skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On a scale of 'no-one has a bloody clue' to 'fully automated', having the process written down somewhere is closer to fully automated than nothing.

So, it is on the path. I've used checklist documentation to document the series of logical steps needed to deploy something. there were no docs left by the previous team, had to work it out myself. that checklist turned into an ansible playbook (which later got binned for something else, but we had all the steps worked out by then).

wikis / markdown checklists have the benefit of being easy to copy and paste into. don't need to worry about "does it run" just "did i paste it in yet".

having said that, for the SSH key example, I really like this idea. Not because it's a good example (who the hell shares the private key?!), but because I always forget the SSH commands I need as I use them so infrequently. so having a 'do-nothing' script laying around to make my dumb brain go to the right places and type the right things would be helpful.
I’ve gone and read the piece you’ve referenced and I can’t locate the second quote. However, I still cannot see any real technical argument about why he believes Linux is trash. The first quote is a diatribe about how, despite Moore’s Law, software seems to get slower.

Nowhere does he give specific examples of how this is a Linux’s issue. Firstly, he isn’t terribly precise what he means by “Linux”. His example is an indexing process that apparently takes all night. There is no mention about why it is that Linux itself is the cause. The OS and even distribution does t seem to be the issue, but the way he is indexing.

I cannot find anywhere in his rather long-winded essay about why he concretely thinks UNIX (and by extension, Linux) is the cause of his woes.

If this is the best argument to say that technology is not where he wants it to be, then I’m unimpressed.
I’m reacting much more to the initial launch ideo from framework [1] and the hype around it than the product page. I’m glad to see they are calling it out so well at this stage.

[1]: https://youtu.be/iMwepyyaj8I?si=AFGEK6He-VWlKQQ9
That's true about Rust but that's a feature not a bug as you can swap out async runtime if needed and if you do add it, it is still as or more efficient than Dart.
What do you mean by "next"? Evolution doesn't have a plan. It'd be more adapted for some things and less for others.
Forcing them to have certainty? Yeah, that's a bad law that screws over the workers. There are people who are at home doing chores or making stuff for Etsy or doing some other contract work who would like to leave the app open and then accept a fare whenever there is one, or would like to open the app to see if anyone else would pay them for a trip they were going to make themselves anyway, regardless of whether the app can guarantee back to back fares.

Instead, laws like that cause Uber to set their hours and then they can't switch on and off whenever they please and have to work miserable graveyard shifts or split shifts if that's what they're assigned.

Meanwhile there is nothing stopping anyone from taking a job with contractually guaranteed hours if that's what they want. There are plenty of jobs like that, you don't have to mandate all jobs be like that and screw over anyone who wants something different.
That might be achievable in rural areas in America

The issue is generally that American grids have WAY MORE overhead line miles than European grids
Reinventing the wheel is a great learning exercise, but it doesn't yeild great software.
why is it 10? why not 7 or 15?
Cleanrooms are vital in ensuring that life sciences products—such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and biologics—are manufactured in environments that minimize the risk of contamination. Even the tiniest particle, microorganism, or impurity in these industries can compromise the product’s quality, safety, or effectiveness.
Over-excitation tends to create more redundant, less synergistic information in networks. The balance between excitation and inhibition is thought by some to be requisite for efficient and flexible cognition.
Not necessarily. The sum of the digits ranges from 36-45, there are 10 possible digits of which 9 will be used. If, say, 5 were the unused number then it would not be divisible by 9.
Has anyone seen Blue Poles? It nearly brought down a government.
Agreed. I know enough about aviation that this is simply "goosing the metrics" by redefining "accident" and "frequency".

Related to Boeing, everyone knew their goose was cooked as soon as they didn't have sign-offs and checklists on those door bolts. Hell, even the AvGas delivery guy at a dirt-strip muni airport with no tower MUST have sign-offs and checklists in triplicate.
Well if I could make it half as good looking as Crafting Interpreters, maybe I’d manage to make it happen, hahah.

I’m mostly focused on jj with my writing right now, but we’ll see…
> I don’t have a good workflow and can’t even imagine one.

NOOOO problem. Simple solution. In one word, text. Two words, text editor. E.g., this Hacker News thread is at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=42988455&goto=item%3Fi...

Sooooo, have that URL and the title of this thread in a simple, old-fashioned, file, text file, maintained with my favorite editor. Then, when want to revisit this thread, use the editor's excellent text search facilities to find the URL, and then, via a simple editor macro I wrote, one keystroke, and, bam, boom, have the Web page displayed via my pre-selected Web browser.

