d-us-vb

without normalizing for number of distinct HN users, as well as the possible incorporation of a new demographic to the site's readership that is less interested in books, but has always been present somewhere in the world, this trend doesn't actually say much. It says something about the website, news.ycombinator.com, but that isn't terribly relevant to anything.

The new demographic is probably vibe-coders, actually. These were people that were never much into reading. But because HN is generally AI adjacent, a person starting to vibe code or otherwise use AI tools will probably find HN in the sources and start using it because it shows up so frequently in forum listings.

So "WE" are probably still talking about books the same amount (pre LLMs-going-mainstream HN users), and the book trend is more of a latent eternal-September effect.

Stallman’s Principle:

The extension language should be a full featured programming language in its own right capable of creating substantial applications because that is something people will want to do!

I wish every application worth putting a plugin system in it followed this philosophy.

The "tradition of Smalltalk" is to experiment and exceed what came before. Alan Kay expressed disappointment about the ossification of Smalltalk upon the release of Smalltalk 80. Pharo and Squeak are trying to carry forward only the tradition of the original Smalltalk to produce new ideas, not "be a Smalltalk" (whatever that means).

If you say "Pharo is a Smalltalk" then you might get some of the religious elite come and claim "Thou must change this aspect of the system! For it is in violation of the law of Smalltalk as handed down to our forefathers in Smalltalk 80". Pharo is its own system, heavily inspired by Smalltalk to the extent that non-language lawyers look at it and say "it's Smalltalk".

People argue about whether Janet or Clojure are lisps. Some people say that only Common Lisp is Lisp. Some include Scheme as well. But the unqualified "Lisp" usually means Common Lisp when referring to an actual language with an actual specification that you can find an actual compiler to create binaries with. Pharo is a Smalltalk in a similar way to how Scheme is a Lisp. Different enough that saying "Scheme" means something different from "Lisp" to everyone who knows enough to know what you're talking about.

If you love that idea but don't mind the switching out the language, CLOG [1] does this on Common Lisp.

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

reductionists being reductionists. I'm with you.

The mode is completely different. You have to twist Cuban’s words to make him say the same thing as Jobs. Because he didn’t say “find the thing you love” he said spend enough effort on what you’re doing until it becomes the thing you love. Jobs is about an actual search, which takes effort, for sure. Cuban is about transformation in place.

It entirely depends what success means to you! Don't let society or even your perception of society define that.

In all fairness, I know that you meant "wealthy and/or influential people". But it bodes ill at every level that your tacit belief about success is widely known and widely accepted (though certainly not universally).

Postman's book is exactly against that definition of success, though he readily points it out. He describes it in the "Gods that Fail" section of the book.

That is, if they're licensed. Most hardware engineers, at least in the US, are not licensed PEs; you only need a PE license if you're signing off on engineering work under government contract or public safety is a concern or its some otherwise regulated industry where the regulations require it.

> doesn’t have to … persist any meaningful state

What is a game save file if not persisted state?

Yeah, Blow has a generally unfavorable opinion of scripting in game engines. Jai (the language) gets around that by being very fast to compile debug builds, about 150 kloc/s, which he says he intends to optimize up to 1 mloc/s. Order of the sinking star compiles in about 2 seconds for a clean build, so iteration can be basically as fast as what you'd expect from scripting.

Well, it becomes bad for you if you start needing to take so much of it that the other stimulant effects start causing problems, like poor sleep. Most addictive substances have this potential, since "the dose makes the poison". But the same dose forever rarely satisfies cravings forever.

> It turns out nicotine is addictive and bad for you

links to a substack post confirming the benefits Gwern wrote about, and acknowledging the risks Gwern acknowledged

> Not even Kelly foresaw the Bitter Lesson

Except that he most certainly did! The bitter lesson isn't about LLMs vs specialized neural networks! It's about manually programmed expert systems vs machine learning. Alpha Go Zero isn't very good at anything but playing Go. It's a highly specialized brain only for that singular task. LLMs remain a problematic technology (both in terms of reliability and privacy) for a lot of domains and my own prediction is that smaller models that are much more reliable for a specific domain will become common after the utility of AI is known by way of LLMs, but the reliability or cost of running them makes it unsustainable.

