skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is what baffles most. When sales goons and marketing nitwits get control over software, it smacks of utter desperation, a lack of confidence in product, and for things such as an OS?

Insanity.

My (seemingly) core OS has no business nagging me.

You know I bought a car, and it nags me about, literally 4 or 5 things every time I use it? Some of which can never be deactivated?

Sheer stupid.
There is a bit of a difference between other professions and software. You wouldn’t hire an orthopedic surgeon for cardiology. Now, the human body doesn’t change that fast. So both are needed. In software the rate of change is much faster. So what happens is tools change and people who want to switch streams for better opportunity have to tweak resumes. Now the only way to validate basic proficiency comes down to leetcode style interviews - for better or worse. It’s pretty much the only common denominator between an interviewer and the candidate.
It never ceases to amaze me how often people will make socialist economic arguments (that are objectively correct) yet eschew the label "socialism".

An enterprise, like providing a utility, has revenues and it has costs. The difference between the two can be called the "surplus labor value". What happens to that depends on the economic system.

In capitalism, capital owners own that enterprise (utility) and they siphon off profits raising the costs. Put another way, capital owners own the means of production, not the residents of the city or the city itself. This is rent-seeking behavior.

In a socialist organization of the economy, the residents either directly or through the city itself, would own the utility. Any profits would go back into the utility or be extra revenue for the city but there's really no incentive to increase prices on the citizens who own the utility (unlike the unquenchable thirst for increasing profits for capital owners).

I have to constantly point out that capitalism isn't markets (market existed thousands of years before it and exist in every economic system). Capitalism simply supplanted feudalism by replacing kings with billionaires. That's it.

We have abundant examples of how the latter is a substantially better system. Just compare EPB Internet (Chattanooga, TN and surrounds) vs Verizon, AT&T, Comcast or Spectrum. Municipal broadband, without exception, is substantially better than any national ISP. The only thing that keeps national ISPs in business is more rent-seeking behavior such as lobbying for legislation to ban municipal broadband.

Given this is the Superbowl weekend, it's worth adding that the Packers are owned by Green Bay (an arrangement the NFL now bans for any other franchise). What do we see in other cities? Teams extorating massive tax breaks from cities, counties and states to build massive stadiums at taxpayer expense without the team having to give up anything. The KC Chiefs are rumbling about leaving because the city didn't pass a sales tax increase to pay for upgrades to Arrowhead Stadium.

I don't know why anyone is surprised by any of this anymore.
I ultimately stopped because the trade off is not being able to see web animations (or most any animations in the OS) most of the time, which isn’t ideal as a web developer.
Wi-Fi is really sub-optimal for light connectivity. Without venturing into high-end home automation systems like RadioRA, your best options for lighting as far as connectivity are concerned are probably Lutron Clear Connect > Z-Wave > Zigbee/Thread. And then any of HomeKit/Home Assistant/Hubitat to handle the automations.
The ones considered adults aren't so emotionally disregulated that they get angry about sometimes useful idioms.
Governments are often okay overspending on government contracts.
I think what he is trying to say is that the value or focus was better when it was placed on the endeavors, not the means behind the endeavors. I don't think anything has to be inevitable. What matters is what we decide to do when challenges like these present themselves and how can we have more of a positive impact on the world when things go awry.

I take issue with your use of the word "utopian" being used in this context. Its not a lost cause to see the world from the perspective of making the world better, by finding our way though this with a better mindset on the future.

And while you are taking the time to ponder these questions because you earn enough to take the time, the world is burning around you. Sorry if my tone is harsh, but these kinds of statements really rub me the wrong way. It feels like you are saying everything that is happening is how its suppose to be and I am strongly against that. We have enough of that perspective, we really don't need it, IMHO.
Do you have any more info about what tax troubles it resolves to use gumroad instead of Shopify? I’m just curious - I run a Shopify store but have never really felt the tax situation was overly complex and assumed I’d have a similar tax process when using a service like gumroad.
It was actually 424, but I think thk rounding was appropriate here.
In my day, the IDE/compiler weren't free (~50% the price of a new computer), the OS wasn't free (~10% the price of a computer, for each update), account handling was such a mess for everyone that I bought software with an actual chequebook and when I cashed in my Kagi* account they sent me an actual cheque too, and the only way to do subscriptions was a direct debit that wouldn't work in every country. Also lots of American companies wouldn't sell me software directly, I had to get friends willing to do the transaction for me and give them money for it.

I'm not saying Apple is entirely fair or well priced (although they were back when the App Store was new, the world changed around them) but I am saying you'll save a lot less than you're expecting to when you do all this stuff yourself — and I'm speaking as one who has.

Keeping track of 190 different sales tax rates is, even by itself, not fun. Best to offload what you can — same reason loads of business go to "the cloud", use site builders or wordpress, or contract out to third-party payroll services.

