HN user
I read through most of the article but didn't see motion sensors mentioned. A lot of suburban streetlights are lighting up empty streets at night. With a combination of motion sensing and LEDs, lighting could follow pedestrians. Cars really don't need street lights in most cases but even then, in higher risk areas, motion sensors could turn on streetlights just as long as needed.
35 years ago I had to program a Z80 by "assembling" programs by hand and punching hexcodes into a board. This was made easier by writing an assembler for it. This was my way into tools which took me eventually to working on a major C++ compiler.
As an ex C++ compiler developer, I heartily approve of this project. Kudos.
Love this site! Well done!
How many people visited the site expecting program UI menus?
Not really as large capacity capacitors (this one seems to be 4V) tend to be low voltage as well. You can touch the terminals without harm but attempting to short them is going to be, er, entertaining. I have accidentally touched a 200V capacitor and it was not fun.
Nice but pricey with a restrictive license.
I call all these new fonts monofonts, mono in the sense of monoculture. Aesthetics practically indistinguishable from each other. Give me one of the IBM Selectric fonts in a modern form and I'll be happy as a clam.
~50 years of distributed systems research and this is a problem we still have to deal with today. Sad!
Every country? No. Every European country? Yes.
They can ban immigration from the third world all they want but at some point, they'll have to confront the economic reality of a 1.42/couple fertility rate.
It was a supergiant, hence died at a young age, and unlikely to have evolved life of any kind in its system.
Again, note that I said "work through" and not "read". Reading code is shallow. Debugging it, modifying it, inserting diagnostic code, etc. is not.
'People' in this case were Don Knuth (TeX) and Leslie Lamport (LaTeX). Both are Turing Award winners.
You missed the point - understanding comes from working through the code, not just reading it. This is nothing new: nobody has learned or done new mathematics or physics or whatever by just reading a textbook.
During the last few months when AI usage was mandated in our team and usage exploded, our team's throughput has barely changed. Now, if this was due to people working 2 hours a day and painting, cooking and playing golf the rest of the day, this would be a great result, but I see many people work past 6pm, and yet the output is mostly the same. We are not tackling harder problems or fixing more bugs despite authoring numerous skills for AI. Eventually the reckoning is sure to come, and I think it will not be pretty.
As I am continually amazed at how well Claude 4.7 deals with highly complicated C++ code, I am also becoming painfully aware of the developing situation mentioned in this article: I no longer completely understand the code it is editing, not because I'm incapable of doing it, but because I have not authored the changes. I am trading throughput for understanding, and, eventually, judgment.
Looks like this would lend itself naturally to sorting algorithm demos.
A colleague once told me, the difference between software engineering and civil engineering is that they build the same bridge repeatedly while we never build the same thing twice.
How could the first Pascal compiler be compiled if it was written in Pascal, but a Pascal compiler didn't yet exist?
Therein lies the magic of bootstrapping a language compiler written in the same language. Look it up.
Pascal, as defined by Wirth, had no "low level" features. E.g., no control over memory allocation other than the language provided new/dispose, no bit operators, clunky strings of fixed size, no access to system calls, no access to assembly, not even any hex or octal constants, all features which a language allowing "low level" access is expected to have (e.g. Ada, Modula-2/3, Oberon, all Pascal-derived languages). Things like conformant array parameters showed up much later in the ISO version but were not widely adopted. No modules either but this is not a low level feature. Turbo Pascal attempted to fix all this on the PC later on and it was deservedly well loved. Still, Wirth successfully wrote Pascal compilers in Pascal without --- obviously -- having a Pascal compiler available. [Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)#...)
Yes. The answer is yes.
I'm not sure why people seem to be under the impression that writing a compiler means that the language the compiler is implemented in should have "low level" features. A compiler is just a text -> text translation tool if you can leverage other tools such as an assembler and never needs to access machine level instructions. E.g., Pascal compilers have traditionally been written in Pascal, hardly a language which conjures up a "low level" image. Even when an assembler isn't available, all your implementation language needs to support, in terms of "low level" features, is writing of bytes to a file.
But manipulating instruction and file formats and such can be tedious if your language doesn't have the right capabilities but it's not impossible.
Most people don't realize how bad geolocated data is for a free society. I can buy data from a broker, geo-fence your house address, and then I'm able to see all the places where you went, who you associate with, and identify all you associate with by tracking them to addresses. All of this happens with anonymized device identifiers. It is the wet dream of a company such as Palantir and all governments who desire absolute control over their populations.
The high level language -> assembly seems like an apt analogy for using LLMs but I would like to argue that it is only a weak one. The reason in that, previously, both the high level language and the assembly language had well defined semantics and the transform was deterministic whereas now you are using English or other human language, with ambiguities and lacking well-defined semantics. The reason math symbolisms were invented in the first place is because human language did not have the required unambiguous precision, and if we encounter hurdles with LLMs, we may need to reinvent this once more.
I wonder have the reconstruction techniques been verified by a double-blind experiment to reconstruct the face of a homo sapiens from a skull with a known photograph. Otherwise, you're just wondering how much of it is just artistry and how much solid, verified technique.
Here's one way to do it.
I've had the good fortune to attend two of his lectures in person. Each time, he effortlessly derived provably correct code from the conditions of the problem and made it seem all too easy. 10 minutes after leaving the lecture, my thought was "Wait, how did he do it again?".
RIP Sir Tony.
I have a strict policy of no Meta glasses for guests in my house. Socially, they're poison.
My statement was accurate as of _when_ I moved away from FreeCad. I'm happy they merged the RealThunder work. But they dilly-dallied for a long time while people were demanding a fix and one was available. Doesn't speak well of their org politics.