skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good perspective - the books that were written in the early 2000s were documenting a lot of the practices that had evolved through the 90s, and giving them a nomenclature. There was a period from roughly 1995-2005 where it felt like we were evolving a real discipline of software engineering, with patterns of how to build things and a language to communicate with each other.
In practice every C build system already does.
Talk of "financial alarm" for a government with monetary sovereignty is specious. It will mislead you into analyzing government finances as if they were household finances, whereas governments use newly created money rather than going bankrupt. And for our government, this really just means less newly created money going directly into private pockets.

It's only this martingale of the "Federal Reserve" neutering the government's own monetary sovereignty that has even allowed for this "debt" narrative. The part of government debt that is owed to private parties is essentially savings accounts for institutions and other countries who believe that USD will hold future value better than other assets. The other part of the government debt that is owed to a different branch of government (Federal Reserve) is nothing more than a sham accounting measure to support the political martingale.

The actual threat is the global demonetization of the US dollar because the US is no longer in a leadership position when all of our industrial, scientific, military, foreign outreach, law enforcement, etc institutions have been destroyed. It won't matter whether the "budget" is balanced if/when foreign countries are offloading US Treasuries. That's the real threat, and "our" "leadership" is now in the process of outright facilitating that destruction.
You could look at WGU for online CS, they’re under $10k/year and they assume you’re working. There’s lots of online information so you can do some research about whether this is really an option that fits you well or not. With work experience in software engineering, you might be able to complete an online degree at somewhere like WGU much faster than 4 years.

I’d say don’t rule out loans either. I no longer know what the landscape is like now, I used subsidized Stafford loans more than 20 years ago. But if you can get a loan with a low interest rate and deferred payback, then you wouldn’t need to worry too much. You might be able to piece the funding together via a combination of loans and work and maybe grants or scholarship if you can find some. If you lost your job or wanted to attend in-person school you could maybe also consider easier, lower-paid part time work. Is family money a potential option? (Don’t answer that, I’m just throwing out something to consider.)

I don’t mean to be glib, I would find the idea of part time work pretty hard to imagine for me, so I have some idea of what I might sound like to you… I just wanted to be encouraging and prompt some creative financial optimism for how you might achieve your goals. Getting a degree won’t guarantee your life or your finances will be better, but statistically it helps, and it is a necessary credential for most of the best jobs, and it is good to broaden your education in non-vocational ways. I’m wishing you good luck!
The problem is existing shell scripts and muscle memory and command histories. `cut -d=` has always worked and works on all the other implementations so it should keep working if you switch to uutils.
For example: No buffer overflows, null pointer exceptions, use-after-free, etc. On ARM and RISCV64 not even the C compiler has to be trusted, because functional correctness has been proven for the binary. And there are more proofs besides functional correctness.
https://docs.sel4.systems/projects/sel4/frequently-asked-que...
Bacterial infections can also trigger autoimmune diseases - it's not just viruses.

Realistically immune systems are extremely complex and I suspect there are probably lots of environmental triggers beyond viruses and bacteria as well
That's a weird non-sequitur you did.

> But that doesn’t mean that the other 60% are homeless and starving.

No one said starving. I'm saying that the average person is in worse straights than the average person from the 1980s.

If your message is 'Maybe not everyone needs a house' then it kinda sounds like you agree with me?
IDK, I think the linked comment is right. LLMs drop some of the barriers to experimentation so much, that previously rejected project ideas may just become worth trying out (especially when we're talking about hobby or research ideas, not full products). It also has the same effect on ideas you may have now, that before you'd reject as "too much work".

Case in point: my wife needed a QR code generator so she could stop asking me every time she needs to make some codes. There are tons of such generators out there - webapps, mobile apps, downloadable programs, plugins to graphics software, etc. But the software world is such a pile of shit that I don't trust any single one of them - experience shows that most random utility software like this is ad-ridden garbage or malware.

Before a year ago, I'd just invest time to try and evaluate some solutions, find one that's least likely to record inputs, or show ads, or inject redirects into generated code, or run excessive surveillance of your phone, etc. But since this need manifested last week, I just asked Claude to make me a client-side generator up to my specific needs, and quickly got a static page with (vendored) JS library, to host from a domain I own.

There's tons of super-specific or one-off utilities a person could use to help them with some task - utilities that make no sense as products, and if they exist, they're just loaded with ads and garbage. LLMs today make it feasible to just get the computer to write you such utilities from scratch, on demand, which guarantees they're garbage-free.
One of the worst emails I’ve ever received on Sunday. Our team wasn’t entirely surprised, however, given the recent product decisions and features that had been released.