* payment processor, not search engine; same domain, otherwise completely unrelated.
Just get a registry! Problem solved ;)

Apps are terrible at this on Windows. Sometimes it's in %USERPROFILE%, sometimes in one of the three %appdata% folders, then My Docs, other times in %ProgramData%, and even worse, %PUBLIC%.

There's a registry for a reason, but even Microsoft doesn't use it for x-platform apps.
If PG&E could be undercut by 25%, then why are there no private companies doing it? Either it is not as profitable as the author claims, or PG&E's monopoly is due to state regulations (I don't know enough about the specifics) and it would be quite contradictory to demand the state solve the problems it created.

Overall it reads like any other socialist argument for nationalizing (in this case "municipalizing") companies, which does not work both on theoretical grounds and based on historical experience. The claim "Walnut Creek could borrow from its utility in recessions, and loan money during booms" is laughable. We know how that ends: the city would finance its deficits with utility money until the company is bankrupt.
VCs, simply put, are a creative force that makes their rich sponsors richer. They are like an intelligent gravity force for money. On the other hand, projects that help people do the opposite: they distribute wealth and make the rich poorer. Of course, the selfish rich aren't going to fund such initiatives. That's why many struggle with a cognitive dissonance: do the right thing and stay poor, or do the wrong thing and make real money.
2 years from now 99.9% of all software will be written by AI. So just put those statements into your system prompt.
I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet for coding assistance (and pay $20/month for the "professional" plan).

I recommend it!
> Turner said that he was “interested in finding something
simpler” than full dependent types.

What are some current options for avoiding full dependent types?
Lemborexant.
> Just keep trying things. Don’t give up.

I agree with this. For me, fixing insomnia has been my number one priority for the past 3 years. It's also a fairly easy priority as during the day you don't actually need to do a whole lot about it other than some reflection. So improvement is pretty slowgoing, simply because you only have 1000 iterations and you're already 3 years older
> We are destroying software by no longer caring about backward APIs compatibility.

My take: SemVer is the worst thing to happen to software engineering, ever.

It was designed as a way to inform dependents that you have a breaking change. But all it has done is enable developers to make these breaking changes in the first place, under the protective umbrella of “I’ll just bump the major version.”

In a better universe, semver wouldn’t exist, and instead people would just understand that breaking changes must never happen, unless the breakage is obviously warranted and it’s clear that all downstreams are okay with the change (ie. Nobody’s using the broken path any more.)

Instead we have a world where SemVer gives people a blank check to change their mind about what API they want, regularly and often, and for them to be comfortable that they won’t break anyone because SemVer will stop people from updating.

But you can’t just not update your dependencies. It’s not like API authors are maintaining N different versions and doing bug fixes going all the way back to 1.0. No, they just bump majors all the time and refactor all over the place, never even thinking about maintaining old versions. So if you don’t do a breaking update, you’re just delaying the inevitable, because all the fixes you may need are only going to be in the latest version. So any old major versions you’re on are by definition technical debt.

So as a consumer, you have to regularly do breaking upgrades to your dependencies and refactor your code to work with whatever whim your dependency is chasing this week. That callback function that used to work now requires a full interface just because, half the functions were renamed, and things you used to be able to do are replaced with things that only do half of what you need. This happens all the god damned time, and not just in languages like JavaScript and Python. I see it constantly in Rust as well. (Hello Axum. You deserve naming and shaming here.)

In a better universe, you’d have to think very long and very carefully about any API you offer. Anything you may change your mind on later, you better minimize. Make your surface area as small as possible. Keep opinions to a minimum. Be as flexible as you can. Don’t paint yourself into a corner. And if you really, really need to do a big refactor, you can’t just bump major versions: you have to start a new project, pick a new name (!), and find someone to maintain the old one. This is how software used to work, and I would love so much to get back to it.
Great article and even more impressive design of the blog. Just clean straight forward easy on the eyes and loads instantly.
> Money is a proxy for manpower.

It is. But you are talking about a very specific policy: How much money goes into Social Security. The cap is arbitrary – not a calculated reflection of physical reality. It is an artificial restraint! Whether the cap is $160 000 or $500 000, you can’t just say “this is a reflection of resource-scarcity” when it is very much a policy decision made to allow the wealthy to pay less taxes.

> For sure there is lots more room to take wealth from workers and give it to non workers, but expect more and more political headwinds and long term consequences.

The goal is, in my eyes, to reduce wealth taken from workers by non-workers – the owners that increasingly make more and more money proportionally to workers. The young always got less than they put in – that’s how companies profit – but now they get even less than they used to. This is because we’ve allowed wages and salaries to stagnate, letting wealth inequality become incomprehensibly massive compared to just two generations ago. The results of this is what makes the young poorer and despondent.

