skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Blow often makes fantastic points about development, and often completely misses the mark.

He’s accomplished great things and has ideas worth listening to - but also plenty of nonsense that’s presented indistinguishably.

I felt quite strongly that the collapse of civilisation talk was one of those pieces of nonsense, and I’ve largely ignored it (despite listening to it twice). I’m grateful to OP for providing a more principled rebuttal.

Don’t even get me started on Casey Muratori, who tries to do the Blow thing but doesn’t even get the good parts right.
Hydro Quebec‘s territory is nowhere near as vulnerable to forest fires as California’s.
I used a spider, that I also use for wok frying. Was plenty to transfer 3 eggs at a time. https://www.amazon.com/Joyce-Chen-30-0036-Stainless-Strainer...
It's cool, but that's definitely a Ralph Steadman background generator, much more than Pollock.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm actually a bit new to product development. What would be a recommended alternative to an executable in this case? After reading some of the other comments I'm aware of the perceived security risk.
Writing bad code for any reason is bad, the question is whether you can write good code to get the next release out. Or are you saying there's no such thing as good code that meets the next release' requirements?
Of course there is a better way, don't give up so easily. One immediate improvement - use a subfolder for organization, so just 1 "garbage" item instead of many.
Fun! Reminds me of spending a week in 2012 trying to find the perfect blackboard chalk effect
http://mmoustafa.com/experiments/chalk/

After many experiments, the most realistic was painting a thick line and then erasing tiny randomly sized rectangles out of it.
I don’t think they imply the payouts are so big they need to raise the rate, but that they have the support of the people in political power to maintain the monopoly and keep charging whatever they want.
Alpha decay and Sharpe ratio: Two measures of investor performance (2021)
In case anyone wants to do one themselves (and learn Clojure), I think this was posted on HN previously:
https://tombooth.co.uk/painting-in-clojure/
CSV files of the works of William Shakespeare
Thanks for your feedback, yea I got to admit there's a bit of sales language there. Hopefully I'll incorporate some more features in the future. At the moment I need to sort out something I missed - perception of a one file .exe file.
All of those things have been happening for over a decade. There is no actual discipline of software design today. It's just people googling shit, copy-and-pasting, and praying.

I often work with people who refuse to use software unless it's so well known that they can google for stackoverflow answers or blog walkthroughs. Not because well-known software is stable or feature-filled; no, they literally are just afraid of having to solve a problem themselves. I'm not sure they could do their jobs without canned answers and walkthroughs. (and I'm not even talking about AI)

This is why I keep saying we need a professional standards body. Somebody needs to draw a line in the sand and at least pretend to be real adults. There needs to be an authoritative body that determines the acceptable way to do this job. Not just reading random people's blogs, or skimming forums for sycophants making popular opinions look like the correct ones. Not just doing whatever a person feels like, with their own personal philosophy and justification. There needs to be a minimum standard, at the very least. Ideally also design criteria, standard parts, and a baseline of tolerances to at least have the tiniest inkling if something is going to fall over as soon as someone touches it. Even more should be required for actual safety systems, or things that impact the lives of millions. And the safety-critical stuff should have to be inspected, just like buildings and cars and food and electric devices are.

The lunatics are running the asylum, so that's not happening anytime soon. It will take a long series of disasters for the government to threaten to regulate our jobs, and then we will finally get off our asses and do what we should have long ago.
The Internet was quite literally a government invention. Google was invented at Stanford. Linux was created by a volunteer who organized on Usenet.
How have you done the last one? I have stuff running on ollama but not with "access to all of it"
> The limitation of your approach I will say is that if you can automate the beginning of a process or the end it’s fine, but if you have two islands in the middle it doesn’t work better than a CLI tool with prompts

I think I may have poorly described my approach then. It's just the same thing, the choice of sheets or Jira or cli or a combo is only about meeting people where their current process is. A dev setup -> cli. A business process between trams -> Jira if that's the current flow. I'm not getting marketing to install my cli tool, and they'd not be the ones doing the manual steps anyway.

The point is just making a process into a series of clearly defined steps that can be manual and can be automated independently.

Your description of what happens alongside 3 and 4 is good, this was really valuable when I've done it. Just like releasing a MVP and finding out key problems with your imagined approach, the issues are usually not what you expect. You also have better test cases and examples.

Massive side benefit when I did this with data was that it also meant a process could be automated 95% of the time, manual 5% without changing the interface anyone worked with. All they saw was the ticket took longer really. That's great when you find absolutely wild stuff in some csv file.
Fair point. Do you have any recommendations on how to do this alternatively, for Windows? I defaulted to .exe but obviously didn't think about the user perception of it.
Something akin to it very likely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel is one example of early IT done by government owned enterprise.
Today I was working on wrapping some simple Python library into a gRPC service so I can use it from some other Go services. The business logic is around 20 lines.

