skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pascal object code with runtime range checks could be slower than C object code without any such checks. Pascal strings typically were either statically bounded or included bounds information, while C strings typically did not.

Unfortunately C's lack of bounds checking made it very easy to create buffer overflows, which turned out to be a huge problem.

Ada doubled down on memory safety, which turned out to be a very good idea, especially if it can be combined with concurrency safety, formal checking (as with SPARK), etc.

Fortunately clang/llvm seem to be making some progress on memory safety; hopefully features like -fbounds-safety [1] will eventually bring C (and maybe C++) solidly into the 1980s.

[1] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/BoundsSafetyAdoptionGuide.html
How did democrat politicians go from saying we shouldn't legalize gay marriage to then saying you are a horrible homophobe if you are against it in a couple of years?

The answer is the same, some people just say what they think will give them the most power and advantages. If denying gay rights gives them votes? "Of course they shouldn't have any!" Wait, no, gay rights give votes?? "Oh, yeah anyone who doesn't give them rights is the worst!"

Almost all leaders are like that in a large enough population, since if you say what people want to hear you tend to bubble upwards.
> but the second anyone suggests we were better off with the taxi cab than Uber or Lyft

Uber or Lyft are more convenient for the customer, but the drivers are being abused by Uber or Lyft. Which is less than ideal.

That's the thing about BigTech: nobody says that the product was not more convenient (at least before enshittification), but the problem is that BigTech abuses their dominant position, over and over again.
Javier Milei backtracks on $4.4B memecoin after 'insiders' pocket $87M
California politicians aren't interested in advice to speed up approval for housing, because they're actively working to slow it down.

Everyone knows that the easiest way to fix housing shortages is to let people build more housing, and there's countless ways to do so. The difficult part is convincing the people of California to vote for politicians that are okay with that.

California lawmakers are currently obsessed with ADUs, because most home owners that could aren't interested in building them, and those that do only add single units at a time. Meanwhile, actual development projects which will add tens to hundreds, or even thousands, of units to the housing market are all micromanaged to oblivion, to prevent them from actually being built.
A similar debate concerned the shape of the table to be used at the conference. The North favored a circular table, in which all parties, including NLF representatives, would appear to be "equal"' in importance. The South Vietnamese argued that only a rectangular table was acceptable, for only a rectangle could show two distinct sides to the conflict. Eventually a compromise was reached, in which representatives of the northern and southern governments would sit at a circular table, with members representing all other parties sitting at individual square tables around them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords

Edit: Also note what Kissinger did behind the back of Thiệu.
I reluctantly use mobile boarding passes when traveling because I don't have a convenient printer when I'm not leaving from home. But presumably the counter could still look me up via my passport or other relevant ID.
Google used AI to summarize the ~200 questions its employees posed ahead of this meeting regarding its DEI and AI policies.

The final two paragraphs of the article are telling:

The third-most-popular question employees asked was why the AI summaries were so bad.

“The AI summaries of questions on Ask are terrible. Can we go back to answering the questions people actually asked?” it read.

I thought summarization was a task AI was considered good at. If their own tech sucks at this, what makes us think it's safe to use in the context of war?
He was great, he deserves, in death, no dishonor
Per TFA, you don't just get "snide remarks" if you fork the compiler. You get booted from all the official community spaces.

Given that those are the first place someone would go to seek help if and when they need one, especially for a community that small, that feels like a considerable risk.
They threw people out of the community if they even created forks of the language, and they literally hard coded in their buddies' projects to use compiler features that everyone else couldn't. "Rules for thee but not for me" does not inspire much confidence in using a new niche language, much less using it in production.
How does that work? fiber optics are delicate. you mean free-space optics?
Yeah that one made my laptop absolutely chug. I want to listen to the page while reading a writeup of why such a simple graphical effect is so inefficiently rendered.
> You're pushing a conspiracy constructed in pursuit of a narrative.

I don't play conspiracies, I distrust everything proven, this includes conspiracy theories with arguments made from air.

I haven't said that was intentional. I blame their errors and mistakes.

> Maybe, just maybe, if people listened to the CDC and WHO we would have better outcomes.

When? They changed their narrative almost 6 times, while killing people with the mechanical respirators or keeping them stuck in-home with no physical activity.

The world already faced this kind of acts during the Spanish Flu, and CDC repeated the exact same mistakes of that time, considering we have better technology and information by that time.

The Wuhan lab research and blame to Chinese people was a conspiracy during COVID, and today we know how CDC was involved into the gain-of-function Wuhan Institute of Virology. Why did they negated everything when questioned?

