jonathanyc

I have been walking some newer programmers through Git recently, so this topic is fresh on my mind. The commands in the blog post do not look friendlier or even different.

The idea of “weighing souls” reminded me of another anti-spam solution from the 90s… believe it or not, there was once a company that used poetry to block spam!

Habeas would license short haikus to companies to embed in email headers. They would then aggressively sue anyone who reproduced their poetry without a license. The idea was you can safely deliver any email with their header, because it was too legally risky to use it in spam.

Kind of a tangent but learning about this was so fun. I guess it's ultimately a hack for there not being another legally enforceable way to punish people for claiming "this email is not spam"?

IANAL so what I'm saying is almost certainly nonsense. But it seems weird that the MIT license has to explicitly say that the licensed software comes with no warranty that it works, but that emails don't have to come with a warranty that they are not spam! Maybe it's hard to define what makes an email spam, but surely it is also hard to define what it means for software to work. Although I suppose spam never e.g. breaks your centrifuge.

They write: "Below, we show uncut videos of runs during which Dreamer collected diamonds."

... but the first video only shows the player character digging downwards without using any tools and eventually dying in lava. What?

I've been the same thing now that I look for it. In a theater in December I saw at least 2 people scrolling through Google or Apple News. In the plane I saw at least 3 people on TikTok. On roadtrips people scroll through Reddit when there is a lull in the conversation.

I don't think it's necessarily worse than people reading a book! But it is certainly widespread.

The biggest problem: developers don’t want GPUs. They don’t even want AI/ML models. They want LLMs.

I considered using a Fly GPU instance for a project and went with Hetzner instead. Fly.io’s GPU offering was just way too expensive to use for inference.

Thanks for the reply! That makes a lot of sense.

The app looks really good! Based on the title I thought it’d be something you made most as a testbed for Racket so I was surprised to see the app itself actually looks great :D

I tried looking through your blog but couldn’t find anything except the 40 minute YouTube video for your other app. It sounds like both the UI and the audio-related code are in Swift? What code ends up actually being in Racket then?

The vast majority of the scam or spam texts I receive come from one provider: Bandwidth (https://www.bandwidth.com/). They technically allow you to report phone numbers (https://www.bandwidth.com/legal/report-a-phone-number/) but most of the time they close my requests claiming that even though the user is obviously running a pig butchering scam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam), they haven't said anything that is technically illegal yet.

Once I reported some obviously fake collections calls; they kept calling me and saying that I needed to respond to a "pending matter" otherwise it would be "escalated." Bandwidth claimed this wasn't abuse and was a legitimate collections business.

To me they're just a nuisance, but the elderly and other vulnerable people have lost their entire retirement savings to these kinds of scams (https://www.propublica.org/article/whats-a-pig-butchering-sc...). It's not good that Bandwidth is abetting this.

While studying anthropology I briefly heard about the theory that in monarchies the support of the nobility should be conceived of as an investment. It really stuck with me.

I actually had no idea FFmpeg could do this.

Are there any sample videos for people to look at? I know YouTube has a very aggressive video stabilization option, but I'm sure that that's using something more complicated than what FFmpeg is doing.

Does FFmpeg implement this using the existing motion coding mechanisms?

I haven't seen any information that could be used for this in the RSS feeds I've looked at. You could scrape the website, especially if it's all running on your own computer, but if you do it on a server you'll almost certainly be blocked unless you use a third-party scraping service. The WSJ in particular is super aggressive; you'll probably be OK with the NYT, which has a personal use exemption.

Unfortunately Anthropic and OpenAI have kind of ruined scraping for everyone else.

I've worked in the SF Bay Area my whole life and no one has ever asked me how I voted at work. Also even if someone asked me, there's no way for anyone to know how I voted, so I could just lie!

I mean, I'll accept your interpretation with as much charity as I take Musk's public statements, even though I think both are wrong :) Hope to chat again in a happier context!

Not really. It uses S-expressions but Scheme pattern matching is totally different. The most common Scheme pattern matching syntax is basically the same as pattern matching in any other language: x means “bind the value at this position to x”, not “the child node of type”. See: https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/Pattern-... or syntax-rules.

