skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my formative experiences as a freshman in CS (I learned to program in college) was accidentally opening a PDF with Emacs and watching as it displayed not weird binary data but a real, rendered PDF. I wondered what else it was doing behind my back that I didn't know about.

Sadly, I was not able to run Doom in a PDF, in Emacs. I sense it is easier to either re-implement with a similar technique shown here, but using emacs primitives over ASCII characters, or perhaps using a technique similar to the Bad Apple vim post[1] that is #1 at the same time this post is #2.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42674116
What? This is absolutely incorrect. There's be no point in PRs if it's too late to change anything. Part of the point is to reduce the number of synchronous discussions your team has to have about code before writing it. PRs let you iterate on actual code instead of endlessly discussing hypothetical implementations.
I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think.

Wow, that's wild. I don't think you are reading the right magazine for that. Atlantic is vaguely left of center, middle of the road oligarchic old school Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ish. It's a good read! But will tell you nothing about the right. If you want that, just read National Review, or The Dispatch for something a little more modern.
The M1 macbook did feel like a big jump for me because it had great performance and no fan, which was a huge thing compared to everything else at the time.
Totally agree! Our biggest goal, I think, is to just have a good excuse to do fun stuff. I look forward to that list.
Everyone who is a fan of Pee Wee Herman has heard of the Alamo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cHLoHou8uY
> I believe consumers, as a right, should be able to install software of their choosing to any computing device that is owned outright.

Manufacturers will then claim that people don't own devices, merely a perpetual license to use it.
When some rando on the Internet make an outlandish claim I know to be skeptical. It's becoming clear that much of what I've seen in print over the last 40 years deserves similar treatment.
Yembo's home home inventory report AI is available for free to LA residents
I seem to remember that Russia has significant expertise in building powerful and compact microwave sources to control and heat plasma in tokamaks. Nizhny Novgorod is a known centre of expertise in such technology. It wouldn’t be such a stretch to imagine that Putin’s thugs have commandeered it to build a crude, nasty means of messing with their perceived enemies in a deniable way.
I completely agree. The only things I consider fun are also "hard", "uncomfortable", and "unpleasant". Otherwise it's just boring.

Another way to say it is "rewarding".
The merit of “cargo cult” as a metaphor is that it’s memorable. Once you’ve heard the story behind it, it inherently expresses the aspect of doing something out of imitation rather than understanding, and that it relates to contexts where the thing doesn’t have the effect you think it has.

“Boiler plate” is absolutely not the same, in that boiler plate is generally necessary and thus the correct thing to do, and there is no implication that one applies it without understanding.
@dang this title needs fixing.
I agree, my first OS was 10.5 Leopard, and I absolutely loved its graphical design—something truly special. It also had a genuine Unix feel to it, which, as you mentioned, seems to have been lost in more recent releases.
I this post has enabled me to put my finger on what makes me uncomfortable about articles like this.

Even though I frequently understand and sympathise with the goals and feelings of the writers, there are two factors that stand out.

1. A sense of certainty of the causal nature of the issues at hand. It comes across that the author has concluded the correct course of action.

2. Everybody, including you, should follow their concluded course of action.

I would be fine with an article talking about what the cargo cult metaphor means, its historical accuracy and how the author thinks that impacts upon people. It would then seem to be quite reasonable for them to say that they are going to cease using the metaphor because of those reasons, and to invite people to consider doing the same if they think the reasons seem valid to them.

It's ok to say

"I think this, so I'm going to change my behaviour"

It seems unreasonable to say.

"I think this, so everyone should change their behaviour"

Unfortunately it feels like we are heading to

"I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour"

The call for everyone else to change is backed by the certainty of their opinion. It presents complainants as wanting you to do their thing not because it's their opinion, it's because it is undeniable fact. It places you as morally deficient if you disagree.

This affects things large and small, whether people want you to boycott a brand of toothpaste, or talk about milliBTC as the base unit of bitcoin, or talk about the topic they are uninterested in in a different forum. The solution is simple, everyone has to do this simple act of my bidding.

Surely if the case for the damage caused by the cargo cult metaphor were to be made clearly and undeniable, people would not need to be told to stop using it, They just would.
I remember once buying a graphics card that included one of these virtual environments where files were on shelves, etc. Wish I could remember its name.
Your best bet is probably iCab, which had its last OS 9 release in 2008. Still pretty old, but you’ll at least have some relatively modern support for stuff like CSS. I used it on OS 9 at the time and it worked pretty well then.
I have trouble imagining that anybody wants to live like that. And yet people do.
This is really neat - did you do any kind of writeup on it? I’d love to read it if you did.
fuck canva, I remember visiting it from Georgia and being greeted a non-working page and a banner shaming me for the war in Ukraine

I know there's probably some US sanctions list somewhere which the company had to adhere to. But experiencing it in Georgia, where streets are covered with Ukrainian flags and people are very open with their opinion on the war is just surreal
Good luck. I hope whatever you do now is different enough that it won't burn you out in the same way.
Nice, but I really really really wish to use the arrow keys to rotate.
I want to install my own software on my smartphone. However, I don't want others with physical access to be able to do this... here we hit a problem, because if the device allows extracting the data, bruteforce becomes feasible..