Raising a tax marginally on these owners, like raising the Social Security cap such that the ultra-wealthy pay more into it, doesn’t break physical reality nor does it take money from workers. It takes money from non-workers.
I'm happy to see this because it's my experience with Gemini too. Google did terribly with Bard (clearly an emergency launch to say "Hey, we're here too!"), Gemini 1.0 and even Gemini 1.5 was only decent in the top 'Pro' tier.

Gemini 2.0 has been a huge step forward and I'm using Flash daily at work for coding. Very liberal limits and much cheaper than OpenAI too. I'm easily in the $0 tier as I don't exceed 15 requests per minute or 1500 per day. I use it with Chatbox AI and my Google Gemini API key.

They've been a bit late to the party though. But the fumbling from Amazon and Apple has opened an opportunity to STILL be ahead and launch the first powerful AI assistant this year. It's no doubt one of the reasons they developed Gemini 2.0 as an agentic AI and I'm only waiting for hardware refreshes now.
NASA solar mission data recovering after server room flood fiasco
The word "accident" is generally inappropriate in this context. For example, it's banned from FHA and NHTSA communications [0] among others because it implies that the incident was random or unpreventable. This article is talking about incidents that can be prevented and were narrowly avoided as opposed to "accidents".

The FAA and the NTSB continue to use "accident", but they're somewhat unique in that and they have very specific technical definitions that don't match popular connotations.

[0] https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/newsroom/crash-not-accident
7-11 trips at any given time of the day are one of my most precious Japan memories from my 3 week trip.

I cannot even explain why, maybe it it the Nintendo-like jiggles and atmosphere of comfort. We have similar markets where I am from any I know 24/7 chains from around the planet and it isn't really what this is about. The products are not super special either ... still it eminates magic for me and when I went to Taiwan a few years later I was EAGER to enter a Japan-style 7-11.
You mean you don't need dep resolution, signatures and moderation? How so?
[edit to add]: There are also hundreds of small example programs of using Miranda2 to solve Advent of Code puzzles, here:

https://github.com/taolson/advent-of-code

Advent of Code Puzzle Descriptions can be found here:

https://adventofcode.com/

While they don't have the puzzle-supplied data sets included, they can be used to see how various solutions are written in Miranda2.
Datacenter energy use to more than double by 2030 thanks AI's insatiable thirst
Like GNOME?

There are rules when to use what, but usually folks rather code away instead of reading documentation.
There actually is an episode of TNG similar to that. The society stopped being able to think for themselves, because the AI did all their thinking for them. Anything the AI didn’t know how to do, they didn’t know how to do. It was in season 1 or season 2.
>> It seems like an LLM could easily perform this task

> Bingo—of course we use an LLM. No human is sitting there churning out demand letters by candlelight. ...

Sorry, let me clarify what I meant: It seems like someone (like myself, at least) could use an LLM to do this without using this site. I do like how you have all the questions prepared for the letter generator, as well as state specific law information, but I personally wouldn't trust uploading my files and story to a random site. That's not to say I should trust ChatGPT, but it does seem a little less sketchy for whatever reason. Not to mention, I can edit the letter more easily because I'm already in a session with it. Anyway, I'm sure other people will find this really useful, so kudos!
No I’m comparing it to VSCode at that instance.

I also use Vim a ton every day (both remote and local). While it’s a neat editor, it’s not an IDE.

The only place I compare it to Vim is the learning curve part, and learning curve is not related to system requirements.
Maybe these expensive-to-serve regions need a different model of power generation.
For starters, it means you should not take the success of the math and ascribe it to an advance in the LLM, or whatever phrase is actually being used to describe the the new fancy target of hype and investment.

An LLM is at best, a possible future component of the speculative future being sold today.

How might future generations visualize this? I'm imagining some ancient Greeks, who have invented an inefficient reciprocating pump, which they declare is a heart and that means they've basically built a person. (At the time, many believed the brain was just there to cool the blood.) Look! The fluid being pumped can move a lever: It's waving to us.
Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers
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.

People tend to adapt to technology by becoming more lazy, putting less effort in understanding. Look at how after of calculators became common, we got generations of people who struggle to do basic math.
Yeah, I have noticed that some commands are now interpreted differently/incorrectly.

But I’ve just started being less ambiguous with commands now. E.g. simply “turn lights out” has worked for me.

So I guess I wouldn’t call that “broken” or “butchered”.
Containers === kernel services on microkernels.

Explicit enough?

Such is the irony of using a monolithic kernel for nothing.

As for Windows, not only has kept its hybrid approach throughout the years, Windows 10 (optionally) and Windows 11 (enforced), runs as a guest on Hyper-V, with multiple subsystems sandboxed, DriverGuard, Virtualization-Based Security, Secure Kernel, UMDF.
I have one of her books, Ornamental Origami. I had no idea she was so prolific. And I had no idea she died recently.

