skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> BSON. Massive duplication of object keys in requests and responses at least.

Can you expand on this, please? Why is BSON bad?
Who wants fluent conversations with AI to get help for realtime translations or location based information (e.g. when traveling)?
Who wants to delegate tasks to AI so it can help work with everyday productivity tools like calendar, emails, etc.

I understand that some of the stuff is not there yet. But dismissing an emerging technology as useless baby stuff? Reminds me of what people were saying of web, web 2.0, etc.
My productivity has taken giant leaps since two years, probably because I'm willing to regularly invest some time into understanding & exploring which workflows can be optimised. It might actually not be trivial, and even some AI companies are not able to showcase their tech in realistic problem solving scenarios. But it's there.

Apple is just really really bad at this atm. Their leadership has transformed the company into a mindset of mirco-optimisations, no more taking risks etc.
Literally dim the light source until the probability of two showing up within the time scale of the measurement is low enough. This is not impractical. For instance there are many kinds of detectors that can be set up to discriminate single photons or particles.
Now would be a good time to have a functional FTC commissioner. Doing a bait and switch like on a product that was sold with a set of features should be illegal. If I buy a car and the sales guy stops by my house the next day to take back the wheels, it would rightfully be seen as ridiculous.
It doesn't matter what it is, or where it's happening in the world, the conversation always comes back to the US. Always.
Why does Vec need to have any unsafe code? If you respond "speed"... then I will scratch my chin.

> For example, the Vec type is a wrapper around a raw pointer, length, and capacity; and exposes a safe interface allowing you to create, manipulate, and access vectors with no risk of pointer math going wrong -- assuming the people who implemented the unsafe code inside of Vec didn't make a mistake, the external, safe interface is guaranteed to be sound no matter what external code does.

I'm sure you already know this, but you can do exactly the same in C by using an opaque pointer to protect the data structure. Then you write a bunch of functions that operate on the opaque pointer. You can use assert() to protect against unreasonable inputs.
> How many contributors to free/open content resources are even bothered that their work might end up being used for AI training?

StackOverflow’s response is a clear counterpoint.
It's not about source code access, it's about guaranteeing the four freedoms. As a user, with proprietary software you have to worry about whether you can share a copy with a friend, sell it on a CD to a guy on the street for $5, or use it at your work place. With free software you can do all of that without worry. For better or for worse, I am not a programmer, and free software is important to me. I have often wished I were a programmer in order to better help and contribute, but have long struggled to learn. I doubt I'm the only one in such a situation.
Unless I remember incorrectly doesn’t iOS do an integrity verification at system boot.
> However, for the autovectorizer to do a good job you have to write code in a very special way

Can you give an example of this "very special way"?
Did you know you could uninstall Notepad (Win11 Ai version) from Settings -> Installed Apps to restore notepad to the version we know and love (without tabs, AI)?
Quantum physics says: yes.
> Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving, no matter how much they're training. Never ever.

This is the OP claim I am saying is absurd.
"The synthetic potential of the present transformation is highlighted by a short synthesis of terfenadine, a pharmaceutically important anti-histamine compound."

It was all fun and games until the Viagra weed got loose.
I'm not sure why people say this about certain languages (it is sometimes said about Haskell, as well).

The code has a C style to it, but that doesn't mean it wasn't actually written in Rust -- Rust deliberately has features to support writing this kind of code, in concert with safer, stricter code.

Imagine if we applied this standard to C code. "Zlib-NG is basically written in assembler, not C..." https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng/blob/50e9ca06e29867a9014e...
Sure, but during the entire time of Autopilot/FSD so far, Teslas have been crashing in ridiculous ways and killing their drivers.

The "but they've patched that failure!" excuse has ALSO been around, and while the cars are definitely getting better, they're still also definitely killing people in ridiculous ways.
I think it’s usually helpful if your knowledge extends a little deeper than the level you usually work at. You need to know a lot about the layer you work in, a good amount about the surrounding layers, and maybe just a little bit about more distant layers.

If you are writing SQL, it’s helpful to understand how database engines manage storage and optimize queries. If you write database engine code, it’s helpful to understand (among many other things of course) how memory is managed by the operating system. If you write OS code, it’s helpful to understand how memory hardware works. And so on. But you can write great SQL without knowing much of anything about memory hardware.

The reverse is also true in that it’s good to know what is going on one level above you as well.

Anyway my experience has been that knowledge of the adjacent stack layers is highly beneficial and I don’t think exaggerated.
Has anyone seen an iOS device fail to boot due to an integrity violation?

