skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I've always been mystified by the idea that writing a new Makefile is some kind of wizardly mystery. Make has its design flaws, for sure, but how hard is it really to write this?

CFLAGS = -std=gnu99 -Wall

all: foo
clean:
$(RM) foo *.o

foo: foo_main.o foolib.o
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) $^ -o $@

(Except with tabs, which HN doesn't allow.)

I haven't tested what I just typed above, but I'm reasonably sure that if I biffed it in a way that makes it nonfunctional, it will be obvious how to correct the problem.

I mean, not that you can't do better than that (I'm pretty sure anyone experienced can see some problems!), or that there aren't tricky and annoying tradeoffs, but it just doesn't seem like a big activation barrier the way people sometimes make it out to be?

Maybe those people just need to spend an afternoon once in their life working through a basic make tutorial? Maybe not the first time they work on a project using make, but, maybe, after the fifth or sixth project when they realize that this somewhat primitive inference engine is going to be something they interact with daily for years? At some point you're getting into "lead a horse to water" or "teach a man to fish" territory. There's a limit to how much you can empower someone who's sabotaging themself.

There's a slightly less minimal example in https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Simple-Ma... with a full explanation. You can read it in a few minutes, but of course you have to experiment to actually learn it. The whole GNU Make 4.4.1 manual in PDF form is only 229 pages, so you can read it after dinner one night, or on your commute on the train over the course of a few days. And then you'll know the complete rules of the game.
We can give them points for creativity.
> Does it need syntax of its own? As a corollary: can it reuse familiar syntax or idioms from other tools/CLIs?

I’m with the author here 100%. Stop inventing new syntaxes and formats for things that don’t need it. It’s not clever, it’s a PITA when it doesn’t work as expected at 3:30 on a Friday.
Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe
If your code is compartimented properly, a lower layers (sub objects) doesn't have to have to do all kind of preparations just because a higher layer has "special needs".

For example, pseudo code in a sub-function:

if (that) write_field('that');
if (these) write_field('these');

With messagepack you have to go and apply the logic to count, then again to write. And keep a state for each levels etc.
Meta is ushering in a 'world without facts', says Nobel peace prize winner
Looks interesting, but the join beta button isnt working atm.
Fun fact: that Spider-Man gif in there - it’s real. No CGI
> Nor does writing a basic, high level specification.

That's the problem. Basic, high level specification gains nothing.

> I’ve taught developers how to use tools like TLA+ and Alloy in week.

You have week length courses. From my experience you have to spend at least of 100 hours trying to model real live distributed protocols with full liveness (most hard TLA+ part) support to be at somewhat formal verification beginner level. Toy examples from courses are cute but teach nothing.
This struck me as a universal truth: "our general intuition about the difficulty of a problem is often a bad metric for how hard it actually is". I feel like this is the core issue of all engineering, all our careers, and was surprised by the logic leap from that immediately to Moravec's Paradox, from a universal truth to a myopic industry insight.

Although I've not done physical robotics, I've done a lot of articulated human animation of independent characters in 3D animation. His insight that motor control is more difficult sets right with me.
it always feels like those are from an era where teletypes would print out the computer output on paper and brevity was key to save ink and paper.
> History teaches us where the story goes.

Does it? When else has this happened before? Or do you just mean manipulated markets specifically?
While VB.NET 1.0 had indeed lots of compatibility issues with VB 6, most of them were fixed in later versions, so I wonder why not at least VB on .NET Framework (Core brings quite a few compatibility issues)

I do know VB since VB 3.0 days, did quite a couple of VB 6 to VB.NET, and VB.NET to C# portings, so it isn't like I don't know the subject.
Yes, because friction depends on the air density. You can think of this as the molecules in the air colliding with a moving object and pushing it backwards, thus slowing it. If there are fewer molecules, there is less friction and the object can move faster with the same thrust.

Thrust itself decreases because there are also fewer molecules to push against, so it can get quite complicated if you want to account for everything. But overall it is easier to fly faster higher up in the atmosphere. Also, atmospheric currents are important.

There is a useful discussion here: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/57209/how-does-...
Say what you will about salt consumption, but my wife suffered thyroid issues until we added a shaker of iodized salt back into our kitchen/eating area.
Right first sentence: "The planet has moved a major step closer to warming more than 1.5C, new data shows, despite world leaders vowing a decade ago they would try to avoid this."

"We must exit this road to ruin - and we have no time to lose," he said in his New Year message, calling for countries to slash emissions of planet-warming gases in 2025."

"Last year's heat is predominantly due to humanity's emissions of planet-warming gases,..."

"The 1.5C figure has become a powerful symbol in international climate negotiations ever since it was agreed in Paris in 2015, with many of the most vulnerable countries considering it a matter of survival."