Setting up uv, Dockerfiles, GitHub Actions, Secrets etc. took me basically the whole day. I can very much relate to "We are destroying software with complex build systems."
Advice for software devs on just about every topic imaginable
I fully understand the risk of highly directional radiation - but that is why I was asking if there was some actual specific testing done. I believe the software in the Starlink (and the beamforming) is designed to only transmit when it knows where it is pointing ( it uses receiver information and ephemeris data to know where and how to transmit ).

I would suspect that if the dish was instead pointing directly at someone with no direct satellite reception there would not be high transmit power.

Again, of course it could be catastrophic in unheard of ways, but is there any evidence of that as a real outcome, potential and likely outcome, or even likely theoretical outcome?

I can understand it takes time for legislation to catch up, although that is far more a 'choice' than a requirement.
`boost_write` doesn't appear to validate the length of the user supplied buffer before casting and dereferencing either, so that's a kernel-mode OOB read. Not sure how exploitable this actually is though.
It was used quite a bit in WFST-based speech recognition decoding, before so-called end-to-end approaches (CTC, RNN-T, AED, etc) took over.
The computer museum is much much better than the bletchley bit, although I suppose if you bothered to go to one you'd always go to the other anyway.
Selling almost any state function to a private entity is almost the opposite of what social democrats want to do…

I think you mean neoliberal democracies.
It used to be everything ran on mechanical machines and analog electronics. That stuff failed all the fucking time. We're no worse off today with software.
> Look at how after of calculators became common, we got generations of people who struggle to do basic math.

Do you have any data behind this claim?

> When developers become too dependent on AI to "assist" them in coding, they're more likely to be unable to debug "their own" code as they won't have a full grasp/understanding of it.

Again, do you have any evidence that this happen?
I wouldn’t say it is better, just different trade offs. Using this tool you can see/restore all files in normal folder structures without requiring the tool itself.
It really isn’t, unless you include the pass through funding for education
I believe Rust has added the ability to mark FFI functions as safe to call at their definition site (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/10/17/Rust-1.82.0.html#safe-...)

That way functions can be marked as accurate/"ok" to call in safe code by the author of the bindings. They could absolutely not be safe; in that case, the binding author is in error marking it so.
really? I know there's quite a few arm64 distributions ... that's pretty strange. What about WSL2 and what about NetBSD?
It's a bit of both.

Police aren't going to arrest you unless they're pretty sure the charges are going to stick, but once you're in custody, they are... well, let's just say "highly motivated" in getting you to sign a confession, and they have a great deal of leeway that is unavailable in the US.
Yocto was kinda doing the nix thing for a while before nix existed, but basically by slowly growing the capabilities in an ad-hoc fashion instead of working on it from first principles. It's resulted in a bit of a mess (it's an unholy mix of a custom functional-ish programming language grown out of a config file format, python, and bash, with a ludicrous capacity for action-at-distance) but there's still not really anything else like it.
In this imaginary world, does every house and business have it's own power station? Are small electronics powered by dc or ac? Do perhaps power strips incorporate something like a power supply that takes the long haul power and proivide something locally more usable, like how many power strips today incorporate usb power supplies? Is it worth making the grid slightly less efficient for houshold/office usage in trade for making it more efficient for EV charging at every parking spot, or is there something totally different like wireless power in the roads all along the roads...

You're asking how high is up.
You are correct, but this goes against what is perceived as "agile." Today, we typically "fix it in the next sprint." It results in poor quality products. And it sucks.
A dear friend sent me this years ago and, more than any other book (maybe tied with https://ldngraffiti.co.uk/media/street-fonts) it has brought me and many visitors great joy and inspiration.
I was wondering the same thing and found this in the Plugs section: https://silverbullet.md/Plugs/Git
Fraud is illegal yes.
git bisect ftw
Why is that? How much data are we expecting the LSP to ingest?

For most projects my expectation is that all the source code gets quickly cached on my machine, and from then on querying a local LSP is much faster. Especially with high-latency connections.
> you don't want a random person become hair stylist for the day and then switch to something else

Considering that the stakes are fairly low (compared to say, surgeon for a day) and that there are plenty of jobs that obviously do not require a license and we are happy to let the employer apply the skills test, where exactly would the line sit between needs license and doesn't?
I miss assembler and maximizing code efficiency to juggle 2k of ram.
Kotlin Native has every one of those features.
Like the user above says, a web service using CSS/JS for the image manipulation (you can get quite good perf with CSS these days)
"The uplink, in front of a directional VSAT antenna, this is very significant."