Also I don't want others to be able to use my phone after stealing it.. here FRP lock helps me but in order for it to work it must also limit how I can use the phone.

I wish we stopped falling for this technical trap and finally focus on the substance - hardware/software companies get away with anti-user features that run on the user's device. This shouldn't be allowed.

I don't need an unlocked bootloader, I just don't want the preinstalled Google spyware. Google should not be allowed to hold my device hostage like this.
I agree. The main reason I shared it is because I find it interesting as a library. I actually use it behind the scenes to build https://telemetry.sh. Essentially, I ingest JSON, infer a Parquet schema, store the data in S3 with a lookaside cache on disk, and then use DataFusion for querying.
> If you can write a Dockerfile to install something you can write a bash script.

Docker is great for making sure that magic bash script that brings the system up actually works again on someone else’s computer or after a big upgrade on your dev machine or whatever.

So many custom build scripts I’ve run into over the years have some kind of unstated dependency on the initial system they were written on, or explicit dependencies on something tricky to install, and as such are really annoying to diagnose later on, especially if they make significant system changes.

Docker is strictly better than a folder full of bash scripts and a Readme.txt. I would have loved having it when I had to operate servers like that with tons of websites running on them. So much nicer to be able to manage dependency upgrades per-site rather than server-wide, invariably causing something to quietly break on one of 200 sites.
As a reviewer, I've been guilty of letting a PR sit for a month, mostly because there were higher more critical things that needed my attention.

Lately, I don't want code to be perfect, because my code never was in the first place.
I want it to be just good enough for me or anyone else in the team to iterate on.
I'll consider this, thank you for the comment!
I also think that some sort of embassy-operated anti-eavesdropping emitters being the cause is the most plausible explanation.

Embassies are typically espionage stations, i.e. they're almost certainly full of equipment that monitors every measurable aspect of the EM spectrum and probably various other things too. Covertly deploying any kind of electromagnetic weapon near an embassy sounds like an impossibility to me.

But if the embassy's own security hardware caused it, it's very likely that it would be kept secret (also to protect the secrecy around such hardware). It would also explain why it happened in multiple locations.
So basically a TDM?
Oh please. Do you really think the people who won the nobel prize for this discovery have a grade school level understanding of speed? You seem to be talking about peculiar velocities, which are absolutely negligible on cosmological scales and only the velocity caused by the expansion of spacetime is relevant.

What they really did was measure the distances and redshifts of dozens of supernovae and looked which energy contents of the universe could explain the observed relationship assuming that the Friedman-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metric accurately describes the universe. Turns out you need 70% of something whose density does not change with the expansion.

This is the original paper if Hossenfelder's summary of the explanation compressed in one sentence does not convince you:

https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9812133

For a derivation of the relationship between redshift and distance see any introdctory text on cosmology, e.g. chapter 8 of https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9712019 (he arrives at the equation on the last page).

Edit: This goes into more detail of matter species in sec. 1.5 and touches on the SN observations in sec. 1.7: https://www.thphys.uni-heidelberg.de/~amendola/teaching/adv-... (on an unrelated note: he was my PhD advisor)
Because the fact that it can't be unlocked makes me reasonably reassured that I can trust the software running on it comes from the vendor of the device

It's the same reason I don't want "the good guys" to have decryption keys to my messaging service, because even if I did trust the FBI, the fact that there is a backdoor at all means it could be exploited by someone I don't trust

Again, if you don't want to use a device that has a locked bootloader, don't buy it. I fail to see how this business model should be legally foreclosed upon. You'll always have the option to buy a device that can be unlocked, someone will always sell such a device. But if you can't lock them, then I can't buy one even if I want to
... plus the license to smash those devices with a hammer :)
https://github.com/codespin-ai/codespin-vscode-extension
lmao! that was so cringe I unlisted it from the main index. who is "we"?

part 3 is to find the secp256k1 private key for satoshi's bitcoins
Thank you for the kind words!

The behavior differences mean some projects (like wgpu, and nextest itself) only support nextest these days. There's also support for setup scripts which can be used to pre-seed databases and stuff.
Why do people feel the incessant need to post about deleting/not using social media.

