porcoda

This kind of case is why I hate patents. As many other commenters pointed out, the fact that light through the skin can be used to measure biometrics is arguably "obvious" given that many people noticed it around the same time. The patent simply measures which group had the $, time, and motivation to submit a patent before any of their peers did. In this situation, the basic measurement method appears all over the place, like in cheap pulseoximeters. Sticking the same device in a wearable or other device isn't a giant leap that deserves being defended via patent law to protect an "inventor".

I'm sure patents have a place in the modern world, but I rarely see a case where they are being used as intended - more often than not, it's as I said above : a measure of who from a bunch of peers who "invented" the same thing at the same time made their submission to a patent office first with the goal of squelching competition or building revenue streams via licensing. Basically, scummy practices abusing the system. Apple certainly is not innocent in this regard - I hate it when they play this game just as much as I hate it when others do too.

Totally agree. The tech community has a massive arrogance problem where we tend towards opt-out vs opt-in for everything. Just because us tech-savvy folks understand the consequences of, say, posting something online, doesn’t mean the bulk of humanity who isn’t tech savvy also understands that and agrees with us.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that their "reason 1" was the sole source of the issue. This smells like an instance of the "nobody likes a know-it-all" problem that often arises with junior devs who haven't yet learned that their job isn't just between them and the computer, but them, the computer, and other people: the cleaner version likely would have replaced the dirty version had the author actually had a dialog with the author of the dirty code and mutually decided that there was a better way.

The article likely would be better titled as "I learned a lesson about working on a team", not "goodbye, clean code".

These articles feel like articles written by journalists for other journalists so they can give awards to each other for “shining a light” on something that they’ve decided isn’t getting illuminated enough.

I’m somewhat cynical about a lot of journalism today simply because it feels like a large cohort of that profession has just gotten trapped in a social-media-attention fueled circle of journalists just doing things to generate praise from other journalists. Interestingly, this pattern seems to be independent of the politics of the involved individuals or venues: they all do it.

I’m not sure how useful it is to the consumers of the journalism: it’s not like anyone is unaware of what’s going on. If anything, most of us are resigned to the fact that we can’t really do much about it other than be angry and frustrated, since people from all kinds of different places and with different motivations just get in the way.

To be honest, Twitter/X has been a sewer for a good decade or so. The only thing that has changed is the kind of sewage that is allowed or encouraged to flow through it.

Amusing qualifications for the senior engineering roles they’re hiring for:

“Deep understanding of what is a computer, what is computer software, and how the two relate.”

Right after the senior ML role that requires people understand how to write “algorithms and programs.”

Kinda hard to take those kinds of requirements seriously.

> Users don't install software anymore, outside of mobile.

That’s a pretty strong statement without any evidence to back it up. It sounds like the kind of statement I hear often from people who spend all of their time in the web-dev echo chambers. Lots of us install software and don’t spend much time in browsers beyond browsing the web and the handful of Electron apps that we have no choice but to use.

I am confused where these users are. Even without brew it’s stupidly simple to install on a Mac: just download MacTeX (https://tug.org/mactex/). It’s a simple installer, and installs a few GUI tools too for those that want them.

I’m more curious how people are overcomplicating the install process so much that it makes it impossible to figure out how to install? I always though “open installer package” was a relatively low bar..

No. I grew up on a C=64, and while the Raspberry Pi hits the cost point, it doesn't hit the exceptionally low barrier to entry in terms of usability. No modern computer is as simple and unintimidating as the machines where you powered it on, saw a blinking cursor, and could just type a command and see the machine react. You could buy books (or magazines - I miss Compute's Gazette), flip the power switch on your computer, and just type in what was on the page and run it. The Pi and other systems have many more steps between power-on and seeing the machine do something based on your input. The Commodore and peers didn't force you to think about files, editors, etc.

If someone could hack together an OS for a Pi that booted straight into something like Processing, maybe it would be close.

I think I did too. Read it after having finished grad school and working for a bit. Not very impressed. But then again, I’ve never been as enamored with the lisp/scheme family as others seem to be.

(Note: very US centric comment here) I’ve become skeptical of the motives behind any article that seems to seed some level of doubt about health screenings and any preventative or treatment measure that involves the healthcare system itself. They always stink of the insurance and for-profit healthcare system and their aversion to paying anything out beyond the absolute bare minimum to get people the care they need. I often wonder how different public attitudes would be towards treatment and prevention if the US healthcare system wasn’t profit driven.

I’ve paid attention to the language since 2017 (it’s kind of impossible not to if you work in the PL research field). I just consider it dead for my own work - that’s the sense in which I haven’t looked back.

I had a pretty similar experience: spent a decade (2007-2017) working professionally in Haskell and just got completely fed up with the state of the language, ecosystem, and community. I migrated most of my new work to Ocaml and haven’t looked back.

For me I think the failure of the Haskell Prime effort to establish a successor standard to Haskell 98 was a big factor: the language and ecosystem became more chaotic and inconsistent over time as people drifted away from any hint of a common standard. Add to that the changes in the community when there were big changes in the cohort of “leaders” who had driven things from the 90s until the early 2010s (eg, when both Simons changed their roles). The folks who took their place haven’t done good things for the language in my opinion.

