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foooorsython Starlark Programming Language

Ah I missed that this thing is actually embedded. I thought they were just doing multiple implementations for shits and gigs.

Carry on, Google

foooorsython Starlark Programming Language

I can appreciate the pain of actually getting things through in a large (100k+ people) organization.

What do you consider the be the justification for three separate implementations of the same build config language? Genuine question. I am not doubting the need for the DSL itself.

foooorsython Starlark Programming Language

>There are three implementations (Go, Rust, Java)

There are so many people at Google just goofing around, lol. People just doing hobby stuff for $350k/year.

There is no justification to implement this custom dialect of Python for a build system that drives everyone crazy 3 times. Reminds me of when it was revealed that 400 people were working on Fuschia — a hobby OS that only shipped on a single smart home device.

foooorsython Syrian government falls in end to 50-year rule of Assad family

>Assad wasn’t really a stabilizing force

Questionable statement.

Syria has (had) a secular government that allowed Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Druze Muslims, twelvers, and Kurds to live there. The status quo for the region is theocratic iron fist of a particular Islamic denomination, with all others persecuted.

Not to mention, Assad is a Ba’athist (as was Sadam) which by definition is all about Arab unity.

Which Sunni warlord group should we hand the country to now? Do you think things will be better? Can you name a single Syrian political figure or interest group (don’t Google!) that you would propose lead the country? Be honest with yourself.

>Almost seven million Syrian refugees might have he chance to return home and rebuild now

They’re not going back.

foooorsython High School Student's First App – NWS Weather Report

Good software that you use every day isn’t worth less than a cup of coffee for you? That’s fine, don’t buy it. Good UIs take time and skill to build. Should this student just do this for free? iOS users have money for software they use — $2/mo is perfectly reasonable.

foooorsython USC Student Rocket Group Shatters International Amateur Space Record

Making this joke falls flat in the comments section of a rocket science article about Americans continuing to dominate space.

foooorsython Demystifying Git Submodules

Two of the largest tech companies in the world, Google and Meta, had to roll custom VCS for their day to day engineering operations because git and git submodule were so unsuitable. The default pack file behavior of git is completely unsuitable for a rapidly releasing company with a monorepo. You don’t want or need the entire history — you just want a few recent commits. You do want some visibility into what your coworkers are up to so you can prevent merge conflicts before they happen (centralization is good!). You probably only need part of the tree, not the entire thing.

If you go back and watch Linus’ talk at Google regarding git, he’s basically describing (unknowingly) why Google needs to not use git for its day to day. Even on a smaller scale, Android (AOSP) had to create a meta tool for git called git-repo to handle its source tree. Git submodule failed there.

foooorsython Advent of Code 2024

The Christmas theme is fun and it’s nice to do one problem per day with a large community.

With leetcode you’re off in the woods by yourself. Stuck on a problem? Here’s a cold write up. Finished a problem? Do another, monkey.

foooorsython C++, Complexity, and Compiler Bugs

Pass by reference was a mistake. Doesn’t need to exist. Obscures what’s actually happening at the call site. Overloads the minds of programmers with an unnecessary third option, which causes bugs like this. Some other non-null indicating syntax for pass by pointer (visible at call site) would’ve made more sense.

I feel exactly like the author. I get less comfortable with C++ year after year, despite writing it all day. I feel like a race car driver who was once confident but has now gotten into too many big crashes.

foooorsython Borgo Programming Language

Top 50 is incredibly generous. I wouldn’t use anything outside of the top ~20 for anything I’d be getting paid to produce.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...

The most important factor for a language is Big Tech backing. Little squabbles on syntax or language features or philosophies are entirely secondary.

foooorsython It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for

BFS/DFS is astonishingly simple. It’s like 10 lines of code. And it’s almost always done (in practice) with a custom type where you work your way through custom fields pointing to the next vertex, so it’s not an algorithm / structure that lends itself well to standard libraries. It’s not like a self-balancing tree (which is actually a bug-prone, large implementation that you should just let the standard lib handle).

If you can’t trust the people sitting next to you implement a simple graph traversal without bugs, then your organization has a professional standards problem.

foooorsython It is humiliating to have to do LeetCode grinding for

All other serious endeavors require endless “grinding”. Imagine a hockey player being annoyed about being asked to tryout. Imagine whining about having to practice their skating or shooting.

