I use Stylus to override design choice that don't work for me.
Generally things like colors, fonts and hard-coded page widths.
Sometimes I'll use Tampermonkey to alter content a bit.
Here is one I use to improve my experience on HN.
191 karma · joined October 31, 2022
Here is one I use to improve my experience on HN.
NO SMOKING. NO SPITTING.
THE MGT.I think working with newer languages like Typescript have made me unsatisfied with languages like Lua which provide no clear way to prevent this sort of mistake, so I like that dialects like Pluto are showing ways Lua could be improved.
script.pluto:1: warning: function was hinted to return string
but actually returns nil [type-mismatch]
1 | function foo(x: number): string
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ here
1 foo
¹: https://pluto-lang.org/web/#code=function%20foo(x%3A%20numbe...
1- https://web.archive.org/web/20190506063632/https://www.hashi...
Lua is nice in many ways but unless you have a pressing need for it I'd recommend sticking with JSON. If you really want executable configurations please consider a newer language like https://dascript.org or https://cuelang.org which provide better type safety.
Fortunately there are other configuration languages available now besides Lua which provide type checking, so I remain hopeful that a future version of Lua or one of the newer typed Lua variants will eventually learn from those.
I had some hope that Luau https://luau-lang.org or Teal https://github.com/teal-language/tl would make things better but with the following example
function foo(x: number): string
if x == 2 then return nil else return "foo" end
end
x = { foo(1), foo(2), foo(3) }
for i,v in ipairs(x) do
print(i,v)
end
1 foo
Many of us grew tired of being locked in to Microsoft's platform, their simple yet stifling assumptions and their hostile behavior.
Those who walked away from Microsoft's Omelas went in a thousand different directions. While some grew tired of being pioneers and returned or found new walled gardens, others refused to trade their freedom for comfort or simplicity.
> I would consider SQLite, itself 20+ years old now, the intellectual heir of BDB.
Indeed. I've worked on projects that only use the btree part of SQLite. If all you need is a btree it's a good place to start.
I'm not going to and I suspect anyone who values their time won't either, especially when my public library meets my needs. But the line I'm asking you to look for isn't the one around a single book - it's the aggregate value previously locked in hundreds of thousands of them now released by the power of research like yours.
Even if you don't agree, I hope you appreciate that authors whose works are protected by copyright will feel entitled to a share of that value. Most of them didn't write their works to further ML research.
> Would I do it again? ... that’s a tough question.
I am reminded of when I was young how accessing an unprotected computer wasn't in itself a crime. People like me hacked into systems mainly out of curiosity. Then the media started making movies about teenagers starting nuclear wars with dial-up modems. Then journalists jumped on the hype train to sell their books and convinced people hackers needed to be punished. Then some went to jail and we got things like the CFAA. In a few short years what might have been wrong but wasn't explicitly illegal became so.
You are clearly a smart and intellectually honest person but society often treats such people poorly - especially when confronted by scary new technology - and the tone of your answers are giving me serious Aaron Swartz vibes. There's a lot of money at stake here.
Sounds like someone so focused on "if they could" but not giving much thought about "if they should".
I don't want you or any responsible ML researcher to go to prison. Responsible researchers make mistakes, but responsible researchers also consider the consequences of their actions. How much consideration was given to those? And given everything you know now, where would you draw the line? At what point do the consequences of this sort of research become indistinguishable from theft? Suppose the research enabled the piracy of a high fidelity copy of a single author's work without their permission? Would that be wrong? What about ~2e5 low fidelity copies of who knows how many man years of labor?
Currently thinking about something like Workerbox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33673047
I'm sorry to say I don't have much good to say about InfluxDB. I first considered them around 2015. I loaded about a week of logs from our OpenStack systems into it. It seemed to work so I included it in our set of internally supported systems and started going about the task of adding it to our backup schedule.
Well, perhaps things are different now but at the time the only way to do a full backup was to save the output from a command like "select * from *". Before adding that to a cron task I tried it from the admin console and quickly caused the server to OOM and die.
It was immediately clear to me that this wasn't a company that cared much about reliability since I was able to trivially crash it doing the only thing I could do at the time to backup my system. Obviously nobody at Influx cared about pesky things like backups or workload management, so I quietly decommissioned the system without incident and moved on to other things.
Some years later I watched Andy Pavlo interview their founder on one of the regular CMU database sessions. Andy was very critical at many points, effectively telling him "we told you this wouldn't work". I felt much the same way.
Influx looks very much like a company that may eventually build right thing after building everything else first.
It was not uncommon in the early 2000's for applications targeting mobile professionals and sales types to work this way, except that instead of SQLite they used things like Notes¹, Jet² and MSDE³. By modern standards these would be considered "tiny mostly static databases" often not exceeding a gigabyte. Instead of connecting over the internet they used serial dial-up file transfer protocols to synchronize with a central database or a mainframe. People would typically download information in the morning, make updates offline and synchronize at the end of the day. A slow trickle of periodic bidirectional updates insured everyone had a reasonably fresh copy of the information they needed.