They're clearly hypocrites as posting to a blog or HN is pretty much the same thing.
Me too but also use some youtube channels, eg. Monotone voices do that for me as well
The same leftist university students that brought Islamic revolution to Iran and cultural revolution to China. It all starts with universities. Today's protesting students from Columbia are tomorrow's political elite and mark my words, Germany's 30s will look like a walk in a park comparing to what will be in US.

And regarding your Idaho farmers and other nutters with horns on the head, they are too irrelevant and dumb to cause anything serious even in large numbers.
I used to have pyenv, asdf or mise to manage python versions (never use conda unless I need DL lib like pytorch). Now just uv is enough.
I used to think this way but then I saw how non-techy people use their devices.

Something like this would inevitably be abused and result in wave of malware so massive that it would render the internet too hostile for all but the most careful, knowledgable and paranoid users.
They haven't published one for this year yet but they do a separate article for pencils.

From last year: https://www.jetpens.com/blog/The-27-Best-Pencils-for-2024-Wo...
as you stated:

a hypothesis is the model (alone) for how things might be

a theory is the hypothesis + corroborating observation

if you have a set of observations and put forth a hypothesis from it (versus a hypothesis that has no observations backing it), it is automatically a theory. it may not be a good one but it is one nonetheless.
> In my opinion nothing notable has ever come out of MSR, regardless of campus.

One notable thing that came out of the Cambridge (England) campus was the implementation of generics in the CLR.
A current Kubuntu still runs (but not well) on my 20+ years old ThinkPad R50e. Windows 8 is similarly slow, but in addition always fails when trying to install a certain update or Windows 10.
That's a slippery slope, because they list devices as sold, not as rented. So they can't claim that. Some still try, especially using copyright on software on the devices as leverage.
> If you don't want an unlocked bootloader, just don't unlock your bootloader.

That kind of logic cuts both ways: "If you don't want a device with a locked boot loader, just don't buy a device with a locked bootloader".

Unfortunately, as consumers, we're trapped between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, I would want 100% freedom to use my device exactly as I see fit and run any software I want, without any form of curation from the manufacturer.
On the other hand, there are plenty of software companies who do shitty things when given absolute freedom over what to do in a user's device (tracking / spying / etc) and I welcome buying a device where the manufacturer helps me fight some of that.

So I can absolutely see both arguments. And I think both types can coexist. I am happy my iPhone doesn't allow Meta to say "to use WhatsApp, you must install the MetaStore®, give it root and install it from there".
I would not be happy with those restrictions on my desktop.
The deciles are much further apart and the ceiling is massive. Compare the medians of all the countries (the US is at or near the top) then compare the 90th percentile and the US is heads and shoulders over the next highest.
I think it's 100% open source chromium, minus some unknown percentage that's closed source surveillance blobs = ~99%. That's the maths I'm inferring.
I was speaking to the Left

So quoting Adam Smith out of context is not really relevant

That said, there is no "butcher, the brewer, or the baker" now, it is Butcher Corp, Brewer Corp, and Baking Corp.
We should just ban foreign routers. Massachusetts invented routers, why would we import them?
You still haven't answered my question. What is your function here? What are you trying to accomplish? Has someone appointed you to this "position" you feel you have here? Maybe best to just let people be, and mind your own business.
"everyone is too stupid to be trusted with general purpose computers" is a pretty grim position to hold
> I agree that your new code does roughly what you'd do in C++ if you wanted this, but you get to the same place as before -- if for example you try commenting out your allocation failure boolean, the code just blows up now. There are lots of APIs like this which make sense in Rust but not in C++ because if you write them in Rust the programmer is going to handle edge cases properly, but in C++ the programmer just ignores the edge cases so why bother.

Er... doesn't this blow up in Rust? https://godbolt.org/z/eaaq43voT

pub fn main() {
let mut vec = Vec::new();
return vec.push_within_capacity(1).unwrap();
}
I understand that all the controversies of the past years put you on the defensive (e.g. the whole thing with Github repo default branches being renamed from "master" to "main", etc), but I think that this is the kind of issue we should try to find a balance on, instead of just throwing out the baby with the bath water.

My native language is Ewe. The words we usually use for caucasian people is "yo vo".It's an evolution of an archaic pronunciation used today by only a few, "ye vu", and it was brought to my attention recently that it means "cunning dog".Ye=cunning, Vu=dog.

Explanation: we kinda didn't start on a good footing with the Germans back in the day ... So today most people will call every white person "cunning dog" without even knowing or meaning harm because the dialect has evolved. On one hand, for most people, it's just a random word with no insulting connotation; you try to make them switch to some another term, you're crazy dumb woke etc. On the other hand, I know I would take offense in being called that even if I'm told the word's lost the original meaning a long time ago.

