skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In almost all cases before gen AI, scraping was found to be legal unless the bot accepted terms of service, in which case bot is bound by ToS. The biggest and most clear is [1]. People have been scraping internet for as long as internet existed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
Microplans: The Future of Consumer SaaS Economics
Computers always do exactly as they're told. Unfortunately, there are so many people telling them to do so many things at so many layers of abstraction that the operator can't be sure of anything anymore.

edit: The thing is, had I prefaced it with "ASSUMING A PROPERLY FUNCTIONING COMPUTER," someone would still roll in to pick it apart. You can't please pedants and make a worthwhile point at the same time.

Do circuits get weird? Can a stray cosmic ray flip a bit even in a system with ECC RAM?

Sure.

Does this meaningfully affect a bit about the hazards of abstractions on top of abstractions?

No.

The point is that abstractions amplify computer problems whether they're human error or ghosts in the machine.
Sometimes small sites show up. Sometimes nothing shows up even though there are matching small sites out there.
I don't see much to disgree with in what you're saying. Were clearly talking about different things.

What happens when you dig in and exhaust all your best efforts and still don't find a solution? Are you a lost cause because you couldn't figure it out for yourself? Or are you allowed to be shown the way it's done so you can learn from that?

Many times in my life have I not been able to figure something out for myself, and needed shown how the thing was done. Just because I couldn't do it on my own doesn't mean I wasn't capable of either doing it once shown, or that by being shown I didn't learn anything.
It can be a game-changer in that sense
Any tips or anecdotes for us (well, me) about the fun things you'd do with students to encourage that joy?

I am not a PhD, but have done a fair bit of tutoring young people in maths. I feel similarly to you there, and am always on the lookout for new ways to foster that feeling of mathematics being fun and wonderful.

It can be hard. The feeling a lot of young people pick up - of maths being roughly akin to pointless abject suffering - is so strongly rooted in young people sometimes, and can be strongly connected to feelings of inadequacy and shame and so on.
That's a fond memory. I still see (with my rose-tinted glasses) KDE 3.4 on SuSE 10 and as the best desktop environment I ever used. That was in 2006 which I can't imagine is anything close to twenty years ago.

Example: https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/10...
I agree that the way things were along time ago was more natural and definitely more creative. Things today though are way different though. A huge difference is that media wasn’t an industry back then. Most people couldn’t even read. The retelling of myths would mostly happen in the form of poetry or drama performed publicly, and the performance schedule was tightly controlled in the form of contests and festivals to honor various things across the calendar. There’s not really analogue to that now. We are truly in uncharted territory, and that was the case since the printing press. Throw in the invention of the internet and it’s a giant mess. I’m optimistic though that we can resolve it and pave a way forward.
The type checking argument comes up in every language discussion and IMO it’s not worth it. Some people love static typing and swear by it as you clearly do here. Others do not find static typing helpful and manage to do well in environments without it.

Your critique here isn’t even a critique of Ruby in these use cases, it’s a critique of any dynamically typed language.

The Ruby functionality I mentioned could easily bail you out in this situation by allowing you to monkey patch the redis gem to restore the old functionality until you were ready to get around to fixing it in your codebase or until you determined that the other dependent gems had been updated.

If anything, this is a great example of exactly my point about the flexibility of Ruby.
Would love to read an engineering blog about your journey from trying to run this on Kubernetes and ending up on Firecracker VM.
I know that computers aren't infallible.

But I also know that traditionally, tills and bank accounts are pretty reliable.

Sure, the store might charge you the wrong amount if the price label on the shelf and the PC don't match up, because by law the label on the shelf is the source of truth. But other than that? If the till says my purchases add up to £23.45, and after making the purchase my bank account has a balance of £345.67? I don't validate the arithmetic.

How much money is in my bank account? Pretty much the amount of money the bank's computer says is in my bank account, modulo any funnyness like pending transactions and cheques that fail to clear. The bank doesn't keep a shoebox of cash in their vault with my name on it for us to reconcile against.
Why not a browser extension?
Fatbobman's Swift Weekly #060 ｜ Older or Outer? Reminiscing About the Pre-Smart Era

- The Anomaly of onChange
- Using AppKit in Catalyst
- Calling Hidden Swift Functions
- Natural Language Framework
- macOS Threading
- Dev Conversations
- Debugging Layouts
I'm pretty ignorant on the ins and outs and trade offs associated with accreditation but yes that sounds like one solution.

It doesn't strike me as unreasonable, software engineers are now able to cause billions in damages and/or cause loss of life via primary or secondary effects.

Sure, one of software's greatest strengths was that anyone could learn it and it'll be sad to lose that but that's not really a reason for structurally enabling things like the Post Office scandal.