Does anyone have experience migrating from Height, and what did you choose as an alternative?
Are you trying to keep it to yourself? Obviously there are some very good aspects and people want to live there.
https://github.com/i486girl/win7-sp2/blob/main/LICENSE is pretty rich, given that the whole repo is just a bazillion binary files from Microsoft
It’s so sad this is the top comment. It’s literally irrelevant. This could happen with any laptop running any OS.
ROX isn't self-contradictory, Allowing read() and execve(), but denying write() and truncate() are totally valid and common in secure execution contexts, although things gets worse with directory traverse.

So yeah, --rox is fine semantically, just ugly. :D
>There’s also a tendency in contemporary textbooks to try to relate topics to concrete things in the real world.

This seems to be a personality thing. I was doing a Linear Algebra course last year and complained at the lack of applications in our textbook.

It seemed so strange to me. Here's this wonderful subject with literally dozens of wonderful, practical, illuminating real-world applications, which make the subject more concrete and easier to understand (and help you understand what's the point of all these obscure manipulations). And the book just... doesn't mention a single one of them? It felt both dishonest and pedagogically unskillful.

I expressed these feelings to my classmates and was met with disgust: "We are pure mathematicians. We do not concern ourselves with applications!"

Lucky for me, their disgust led them to discard several wonderful "Linear Algebra With Applications" books to the "free book pile", which I made excellent use of and greatly enjoyed.

That being said, in most of these books the "applications" are confined to a bonus section at the end of each chapter, and do not interfere with the main text.
Microsoft take note that I read this article and everything Raymond Chen puts out under your company brand. I have zero interest in Windows as a platform and actively steer large customers away from it anytime it's discussed, since it has no value offering for most of us.
Fascinating read as always Ken.
It seems that the concept of a “Chorded Keyboard” from Douglas then spawned several relatively successful successors later on:

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

Growing up in the Netherlands in the 80s it was hard to not be aware of the “Velotype”: it had more keys and supposedly made it easier to learn the “chords”.

Your reference to the book Nerds 2.0.1 is great, the book is a companion to the excelent PBS 3-part series from 1998

https://archive.org/details/movies?tab=collection&query=Nerd...
Not that it changes the outcome, but I swear I remember reading that the majority of sea-level rise actually comes from the thermal expansion of liquid water, not displacement from thawing of ice caps. Can anyone confirm/refute this?
well yeah maybe, if you like.
So my basic approach is:

1. Create the project folder

2. Initialize everything using a template scaffolding system (vite, nextjs, etc.)

3. Create a simple README.md which contains a list of the desired tech stack (for reinforcement purposes) and goal of the project.

4. Start up Claude

5. Use the `/init` command which creates the vanilla CLAUDE.md file

Interestingly, Claude captures all the NPM commands from the package json into the instructional file but the issue with this is that in my particular test case it kept trying to run `npm run dev` which spins up the app itself. That's... not ideal since I'm running it myself so it can hot-reload and I can see the changes applied immediately. I usually delete that line.

But I should note that I've never used any "agentic coding assistants" before (Aider.chat, Cursor, etc.) - so I'm sort of learning as I go.

One thing I'd be curious about is if there is a "clientside browser" MCP that Claude (or other assistants) can monitor - because ideally you'd really want Claude to be doing the following periodically:

- Taking a screenshot of the browser and using some multimodal system to sanity check

- Monitor the Dev Tools console for errors/warnings/etc.

- Read through the DOM to sanity check

So I have "npm run dev" already running and I could theoretically instruct Claude (or another system) to attach itself to the Chromium/Firefox browser window.

This MCP server seems to be focused on Node/serverside debugging.
My friend rigged nibbles.bas so that he could beat his brother more often.
Back in the mid '80s our school was given a small number of Microwriter chorded keyboards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter) for our BBC Micro lab. Even as 12 year olds we were already crazy good touch-typists, so the Microwriter felt very clunky and unintuitive to us. I don't know what the lesson is from that. Just because it seems a good idea doesn't mean that it is. Or typewriter-style keyboards have survived over a century and a half for a reason.
Well, that's why I don't use Android either.
Thank you for this, wonderful break down of some amazing history. I have watched that demo many many times in my pursuit of human computer interface thinking.

I often wondered what happened to this piece of hardware… I still hold a deep belief that our current input methods are flawed(as amazing as they are) and we are in need of another leap forward.

Anyway great read - thank you again.
Lots of Mastodon instances do not wish to let indexers take their whole feed. As a result, there is no way to globally track a search string or even a hashtag.

A bunch of reactionaries seems to believe that search is a privacy violation... On a publishing platform - hilarious !

Anyway, I've stopped trying and my current global village microblogging forum is Bluesky.
I had built something similar (but much less refined) for greek rhythms https://boombox-agw.pages.dev/
> Modern GPUs are overkill for 2D

That explains why modern GUI are crap: because they are not able to draw a bloody rectangle, and fill it with colour. /s
Perhaps scp -p or sshfs would have worked. This is just a guess. I am not certain.
GTC'25 Notes: CUDA Techniques to Maximize Memory Bandwidth – Part 1
> Continuing to call it Peano Arithmetic is respect for the fact that the guy got it mostly right, and it took the mathematics community many more years to refine the ideas to their current point.