Personally I don't know where the middle ground should be. But some "retroactive policing of language" is definitely needed. It may seem mundane to you, but sometimes these kind of things can be unsavory to other people. With globalization, it's not you and your pals anymore ...
Trolling used to be more about pranking each other than about organised scam or attacks, or manufacturing consent for governments or promoting political parties. It was more like an internet art form. I guess this is about what one can consider as the internet being more innocent back then.
So it's like a shebang for dependencies. Cool.
There's just not enough talk about this. This is the actual failure of government, not focusing enough on surviving fires
As the author mentions, desktop computers have always been (mostly) unlocked. This comment is just over the top scaremongering.
Easy SSH Servers in Golang
The real question is, are you pulling down the code and running the PR locally before approving it, or just looking at the code.
Profit caps in general are a bad idea, and should only be considered in a near complete absence of competition.

In insurance the problem is even worse, because you can’t compute what a reasonable profit cap is. Because of tail risks, you often see insurance companies making a profit of $1b each year for 30 years, then suffering a loss of $40b. Looked at during the typical year you might conclude the profits are excessive, but over a long term it might become apparent that the average profit is actually zero or even negative.

As is often the case, more competition and better competition policy is the solution.
What I Would Tell the Frontier Labs
The Firefox team’s code review guidelines recommend:

> Aim for a response within 1 business day. This need not be a full review, but could be a comment setting expectations about when you’ll be able to review the patch, pointing to other folks who might be able to review it sooner or would be more appropriate to review the patch.

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/FrontendCode...

To speed up reviews that don’t require a particular individual’s approval, some Firefox teams create (Phabricator) reviewer groups for different feature areas (such as graphics or Windows code) so anyone in that group can approve a PR.
This is very interesting, thanks for posting! Makes me think of the big choice diagrams in Detroit: Become Human. I wonder if there is any literature about this?
Those tests are a joke. They've lowered the standards to capture the minimum physical requirements to do the most basic of firefighting tasks.

And 10 minutes, how about they test them for 8 hours of that kind of work?

Who is going to last a whole shift or 36 straight hours of fighting Palisades fires?
Except... file systems are still there and if you want to be anything more than a user (or "creator"), you need to know about them.
Very unlikely, for the simple reason that the US built the bomb. If Nazi Germany had not capitulated in May '45, it would have had one or several of its cities leveled by some nukes. The outcome of the war would have been the same, with the possible exception that Eastern Europe would not have fallen under Soviet influence.
That's an interesting, well sourced article, I'm glad I've read it. I honestly didn't know that the full-size straw-airplanes were fakes from a movie. They're the face of this metaphor.

That said, the article would have been a lot better without moralizing about harmful colonialism, or claiming that this metaphor is supposedly an insult.

The purpose of this metaphor was never to gain historical insights, or to teach a lesson about colonialism, or to judge the Polynesian natives from 80 years ago, it's to teach a lesson about modern practices of software development (or science I guess). It's a fable.

You can replace the Polynesians in the fable with anyone else, and the payload of the fable does not change. Because the payload of it has nothing to do with the Polynesians. I personally didn't remember that this metaphor was specifically about Polynesians and the war supplies. I remembered it being about some abstract tribes, possibly Africans and humanitarian aid supplies. Did someone explain it to me the wrong way, or was it me who assumed wrong from the fake photos? I dunno. It does not matter. I wasn't relying on this fable for anything other than a software development lesson. It was not a covert tool to justify colonialism, or to assert intellectual superiority over some historical tribes on the other side of the globe.

It's definitely good to know the historical truth – as I said, I genuinely do appreciate all the exposition in this article. But, if you package that together with the moralizing, it comes off as yet more culture war BS that I am so sick of.

The difference in motivation is very important. If you write with the primary goal to expose historical inaccuracies – that's great. Then I can trust you. But if you write with the primary goal to stop people from using offensive (in your view) metaphors, then the historical inaccuracies are just a convenient tool, a talking point, for you to achieve your real goal. Because if this metaphor was actually historically true, you would probably still find it offensive. And so if that's your goal, then I can't trust you to provide historical accuracy. I will suspect you of presenting selective evidence, and other tricks to further your goal. That is why your moralizing detracts from the article.
You left out the vital clause. "... if they have total unfettered control". Also, not everyone. Obviously.

It's a position I came to rather regretfully and sadly.
I would also be happy with those restrictions on a traditional PC-class computing device (laptop or desktop). Would I personally buy one? Probably not, but I'd feel a whole hell of a lot better if my non-techie wife or mother or brother were using one and they were no more susceptible to some kind of exploit on their PC device than they were on their phone

That's the whole thing--there should be choice
Pens are all well and good, but what are people's favorite notebooks? I've found that the paper is perhaps just as important as the pen in a satisfactory writing experience.
As PDF supports DEFLATE compression, it should be possible to shrink the size of the PDF document considerably.
that indeed sounds remarkably puzzling, so much so that i find it a bit hard to believe