You probably don't need accreditation to serve cat pics but things dealing with money and life/death should. But IANAL so hopefully someone else can bring better insight to this area.
That's funny because the first thing I do when I write a LaTeX document is to make it look less like a (default) LaTeX document.
Unix Review Magazine Interviews Larry Tesler
> What's the point of a genetics test for a coat pattern? Can't you just look at the cat?

When you're trying to understand a complex system, it's best to start with things you can actually see directly. Doubly so, if you're going to try and change something.

Coding analogy: there's a reason "Hello World" is about printing stuff to console, and the very first thing you do when writing to a new target, or reconfiguring some application, or testing unfamiliar commands, etc. is something where observable output directly reflects the changes to inputs you make. Otherwise, you don't know whether you're doing things right, or doing anything in the first place.

WRT. COVID/flu tests. You or your kid come to the doctor with a running nose and some cough. The test is useful to tell you whether you're dealing with one of the "heavy hitters" like the flu or COVID or RSV, or just a bog standard ${random kindergarten viral infection} that's treated by nose cleaning + anti-cough medicine + pretending you're not sick anymore, or whether this stuff is bacterial and maybe you need another swab to pick the right antibiotics.
To be fair, the government were lied to by the Post Office people about whether or not there were bugs. They also lied about whether Fujitsu had the ability to amend the ledgers even though Fujitsu had a team working to correct some of the inaccuracies.
I wonder if a 7600 XT is a cut-down 7800 XT then, because both normal and XT variants of the 6700 and 7700 only have 12GB VRAM.

Nonetheless, great info. Sounds like it might be the budget inference king!
> The first thing you have to get used to when moving from school to uni is being utterly lost and defeated.

Very well said, at the university where I studied, there was a pre-semester math repetition course. It was a week long and started with addition of natural numbers. After two days, everything I learned in 13 years of school had been repeated. That was a brutal resetting of expectations. But it made everybody clear, that this is not school anymore. That a different kind of work and focus would be necessary.
I think you mean that nuclear power generators are required to take extremely expensive safety measures when they handle significant amounts of radioactive materials (several thick concrete walls around the nuclear material, regular thorough inspection of the walls, and so on and so forth). Planes are not required to do that.

However, it's a bit unfair, because the safety regulations for radioactive materials prohibit air transport of such amounts. You're saying that "handle with extreme care" is a higher safety standard than "doing that is forbidden".
Yet it's still not used in most C codebases. Where was it for Heartbleed?

We all understand that things can be done better. The problem is that they often are not.

Rust and other tools help by not giving people the choice to do sloppy work at all. History has proven many times that defaults matter.
Interesting account of how living a democracy at a company level fails. The power of the people we pride ourselves on at a state level fails to take hold in the workplace.
> unless they violate laws

*unless they violate country laws.

Which means openAI or its alternative could survive in China but not in US. The question is that if we are fine with it?
I've always had issues with nopasswd, maybe it's just a thing with how I'm doing it but it never seems to work in Arch
Shattered Assumptions Theory
I think the problem is too much money.
Great software works well when it enables people to do things they could not before. Low code works well when the use case is isolated to something where you can focus on simplifying or putting training wheels on writing logic or configurations. When things get complex you end up with what amounts to Xcode or Visual Studio - something that clearly does help professional go faster.

When you try to replace an entire language and multiple libraries with visual editor, you end up with something really complex, and often beyond your user's abilities to learn with the limited time/attention they have.
I don't think OP implied that they loathe all aggregated statistics. They likely loathe a subset which was implied with like this
They don't - random bit flips are expected over time. ECC memory is a thing because of this, but cosmic rays can strike the processors too.
No need for anger - I think we're mostly in (violent) agreement here. :)

Maybe the one area we would significantly disagree is that I don't think it's simply that "the people working on it are not smart enough and are more interested in stoking egos and careers than doing real science".

Honestly, I've had discussions with so many mid-level smart trusted colleagues who always think that the higher-ups are making stupid decisions, and they'd do better. They're right that some of the decisions might be stupid (and you're probably right about "stoking egos and careers") some of the time, but people are promoted, decision-makers come and go, and the decisions (and failure rates) don't really improve. I (think I) see it for what it is, and agree that we lack meaningfully informative pre-clinical models, but I'm also comfortable to acknowledge the weaknesses of the system and be honest that I don't have all of the answers. At the moment, it's a heinously inefficient crap-shoot, but it's the best we've so far come up with.