Many more across article...
Auto-generated Makefiles that CMake and Autotools produce really leave a bad impression on how complex Makefiles need to be.
The Quantum PHP Framework team has wrapped up 2024 with an exciting new release — version 2.9, which debuted at the end of November. This update, arriving just under a year after the 2.8 release, brings a fresh wave of enhancements and features, reinforcing Quantum’s position as a robust and developer-friendly framework.
While I agree with the larger sentiment I think you’re making (I also make it a habit to peruse the manual just to see what is available), how often do you reread the manual, especially for your shell? I knew about associative arrays in bash, but not by reading the manual as those were introduced in v4 and I’ve been using bash for longer than that.
Well, it's not just that. Every company insists on doing things differently and usually in annoying ways. Having a way to deal with companies while avoiding their internal policies (e.g. upselling, "retention team", ...) would be very nice.

Yes, VCs want this because it's an opportunity for a double-sided marketplace, but I still want it too.

I wonder to what extent is what these FANG businesses want with AI can be described as just "an API into businesses that don't want to provide an API".
Are functional language easier to make safe?
The Shepard's Leap – traversing impossible terrain [video]
Meta being way ahead of the game as usual.

Acknowledging race in job seeking makes for intrinsically tokenized contingents of people. I’m not just a PHP guy… I’m a BLACK PHP guy, etc.

True equality imo is equivalent to a form of neutrality. Pay no mind to race at all and instead focus on hiring the best hackers available and let the educational markets figure out the rest.
Yup thats what the book is saying too (:
well, there's some history regarding nuclear weapons wrt cuba.
Or they started the APU, but never got around to connecting its generator to the main bus. That's a second button press, after confirming it has successfully started.
Cf https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherd%27s_leap
> Doesn't it defeat the purpose to fund organizations that are clearly against free speech such as ADL and SPLC, when you are claiming to defend free speech?

They're absolving themselves of the ethical "bad feels" of hosting content they disagree with.

If you host a Nazi website full of antisemitism, they'll donate to the ADL as a counter.

If you host a white supremacist website, they'll donate to the SPLC.

They're thinking of this as a form of equivalent exchange. If you put bad energy into the universe, they'll take your money and pay the groups that oppose you as a form of balance.

The reason they host these horrible websites is that they believe free speech is more of a moral high ground than turning these customers away.

> Why even bother to piss off users you don't like? For pretending rights?

Free speech is vital. You should defend the speech of people you find abhorrent (racists, Nazis, atheists, gays, whatever), because if the political pendulum swings and the machinery, will, or precedent to censor is present, you'll be the one silenced.

Before the internet, conservatives frequently censored topics they disliked. Atheism, LGBT content, porn, certain political discourse -- pretty much anything that the religiously pious people of the 80's and 90's would detest -- were censored from the airwaves, found unsuitable to publish, and pushed out of the zeitgeist.

From around 2014 to 2024 it was the exact opposite. Questioning liberal policies you got caught by social media dragnets - content was deboosted or removed, people were banned. Questioning the origins of Covid, talking about DEI policies, etc.

And now the pendulum is swinging back again. We're in for more of the same from the other side.

We should stop building tools for censorship and instead enable individuals to control the content they consume. We should be able to individually (or as a group) opt into blocking certain people and content. We should be able to tweak our algorithms. But we should always be immune to having our speech immediately deleted from the internet for going against whatever the current power may be.

Freedom of speech for thee means freedom of speech for me.

And freedom of speech does not mean -- and has never meant -- freedom from consequences. The minute you open your mouth your peers will judge you.
I advocate the following rules for when to write and when not to write a shell script.

# Write a shell script:

* Heavy lifting done by powerful tool (sort, grep, curl, git, sed, find, …)

* Script will glue diverse tools

* Workflow resembles a pipeline

* Steps can be interactively developed as shell commands

* Portability

* Avoid dependency hell

* One-off job

# Avoid shell scripting:

* Difficult to see the preceding patterns

* Hot loops

* Complex arithmetic / data structures / parameters / error handling

* Mostly binary data

* Large code body (> 500 LoC)

* Need a user interface

A need for associative arrays (implemented in Bash as via hashmaps) moves the task to the second category (avoid shell scripting).
I learn several languages with those automated emails
A few weeks ago, I shared a side project on HN about how I improve my Dutch vocabulary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42521773

Based on the great feedback I received, I expanded the tool to allow users to learn any language at any difficulty level. Personally, I am now using it to learn Dutch words at C1 and Spanish words at B1 level.
AWS is a perfect comparison because they are also crazy expensive for egress. You get 10 Gbit/s for around 600$ in every NA and European datacenter.
> The researchers behind it first published their thesis in 2011, but have since made spoons, forks, and chopsticks that pass electric currents into food.
Hello, and thank you for creating Glicol—it’s an outstanding tool for live coding and audio synthesis!