> Is it a shame that Galois theory isn’t presented as a historical fossil and frozen to its state of development in Galois’s lifetime? I may be making a rather big assumption, but I like to think he would be proud, and so would Peano.

Oh, by no means do I object to calling an updated and generalised version by the name of the person who originated the subject! Since you've brought up Galois, I hardly think that he'd recognize the modern theory of Galois connections, but I think that the name is wholly appropriate.

No, what I thought was a shame is if the original theory doesn't get discussed at all. If my only exposure to Peano's work was, for example, the axiom schema in Enderton, then I don't think I'd be able to appreciate why it's such a big deal. That would feel to me like teaching the theory of Galois connections without ever saying anything about field theory! Whereas, on the other hand, I did immediately understand as an undergraduate the magic of being able to define everything in terms of the pointed set using induction, and I think I'd appreciate even more having seen that first and then seeing how it is updated for modern mathematical logic.

In fact, at a casual glance, I still don't see why L1, L3, and the A, M, and E axioms can't be omitted in the presence of the axiom(s) on p. 269, which has been the whole substance of my objection. I believe that there's an answer, but, if I don't see it as a professional mathematician (though not a logician), then surely it can't be true that every undergraduate will appreciate it!
so what’s your solution then? you realize corporations are just run by people? but yes they become cold, heartless soul sucking places. yes.

make your own company and do something about it then. or STFU.
Hopefully it won't. You don't put webshit in control of rockets or cars, and you shouldn't put vibecoded software in control of them either. Programming safety-critical systems is its own thing, and it should be resistant to LLM incursions at least as long as human sign-off is an important part of the job.
Tucker is appalling; the things he's said have substantially contributing to the coup, which has now only the courts left in the way, and to Vladimir's attack on Ukraine and the near-million deaths and maimings which come from that. I couldn't bear to look or hear him, which obviously makes watching his interviews impossible.
IME commands get there by expressing complexity that belongs in a full configuration file on the command line (as well / instead).

It's nice if things are simple enough that a hand-full or two of flags are sufficient. However more complex programs that do more or substantially different things from traditional bytestream filter programs often do need proper configuration files.
Sure, but can you at least concede that this technical possibility eliminates the argument that these services can't affect those that don't opt into them? That's the argument I'm trying to make, not necessarily that a particular serial killer had his privacy violated.
This misses that if the agent is occasionally going haywire, the user is leaving and never coming back. AI deployments are about managing expectations - you’re much better off with an agent that’s 80 +/- 10% successful than 90 +/- 40%. The more you lean into full automation, the more guardrails you give up and the more variance your system has. This is a real problem.
https://www.youtube.com/@thecivilrightslawyer ;

the Institute for Justice ;

etc.

Just because you've never seen it advertised doesn't mean it isn't happening. And there's 3300 counties in the US, and fifty state police entities, plus however many municipalities with police forces. Also, if you AAL, "qualified immunity" makes it difficult to "go after" individual police, so most suits are filed against the city and the department for having "bad policy" - because proving civil rights violations is quite difficult, even if it seems like a cut and dry case.
An example of this is timing side channels.

Originating in an effort within seL4[0], there's ongoing work[1] in RISC-V to resolve this.

0. https://sel4.systems//Foundation/Summit/2022/slides/d1_11_fe...

1. https://lf-riscv.atlassian.net/browse/RVS-3569
Show HN: ScottFish – A simple GA4 analytics dashboard built out of frustration
When Google forced the switch from UA to GA4, I found myself struggling to understand my magazine's performance metrics (I occasionally edit a magazine along with my full-time job).

So I built a dashboard that pulls GA4 data and presents it in a clean, intuitive interface focused on metrics that actually matter. It made the job of pulling reports and usage stats very simple for my website and greatly improved my daily productivity.

At this stage, it was running on localhost on my machine and during this project, I ended up learning React (coming from a pure C/C++ world).

I showed it to a couple of friends who run small businesses and manage their own websites, and after considering their feedback, I made a few changes to the UX , added authentication, and launched it publicly a week ago.

Based on their feedback, I am currently working on integrations with Google My Business, Merchant Center, and other Google products to create an all-in-one dashboard for small business owners.

All in due time .. could be months away with my full-time job :)

I'd love your feedback on the project! I hope it can make your life easy too.

https://www.scottfish.com

PS: why "scottfish"? Well, my kid plays chess and loves "stockfish" and I am a Piscean, so ... I thought, why not "scottfish" :)
> even Google Maps routinely struggles with performance on a top-of-the-line iPhone.