Whatever it's verifying is insufficient to stop persistent iOS malware, hence the existence of the MVT toolkit, which itself can only identify a small subset of real-world attacks. For evidence, look no further than the endless stream of zero-day CVEs in Apple Security Updates for iOS. Recovery from iOS malware often requires DFU (Device Firmware Update) mode reinstallation from a separate device running macOS.

Non-persistent iOS malware can be flushed by a device hot-key reboot which prevents malware from simulating the appearance of a reboot.
In terms of file contents, I have a bugfix commit somewhere that just adds a single newline to a config file (no line deleted in the diff). We were using something that had its own own custom parser for what looked like an INI file, and we managed to find an edge case where the wrong number of blank lines would break it.
How do they still cost money?
I feel like this keeps coming up again and again and I can't help thinking that they just don't get it. Or maybe I don't.

There's two prevailing sentiments IMO - (1) FSF-like: the greatest freedom is achieved when we empower the users of the software to improve or fix the very software that they are using and (2) BSD-like: the greatest freedom is achieved when we permit licensees to freely use the software how they see fit.

In my opinion, nothing in either scenario risks "appropriation". There's only different takes on "freedom." But if you fear appropriation then clearly licenses like AGPL and GPLv3 are more suitable.

Making money is not incompatible with Open Source nor Free Software. Making lots and lots of money is not incompatible with it either.

If you don't like what might happen when you license your code liberally, you might just prefer proprietary software. And that's okay too. You can even publish the source but add a restrictive license (or explicitly forbid any use). This is a source available proprietary approach. I wouldn't contribute to a project like this, but there's no reason you couldn't make yours like this.

Free (beer/kostenloss, not freiheit) is magic and does magical things to people's brains. Also, public software work is really valuable to attract higher quality results.

If you seek to balance a ledger, then it's not free (in either sense of the word).

I wonder to myself: these articles, are they really written by open source software contributors who regret their contributions? Or someone on the outside looking in, wondering how they can "fix" things?
I'm all in on Bluesky since last week and I agree with you that there's a lot to it.
We have very different experiences then. Don't know what to tell you.

Every interaction I've had with a rust programmer has led me to believe they are a toxic community of cultists. It's unlike any programming community I've seen.
> With basic research, you often have to wait for decades before you can tell if the work was important or useful. But because funding needs to be available before the work is done, you can't base funding decisions on the value of the work.

I think you were right ten years ago, but a lot of new ways of doing things now change this paradigm.
At least in recent C++ standards, integers are defined as two’s complement. As a practical matter what hardware like that may still exist doesn’t have a modern C++ compiler, rendering it a moot point.

UB in C is often found where different real hardware architectures had incompatible behavior. Rather than biasing the language for or against different architectures they left it to the compiler to figure out how to optimize for the cases where instruction behavior diverge. This is still true on current architectures e.g. shift overflow behavior which is why shift overflow is UB.
True! Only, Good C programmers don’t exist.
> What language is the JVM written in?

I am pretty sure it is C++.

I like your second paragraph. It is well written.
Oh hey, I also have "in defense of undefined behavior" in the queue of blog posts I'd like to write some time, with that exact title. What a coincidence. That said, it's unlikely to get written as I have things that are more specific to my actual research ahead of it.

One of the things I'd want to say is that UB is a useful and accurate way to model what happens when, say, a program writes over memory used by the allocator. Languages like Odin might try to pretend they don't have UB, but in my opinion it's impossible to get there just by disabling certain compiler optimizations (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800814 for an argument about this).

I see UB as essentially a proof obligation, to be discharged in some other way. A really good way is to have UB in the intermediate representation, and compile a safe language into it (with unsafe escape hatches when needed). But there are other ways, including formal methods, rigorous testing, or just being a really smart solo programmer who's learned how to avoid UB and doesn't have to work in a team.

Feel free to send me your draft.
Despite the high frequency that alarmist "formatting you HDD" is cited in discussing UB, I've never seen it happen. Surely there exist real examples of catastrophic failures which could actually teach us something, beyond making a hyperbolic point.
> think we're I to adopt my split columnar ergonomic keyboard now I would just stick with qwerty. I think the keyboard helped me more than the layout.

Doing just this is actually why I changed layouts again. I built a Pinky4 split columnar stagger keyboard. A few months later I was used to it, but still had hand pain using Dvorak. The layout really is what made a difference for me. I still use that keyboard, but with Workman now.
Considering Australia (SA) invented the concept of the Torrens Title which means that we don't have to pay extra to protect a piece of paper, and that the Titles Office has always charged for access to titles, I don't think that this is the "hypercapitalism" hill to die on.

It also means that banks can't sell mortgages out from under their borrowers because all liens and other finanacial liabilities attached to a title are known.
MySQL would never have eaten Oracle. Oracle had
/has a huge installed base of corporate/government customers who are risk adverse to switching out their database for fear of breaking critical systems.

