vova_hn2

> Every closed source software has the potential to centralize and lock you out of it.

Ye, but you could (at least, theoretically) make your own open source alternative and you weren't particularly disadvantaged compared to corporate programmers doing closed source.

For example, Linux initially was just one guy doing it for fun and see how far did it go.

We may soon come to a situation, when something like Linux will be impossible, because devs making proprietary software will have access to newer/better models that are only sold to big companies and tightly controlled (in the sense that you can use them only for certain "safe" purposes).

> Bitcoin was decentralized but so was cash. And it was still possible to send cash to people around the world it was just harder to set up and trust. And those cash sending mechanisms didn't really lock people out of them (but could theoretically, sometimes did by way of sanctions).

My point is that in future we may come to a scenario when someone like Satoshi won't be able to create something like Bitcoin while keeping their privacy. Because you have to provide a phone number to use OpenAI and also because "creating a non government-authorized financial instrument violates my safety guidelines" or something.

> AI doesn't make programmers 100x productive and it never will, so not really a point there. As long as the output is non deterministic, you have to check it, and no one can check their code 100x faster than writing it

Maybe, maybe not. I'm afraid that eventually fully automated systems will be able to produce code that is good enough without manual checking. Doesn't matter if it is deterministic or not. If the probability of a catastrophic failure is low enough, you can safely ignore it.

I think that this is the scariest part of the upcoming AI era.

Every time you want to do something, you essentially have to ask permission from a corporation (and, possibly, from a government that regulates it) to do it.

I was thinking about Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto.

Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin (I know that large part of HN crowd is very critical of it), my point is that people were able to create software that has big social impact without asking permission from anyone and without revealing their identity.

Back in the days you could be just some guy sitting in your room, possibly in a backwaters 3rd world country, with a laptop that costs just a couple of hundred dollars and you (potentially) could be just as impactful as a well funded corporate coder. It all depended on your skills and ingenuity.

Now, we are coming to an era when you:

1. Have to have resources to buy tokens or buy/rent inference hardware

2. Have to reveal your identity, your intentions and ask for a permission. Everything you do is potentially logged and analyzed

Of course, theoretically you can do everything "the old school way", but if AI makes a programmer 100x - 1000x more productive, you will always be behind and never catch up.

> We could simply define Pluto as the edge of our Solar System and everything beyond its orbit a Kuiper Belt Object.

A Kuiper Belt Object not being a part of Solar System doesn't make any sense. A star system is the star + all objects that orbit it. Why would you arbitrarily exclude some objects that orbit the Sun?

> pseudo-scientific definition

How is it pseudo-scientific?

Pluto orbits center of combined masses of itself and Charon, which does not lie within either of them. Also, they are both tidally locked to each other, just like Moon is tidally locked to Earth.

> other bodies of comparable size

In addition to what other commenters said about orbital resonance: Neptune has approximately 20 times bigger radius and is about 10_000 (ten thousand) times heavier. This is comparable to difference in mass between a human and a hummingbird. Could we really call them "comparable size"? I'm not sure, this is not a particularly precise term, but I would say - no.

Sorry, but I think that this is a completely made up problem. I've checked out the referenced Tonsky's article [0] and for me "colorful" examples are much easier to read than his suggested alternative.

Also, I had to use reader view for TFA because of this silly pixelated font. Ironic, considering that the article is about readability.

[0] https://tonsky.me/blog/syntax-highlighting/

> Many companies want a permanent presence on your homescreen and think you're too thick to use your browser's bookmarks feature.

I thought that they just want to collect more data about you.

Where would the dogs go? They don't have their own ecological niche and usually can't survive in the wild. In cases when they actually can survive in the wild, stray dogs are known to wreak absolute havoc on the natural native ecosystem. Total dog extermination?

I'm still sad that JSON5 never became industry standard.

Unlike hjson, toml and many others, JSON5 didn't try to reinvent the wheel and create a totally new syntax.

Instead, they took 2 already well established standards (JSON and ECMAScript 5.1) and put them together.

I think that it is pleasant enough to write by hand while not creating yet another new syntax that you have to get used to.

[0] https://json5.org/

Okay, but how cool is that this feature (hotkey to pass a video, that is open in the browser, to yt-dlp) exists and works out of the box?

It's unfortunate, that it was developed in a weird, insecure way, but I think that the fact that it exists is very cool.

I've heard about Omarchy long time ago, but didn't switch, because at some point in my life I started to prefer something that is rock solid and well supported (currently on Fedora Atomic with KDE) to new/shiny/bleeding edge. But still. I think that an overall good UX out of the box is composed of little things like this.

Missed the best name! https://1337labs.org/

(I'm not affiliated with this company and know nothing about it)

> A lot of it is anorexia by another name.

Literally my first thought after reading this training log excerpt:

> 10/4/2012: I’m really trying to be conscious right now about losing some worthless snack weight… Need to be more diligent, take action, get fucking after it, and restore the body and the mind!