Do you understand many Chinese people faced discrimination because of this? And this was well known project funded by the NIH.
I think it's definitely helpful to describe a source's political leaning to add context to a discussion. However, claiming that they generally "hate big tech, love DEI" seems a little disingenuous. I think, HN is best when it's nuanced and does not jump and feed on hyperbolic culture war topics primarily used as ragebait.

There surely are many articles supportive of diversity initiatives published by the Guardian. But they have also published critical and nuanced articles on the subject. Here are a two examples:

"Focusing on diversity means we miss the big picture. It’s class that shapes our lives" -> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/29/focusi...

"So your company uses diversity training. Does it even work?" -> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/10/workplace-dive...
Love the web(b) page! I guess you also use your color palette there?

P.S. Subscribed to the RSS feed, but I noticed it's not auto detectable from main URL.
Decrease foreign aid. Instead of $25+B to Israel (just an example, sure there are tons of others), we can keep the money for ourselves.
Solution: Buy physical books, then clone at home.
There was a zero chance the company with the best AI LLM models would not get involved in weaponization, willingly or not.

DAI is going to be one of the first things the next administration brings back, mark my words. Saying it's discriminatory is like saying affirmative action is discriminatory
My experience at rental car companies has in the last couple of years degraded to say the least. Customer service has been pretty hostile similar to the descriptions of turo in this article.

I think part of it is consolidation of the companies. Hertz now seems to be hertz plus dollar plus some other company. Hertz used to be cool (and more expensive, now it’s one of the cheapest).

It feels like it felt as the taxi companies were being killed by uber and later Lyft. Some external factor is causing them to fail and they’re floundering and clawing for every penny they can get.

I never heard of turo but may check it out for my next trip to the USA. But I think the real killer of the rental car companies is rideshare. It’s now usually cheaper for me to do two rides a day on rideshare than to rent a car for a week.
> For these reasons, I can't advise people to touch anything Evan does in the future.

> I guess you haven't been personally contacted by a member of the core team trying to steer you into changing course on a technical topic. That interaction was not delightful.

I agree, the community itself has a sort of toxic positivity to it, where criticisms are verboten and one must act like everything is good.
That's fantastic! And you just gained a supporter. Enjoy your 'coffee' :-)

Compassion will fix this world, my dear friend, spread the word!
It’s speed makes it better for me to iterate … o1 pro is just too slow or not yet good enough to wait 5 minutes…
The description of social contract does not imply that it was signed by me
TypeScript is as old as Elm, though. Arguably more so when you consider prod deployments.
They are also now illegal by executive order which is the main reason companies are getting rid of them. I agree with you they were biased but companies don't care about that
You know neuroticism is a term of art in psychology, right? It's a value neutral term, not a pejorative. If your argument is that he deserves firing because he's sexist and your evidence that he's sexist is he called women neurotic then you're part of the reason we can't have reasoned debates.
What went into creating the color scheme?
Before it happens it's conspiracy thinking to go around connecting random dots.

After it happens, everyone will say it was obvious all along, if only you could have connected the dots.

Dots such as famously bragging about defaulting on personal and business debts, big promises about radical reductions in debt levels with zero public plan for how it's supposed to happen, eagerness to renege on long standing treaty commitments, withdrawal from international organizations, threats of economic warfare against allies and adversaries alike, immediate seizure of the Treasury systems that execute payments for bond interest and principal, a stated desire to dramatically devalue the dollar, etc.

Usually gold just sits in underground vaults and changes in ownership are recorded in a ledger.

When massive quantities of physical gold are put on airplanes, something unusual is happening.
It's funny that this could be interpreted as either far left (the biases against marginalized people need to be heavily counteracted in order for them to succeed) or far right (without DEI they would be unable to succeed on their own merits because they are less able than the typical white male straight christians).
What it can't be interpreted as is reasonable. It's insulting no matter how you look at it, either paternalistic or white supremecist. Saying that everyone who isn't of certain skin color, gender, religion, or orientation is "fucked" without relatively recent HR initiatives is on its face ridiculous and insulting to those who have succeeded without it, which is the vast majority of them!
Probably not what you actually meant but this whole topic seems so ridiculously polarized that people will post those type of extemist interpretations without a second thought.