1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino
Some time ago I followed this guide https://vxlabs.com/2022/06/12/typescript-development-with-em... and added this to my .emacs
(use-package tree-sitter
:ensure t
:config
;; activate tree-sitter on any buffer containing code for which it has a parser available
(global-tree-sitter-mode)
;; you can easily see the difference tree-sitter-hl-mode makes for python, ts or tsx
;; by switching on and off
(add-hook 'tree-sitter-after-on-hook #'tree-sitter-hl-mode))
(use-package tree-sitter-langs
:ensure t
:after tree-sitter)
% open -n -a Emacs --args "-q"
Even without a startup file, I can't open https://github.com/ASDAlexander77/TypeScriptCompiler/blob/ma... and scroll through the file unless I also manually do
ESC : (global-font-lock-mode 0)
We wrote our programs on special pads of paper, transferred them to punch cards, gave our decks to operators who would run our programs on an IBM. Around a half hour later the operators gave us back printouts with the results of our runs. Most people didn't wait around but my friend and I would stay late so we could get more runs in. If we were nice to the operator they might bump our job up in the queue.
Most of the programs we wrote were very simple. Things you could easily do now with a few lines of a modern scripting language.
Our class's teacher was a professional COBOL programmer who had a day job working at a soda company. Some kind of emergency came up at his job half way through the course and he stopped showing up so we were left on our own for a few weeks.
Just before the end of the class the department head took over and told everyone they would need to implement a binary search on the final exam. This was way too hard for most of the other students but not a big deal for my friend and I. We were done in a few minutes.
I was also fortunate to meet another guy in the class who asked me to help him with some programs he had to write at his job. He was a soil engineer who wanted to move into a finance job but found the programming work difficult, so I spent a few hours a week tutoring him and writing programs with him.
Eventually I graduated and he ran out of work for me but by then we became good friends. While I can't say I got much out of of the COBOL class I'm glad I took it because if I hadn't I would not have met him.
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/sigh
________________ M-x emacs-version
GNU Emacs 29.1 (build 1, x86_64-apple-darwin18.7.0,
NS appkit-1671.60 Version 10.14.6 (Build 18G9323)) of 2023-07-30
________________ M-x describe-mode (for C++)
Minor modes enabled in this buffer: Font-Lock Tree-Sitter-Hl Tree-Sitter
The major mode is C++//l mode defined in cc-mode.el:
Major mode for editing C++ code.
Using CC Mode version 5.35.2
________________ M-x describe-mode (for ts)
Minor modes enabled in this buffer: Font-Lock Tree-Sitter-Hl Tree-Sitter
The major mode is TypeScript mode defined in typescript-mode.el:
Major mode for editing typescript.
;;; typescript-mode.el --- Major mode for editing typescript
;; URL: http://github.com/ananthakumaran/typescript.el
;; Version: 0.4
;; Keywords: typescript languages
;; Package-Requires: ((emacs "24.3"))
________________ os
% uname -srm
Darwin 19.6.0 x86_64
% sw_vers
ProductName: Mac OS X
ProductVersion: 10.15.7
BuildVersion: 19H15I'm also not happy about the fact that I can no longer open large C++ files like https://github.com/ASDAlexander77/TypeScriptCompiler/blob/ma... in C++ mode without scrolling becoming so sluggish as to be unusable. I either have to disable C++ mode or open them in an older version.
It's good that emacs is getting some long needed attention, but I'm sad the latest version isn't as usable for me.
About a decade and a half ago I setup a 48 drive Sun 4540 this way. The OS needed 2 dedicated drives on the first controller so I assigned two neighboring drives on that controller near the intake fans as hot spares. The remaining drives were organized into mirror pairs with each drive on a separate controller. The final root was a concatenation of the pairs.
This setup proved to be very robust. Although I left the company when financial troubles pushed the founders into a messy divorce, one of the founders asked me to come back a few years later after they restructured. The 4540 had been moved to a new colo but otherwise ignored because none of the admins knew Solaris or bothered to check the monitoring systems.
When I returned I discovered in the time I was away 4 drives had failed but ZFS/smf happily took two of the failed drives offline and replaced them with the spares. The two other failed drives left their respective pools degraded but functional. Replacing the failed drives was easy once they arrived.
Although neglected for years, none of the applications or databases that relied on that server ever suffered any downtime from the drive failures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
I explained I was new to the group, had no special understanding of the code they changed or the tests that failed and wasn't about to deviate from SDLC principles when there wasn't a compelling need. In my view committing an untested change was what caused the trouble in the first place and I had no confidence that the fix they wanted me to commit would make things better. I suggested that they simply revert their change and come back to it later when they had time.
This only made the other person more irritated. They raised their voice and continued to demand I do what they suggested and I continued to politely explain that while I was willing to help them work through the problem, review their code, examine the data or follow any appropriately documented procedure, I wasn't willing to violate proper engineering principles this way. Their shouting started attracting some unwanted attention and they decided to just pack up and leave. Later that evening another engineer reverted their change and everything was fine again.
My manager asked me how I felt about the incident the next day. I said that although their behavior was irritating, I didn't hold it against them. Even the best of people make mistakes when desperate or rushed. Their mind just wasn't in the right place at that time. They really just needed to get away for a bit. What matters is that we move on, try our best to treat each other with respect and remember that we're all part of the same team.