It’s as much a Scheme dialect as WASM’s S-expression form is a Scheme dialect.

Treesitter’s query syntax is slightly understandable in the sense that having x match a node among siblings of type x works well for extracting values out of sibling lists. Most conventional pattern syntaxes struggle with this, e.g. how do you match the string “foo” inside of a list of strings in OCaml or Rust without leaving the match expression and resorting to a loop?

But you could imagine a syntax-rules like use of ellipses …. There’s also a more powerful pattern syntax someone worked on for implementing Scheme-like macros in non-S-expression based languages whose name escapes me right now.

I loved the vending machines for drinks!! I had at least one novel drink every day and enjoyed almost all of them. If you remember the name of the white grape drink you mention I’d love to look for it, it sounds great.

In Canada, there was a lot of controversy over the government awarding ~$200M in contracts to one consultancy, almost always without competitive bidding. They chronically underdelivered, e.g.:

    There has been much scrutiny over how much the ArriveCAN app cost to develop and who was subcontracted for its development. Contracts show that the federal government will spend close to $54 million with 23 separate subcontractors. A Parliamentary committee ordered federal departments to submit contracting documents related to the app but have been told that the names of subcontractors cannot be released citing issues of confidentiality. In October 2022, two developers at two separate IT companies took part in a hackathon where they both developed duplicates of the ArriveCAN app in under two days, for an estimated cost of $250,000.

The query language is definitely underdocumented. In case it helps you, what helped me was realizing it’s basically a funky pattern language, à la the match pattern sublanguages in OCaml/Haskell/Rust.

But the syntax for variable binding is idiosyncratic and the opposite of normal pattern languages. Writing “x” doesn’t bind the thing at the position to the variable x; instead, you have to write e.g. foo @x to bind x to the child of type foo. Insanely, some Scheme dialects use @ with the exact opposite semantics!! There’s also a bizarre # syntax for conditionals and statements.

Honestly there isn’t really an excuse for how weird they made the pattern syntax given that people have spent decades working on pattern matching for everything from XML to objects (even respecting abstraction!). I’ve slowly been souring on treesitter in general, but paraphrasing Stroustrup: there are things people complain about, and then there are things nobody uses.

Igalia is a pretty interesting business. For context, they are a consultancy whose engineers contribute quite a bit to the various browser engines (WebKit, Blink, and Gecko; perhaps Servo too?), among other things. From Wikipedia:

    In 2019 they were the #2 committers to both the WebKit and Chromium codebases and in the top 10 contributors to Gecko/Servo. Igalia has helped the interoperability of some features across web engines; they implemented CSS Grid Layout in WebKit and Blink.

To my surprise, they sold these things in pretty much every big store I went to in Japan. A record store sold them, albeit in the adult records section. But an otherwise normal department store also sold them behind a curtain.

I bought one in the record store “as a joke,” ha ha. I tried to use the self checkout machine but hit an error; obviously it was in Japanese. The machine made an audible ding. A friendly clerk heard the ding and came over to help. Maybe it was business as usual for her, but I was too mortified to even look at her face to see her expression.

Also in the end I couldn’t really get into it (as it were) and threw it away. The only thing satisfied that day was my curiosity.

I don’t think you and I disagree! I agree that Musk is being a hypocrite and that his actions are inconsistent both with (1) being a ‘free speech absolutist’ and with (2) allowing all legal speech.

But (2) is definitely not (1). He used to say he supported (1), now he says (2). I guess you could say that that isn’t retraction, and that he still claims he’s a free speech absolutist, but as much as I think he’s a hypocrite I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and allow him to change his mind.

It’s also legal to post flight tracker information, but Musk opposes that in contradiction to (2) as well. That’s also incredibly hypocritical.

I get the feeling you and many others didn’t finish reading my comment before concluding that I’m an Elon Musk fan when in fact I’m the opposite :P I’m guessing people stopped around the first quote, before I point out that what he’s doing here is also hypocritical: blocking documents on JD Vance while having been vocally against blocking documents on Hunter Biden.