No one building a business today would ever choose Oracle, but their hold on legacy customers is pretty strong. They will probably die a slow death as their customer base dwindles if they can’t pivot.

They are fairly similar to IBM
No issues.. Thanks..
Before the dotcom boom there was a rule of thumb in the Valley: "in order to go public you have to have 5 consecutive quarters of profit"

These days that's all gone out the window, but you can see why back then companies that did go public were more likely to succeed
To be fair, OP never said this was necessarily related directly to the article.

I’ll often post loosely related tangents like this because I would enjoy discussing the tangent with the HN crowd, but there’s often not a better opportunity to discuss it, so why not while we’re sort of on the topic anyway.

Ack that I don’t think it makes sense to discuss not even remotely related topics. But as long as it’s in the ballpark and it’s not going against other guidelines and leads to interesting discussion, I think it’s fine.
SpaceX asks US to address foreign trade barriers
I'd like to know who is buried at a national cemetery who was both at a Japanese internment camp and later a Korean or Vietnam POW. Would the help desk blow my request off?
That's the clearest explanation I've ever seen, thanks.
Tk’s look was based directly on the Motif widget toolkit that was dominant on UNIX workstations at the time it was created.
Do you think my last sentence is describing things incorrectly? I don't really understand how you could take that depiction and call it "potato potato".
OK some protests aren't attacked. Agreed. In so called non Democratic countries they tend to be arrested/ imprisoned/ killed.

Uhm. So what? Some protests never happen. Some protests people wear pink hats. Some protests people stay home. So what?

I think being dead is more permanent damage than hearing loss will ever be. So yeah. They're not dead.

Lots of pussies are right and real men are wrong. Not sure why you bring up pussies?

Your high horse is kindergarten clear: bad guys did something bad and we're supposed to have moral outrage or were gonna be condemned

I refused your childish narrative and asserted my right to assert the morally superior position of life over hearing damage: I choose life.

I never called anyone weak minded nor did I say sonic or non lethals were "OK". But you seem weak minded so maybe one person.

Protestors are gonna be suppressed. Gas, arrest, mass beatings, kettling, mass shooting, etc. What does not kill them makes them stronger.

Despite your weak minded analytic skills I appreciate your reply. Please try harder next time even though I know it gives you a head ache.

Cheers.
That's not how words work. They chose that word because it's evocative of exactly what most people think while being just vague enough to give them regulatory deniability.
I think Firefox "weirdos" are probably under reported in general because they go to great lengths to hide themselves from analytics. Therefore I also think the number of "weirdos" who change their UA while still allowing JS analytics is basically nil.

On any consumer site, mobile UAs just overwhelm the desktop ones anyway. Nobody cares about Samsung Browser, why would they care about some shit that's way below the fold.
Most modern malware is not disk resident, as it has a higher probability of persisting by re-infection with an undocumented zero-day.

For example, people that play games that bind the GPS location services will find interruptions magically stop for awhile after a cold power-off, and power-on restart. Or the battery performance suddenly stops quickly losing power in standby, as recording/image capture was burning power and data budgets.

Ultimately, a smartphone is impossible to fully secure, as the complexity has a million holes in it regardless of the brand. And Gemini is a whole can of worms I'd rather not discuss without my lawyer present. =3
ptrdiff_t is also useful in this case if signed semantics are desired.
I ran OS/2 v 3 on a machine with 8 megabytes (sic) of RAM quite smoothly. But I had to choose: either I enable TCP/IP networking and disable the Win16 emulator, or the other way around. If I enabled both, the machine started to swap to disk too much.

Win95 worked well on such a machine, and even worked tolerably on machines with 4 MB RAM, which were still around. It lacked the nice true multitasking, because it was basically running on a DOS extender, like most large DOS games. But you could run win32 programs, win16 programs, DOS programs, and have TCP/IP and thus access the Internet all at the same time. It was a killer combination. Also, it had a really thought-out GUI, a big upgrade compared to Win 3.1. (Far from the coolness of OS/2 WPS, but...)
It doesn’t have to be offered for free. If you sell a lifetime license for your software it’s actually sort of in your interest for customers to self host since then you’re off the hook for server costs.

The main thrust here is if you buy a “lifetime” license, it should be your lifetime, not the lifetime of the company that sold it to you.
Waves are quantized (one wave, two waves, ...), so energy transfers by waves are quantized too.
Whois -r lookups I use Arin for.

Maybe I'm confused but whois gave me domain owner, but whois -r gave me Arin IP netblock ownership.

