of simple. Indeed, I believe that the syntax bloat of Java, which is not a source of simplicity, is a significant source of complexity and causes overengineered frameworks to proliferate in the ecosystem to make up for the language defects. Moreover, Java is full of features and keeps adding new ones every six months. Every new feature is more complexity, possibly added for a good reason, but nevertheless increasing the complexity of the language.
Few things are more masculine than mowing down pedestrians with a pseudo diesel locomotive.
i am for now. Been casually on the lookout for some other super dope builders but it's not a process you can control outside passive looking, and definitely not something to rush
Projection is easier than deep thought.
I really like Dart, and it's clearly far superior to its competitors in the "old imperative" space, like Python, Javascript (though Typescript obviously has fancier types), Java, and even Go IMO.

The frustrating thing is that it's so close to the functional features that Rust embraced (mainly that everything is an expression), but it just brushes against it. Like, with Python and Javascript, you know they're shit. Nobody expects to be able to write a switch that evaluates to a lambda or whatever in Python. But Dart is just so close to greatness but just misses!

They even added switch expressions recently, but with a different syntax to switch statements! So close!

Still, overall it's a great language and really deserves more market share. In particular the dev tooling is the best of any language I've used. The LSP server is instantaneous. Nothing else comes close.
I'm pretty sure you draw the same line:

* Pealing a carrot: not cruel

* Skinning a rabbit alive: unnecessarily cruel

For all the nonsense about plants experiencing "pain", they, uh, don't. Animals do. Outside of bad philosophical arguments, everyone behaves broadly in accordance with that belief.
What does gambling have to do with investing?
I find that hard to believe. Bochs is trivial to detect, unless you heavily patch it, then it's still detectable (for example, by leveraging known bugs/mismatches with a real CPSs). And that's just a tip of the iceberg as far as antivm goes.

But I agree that many detectors used by malware don't expect Bochs and thus don't detect it.
Thanks! I did not read that as being to prevent them from dropping out or getting pregnant, or other "problem kid" behavior, just at risk for academic problems in the future. When I was in school educators framed it entirely as "living up to your potential". I see what you mean though.
not all cereals have added sugar, I dont buy 40% added sugar, but rather 0% and 14% added sugar cereals
Neat, this could be a step forward from using something like n8n to manage processes, input and reviews.
glad it resonates - and yes exactly - love the framing of "engineering team" -> single programmer.
I was a gifted student in CA public school. Now I code for food :(
Oft repeated, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this actually studied in practice. And personally I suspect it’s more a clever meme by knife sellers.
homeschooling is a pretty amazing solution if done right
And then the rabbit pulls the reverse lever, and the trolley is speeding back towards Elmer Fudd.
Looking for the Answer To_ "Do I Own the Digital Media I Paid For?"
Functional programming is not "newer", it is as old as Lisp, which dates back to the 60s. The people who made Go simply decided that the language did not need those features.
So the airline sells a last minute ticket and after the customer pays, the airline's agent initiates steps to coerce the ticket holder from enjoying the travel he just purchased. All in the name of profit. Sounds unfair, deceptive and damaging to me, exactly the sort of thing that ruins reputations and balance sheets.
It wasn't just TP that used overlays; it was a very common technique for large DOS apps in general.
Can you actually fire people who work for free at your "lean startup"? Sounds like another founder who is high on their own supply.
There's a big asterisk on the word "learn" in that headline.
>You want string array contains, nope

Go now has slices.Contains
Nice to see someone else banging this drum!