This is reasonable, and I fully can understand that direct transmission at reasonable power going into a sensitive receiver can be problematic. In practice I suspect it would require some particularly aggressive intent to aim it such that you see that condition - and of course at the point you are at intent the 'rules' are optional.
I hate to break it to you but that's a large percentage of open source projects. The high majority of code is by a low minority of people

I think this is because the barrier to meaningfully contribute is too high simply because large code bases are almost always complicated and hard to understand.

There's a few extraordinary exceptions (NetBSD source comes to mind) but they're extreme outliers
Jackson Pollock's style evolved throughout his life. The Whitney had a show with his early works and it's nothing like his splatter painting style we all know[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/nyregion/a-review-of-men-...
Yeah, I totally get that, but I suppose my argument would be is if you're going to bother writing your driver in Rust, until there are more mature Rust bindings for the OS interfaces, you might as well only write your most safety-sensitive business logic in Rust, and then write all the interfacing with the OS in C.
Adult social care is mainly to old people, who typically own their own homes. There was a suggestion in 2017 that people with a lot of wealth could fund their own care even if they aren’t moved to a care home (which is currently the case). Labour and the daily mail joined forces to block this.
Does he though?

It seems like he just makes these broad critical statements then pisses off to continue to do nothing.

I wouldn’t even say he’s accomplished great things. He’s accomplished some decent things.

He’s released two games which barely qualify as games. They’re more like puzzles. You don’t need to play them ever again after you finish the first time. Braid is ok. And the Witness is just Flow. And then after that he’s been working on a programming language for the past decade which he hasn’t released to the public because “it’s not finished”.

He got lucky and made his nut and ever since then has thought of himself as way more talented than he is.
I wonder if there's any free space underground? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYxaKw_CfeY
If they did, they wouldn't survive for more than a few generations, no?
Well, the xz backdoor was detected through the behaviour of the resulting binaries, not through observation of the source code tampering, so I don't think it's a great example.
There is a question as to whether it used SWF back in the day. It is likely but also would Java Applets have still been an option then?
I teach the systems class at Montana State, where we go from transistors up to a real computing system, and I have students that don't understand what a file system really is when they start my class

I agree that blow is wrong on some details, but I really think we need to be thinking hard around a NAND-to-Tetris style education that starts in high school for our technical students.

I use "outdated" models like Little Man Computer and a simple visual MIPS emulator which, even though they aren't realistic, at least give the students a sense of where we came from, with a level of complexity that a normal human can get their head around. When I look at modern 64 bit architecture books that get suggested for me to teach with I just laugh.

Anyway, not to say I agree 100% with Blow on everything, but connecting technology down to the roots is a hard problem.
It’s for the same reason that almost everything in Unix is like

ls, man, wc, ps, grep, …

instead of

list, manual, word count, process(es?), <actually, what the hell does that stand for again>, ….

You get used to it, and then it’s much quicker. And being able to write things down quickly is very important when you’re in flow.
Go is a C++ killer in a different sense: there are things that people would have written in C++ (or often in C) that are today often written in Go instead. Not everything, obviously. But Go is a great Unix glue language for programs too big to write in Shell and often those would be written in C or C++ in the past.
I don’t think they are easy. Russia spent tens of millions on the 2016 election and research found it had essentially no effect. The last three presidential elections were won by the candidate with the least money (and often by significant margins).

Elections are won by people voting for issues that affect them, not a rich boogeyman
It's been removed by the mods unfortunately.
It's true some Scala features or patterns fell out of fashion but I don't recall any time where replacing compile-time logic with annotation based runtime reflection was considered a good idea. And I don't think Guice was ever the most popular JSR-330 implementation, at least not when Play started using it. Spring had been dominating the Java world for several years by then. Funnily enough in the Android world I remember Dagger being very popular exactly around that time as people figured compile-time automatic DI is a lot saner than Guice.

Of course Spring is another can of worms entirely and I find many aspects infuriating. But things like diamond dependencies are less of an issue thanks to Maven BOMs which are common in the ecosystem.

My point is that ~10 years ago people started using Spark at my company, got curious about Scala and thought Play was compelling. Nowadays Spark (in Scala) is less ubiquitous and these teams remember that so many people got burned by Play before.

Funnily enough the peak of Scala's hype which I believe plateaued between 2014 and 2019 before dropping sharply was mainly driven by:

Spark: ground breaking in many ways but has become a huge liability to the ecosystem, holding so many libraries back. Databricks is also the main financial contributor to the Scala Center (I believe) while not giving much of a damn about the community or Scala 3 altogether. Spark is a very frustrating piece of software overall and today 95% of users are in PySpark anyway, avoiding JVM dependency hell being one reason.