e: ah, just looked at the username and account creation date. I'm now rescinding my assumption of good faith intent.
What amenities would you recommend around that annual budget? Honest question, I’m finding the lounges to be less helpful these days.
Very long spools are connected to the drone and it is flown by wire until it strikes its target.
What, Googlers don't like AI summaries shoved down their throat? Too bad, it's a feature, and features can't be disabled! :)
I actually felt bad for the poor bot :(
This is like arguing nobody is actually in charge of their bike because slamming the front brake at high speed has consequences other than stopping. It's not that we've somehow stopped being in charge of the device rather "it's going 20 mph" means there are other desires to balance beyond than "I'd like to stop immediately".
im not sure i follow the logic of state boundaries being a useful level of granularity for any audience. if some suburb of Austin has a power outage affecting 10k people in a 3mi radius, that means i get to see 8.7% of the contiguous US land area turn yellow unless i specifically select to zoom to TX to discover that the affected area is 10,000x smaller?
If you throw out the Linux tech from my explanation, it would become a general description which holds up even for Windows.
nope, fiber optics

https://www.spotterglobal.com/blog/spotter-blog-3/new-stealt...
I think it's already been ported, based on https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/1i99ze0/resynthesizer...
Very illegal here in Australia. I believe even possession is illegal. Technically even our SDRs need to be below some power threshold, though most probably don't conform.
Microsoft interestingly enough appears to be standing their ground on DEI. [0]

Yet, they hopped on the layoff train this time around with a particularly nasty twist. [1]

Perhaps they were afraid they'd need to be sociopathic in at least one regard, lest they buck the wider ethos lately. Facebook for example, offered generous severance packages but threw DEI in the trash immediately. [2]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/business/dei-programs-ini...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-performance-based-...

[2] https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/laid-off-meta-employees-blast...
Good question. GP and parent's sibling sound at least uninformed if not misinformed.
You are discussing physics. Everyone else in this thread is discussing mathematics. Sorry but you are the one who's off topic.
Did people already forget he allowed Anti-semitism? And then brands left Twitter? And then he threatened to sue the brands for leaving?

We can argue the first part all day. The point was Coca Cola and co. did not want to assossiate anymore and that had an objective dollar amount.

I know less about this situation, but Twitter in 2024 apparently made some controversial blocking changes and that started the bluesky migration. I don't know the dollar amount there, but they apparently lost some big influencers.
>The general pattern is this

Definitely sounds like one vector, along with enshittification and other factors.

>*You either need to prevent the apparatus...or..."

That solution set kind of assumes that we must get to this point where those are the viable options. For me that begs the question, "what's underlying all of this that makes it so arriving here is the pattern?"

For example, questioning what we can do about such centralization and entrenched incumbencies in the first place; exploring whether some industries should be not-for-profit or public benefit, etc.

In general, the current system/economy presents a ton of inertia, frequently backed by network effects. I think we'll need to start looking at more creative/disruptive solutions for many of these issues.
I want to use rescript but the unit testing story seems non-existent, there's some vague mentions of using Jest which is just an awful choice. If there's a way pf using Vitest with it, or something at all, that would be good.
How Not to Implement a DHT
I started this as an explanation of why most people implement bad DHTs and it evolved into an explanation of how they work.
> The concept was well intentioned but, quite ironically, these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else.

I think the programs basically did nothing. They were ineffective. Yet, that made a lot of people really angry.
Yeah, Apple doesn't want Netflix recommending their own shows for free, when Apple could be recommending their own shows, are charging Netflix to recommend theirs.

Of course Netflix doesn't want Apple to have control of the interface to the Netflix streaming service, just as much as Apple doesn't want Netflix to have control of the interface to Apple's streaming service.
An incentive for them to quietly push out bad cops, and cover up their misdeeds long after they're gone. That doesn't sound like a healthy way to solve systemic problems, to me.
What kind of UI, just any ol' app?
Fucked because of the deeply engrained racism, sexism, and homophobia in American society right?

It's like people forget many of the people you see in those photos hanging black people, letting the police dogs go into a crowd, putting glass in the chairs of the Little Rock nine, etc are still alive. My living parents and grand mother were both born into a segregated country.

The civil rights legislation was passed in 1965

Donald Trump lived his entire childhood in a country where it was completely fine to use and treat minorities like trash. I think he and a lot of other people miss it.
It seems simple, but I used the JSON format which seems to add a lot of complexity (basically serialized version of objects)

I also had to install a separate module just to get a decent access log...

Could be my fault for going too far down a wrong path, but it could also be a sign of poor documentation
this feels like living in an alternate universe where instead of the guide changing it's moto from
"dont panic" to "panic" we get a change of user agreement notification on e reader screens
> my device is moving from one cell tower to the next, getting a new IP address every few minutes

You're pretty much never getting a new IP at every cell tower.

> Then I get to my friends house and his router is gonna block unestablished connections so you better call me soon.

PMP can solve that.