Text. Keep nearly everything important in just text. Source code of .NET for my startup's Web site? Text, never anything but text. Visual Studio? No thanks: Did I mention text? Posts at Hacker News? Text, both for my posts and those of everyone else. File system directory tree? Uh, again the T-word, with the tree from the Rexx function SysFileTree. In the editor, can sort on date, size, name, etc.
I lost a best friend that few years prior to his jail conviction got his phd in economics. I always knew about his business and he told me many stories about why he was doing it. I even advised him. But I always stayed out of it. One thing got clear to me. The people in that world are similar to our 'normal' world. You have the same hierarchy as in normal society with smart and dumb, nice and not so nice people. His story took place in Europe. He started after meeting some people in his fighting gym. Got a first assignment and things rolled fasr from there. High reward and thrill was an important motivation for him. He occasionally had hundreds of thousands of euros in cash. which we mainly spend on parties, escorts and drugs. Sometimes huge chunks of the money got lost because a person in the chain got caught or stole the money. But on avarage he was making like 200k a month.
He got caught on the highway few years ago with several kilos of heroine and cocaine and has to sit for 22 years.
Caution went out the door.
Are you aware of the AltTab app ? Highly customisable and best way to switch between opened windows on Macos. https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

Couldn't go back.
Showed this to my 16 year old and she said, "oh, yeah, I've got that bookmarked."

"You should also try Mondrian and Me."

I did, and it's as you would expect:

https://mondrianandme.com/

More fun than panda dataframes, at least at this hour.
Oh, yeah, you’re right. That was a shitty move, and the custom collection workaround wasn’t really nice either. I think even some Mozilla-owned extensions had to teach their users how to do that?

Personally, I’d just allow installing any extensions (from AMO at least) and put a big scary warning that this is unsupported (which was the reason they gave for the whitelist approach).
Let’s do both. Pressure your gov representatives to deal with the Googles/Apples of the world locking down computing, stifling competition.
And also do what you can as an engineer. We have the knowledge about what technologies are democratizing.
Support open source (the real kind)

When you’re building products, make sure you treat your users like real people, with respect.

At every level of the stack, from firmware to OS to application to cloud, let the user own their device, and their data.

Any amount of contribution, no matter how small, helps. Get your coworkers or classmates aware of the issue. It won’t be a monumental contribution, but it all counts.
tomrod, you're a serial abuser of the guidelines. You should take some time to think about what you say and do on HN and whether you are adding to the discourse are detracting from it. I think you could adjust your tone on almost all your political comments to be more thoughtful and less combative. It would be less work to point out cases where you observe the spirit of these guidelines than where you violate them. I'm sure you wouldn't wish to be so prejudiced, but you come across as an ideologue. Is that really who you want to be?
honestly, i run into the same issue. my use case is mostly for older wifi capture portals which just dont work against https since they obviously cant mitm the user. my other use case is for development work when I want to capture the traffic with wireshark without setting up https stripping via pinned certificate myself.
Vegetarianism also reduces crop farming since most crops aren't directly eaten by humans (especially in richer countries):

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
> And it's not clear if memory safety is the largest source of problems building software today.

The Chromium team found that

> Around 70% of our high severity security bugs are memory unsafety problems (that is, mistakes with C/C++ pointers). Half of those are use-after-free bugs.

Chromium Security: Memory Safety (https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...)

Microsoft found that

> ~70% of the vulnerabilities Microsoft assigns a CVE each year continue to be memory safety issues

A proactive approach to more secure code (https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2019/07/a-proactive-approach...)

It’s possible you hadn’t come across these studies before. But if you have, and you didn’t find them convincing, what did they lack?

- Were the codebases not old enough? They’re anywhere between 15 and 30 years old, so probably not.

- Did the codebases not have enough users? I think both have billions of active users, so I don’t think so.

- Was it a “skill issue”? Are the developers at Google and Microsoft just not that good? Maybe they didn’t consider good design and architecture at any point while writing software over the last couple of decades. Possible!

There’s just one problem with the “skill issue” theory though. Android, presumably staffed with the same calibre of engineers as Chrome, also written in C++ also found that 76% of vulnerabilities were related to memory safety. We’ve got consistency, if nothing else. And then, in recent years, something remarkable happened.

> the percentage of memory safety vulnerabilities in Android dropped from 76% to 24% over 6 years as development shifted to memory safe languages.

Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities at the Source (https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s...)

They stopped writing new C++ code and the memory safety vulnerabilities dropped dramatically. Billions of Android users are already benefiting from much more secure devices, today!

You originally said

> And it's not clear if memory safety is the largest source of problems building software today.

It is possible to defend this by saying “what matters in software is product market fit” or something similar. That would be technically correct, while side stepping the issue.