I was wondering about the possibility of extending Glicol’s functionality to include features such as:

TTS Emotional Replication
Generating human-like emotional expressions in sound (e.g., sighs, coughs, gasps).
Sound Effects Simulation
Creating realistic environmental sounds, such as thunder, rain, wind, and other ambient effects.
Novel Sound Creation
Enabling the generation of entirely new and experimental sounds, potentially by training on a provided audio dataset.
Given Glicol’s modular architecture, Rust-based engine, and WebAssembly (WASM) support, I’m curious whether it would be theoretically possible to support such extensions within the current framework.

Questions
Are any of these features currently possible with Glicol?
If not, are there any plans or ongoing developments to enable functionality like this in the future?
I believe these additions could expand Glicol’s applications far beyond music generation, opening up exciting possibilities in areas like:

TTS systems with nuanced emotional expression.
Sound design for games, films, and interactive media.
Experimental audio research and creative sound exploration.
Before concluding, I’d like to add that Glicol’s potential use cases could extend well beyond music generation, offering new opportunities for innovation in audio-based applications.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and whether these ideas align with Glicol’s future vision. Thank you for your time and for developing such an inspiring platform!
The amount of money made from those sites (and spent for good) is surely infinitesimal to the bad they do by spreading hate. Much better to just not host the content. I don’t believe in slippery slope nonsense, it’s easy to know what sort of speech is about harming other people and no I don’t believe in publishing that.
There are plenty of other sources for iodine.
this time, it really IS the manganese nodules. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian#Building_Gloma...
That sounds less than compartmentalisation and more like you having special needs and being unhappy they are not catered to.
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Right.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/56323296
Are you looking for trouble? (2019)
You should probably read the release notes for new major versions. Also, anytime you think “I wish there was <feature> available in this program”, you should probably double-check if such a feature has appeared since you last learned the program.
That kind of nepotism is the exception, not the rule, and it stands out like a sore thumb when it happens.

You’re right that success (as a company, or individual) is not only based in merit though. There’s plenty of examples of people continuing to do business with Oracle to prove that point.

Making a good enough product, at a good enough price point and make the executive with money happy enough with the trade-offs: and you’re successful. Same as B2C, really.
I was struggling to find the word, but I think I do mean "declarative." It's also deductive, but I'm looking at it from the point of view of what I'd have to do if I were proving something. I'm on board with testing being formal as in algorithmic.

Seems like there's domain-specific terminology (almost wrote "language"!) I'm using accidentally or incorrectly and making a mess. I might have stepped in it with "model." Mainly I just think I see a difference between ways of verifying where the work is doing and the work is being. But it sounds like I don't know enough to have this conversation.

Thanks for humoring me, though.
H1 Visa has existed since 1952. The 65,000 per year cap (H1B) has existed since 1990. The 20,000 quota for Masters/PhD holders has existed since 2004.

What in the world are you talking about?
Forget it, you ain't gonna make Linux-centric open-source community to really care about Windows (or other un-POSIX-like OSes, of which today there is almost none). The others have to give in and accomodate to their ways if those others want to use their code.

And since Windows-centric developers, when porting their apps to Linux, are generally willing to accomodate for Linux-specific idiosyncrasies (that's what porting is about, after all) if they care abour that platform enough, the dynamic will generally stay the same: people porting from Windows to Linux will keep making compatibility shims, people porting from Linux to Windows will keep telling you "build it with MinGW or just run it in WSL2, idgaf".
*Engines That Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond* by Alasdair G. M. Nairn

I’ve had a few aha moments while reading this book. Although it's primarily written from an investor's perspective, it does contain a fair share of insight about creation and commercialisation of technology, the mechanics of monopolies, government involvement, foreign affairs, etc.
Moravec's paradox is really interesting in terms of what it says about ourselves: We are super impressive in ways in which we aren't consciously aware. My belief about this is that our self-aware mind is only a very small part of what our brain is doing. This is extremely clear when it comes to athletic performance, but also there are intellectual things that people call intuition or other things, which aren't part of our self-aware mind, but still do a ton of heavy lifting in our day to day life.
Groovy closure delegates' type can be declared, giving as much information as with Kotlin. The reason you couldn't follow the code was that the people who wrote those things either didn't declare types, or IntelliJ wasn't using the type declarations (I believe Groovy support in Gradle files is less good than in general Groovy files, where the IDE does support this). You're correct that some plugins will resolve things dynamically and those cannot be resolved by the IDE. But that's not the fault of the language, if you're going to rewrite in Kotlin with types, you could just as well add types to your Groovy declarations for the same result.
In the same space https://yasa.com/ axial flush motors.
I think it was Joel Spolsky who said that the sweet spot with VB was throwing seasoned C++ programmers at it, and that became a huge productivity boost to the teams. I think this goes to say that the bad name of VB6 is due to its lower entry barrier, which made it easy for beginner devs to deliver terrible software.
Disagree, it has been 'a thing'. Both music and film use the term 'master' for production and release. One would make new releases/mixes from masters. Much like one may branch with a repository.