> Because relying on your users to have stable IP’s

Not a stable IP, but some kind of stable identity. Like a DNS name. That can be provided by someone like Apple, or Google, or whoever. It doesn't need to be ultra-centralized by only a single thing controlling it.
Thank you! Haha, one of my favorite domains.
If you know more than others, it would be great to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Comments that only declare how much you know, without sharing any of it, are less useful, and ultimately off-topic.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Yeah I gotta fix that, probably this week!
> these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior

Professional sports went through a "DEI" phase. Despite some rough patches, I'd say that it worked out for the better as a whole if you look at it in retrospect.

Similarly, individual companies may have fumbled DEI initiatives, but years on, I think it will have had a (small) positive impact.
How is DEI discriminatory? Do you know of studies that have statistics to back up the claim?
We're in the process of updating our documentation to help people port their existing plug-ins and scripts to 3.0: https://testing.developer.gimp.org/resource/writing-a-plug-i...

Now that the API is stable for 3.0, we're hoping more people will feel comfortable updating to it.
You will eat your slop and you will enjoy it
I’d argue they had reverse intentions in that it over fit on discriminatory hiring (against white men)
For all the younger people I think it's important to know, that before Windows 95 the concept of "shutting down" a computer was mostly unknown.

DOS never had an option to shut down, you just saved your work and turned off the computer. Also with Windows 3.x it was normal to just switch the PC off, without any prior shut down process.

Back in the days most software was synchronous, there were no background processes, no write cache (and read cache was optional). Once the "saving document" message was gone, it was written to disk. With floppys and early hard drives it was easy to hear anyway, when the noise stopped it was written to disk.
Agreed. On that note London is also big enough that percentages are the right measure. Here is 7% of London being knocked out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_London_blackout
my guess is any new administration would realize it’s a massive political loser.

i’m personally in favor of some limited AA in unis, but if even black people are majority against AA when polled… it’s definitely not coming back. might be that this changes once minority groups realize how much of an impact it was actually having, i think a large segment of people convinced themselves that a lot more of these admissions were by pure merit than is supported by the data.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-87323-x
Texas only adds more clean generation because it’s way less capital intensive than building a natural gas or coal plant. Those plants require $500M+ minimum and the returns just aren’t that great. My wife is an energy attorney in Texas and handles power purchase and interconnection deals like these all day long.

Solar and wind deals require far less capital, go up faster, and aren’t subject to the supply risk of natural gas or coal.

Texas also has a lot of clean energy thanks to sun and terrain. The Edwards plateau creates some of the best wind generation opportunities in the US.

Texas also attracts energy heavy industries because it has relatively cheap power. Which we’ve learned partly results from not paying anyone to have excess capacity… which is all fun and games until you have winter storm Yuri roll in and your only option is to “shed load” which btw kills some people.

Another aspect of Texas is that we have demand response contracts whereby certain users get paid simply for the ability to “take” power when required. This is very attractive to bitcoin miners. Prices here go negative from time to time which is pretty wild.

All of this attracts a lot of energy-intensive industries to Texas.
In the 90s (i.e. when Windows first got this splash screen), there was no concern with physical damage - after all, in DOS, just turning it off while at the C:\> prompt was the normal procedure.

But the filesystems normally used on PCs at the time didn't have journalling or other mechanisms to prevent metadata damage if the power was turned off in the middle of a metadata update, which made data loss that much more likely even for blocks that were already written.
Affirmative action is discriminatory. It is literally discriminating between different people based on sex, race, religion, or gender identity. You can argue it's good discrimination, but it is by definition discrimination.
In the last year I did a lot of thinking along these lines (I’m 30 for context).

Until now I’ve spent a lot of my focus chasing credentials, even if I didn’t really realize that.

For example, having good schools, companies, etc (YC even!) on the resume.

All of that served me well, but I think now it’s important to switch to harvesting some of the fruits of that labor and deciding what I inherently want to pursue.

I get joy out of a bunch of things; spending time with my family, running a business, even learning and listening to my favorite podcasts. I’m much more focused on doing things that bring me joy now, and the choices I make are in service of that.

A few things I read last year that were influential for me:

Obituary for a Quiet Life (relatively short): https://bittersoutherner.com/feature/2023/obituary-for-a-qui...

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter

My tl;dr is really just the pursuit of love, joy, good health, and good money.
I can tell you at Apple where I worked for almost a decade in the last year I see teams 99% made up of DEI hires. Apple should share the data.
Which one? Hobbes's, Rousseau's, Locke's, or Spencer's? Generally, these so-called contracts are morally fashionable bandwagons attempting to appeal to some vague authority. They lack at least two elements that make a contract in the proper sense of the term: mutual consideration and clear, well-defined, promises of fixed duration and scope. There's no contractual obligation to keep a society "alive" indefinitely and for its own sake anymore than there was one to keep the British Empire in tact.
Sure. Just like open heart surgery, Medieval English, and penguin husbandry.