Instead I’ll ask you, do you still think it is possible to write secure software in C++, but just trying a little harder. Through “good design and architecture”, as your previous comment implied.
Show HN: Daily-notes.nvim – fuzzy time journal and planning plugin
I wrote an nvim plugin that does fuzzy time parsing on plain english dates to help you create + organise periodic notes. I use it daily at work and home. Hope it's helpful to others. :)

note: not using NLP, LLMs or 'true' fuzzy parsing as per academic literature; just normal recursive descent parsing
Explosive-Laden Goggles Sent to Russian FPV Drone Operators
About: https://opendaw.org/
The first part of your request sounds like you're looking for biographies of technologists, while at the end it sounds like you're looking for something more like self-help books. If you're looking for the former, a couple of big, fascinating histories that describe long careers in technology, starting with childhood, are

- The Dream Machine [1], which chronicles the career of J. C. R. Licklider

- The Friendly Orange Glow [2], where Donald Bitzer is the main character.

[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine

[2] http://friendlyorangeglow.com/
C# allows casting string[] to object[], but this requires the compiler to insert runtime type checks each time the array elements are modified:

object[] array = new string[10];
// throws a run-time exception
array[0] = 10;
You can't retake the web browser since the browser is a slave to the web itself, and the web's ridiculous excesses are enabled by the expansionism of Chrome and before that Firefox. It's a tragedy but I don't see a cure. Best I can hope for is a security-oriented niche subset getting some traction. Gemini tried to be that, but was too silly.
Not a fan of screeds like this. "We" are not doing anything. Some software sucks. Some doesn't. You can choose not to follow practices that produce shitty software. The cream will rise. None of these items is necessary and anyone can simply opt out. Just don't do it that way.
> Scientists long thought that tiny turtles drifted passively with ocean currents, literally going with the flow.

> "What we've uncovered is that the turtles are actually swimming,"

> the trick was developing flexible solar-powered tags that could hang onto shells long enough to send back data.

> Eventually the GPS tags slough off because "the outside of a young turtle's shell sheds as they grow very quickly,"
I don't know why you would expect it to see a gorilla without an image to look at. Humans can't.
Not sure they are doing extra money because official apps are generally opened by free, community driven, ones, but yeah, this is my main issue with Macos nowadays, official apps are so flawed the os needs to be heavily customed out of the box.
Yes. Particularly it's those little badges that let you share some content or other on the social media site of your choice. I'm under the impression that whether you click them or not, they are phoning home to Facebook about your behavior.

So it's not hidden in react itself but rather in the constructed-on-page-load-and-hard-to-disable-just-parts-of space which react creates.

I'll confess to not having merely read about this skulduggery and not analyzed it myself. But it certainly explains why Facebook open sourced react and also why those things are everywhere. Is there a better explanation?
It’s demoralizing how the number of times an event has to happen for action to occur is quadratic to the severity (1 being highest).

Troubling things have to happen three or four times and super annoying has to happen dozens before anyone acts, let alone gets a mandate to do so.
*cost-effectively — confusing title without the proper adverb hyphenation
Amusing comments provided you are not Vinod. Three sites and I would hope that connectomes were computed interleaved between cases and controls and analyzed with blinding. Is that standard? Do you think behavioral difference in the scanner could generate false positive connectome differences?
Thank you, I got the same impression, I have relatives and friends who work in government roles for local and statewide energy operators and ran this post by them, hopefully I did not butcher the details too much.
You generally shouldn't. But data at rest is different from data in transit in that you are vulnerable to a MITM with data in transit. Who cares if you're saving an encrypted file or not, if you can't trust that it's the same file that you intended to access.
If this takes off, it will end up poisoning search results for anyone interested in retrocomputing.
It has no driver standard on purpose with the intention of getting drivers into the mainline kernel tree.

If drivers are "standard" then low quality drivers full of bugs and security vulnerabilities proliferate and only the OEM can fix them because they're closed source, but they don't care to as long as the driver meets a minimum threshold of not losing them too many sales, and they don't care about legacy hardware at all or by then have ceased to exist, even if people are still using the hardware.

If there is no driver standard then maintaining a driver outside the kernel tree is a pain and more companies get their drivers into the kernel tree so the kernel maintainers will deal with updating them when the driver interface changes, which in turn provides other people with access to fix their heinous bugs.
Cilium netkit: The Final Frontier in Container Networking Performance
> As an EM, your role isn’t just about managing the technical—it’s about understanding the people behind the work.

Yeah it is a lovely sentiment, but it is a sweet nothing if someone doesn't understand the techniques to back up nice words with an appreciation for the people behind the work.

We discover in the follow up that to this EM it means engaging in endless debate (the GitHub issue may have more spilled ink than a Tolstoy work) over the appropriate default branch name. That isn't what prioritising people should look like in practice. In fact that sort of debate springing up and becoming a serious milestone is the sort of thing that should trigger a check for whether empathy failures are taking place. Why is a culture developing where the team is being focusing on such trivialities instead of something that promotes their success or the success of groups like the greater organisation or customers? People with empathy tend to focus on the actual success of real people; and anything more than a cursory aye/nay poll on branch naming would be a concern because it suggests that the real problems every team has aren't getting attention.
If you are mindful of performance,
one thing to be careful of, is that interfaces often prevent inlining and can cause performance issues.