It has to download the jpegs.
Don't forget retro IBM MVS mainframe assembler from the 1980's! It can be had by installing the Hercules mainframe emulator (https://www.prince-webdesign.nl/tk5) on your PC. This amazing emulator takes you back to the IBM mainframe of the 1980's complete the Assembler, COBOL, Fortran etc.
On the first link, I had to scroll for a while to find a single book in English, and then a while for the next one. But they are indeed there.

Perhaps adding tags or sections by language would be helpful.
Humans will always value human labor, creative destruction is foundational to economic growth and it has been happening since the discovery of fire.
An "Impossible" Disease Outbreak in the Alps
This would be a good read for you - https://tb-manual.torproject.org/anti-fingerprinting/. There's also Linux distributions like my current daily driver - https://wiki.cachyos.org/support/faq/#rfp-resist-fingerprint... that implement their own forks of Firefox and may add additional sandboxing like bubblewrap or firejail on top of it.

That being said I was a lifelong Windows user up until 5-6 years ago, and while everyone else in my family uses apple devices I was never interested in using one(since I like building my own PCs :p)
LLMs are often worse, yes, but there are decision tree based machine learning models that can learn to be deterministic for classification if your training data accurately reflects the actual problem data.
I don’t think it’s that we _can’t_ accurately measure developer value/productivity, it’s that doing so isn’t feasible with any methodology we currently have. As you said, we’re not doing magic, therefore our value is measurable. Measuring just requires an impractical degree of time and energy.
I suspect the lucrative patent system has helped create rather exorbitant costs and restrictions for performing trials, which hinders non-patentable research, ironically.

But both the federal and state govts do fund tons of such research. Some states have specific Alzheimer's trials and funds. I would think they could handle dirt-cheap therapies like this without getting into sweeping political changes. Though I suspect the solution is much harder than just run a trial with the drugs we have, or else we would already be hearing about mountains of evidence from doctors using the medications off-label.
An IOMMU can help significantly with the driver problem, preventing a properly initialized driver from misbehaving and compromising the system.
I think this is the part that classic sci-fi didn't get right. It assumed that we would own the robots instead of them being owned by corporations that would rent them out.

Having a robot that I don't control that's stronger than me and smarter than me in my house does not sound at all comforting.
Are you sure? Because last I checked OpenSnitch used different techniques from namespaces, that seemed more brittle to me.
How did Engelbart render black text on a white background during his 1968 Demo, considering that the display technology at the time was based on vector CRTs, which typically produced glowing light rather than dark areas?
The biggest game-changer is that whatever MCP server I need, I can just ask Claude to code it.
As others have said, avoid startup theatre and do what actually needs doing within your capabilities and the hours (eg owl/lark) that work for you and your colleagues.

When I was 18 and running a business on the side while an undergrad I think that I did 18 hours most days. Absolutely would not have wanted to do that much nor sustained it when my kids were small, with financial consulting and a different start-up on the side, nor now that I don't have to work if I don't want to.
Came to say: Compilers: Principles Techniques and Tools after 1988.
No, command tools should follow the POSIX standards, not GNU.
> It is an oversimplification, because those people were getting more federal money. [..] They voted for lower taxes in their local states and thus underfunded own infrastructure.

You cut what you can when you're strapped, and Kansas and Louisiana can't control their federal tax obligations, or federal contributions to things like the Big Dig or the post-collapse Baltimore bridge building projects. They just hope that when the tornadoes / hurricanes come and the levee breaks that the rest of the country will be keen to pay for something that benefits them. This doesn't always pan out though. As an example.. it doesn't get more federal than the army corps of engineers, but they argued for sovereign immunity.

We'll see whether the LA wildfires get handled better or worse than climate catastrophes in the flyover states or the south east, but naturally California will probably do better and get more help than a politically unimportant place would. Without getting way into the weeds on details, perhaps we can agree that the optics of this stuff just aren't great. Without "rationalizing motivations" or "making people sound better".. basically you can choose to either double down on the other'ing or you can at least try to listen and empathize.
Yeah I actually had an Uber driver show up after like an hour and been like “I’m not taking you there!”
TL;DR: Trump 2.0 has ushered in a two-tier legal system that won’t be noticed by most people because it continues to function normally unless you’re part of an exclusive or targeted group. By keeping most of the system functioning normally, the leadership prevents major protests from erupting, while accomplishing some of the more radical goals of the administration.

Scary stuff. And it seems reasonable to draw this parallel with the Nazi state. The targeting of specific law firms such as Paul, Klein, for instance, must surely be chilling other, smaller firms, whose balance sheets would not withstand a direct assault by the state.
1Password actually has built-in support for that very flow: https://support.1password.com/generate-security-questions/#c...

The only thing is you sometimes have to warn the customer service agent that you have an unusual answer to "childhood best friend" but otherwise I've never had a problem with it