Now, I'll entertain conspiracy for just a moment. There might be concerning roots here with property or ownership... but if that's the case, the problem isn't with the language being descriptive of the system in which it operates.

We won't 'kill all masters' by getting rid of the word. My real conspiracy theory is this is one of many attempts to sow division. Nation-state nonsense.
Faulty evacuation alerts woke Angelenos in a panic
Bet you’re fun at parties as they say.

I totally understand why simplifying assumptions are helpful in modelling and definitely don’t need you to explain that. It also is a bit ridiculous if you think literally about it which makes it something that is fun to laugh about as here.
Apparently an unpopular comment but I commend it for having the ability to step back and think "wtf are we doing", which far too many people seem to lack.
You've gotta admit that a spoon which adds salt flavour is an oddly superficial use of technology... is it really a good solution to a real problem?
Does "Remember the high you go the further it'll have to travel" really need to be debunked? Did the "design and construction firm" spell "drill" with one "l"?
For everyone like me who had to google that acronym:

DEI: Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability.
You're implying Black Americans should be thankful to return to an era where they were slightly wealthier, but had fewer rights, fewer protections and enormous, normalization, socially acceptable discrimination.
Hallucinations are a well known problem. And there are some mitigations that work pretty well. Mostly with enough context and prompt engineering, LLMs can be pretty reliable. And obscure popular fiction trivia is maybe not that relevant for every use case. Which would be robotics in this case; not the finer points of Michael Crighton related trivia.

You were testing its knowledge, not its ability to reason or classify things it sees. I asked the same question to perplexity.ai. If you use the free version, it uses less advanced LLMs but it compensates with prompt engineering and making it do a search to come up with this answer:

> The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is a psychological phenomenon that describes people's tendency to trust media reports on unfamiliar topics despite recognizing inaccuracies in articles about subjects they know well. This effect, coined by novelist Michael Crichton, highlights a cognitive bias in how we consume news and information.

Sounds good to me. And it got me a nice reference to something called the portal wiki, and another one for the same wikipedia article you cited. And a few more references. And it goes on a bit to explain how it works. And I get your finer point here that I shouldn't believe everything I read. Luckily, my supervisor worked hard to train that out of me when I was doing a Ph. D. back in the day. But fair point and well made.

Anyway, this is a good example of how to mitigate hallucination with this specific question (and similar ones). Kind of the use case perplexity.ai was made to solve. I use it a lot. In my experience it does a great job figuring out the right references and extracting information from those. It can even address some fairly detailed questions. But especially on the freemium plan, you will run into limitations related to reasoning with what it extracts (you can pay them to use better models). And it helps to click on the links it provides to double check.

For things that involve reasoning (like coding), I use different tools. Different topic so won't bore you with that.

But what figure.ai is doing, falls well in the scope of several things openai does very well that you can use via their API. It's not going to be perfect for everything. But there probably is a lot that it nails without too much effort. I've done some things with their APIs that worked fairly well at least.
TBF, the Bash manpage now runs > 80 pages:

man -Tps bash | ps2pdf - bash.pdf

That can be daunting. Though illuminating.
> To me, this is a development in the wrong direction.

That ship has sailed. These were introduced in Bash 4, released in 2009, and Bash is already on version 5.
That's how I discovered the '&' regex feature in less some years back.
They mean it is actually accelerating constantly.

My math might be wrong, but if we were accelerating at 9.8m/s/s for at least 4000 years (roughly as long as we have continuously recorded history and the minimum time “gravity” has been observed) then we ought to currently be traveling through space at over 1,000,000,000,000m/s.

Now I’m no physicist, but I reckon that might end up violating causality.
I agree that if it was main before it shouldn’t have been changed.

The whole branch naming thing is still only half implemented fwiw. Lots are still master, the default for new branches seems to be main. At my company it is “develop” for git.

Other VCS software uses a totally different name, perforce uses main for example.

I don’t really care what it was, it could have been “killwhitey” and I still would have been against changing it because of the effort involved in changing every repo on earth and the invalidation of every tutorial in existence.
There's apparently nothing more cowardly than a billionaire worried about being slightly less rich.