jonathanyc

2 maanden geledendiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

11 maanden geledendiscuss

> 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.

jonathanyc

vorig jaardiscuss

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?

jonathanyc

vorig jaardiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

vorig jaardiscuss

> 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.

jonathanyc

vorig jaardiscuss

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

jonathanyc

vorig jaardiscuss

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?

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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?

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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!

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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!

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

Surely the actual app was more complicated than the hackathon duplicates. But where in between $250k and $54m should the cost have been? To be fair, I read estimates saying Healthcare.gov cost around $500m, and a friend who I know is a great engineer worked on that (albeit in a rescue capacity). And a single F-35 costs $80m, so maybe we need to triage things.

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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.

jonathanyc

2 jaar geledendiscuss

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!

jonathanyc

Submissions

LLMs struggle to explain themselves

Show HN: Fuzz Map – a GUI fuzzer, interactive demo

Would you like to own Exist? (March)

Uber crash ‘catastrophic failure’ of its self-driving technology, experts say

Lyft now allowed in NYC but as a fully-regulated livery service

What Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming

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