"worthless snack weight" sounds very similar to epithets that anorexic people often use.

pastvu were created by people from xUSSR and most users are also from there, the data there is actually global. For example, if you navigate to Richmond, Virginia, you can see that there are more there one hundred photos available.

(default map provider is in Russian, but you can switch to OSM using selector at the top of the page)

It is very common for vibecoded UI to have significant usability problems on mobile platforms and I find it annoying.

I'm pretty sure that it can be fixed by either manual testing and giving the agent feedback or by giving the engine tools to do the testing. Vibecoders just tend to be very careless about such things.

> and then promptly forgot

Maybe anti-doping rules enforcement became stricter?

> After he died, Secretariat’s heart was reportedly measured at almost 10 kilograms – twice as much as normal. This appears to have been a physiological fluke, however, as it isn’t a trait reliably passed down to offspring.

In humans, enlargement of internal organs (including heart) is know to be a side effect of using growth hormone as a PED. Wiki says [0] that "Extracted growth hormone was used since the late 1950s", so in 1973 it was already a well known technology.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_hormone_therapy#Extract...

How exactly do you block sftp at the firewall if it uses the same port as ssh? From the firewall's perspective it is just some encrypted traffic inside ssh tunnel. I think that you might be mistaking sftp with ftps (ftp through ssl/tls tunnel), these are different protocols. I suggest you try connecting to any box you have access to using Sftp protocol and ssh credentials and see the result.

No, I was talking about SFTP, not scp. OpenSSH server has SFTP enabled by default. You can mount it using sshfs or browse it using any SFTP client (or any program with embedded SFTP client, which is most IDEs).

So, if "digging around" means looking at folders' structure, you can do it through SFTP without copying everything (unlike scp or rsync).

And if digging around means running commands, nothing prevents you from having a session for running commands open in parallel.

> maybe t-strings can be creatively used here somehow

Maybe they could, but I would be the first to oppose introducing creative ways to do logging or string formatting.

Such basic things should be done in the most standard way possible to reduce cognitive effort required to read and understand the code.

But the standard way is kinda ugly. Most people would expect f-strings to be used for "normal" string formatting and %-style to be used for logging, because it is the default and most codebases do it this way. Therefore, you basically forced to have (at least) two different formatting syntaxes in your codebase.

I say "at least", because if the program serves html pages, you most likely also have some other template engine like jinja...

How often do you have SSH access to a box but don't have SFTP access?

Most IDEs support editing files on a remote machine through SFTP.

I like f-strings but I don't like that there are at least five ways to format stings.

1. %-formatting [1]

2. str.format [2]

3. string.Template [3]

4. f-string [4]

5. t-string [5]

What happened to "one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it"? [6]

Also, the way string formatting interacts with logging is a total mess. People just pass f-strings to logging, which seems to be an intuitive way to do it. Except it limits your options if you want to collect structured logs and it doesn't allow you to use late evaluation based on log level.

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#format-example...

[2] https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.format

[3] https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html#string.Templat...

[4] https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#f-...

[5] https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#t-...

[6] https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/

I think this is pretty intuitive (I was able to answer the question correctly before opening the spoiler), but I really like raw string designs in Rust and C++11 that allow you to stop worrying about escaping completely.

Are we assuming that this is the companies themselves scraping data from training or is this "agents" acting on behalf of users? Nowadays every major chat UI (ChatGPT, Claude etc) has a "tool" that allows LLM to load web pages, so it must generate some traffic.

The question is what exactly are you trying to achieve. Do you want to prevent them from gathering data or do you want to save resources?

If it is the latter, then, perhaps, some p2p (torrent-like) content delivery system could help.

Apparently, "SuperDuper" is a backup tool for Mac OS. I would really appreciate the article mentioning it.

If I haven't read any of her books, which book or series would you recommend as a starting point?

Very fun indeed!

Can't believe, that this [0] solution to Challenge #5 actually worked, lol

Challenge #6 is "Transport 40 people using 60 elevator moves or less". Unfortunately docs don't make it clear what exactly counts as a "move".

[0] https://gist.github.com/vovanz/66e4396934ac656a8f8c32fcee43d...

> If you were mobility disabled

In one of the buildings where I worked, "fancy Destination Dispatch kiosk" had a separate button with a wheelchair pictogram that would ensure that the elevator has enough space for a wheelchair.

> What if the nearest car is full?

I wonder how do elevators find out if the car is full or not.

I once been to an office building where it obviously didn't work properly.

I needed to get down from a pretty high (15+) floor to the bottom during the evening rush.

The elevator got full immediately but still stopped almost on every floor on the way down.

Each time an awkward scene ensued: a huge crowd of people outside elevator just standing and looking at the crowd in the elevator. Everyone has to just wait pointlessly.