I wouldn't call it a hoax - it was largely a very overstated result that didn't stand up to deeper scrutiny. That isn't really harmful. The primary issue I have with this, and many related things in recent years, is people outside the community of working scientists treating "X was posted on the arXiv" as "X was published". This tends to lead to people assuming that since it appears on that site and has the layout of a regular paper that it somehow has legitimacy. We saw this over and over and over during the peak of the pandemic, even seeing regular news sources writing articles where the only source material was some random recently posted arXiv paper. I don't think I ever saw corrections published in the cases when those preprints proved to be bogus. The arXiv is extremely useful, but lots of people outside the community of working scientists don't seem to understand how to weight what people post there.

As for the "audacity of HN" - this site is a very bizarre mixture of a relatively small number of working scientists, a lot of people without much scientific background who are very interested in science, and get-rich-quick startup types who are sniffing around for the next breakthrough they can turn into money. That mix leads to weird dynamics when it comes to how scientific activities get discussed.

Airbus has invested in applying software verification for a while (https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf). I haven’t seen as much sustained interest in formal verification in industry in the US as I’ve seen in Europe, so I’m guessing this may contribute at least a little to the difference. Fortunately more US companies are starting to take this stuff more seriously.

They need to give people a compelling reason to upgrade. I stopped upgrading my iPad when the new features didn’t make it any better for media consumption and the basic apps I run on it. The cost to upgrade just isn’t justified by little incremental changes.

I gave up trying to use it as an alternative for doing work on travel - my workflow just doesn’t translate well to that device no matter how much I tried, so I just carry the bigger 16” laptop everywhere. They’d have to make some pretty big changes to the OS to win me over for work.

Just because it’s not web (LAMP or current-fad.js) software doesn’t make it “weird software”. By that definition everyone I work with does “weird software” since web technology (and the halo of stuff around it) never comes up. Just because places like HN are super, super biased towards web stuff doesn’t make everything else unusual.

There’s also VAL, one of the 80s era languages that influenced Haskell (via SISAL). Alas, outside the parallel languages community I don’t think many people are familiar with that VAL.

Oh please: Letting a user block another user has nothing to do with a free and open internet. Save the anger for when there’s an actual threat to the internet, otherwise people will just start tuning free/open internet advocates out entirely.

I like this. The focus on lexing/parsing for language implementation often overshadows the fact that the bulk of the work in any language effort is in the semantics and analysis (e.g., everything after one has a parse tree). On the production compiler I get paid to work on, front end work makes up at most 10% of the team time and effort. Even on experimental language projects that we occasionally play with, the front end is usually given minimal attention - just enough to have a syntax that we can use to start instantiating ASTs and doing the interesting work. More often than not, I punt on a front end altogether and just piggyback on some existing language (e.g., Haskell, ML, etc) and basically explore the semantics or analysis questions I'm interested in via a DSL-style embedding and ignore syntax altogether.

When the industry adopted open office plans as the norm I almost changed careers. Spending 6 years in that soul crushing environment after having spent the previous couple decades in either regular offices or cubes was not fun. I have no desire to ever return to that. WFH is definitely not optimal, but given the alternative, I’ll take it.

Having worked over 25 years in offices, I can assure you: being in an office was never a means to prevent people slacking off to extreme degrees. We had plenty of dead weight that contributed nothing even when we were all sitting in our silly little cubes or open office plan dystopia.

I also think you vastly over estimate the number of people who are willing to commit fraud to make more money.

Given that the talk about 27 languages is about natural language processing, you can probably figure out the answer.

You might like this article from 2022 too then: “The Man in the Eyeball Mask”. https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/hardy-fox-th...

A good movie about the Residents is “Theory of Obscurity” : https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2833768/

Sports (both playing in amateur leagues and attending local teams), seeing live music, and participating in local arts collectives. I tried computer related communities (hacker spaces, meetups, etc), but it always felt like it was just work in disguise or people trying to turn fun into resume fodder or networking for professional purposes. So I just try to find people with mutual interests that are orthogonal to my day job.

> I don't use Rust, but the constant childish bickering has turned me away from even caring to.

Same. I want to use it because technically it's the right choice for a few projects, but when I talk to people in my organization I still label it as "too immature and volatile to adopt today, but worth watching". I was hoping the adoption by Linux and Microsoft would be the forcing factor to stabilize it, but the governance aspect still seems chaotic. I'll keep watching and hopefully it calms down such that adopting it won't be a risk. Or maybe the good parts will just get adopted by a more stable (w.r.t. governance and standardization) language.

I like languages that are a monoculture. It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants? It was a pain in the ass - VMS Fortran, Cray Fortran, HPF, etc... ("How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer" - pointers were variant specific? Ugh). Pulling the variants together under a common standard made it reasonable to build projects from multiple groups without having to know how all of the different variants interacted. If you pay attention to the post-Fortran 95 language standards, a lot of work has gone into standardizing what used to fall under the chaotic world of vendor specific extensions and implementation choices.

I'm all for the diversity that emerges when you have different libraries and tools that take on the flavor of each group that builds them. But at least establish a common language in which to build that diverse ecosystem.

It's easy when a project is new to adopt one variant and be happy in your little variant bubble, but when that project turns out to live for a while and inevitably has to start working with other projects or tools that rely on one of the other variants - you've got a headache, and life gets hard (and you'll probably start wishing people had just standardized things in the first place!)

PolyML is what I use.

Super short answer: SAT doesn’t exhibit the nice properties other optimization problems often have where you can tell when you’re near a correct answer. So it doesn’t resemble most continuous optimization problems. Regarding parallelism, there has been research into parallel SAT, but it’s hard in part due to the problem of sharing information between threads/tasks in conflict clause learning algorithms. I don’t remember specific papers but a quick search on google scholar or looking at past SAT competitions would turn up material if you’re interested in the topic.