Generally speaking the Go compiler seems to have trouble with inlining, PGO (profile guided optimization) can help though.
Depends how you do it... in the UK we have the underlying infrastructure government owned and we choose who to buy our electricity and gas from.
Bankruptcy would not help because you’d still have some entity managing the entire coverage area. The gain comes from creating a market for lemons.
Interesting. My experience is that bulky abstraction layers are harder to maintain than own software.

In game development, whenever we go with highly abstract middleware, it always ends up limiting us in what we can do, at what level of performance, how much we can steer it towards our hardware targets, and similar. Moreover, when teams become so lean that they can only do high level programming and something breaks close to the metal, I’ve seen even “senior” programmers in the AAA industry flail around with no idea how to debug it, and no skills to understand the low level code.

I’ve seen gameplay programmers who don’t understand RAII and graphics programmers who don’t know how to draw a shape with OpenGL. Those are examples of core discipline knowledge lost in the games industry. Aka what we have now, we might not know anymore how to build from scratch. Or at least most software engineers in the industry wouldn’t. It cannot end well.

Building your own in my exp is a better idea — then you can at least always steer it, improve and evolve it, and fix it. And you don’t accidentally build companies with knowledge a mile wide and an inch deep, which genuinely cannot ship innovative products (technically it is impossible).
This has not been the case with the three operators in the Bay Area - Santa Clara, Palo Alto, and Alameda.
Related/dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42988706
if you don't feel exhausted from time to time it means you potential is wasted. Community interest is important so it's important that employees at such companies utilize their full potential. If decision was made because of signs of burnout it means they needed more employees.
Which researchers, and why do they have such a "right"?
Influenza is the best-known example, but others with the same segmented genome structure can also do it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reassortment
The fidelity, definitely. I think quality is a harder sell. I do think we have more gaming history behind us now to draw from and I think we will be entering a new golden age soon but at the moment gaming feels like it's in a rut.
market forces do exist. But it varies highly from industry to industry and product category to category.

Food:
- restaurants definitely compete with each other, mostly in each local area
- and within that, different slices of the restaurant business more directly compete, e.g. fast food is more competing with each other than fine dining.
- BUT: we have a huge problem with a lack of competition in the supply chain driving prices up for everyone, at least in the US.
- Groceries are similarly impacted by supply chain monopolies

Smartphones: high end smartphones are a oligopoly: - Apple vs Samsung vs HTC and several other tech companies producing phones; Apple definitely commands quite a bit of a premium, as do some of the nicer Android phones. But on the whole, the companies really are fighting to one-up each other with better features, battery life, etc. - quality is improving, even if the price is over-charging vs the ideal competitive market. Low end phones are even more fiercely competitive

Other electronic categories seem to show decent market dynamics; headphones, earbuds, usb peripherals, keyboards, etc. all seem very commoditized; there certainly are brands that try to command a bit of a premium based on reputation / marketing, but the cheap options are often good enough and definitely have a very competitive market. Big electronics like GPUs and gaming consoles though I think it's easier to start considering market distortions due to more monopoly power.

Of course there are no shortage of monopolistic practices out there, e.g. for utilities, collusion on rent, online retail (Amazon), textbook prices, medical care & pharmaceuticals, and even more mundane things like frozen potatoes and chicken.

---

The thing that bothers me most with the simplistic view that "the market will do it better" is that the whole premise of market forces giving the most efficient price assumes that (a) a commodity is being traded by (b) a large number of buyers and sellers, none of whom have any significant share of the market. Many markets either (a) aren't trading a commodity (e.g. iPhones and Android phones aren't interchangeable so Apple can command a premium price) or (b) have consolidated buying or selling to the point that they don't have the large number of independent buyers or sellers necessary to have the price be set by market dynamics rather than the monopolist or monopsonist. And the people promoting "let the market fix it" either are too dumb to realize that, or more likely are letting their rich friends make a quick buck or want to score political points by promoting smaller government.
The average residential electricity rate in CA is $0.34/kWh. In these problematic locations, I'd expect the cost to be even more than this. Ground mount PV would be suitable here, so there would not be great problems with scaling. I think a PV + battery system should be competitive regardless of "modernity", whatever it was you meant by that.

To put numbers on it: for a 12 kW system in Chico, CA (a location at ~40 degrees N I chose arbitrarily) the NREL calculator at https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php gives annual generation of 18500 kWh (40 degree inclination). For a lifespan of 20 years at $0.34/kWh this is $125800 worth of electricity. A 12 kW + 16 kWh LFP battery system costs something like $36K (+ installation and financing).