Compared to many other things, software engineering requires astonishingly low prep. Your average high school baseball player has spent more time in the batting cage to earn a varsity letter than the median SF SWE has spent on leetcode

foooorsython How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing? (2020)

Because on solo drives, your user experience would be severely diminished. People like CarPlay, Android Auto, and BT BR/EDR profiles. Want to guess the percentage of owners that NEVER pair a primary device in modern cars? It’s almost zero.

Do you want a pat on the back for defeating the imagined safety mechanism? You can also buy seat belt plugs to turn the seat belt chime off. Very few people end up doing this in practice (because it’s stupid).

What is your specific aversion to your car expecting you to separate control of your phone while driving alone? Assume you have HFP, A2DP, and/or CarPlay/Android Auto with voice control. Why do you need physical control of your phone while your car is in gear/moving? You don’t.

foooorsython How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing? (2020)

>common radio technology isn't good enough to isolate the driver's seat

Look man, you don’t know what you’re talking about. UWB can easily position a device in a vehicle. BT direction finding is also quite promising.

But I’m not suggesting any advanced locating, let alone a jammer (lol). I’m literally just suggesting an NFC pad with a phone “seat belt” for the primary device connected to the infotainment. Car makes a beeping noise until you rest the phone in the safe spot. That’s it. Nothing any more extreme than existing seat belt and speed limit warnings (which save lives despite their nuisance).

t. Actual automotive engineer for a major OEM that works on infotainment & mobile software, Bluetooth, UWB, & future RF

foooorsython How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing? (2020)

It remains to be defined, but some of the technology is already there. We have driver monitoring systems. We know which device is paired to the infotainment system. That device could be physically sequestered from driver access while the vehicle is in gear (via NFC, for example).

I don’t want my car to be an arm of the nanny state. I don’t want insurance companies spying on my drives or owning my driver monitoring data. But, there could be a simple “place the connected device on this pad and strap it in while you drive” type system, that actually attempts to enforce the policy. Does it get hard once multiple people/devices get in the car? Sure. Could individual drivers just bring a second device along to defeat it? Yes. But for the average solo driver that doesn’t pre mediate their own misbehavior, it could reduce distraction without trampling on privacy or significantly added nuisance.

foooorsython How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing? (2020)

https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained...

NCAP has a dedicated test battery.

Pedestrian figures are alarming, but I doubt vehicle mass and shape are the largest factor contributing to their rise. The numbers have increased since 2009. Smart phones and distracted driving are a huge factor here. That combined with NA’s terrible pedestrian infrastructure is a terrible combination.

The fastest way to curtail pedestrian deaths is to build real pedestrian infrastructure and get serious about anti-cell phone technology for the driver’s seat.

Edit: Oh, also several NA cities just stopped enforcing all traffic laws post summer 2020. Can’t ignore that in the post pandemic spike.

foooorsython How do cars do in out-of-sample crash testing?

Driver demographics play a huge factor (young men are the deadliest drivers). Also, the makeup of your vehicle lineup skews the numbers. Small crossovers are the deadliest vehicles (low mass, prone to rollover). Tesla’s lineup is small (only 5 vehicles) and the Model Y dominates sales numbers. That hurts their overall fatality per mile number.

Looking at real world results is still important. The BMW F10 530i had zero worldwide fatalities over its entire production. Results like that should speak more than contrived sled tests.

foooorsython Tencent Hunyuan-Large

It’s perfectly intuitive to anyone with a brain. Never heard of OSI but they seem just about as pedantic, neurotic, and annoying with language as FSF.

Open source = I can view the source code. That’s what it means, that what it has always meant, and that what it will always mean. Simple as.

foooorsython Show HN: Kotlin Money

Even as someone familiar with Kotlin, it's hard to decipher what this library is doing without syntax highlighting here. The author is using infix functions and custom extension functions on primitive types. Non-Kotlin-natives will scratch heads.

foooorsython How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

Are you dealing with MBB consultants? These are ivy-educated MBAs with no operating experience and no real expertise in almost anything other than powerpoint and credential attainment.