I encourage anybody that likes geometry and puzzles to give modular origami a try. You just need lots of little pieces of paper, and some patience. Then you end up with fun little desk ornaments: https://wonger.dev/assets/origami.jpg
Just because something happens on a yearly cadence doesn't mean that "seasonality" is a good reasoning. It's just restating that it happens on a yearly cadence, it doesn't actually explain why it happens.
Nitpick: it wasn’t a forced update, and I got exactly one notification about the Playground stuff that I remember.
That's actually a moderately decent pitch for an episode.
Me, me, me, got it. Unfortunately there are other folks in the world. ;-)

Students need to focus on fundamentals, not the fanciest automatic whiz-bang tools available. Why we learn arithmetic before allowing calculators.
> You are just name calling

who did i call a name?
On the other hand I think it’s an awful response.

> pick one and fall in love with your co-workers, make them friends, and do tech for the sake of tech.

Not caring about what you are building and why is how we got here. Too many hyper focused people in tech only interested if they could do things without wondering if they should.

Precisely how we now have technology-oligarchs who got rich off of the work of such single minded people now destroying the country.

Enough people thinking like this is what has led to people like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin to thrive and become influential.

Sure that algorithm is cool and all but it’s been used for techno-fascism.
But there have always been people who struggle to do basic math. It doesn’t seem true that people will be unable to debug “their own” code, even if it was generated by AI, because people already learn how to debug open source software not written by themselves.
Sshfs doesn't pass inotify and other things, so your IDE doesn't know a file has changed (git, compiler output, and so on.)

VScode sees file changes immediately.
> One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent.

Different people have different definitions of intelligence. Mine doesn't require thinking or any kind of sentience so I can consider LLMs to be intelligent simply because they provide intelligent seeming answers to questions.

If you have a different definition, then of course you will disagree.

It's not rocket science. Just agree on a definition beforehand.
Makes sense. The anti-cheat ran in usermode on Linux, so it was trivial to bypass.
Are the features and codecs safari doesn't support part of WebKit? If so does that mean that any browser on iOS doesn't support it either?

Also, the article links to a blog post[0] about video with transparency, and although the performance is the main complaint I had no idea this was a thing! Worth the read if you enjoyed the article I think.

[0] https://jakearchibald.com/2024/video-with-transparency/
This is acutally somewhat interesting. I definitely don't want to bring back the indentured servitude model (or indentured servititude lite which I worry would happen), but maybe with some creativity we could come up with something. Maybe a way for other companies to buy out a contract or something?

My guess is there isn't really a way to get this done without some violations of freedom, so it probably isn't going to work, but it would be fun to brainstorm on.
Scientists Simulated Bennu Crashing to Earth. It's Not Pretty
My interpretation is really just having placeholder workflows that still require manual steps and maybe even print them out as text, but don’t necessarily wait.
Narrower, Deeper, Older
Suffrage in the early 20th century applied more to whites than blacks. And having low wage labor be black market without protections can in some cases benefit the upper classes.
The article is spot on. It's pretty much what happened when Maersk was hacked within an inch of bankruptcy.

The flaw was identified, flagged and acknowledged before it happened:

"In 2016, one group of IT executives had pushed for a preemptive security redesign of Maersk’s entire global network. They called attention to Maersk’s less-than-perfect software patching, outdated operating systems, and above all insufficient network segmentation. That last vulnerability in particular, they warned, could allow malware with access to one part of the network to spread wildly beyond its initial foothold, exactly as NotPetya would the next year."

But:

"The security revamp was green-lit and budgeted. But its success was never made a so-called key performance indicator for Maersk’s most senior IT overseers, so implementing it wouldn’t contribute to their bonuses."

Basically, a near miss that wasn't incentivised for anyone to fix.

If you're interested in this type of story, it's an absolute thriller to read:
https://archive.is/Gyu2T#selection-3563.0-3563.212
Exactly! I think they realize this too but justify it as a bet. They win the bet often enough that it makes it worth it, and the few times they lose are just accepted as risks of the business. It seems idiotic to me, just as idiotic as thinking of engineers as fungible.
This is a great post! I'm very intrigued to see how Carbon ends up. I've also enjoyed reading about some of their implementation choices, being more data-driven.
It’s all open source, sorry there was no link!

https://github.com/ajwerner/voronoi
Good point. I probably knew that at one time but now leverage it via chatgpt so forgot. Does anyone know if there is an AI wall with text to image?
Pretty much exactly how I write. (My lower case zeta is prettier)
Asynchronous Programming in Julia
And only to your eyes and those you force your vision onto. The rest of the universe never sees it. You don’t exist to much of the universe (if a tree falls and no one is around to hear it, you understand what I mean).

So you simultaneously exist and don’t exist. Sorry about this, your post took me on this tangent.