Arin is useful, whois is not.
> Technology, instead of giving us more free time, caused us just to fill that free time with different work

Technology gave us more free time. It also gave us more things to do with that time. You don't need more than a few tens of thousands of dollars of savings to basically retire somewhere remote-ish and live a 19th-century lifestyle. Most of us don't do it because want air travel and internet and modern medicines.
AFAIK you can't send wol packets between subnets, or over wireguard, without either reconfiguring your router firewall or setting up an proxy service on Lan what you can poke to actually send the wol request.
Well Oracle bought Sun so it’s tough to see your argument but I love the EMC addition. I know many who retired from there and are still retired . Their sales team printed money
> The value of most software for most companies has a limit, pushed down both by supply of software engineering labor and that manual labor is actually quite cheap and your software must inherently cost less than what it would to just pay a human to do it.

Software, in the limit, is FREE. It gets written once for a finite cost and then can be copied ad infinitum. Even stratospheric labor costs are acceptable because of this.

> (avionics software costs a lot more to develop, and yet even then the actual SWE salaries there don't reflect it)

But the cost to develop a piece of software (or anything, really) has nothing whatsoever to do with its value!

Avionics software is expensive not because it's inherently more complicated (high-quality OSS hobbyist implementations like Ardupilot exist for free), but because it has to undergo system integration tests because of FAA regulations.

And, despite lower pay for avionics engineers, the value to the end users of quality avionics is literally the difference between life and death.

> but by and large the value of software is nowhere near what a decade of market distortion led us to believe.

Where do you get this idea? Tech, as a whole, is a wildly profitable sector of the economy. It is a primary driver of US GDP growth and productivity [1].

> Remember most of us (including me) are plumbers, not rocket scientists. It's just that a decade of market distortion allowed us to play rocket scientist (with only a tiny minority of those rockets actually ever needing to fly). Now we're back to being what we really are.

I get that ZIRP is ideologically unpopular, I really do. You can only see so many "Uber but for dogs" startups get multimillion dollar funding rounds before you get cynical.

That being said, interest rates have been falling for centuries [2]. Low interest rates are a fundamental reflection of a society that's gotten better at allocating investments efficiently.

It turns out that software, because of the whole "zero marginal cost" thing, is a spectacularly efficient investment.

1: https://cpram.com/fra/en/individual/publications/megatrends/...

2: https://www.nber.org/digest/202212/real-interest-rate-declin...
>I don't like seeing an icon and having no idea what it does without clicking it

And that's assuming you're lucky enough to be using a UI that clearly marks what's interactible instead of being maximally flat.
Yup, Linux ate Sun and Sun shot Java in the head hiring Jonathan Schwartz

I don’t care what anyone or the courts say: Android stole Java and Google and all the ex Java people it hired know it

Imagine the outcome if Java was licensed correctly and Schwartz didn’t just give to Eric
People should just modify the GPL and add a clause that explicitly forbids training AI and similar things. Instead of hoping a court will follow the logic, just settle it for good.
One can easily protect themselves [0]!

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXKTBQBugIA
Noted.
Mostly I try it to create space / distinguish the comma, I think It has been ingrained in me for quite some time.
I think I misunderstood the rule of space after comma to include it before comma as well.
It's true that Ptolemaic cosmology stuck thinkers in a rut for a very long time; but what got us out of that rut was observation (and simplification). Copernicus saw that heliocentrism led to a simpler model that fit observation better (ironically he wanted to recover Ptolemy's perfectly circular orbits!). In turn, Kepler's perfectionism led him to ditch the circular orbit idea to yield the first accurate description of orbits as ellipses. Yes, transgression against long-held belief was necessary to move forward, but in every case the transgression explained observation. Transgression itself is undesirable. In fact, transgression unmotivated by observation is what powers the dark soul of the "crank", who is at best a time-waster and at worst a spreader of mental illness.

Even Einstein did not produce (e.g. special relativity) out of whole cloth. He provided a consistent conceptualization of Lorentz contraction, itself the result of observing descrepencies in the motion of Jupiter's moons. The same could be said of the photoelectric effect, the ultraviolet catastrophe, and QM.

All this to say that your statement "The rapid decline in progress in modern times would seem most likely to suggest that something we are taking as a fundamental assumption is probably wrong" is unsupported. Nothing could be more popular than questioning fundamental assumptions in science today!

It could very well be that, as Sean Carroll puts it, we really know how everything larger than the diameter of a nuetron works! Moreover, we know that even if we find strangeness at tiny scales, our current theories WILL remain valid approximations, just like Newtonian mechanics are valid approximations of special and general relativity. The path to progress will not happen because a rogue genius finds something everyone missed and boldly questions assumptions long-held. Scientific revolution first requires an observation inconsistent with known models, but even the LHC hasn't given us even one of those. There is reason to think that GR, QM, and the standard model are all there is...until we do some experiments near a black hole!