Mr Beast is talking about actual experts in incredibly niche things, like baking giant cakes. Completely different type of person to the extent that "consultant" is just a total misnomer if you're used to the term in the land of F1000 corpo-speak. Mr Beast is probably reaching out to people guerilla-style that don't even have "consulting" firms -- which makes total sense if you're doing crazy stuff on YouTube.

foooorsython Gitlab is reportedly up for sale

>They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

Gitlab had many features first. Namely, they had integrated CI way before GitHub did. Their open CI runners are really cool and easy to setup. GitHub had to scramble to put out their Actions product to compete.

I don’t know what the feature comparison looks like today, but many of the innovative features you probably use on GitHub were on Gitlab first. They had a way more innovation velocity for quite a while.

foooorsython Null-Restricted and Nullable Types

>Java is not an innovative language

Wild statement. Java certainly was incredibly innovative upon release. It didn’t explode in popularity by accident.

foooorsython Show HN: Vdm, a sane alternative to e.g. Git submodules

>I don’t really care

I care about the aesthetics and the convenience that the tool provides. git-repo at least has a simple command to get all the latest stuff (repo sync). Git submodules is a mess in this regard. Just look at this stack overflow thread:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1030169/pull-latest-chan...

People are confused at how to do THE most basic command that you’d have to do every single day with a multi-repo environment. There’s debating in the comments about what flags you should actually use. No thanks.

There’s a lot of room for improvement in this space. git-repo isn’t widely used outside of aosp. Lots of organizations are struggling with proper tooling for this type of setup.

foooorsython Show HN: Vdm, a sane alternative to e.g. Git submodules

Looks cool! Seems functionally similar to AOSP’s git-repo, but already feels more approachable with that simple yaml remote list.

What collaborative tool would you recommend using with vdm? AOSP has gerrit which is sort of specifically designed for this multi-remote meta setup. GitHub/GitLab don’t play nice with this type of environment.

foooorsython Median filtering (2022)

I honestly recommend just writing them by hand in a simple language (C or Python), without relying on third party dependencies (just load an uncompressed grayscale image to use as your input).

OpenCV implementations of this stuff will be complex with lots of architecture specific optimizations. They will also have tons of branches for different image formats — you can keep things very simple by just using single channel uncompressed grayscale. The Huang histogram and Perrault/Hebert constant time papers are very approachable. They have pseudocode and visualizations. They’re not that tricky. You can sit down in a day and implement them without much headache.

foooorsython Median filtering (2022)

Had a lot of fun implementing the Huang histogram approach and the constant time approach by hand in a prior role.

Never saw the binary tree approach. And this article, being written in summer of 22, missed out on the 2D wavelet approach published later on that year.

https://cgenglab.github.io/en/publication/sigga22_wmatrix_me....

foooorsython Crafting Interpreters

This book, unlike the infamous “Dragon Book” for compilers, can be read cover to cover. The Dragon Book has great detail but it is a slog, especially in early chapters. So many students drop their first course on compilers every year because of the Dragon Book and not the actual concepts

foooorsython Alphabet Winds Down Mineral, Licenses Ag Technology to Berry Producer Driscoll's

>That is certainly better than killing these projects?

You sure?

Google obfuscates these moonshots (Waymo, Verily) in the “Other Bets” line in their 10-K. They lose money in the aggregate and the detailed financials for each entity aren’t revealed.

If a company like Waymo looked like it were on the path to profitability, Google wouldn’t hide the financials. They report the bare minimum (jumbled up with a bunch of unrelated stuff) because the numbers are grim.

foooorsython Google's carbon emissions surge nearly 50% due to AI energy demand

ChatGPT is the fastest product in history to reach 100M MAUs.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chatgpt-on-track-to-surpass-1...

Consumers are definitely demanding something like ChatGPT. Other companies are trying to ride the wave, and their attempts often feel forced as they’re trying to inject LLMs where they don’t really belong.

foooorsython The weirdest QNX bug I've encountered (2021)

>There is NO market where “ASIL” is required

Define “required”. If every single legal department at every single major automotive company says “we must obtain ASIL-B certification for our gauge cluster software or we can’t sell cars”, does it matter if regulators don’t overtly mandate it? The legal environments of all of the major automotive markets make it a de facto requirement.