But, prove me wrong. There are likely countless molecules that have been discarded that have therapeutic benefit waiting to be realised. (I don't mean to sound facetious here but) If you can do better, and are smarter than and will make better decisions than everyone else in the industry, you'll be a billionaire in short order, as this is literally the golden ticket in this industry that everyone else is missing.
Also HN: "Zomg, HN unbellyfeel as one prolefeed. This ungood diffspeak seen as newthink, must crimethink peers for lackold fullwise groupthink."
Deaths aren’t the only negative consequence of auto accidents, however. I imagine if we count serious injuries per mile driving vs flying, the difference would be more stark.
If your projects and libraries are public, your package manager will likely let you use Git references (usually commits/branches/tags) to define dependencies. I find that cleaner than submodules.
Everyone hates hearing this one:
Documentation, documentation, documentation.
Programming is a social task. Therefore, everything else related to software development best practices branches off from that.
Sourceforge was terrible by the time Github was ascending.
Wicket sounds like a throwback to JSF. No thanks.
Wrote that reply then clicked on your page to see if there were a blog or anything where you elaborate already on these topics - I've already read a couple of articles from your substack! Oops, hah, I did not realise I was writing to the person behind that.

I'd filed it away in my head as something to sink more time into when I've the emotional space to do so, but essentially I find it quite courageous to go against the grain in a world where it's perhaps harder and harder to do so. Everyone has a hot take, of course, but the hot takes are usually very much within the bounds of acceptable discourse.

Anyway, more power to you, in your endeavours.
And why run in the cloud in place of my own computer, with my own IP that won't be flagged for being an AWS IP?
The only thing reliable about them (and the humans that create them) is that they easily fool a bunch of fools.

Of course, it does appear that they are incredibly reliable at being somewhat reliable, but that's not the kind of reliable that I'm looking for, especially when the environmental cost of generating them is so expensive, and doubly so as global heating ramps up.
It is called internet. It could regurgitate billions of pieces of information to billions of people every day.
I prefer write LaTex document, compile to pdf and then convert pdf to html using pdf2htmlEX.
The problem is allocating resources if you want to deal with every challenge to evidence provided by a computerised system. I think it was initially a problem with people challenging speed camera results.
Hey, author here. I decided on the 16 since its support lifetime started this year. If I'd gotten the SE (which I seriously considered since it has a more appealing form factor and touchID) I would only have a 4 year support lifetime as opposed to the full 6.
They don’t, computers generate faulty results once in a while, even perfectly functioning computers. And on top of that hardware may degrade generating more errors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us Ancient meme.
The bit that I find incredible is that each one of the victims was told that it was just them and it hadn't happened to anyone else....
Buggy software is important aspect of the story but to me it’s not the main one.

The main one is that the post office management/officials at some point became aware of the bugs and that they were ruining lives of innocent people and they knowingly kept lying to save their asses.

The inquiry page has all of this and more: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/about-inquiry

I’ve read through it, it’s long but it’s a good (while terrifying) read.
Very expensive fire extinguisher you have there. But you don’t care. Because America can will USDs into existence anytime.
I know

I was doing a bit
i have been using python as syntax "carrier" for many Domain languages/DSL. Re-purposing what constructs like class:.., with..: certain func-calls, etc. mean within that. Works wonders.. though one has to be careful as it may not look like python at all :/
In unrelated news, "Unknown Realm" was apparently demoed at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo this year: ttps://stirringdragon.games/portland-recap-pt-1/
Fatalities per trip is similarly misleading because of the number of extremely short trips people make in cars.

If you really start including risk factors you'll never stop, the risk is proportional to many other factors as well:

1) Time of day: Time of day factors in probably for both flying and driving at varying degrees

2) Where: In the US, which state you're driving in matters significantly for driving fatality rates

3) Day of week: Driving on weekends is more dangerous than driving during the week, doesn't seem to affect flights

4) ATC is a variable for flight accidents but not drivers

5) Flights might actually carry more risk per mile in certain situations: Flying over the oceans, eg

A truly correct apples-to-apples comparison would be so hyper-specific as to be useless.
Turkish strike drone completes first carrier landing, takeoff
Yep, all of what you said PLUS the fact that you can just use arena allocations where you know you'll have to allocate hundreds / thousands of objects and then free them almost at the same time.

The blog article's author even alludes to this, which makes the post kind of funny. He debunked his own argument and yet continues on as if he did not.
As I understand parent comment it assumes following transaction records: (source_account, dest_account, amount). I argue it complicates things.

You talk more about how to make db data simultaneously a representation of final reports. I believe it's not related to this thread.
I still keep the Reference Guide on my desk to remind me of my roots and how far things have come and yet how much they remain the same.
I don’t expect teenagers to be geniuses—I remember being one—but I do expect them to at least not be complete idiots and understand that lying and bragging about it is not a winning move. They’re ensuring heightened government-mandated invasion of data privacy on everyone, including them.
> taking the number of crashes per kilometer, and multiplying by the number of kilometers you'll drive for. A trip of 5000km is less safe than a 5km one.