Play: good idea, questionable execution, poor governance, and today mostly irrelevant to the future of Scala. Props to community maintainers who managed to secure funding and brought the framework back from the dead, saving many projects from a certain death.

Akka: also ground breaking, pretty much the only game in town if you need stateful cluster sharding, deployed at scale by top-tier companies. But also overkill for most people, and on top of that the relicensing really hurt the community and broke trust.

The boons and banes of Scala.
I think it's good enough or side projects. More powerful than C so I don't need to hand roll strings and some algos but I tend to keep a minimum number of features because I'm such an amateur.
It's interesting that 1) there are PG&E areas in Palo Alto (such as the Stanford University campus) and 2) PG&E manages the transmission grid for the whole SF Bay Area.

Stanford endured lengthy PG&E power outages while the municipal utility continued to operate. However, the university probably has negotiated rates that are lower than what regular PG&E customers pay in Palo Alto.
This stuff is so divisive. You can find seemingly a roughly equal number of people who passionately think the opposite on many of these very-different-from-windows UX choices.
I’m one. The dock tells me what apps are running and available. There are other ways to find the windows, and running apps don’t need windows.
Sold! Thank you for pressing the order button on my next book ;)
> And most of that misses the goal of why you write software for a business. You write software for a company so someone will give them money for it or so the company can save money

Hmm. I run a solo-founder SaaS business. I write software for my customers so that they can improve their workflows: essentially, work faster, with fewer mistakes, and make work easier. My customer pay me money if my software improves their lives and workflows. If it doesn't live up to the promise, they stop paying me money.

Most of Dieter Rams's design rules very much do apply to software that I write. I can't always afford to follow all of these rules, but I'm aiming to.

And while I don't always agree with antirez, his post resonated with me. Many good points there.

Incidentally, many of the aberrations he mentioned are side-effects of work-for-hire: if you work for a company and get a monthly salary, you are not directly connected to customers, do not know where the money comes from, and you are not constrained by time and money. In contrast to that, if you are the sole person in a business, you really care about what is the priority. You don't spend time on useless rewrites, you are super careful with dependencies (because they end up costing so much maintenance in the future), you comment your code because you do so much that you forget everything quickly, and you minimize complexity, because simpler things are easier to build, debug and maintain.
IIRC at university-level we used the wedge symbol [0] for cross product - not sure how common that is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_(symbol)
It supports standard UEFI boot, Ubuntu has a WIP image you can use that has some extra patches, and with some fiddling you can get other distros, assuming you use a really recent kernel with a supported device tree and maybe you need some firmware updates and a kernel patch or two (search 'x1e' in the Linux tree to see if yours is in there.) Wifi, USB-C etc work last I checked. Not sure about BT or general sound support or anything like that.

Overall though, things "work" but as far as usable goes, it seems to remain in a pretty poor state; especially given the lack of accelerated graphics combined with no NUC/SFF options. I guess WSL2 is probably okay. But it's a shame, because the hardware does seem pretty nice.

When some NUC options come out you'll at least be able to use it in a headless form factor, I guess.
Germany has also tried women-only cars and there have been discussions of having them in the UK, but they were rejected not because they're not needed but due to the optics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-only_passenger_car#Europ...

Not saying this as whataboutism or to defend anything, just that men are probably not always aware of the problems women face even in the west so be vigilant when you ride public transport and don't think it's only a Japan problem.
The tall office building artistically considered [pdf]
Genetic diversity is a damnable thing. Listen to your body. Mine gets "hot" when I drink (I suspect it's general inflammation when my liver is working overtime to break everything down), which then disallows proper sleep.

If I've been dry for ~ a week, I'll notice sleep degradation around two beers drank <4 hours before going to bed.

If I've been in a groove of going out, the limit is higher.
I completely agree, they answered as you or I would have, or even better; if we were in the same situation!

It’s more interesting that Zuckerberg would ask this, at least to me.
Geneva/IL has its own utilities. Water and electricity. Gas is still ComEd.
How does enforcing profiles per-translation unit make any sense? Some of these guarantees can only be enforced if assumptions are made about data/references coming from other translation units.
I have listened to a few podcasts by HFT people. Looks like you try to maximize performance and use a lot of C++ skills. Very interesting to listen to but I wonder how does anyone pick up the skills?
Plenty of hand written assembler in core programs like ffmpeg. Sure most people glue together tedious JavaScript frameworks but there’s still people doing real work.
lol yep, you're 100% right.