Such is HN!

I like the idea of a guide like this. Reminds me of “Implementation of Hex Grids,” another high quality game-related guide: https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/implementation.h... and before that, “Beej’s Guide to Network Programming”: https://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

Weird, this whole time I had the impression that the Apple App Store was more strongly reviewed than the Google Play Store. I remember searching on the Play Store and getting e.g. lookalike/phishing apps pretending to be Firefox, but which I’m sure actually did cryptocurrency mining.

This is very cool. I was randomly clicking on circles and thinking it was weird that none of them sounded bad yet. Then I clicked on one of the presets, which merged its state in, and realized it was indeed possible to end up with a loop that just sounds bad!

On the one hand, Musk has already retracted his claim[1] that he's a "free speech absolutist"[2], so I don't think it's fair to come after him for that:

    In last month’s interview with the BBC, Musk said, “the rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country … If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.” At another point in the interview, Musk said: “If people of a given country are against a certain type of speech, they should talk to their elected representatives and pass a law to prevent it.”

    Twitter, before it was bought by Elon Musk, had a policy regarding hacked materials — but the page is no longer available. A pre-Musk version of the policy, dated 2019, stated that posting or linking to hacked content is prohibited. Under this policy, links to a story by The New York Post about Hunter Biden, the current president’s son, were banned. But in October 2020, Twitter changed its policy to say that it would no longer block hacked materials, after an outcry about how the company had handled the Post story. “Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix,” wrote then-CEO Jack Dorsey.
    Musk was one of the people who was unhappy with the decision to ban links to the Post’s story. “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk wrote of the decision on the story in April 2022. He even invited former Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi to examine internal documents showing how Twitter handled the decision. (In the course of tweeting his conclusions, Taibbi exposed the email addresses of Dorsey and Representative Ro Khanna.)

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-govern...

Interesting:

He and Kressner’s algorithm is delightful. Ultimately, it uses randomness in only a small way. For most coefficients a_1, a_2 \in \real, a matrix Q diagonalizing a_1 H + a_2 S will also diagonalize A = H+iS. But, for any specific choice of a_1, a_2, there is a possibility of failure. To avoid this possibility, we can just pick a_1 and a_2 at random. It’s really as simple as that.

Does anyone use randomized algorithms like these at work? I’m very curious about the conditions where it makes sense. Another comment links to a monograph but I’m more curious about the product side. I worked a little on geometry processing for maps in the past and I don’t think we used any randomized algorithms.

I can see how you could e.g. fix a the random seed for a partition of the data so that if you end up in the bad case you can change it (similar to how you can change consistent hashing keys to load balance).

The Hotelling game seems related:

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6840/2020sp/note/scribe...

https://www.eco.uc3m.es/~mmachado/teaching/oi-i-mei/slides/4...

IIRC the conclusion is that it’s optimal for stores to be positioned at extremes relative to each other (e.g. at two ends of the city) but the socially optimal situation is actually for them to be positioned closer together.

    I noticed that my neighborhood is all Lawsons, so I got the location of all Conbinis and ran some basic analysis to see if these pockets of brand territory are common.

Through effective population size reconstructions and extensive population genetics simulations, we reject a scenario involving a severe population bottleneck during the 1600s, as proposed by the ecocide theory.

This is an interesting idea! Could you put some examples of the recommendations the system generates on the home page?

As a corollary, if you try to be too clever with your data reduction strategy, you might walk yourself into a dead end / local maximum by making the job of off-the-shelf compression algorithms more difficult.

This is particularly interesting to me because (1) they have a natural control, given that it’s such a small area, and (2) the mechanism is apparently a mystery?

When comparing the site to a nearby control area that hadn't been treated with orange peels, Treuer's team found their experimental compost heap yielded richer soil, more tree biomass, and a broader diversity of tree species – including a fig tree so huge it would take three people wrapping their arms around the trunk to cover the circumference.

As for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.

"That's the million dollar question that we don't yet have the answer to," Treuer told Popular Science.