When comparing a difference of 1000x, sure its probably safer.

Your premise is wrong though, it isn't common sense to take a generalized statistic like deaths per km and extrapolate that to be the correct estimate for any particular trip.

The statistic loses all context of differences in vehicles, road conditions, time of day, specific roads, etc. The stat is a great example of how a statistic seems meaningful to get a big picture but is completely useless to us as we can't make any decisions based on a number that is so generalized as to lose all context and meaning.
I imagine it stems from something like: the clock was correct at 1pm and at 3pm but was it correct at 2pm?
Make is awesome, but it's such a hack ... Writing and designing a build for a complicated project is such a pain because of the recursive calling.
that's largely solved problem. ieee758 defines consistent rules for dealing with infinities. even if don't use the floating-point parts and made a new integer format, it almost certainly would make sense to lift ieee754 rules as-is.
We are not such a simple thing that we should be the result of a simple random collision.
Like your body -everything is cut out according to its innate abilities with perfect measure and order, and put together with the finest art, in the shortest way, the best form, the lightest manner, and most practicable shape. Look at the clothes of birds, for example, and the easy way they ruffle up their feathers and continuously use them. Also, things are given bodies and dressed in forms in a wise manner with no waste and nothing in vain
Seems to me that computers do generally perform their tasks reliably. (I say generally, not infallibly; cosmic rays and power failures and such). The issue is really about whether their human programmers have successfully programmed the computer to do the intended task, and about whether their human operators are successfully interpreting computer outputs. So this is surely about what constitutes an expert witness, and how reasonable it is to rely on the testimony of an expert witness, where computers are concerned.
> it wasn't designed as a multi-user database. You could run Access on a network file share but performance would suffer [...] Access did support a client-only mode, where Access is used for the forms, queries and application code, but the actual data is stored in Microsoft SQL Server

Both your comment and a sibling's mention features that Access either didn't have or didn't do well. However, there were low-code/scripting workarounds for all of these, which were in fact used in many places. It was scalable if you were just knowledgeable and persistent enough to keep chasing your goals. In addition, the backend didn't have to be SQL Server, it could just be another Access database.

I myself created a 'sharded' Access-only implementation (admittedly a fairly simplistic one) that supported over 300 concurrent users. The trick was to keep record locking to a minimum by training users to click a 'save record' button when they were done filling out a form (which defaulted to an offline state)-- all the data was then uploaded to the central database in a few milliseconds, and the connection was immediately closed. Kind of mimicking old webforms. It worked.

> IT programmers invariably cursed the buggy hack of an application they had to maintain

This was really the biggest problem. Only apps designed by people who were pretty good at what they were doing avoided this.
The important bit is that if you screw up badly enough then your professional qualification is removed and you can't do that type of work any more.

[NB I am frequently reminded of this point by my wife who is a solicitor].
Single entry is not easier. Every time it makes things horribly complex really fast. I don't understand your point.
If you open the link it will be more clear to you that GNU wants to share information with so called bad hackers.
I don't think it's fair to blame software engineering. Bugs happen, especially where there are no incentives to not have bugs.
First of all justice system is to blame. Sentencing someone on assumption that some complicated software worked correctly is criminally stupid and should result on all people involved being barred from the profession.

Another thing is that software should be treated as just a tool to help to fulfill legal/accounting requirements. If the software is wrong then the required documents are going to be wrong and that's supposedly auditable. This way there are incentives to produce/finance correct software because what is going to be judge and relied upon is not software itself but what it produces (the documents).

Calls to make software engineers responsible will just result in fewer competent people willing to do the work. The justice system is incompetent enough already. Can you imagine lawyers discussing if your off by 1 bug was "criminal negligence" or just a normal mistake that happens? If you going to jail depends on what they decide you will just not take the job and no one sane/competent is going to take it either. The end result is going to be over payed morons writing software and then sometimes going to jail for it - not an improvement over current state of things.
> Believe me, I've tutored a lot of people, many of which initially disliked math and found it difficult. But after a few tutoring sessions, I could see a little sparkle in their eye that said, "hey, this might be cool".

Exactly the same for me. Honestly, the satisfaction of seeing that "sparkle" in the eye of an initially unmotivated or discouraged student is probably among the most fulfilling moments of my professional career.
TeXmacs has a release earlier this year: https://lists.texmacs.org/wws/arc/texmacs-info/2024-04/msg00...

But I think it's not going anywhere fast, after reaching feature stability there maybe isn't much to do except the hard work of upgrading dependencies (like Guile and Qt) that maybe isn't appealing to the devs.
Tried my site, looks like you're just scraping as is, and any captcha will affect the process.

I use CloudFlare, and I got:

> The page title is "Just a moment...", which is not descriptive and doesn't reflect page content.