While biology has inspired many inventions, the electric motor is not one of them. Electric motors were invented in the mid 19th century, before cells were known to be anything more than simple blobs of protoplasm, barely distinguishable under a microscope. It wasn't until high powered microscopes were invented that biologists had any clue to the previously unthinkable complexity of cellular life.

You're being a bit ambiguous. I would say that in all countries, there exist individuals who in their own subjective opinion would view capital punishment as murder.

But you're not engaging with my point on its own terms, and as such are missing it entirely. In the case of an individual viewing capital punishment as murder requires an ethical judgment to be made, which is the point, not the example.

If an author says "we" and you disagree with them, it is not productive to nitpick about whom that class names: you already have enough information to answer it: a group the author is aware of and identifies with in regard to the following view. You reading it doesn't imply you're a part of the class.

Secondly, the usage of "we" in hypothetical discussion acts more as a fairly neutral stand in to satisfy English's requirement for an explicit subject, while setting the right tone.

But for the sake of precision, as no one is above a tacit request for precision...

If a criminal on death row is executed, one who views capital punishment as ethical would not describe the killing as murder.

if cows, pigs, and chickens are real living beings, we are committing killing.

Whether killing is murder requires an ethical judgment to be made. If a criminal on death row is executed, we would not say they were murdered. At least, not until it is shown that they were innocent after the fact; in which case those who falsely accused him, botched evidence, mishandled the case may be ethically considered to have murdered him, or at the very least have committed negligent manslaughter, though legally speaking there are limitations.

Also, murder applies only to beings considered persons. As animals are not considered persons by most, it is a category error to suppose that they can be murdered.

This is circular reasoning. The fact that most eventually failed can't inform the reasoning of why they eventually failed.

Not sure what this guy is on about. Languages with extensible syntax (through macros, through term rewriting, through intrusive function like decorators) have always been available, though notably less popular. Languages also can support extensible features through reflection: runtime inspection of structure of user-defined types.

- Any language with bicameral syntax (the lisps, etc)

- Rebol and Red

- Smalltalk, Self, etc.

People tend to not like these for most programming problems due to the eventual maintenance burden and the steep up front cost of becoming competent with them. But the title and thesis of this post is a bit of a head scratcher: we've always been able to change languages designed to be changed, and mainstream high level language no. 2, Lisp, was one such language. As always, whether or not a language supports macros or some general metaprogramming facility is a design tradeoff both for the complexity of the compiler and the implicit complexity of the codebase (knowing that the language doesn't prevent you from defining new operators with semantics that may go counter to the intuition employed in the base language).

the building codes change frequently in Japan; it's often cheaper to rebuild than to bring an old house up to code to get it approved for inhabitation by the new owner, unless the building is deemed of historical importance.

This is what a lot of people learning Japanese do for reading practice. Reading signage and exploring an area virtually through street view is great for in-context learning.

This feels a bit too optimistic regarding programming. Or perhaps betrays an imprecise definition of programming. To me, programming is about expressing algorithms. But algorithms may be totally illegible and still work fine.

Math on the other hand is exclusively about being understood. It is ideas from math that made algorithms legible and thus made the act of programming an act of communication. If by programming you mean using notation and ideas that were borrowed from mathematics to specify algorithms, then for sure it’s communication, but only inasmuch as it was math first. If you mean only specifying algorithms, then no communication need take place; the executor of the algorithm will deterministically execute it irrespective of its ability to communicate.

There’s an ongoing debate about whether articles are a proper part of speech; the only articles in English are the and a. Some grammarians prefer “determiner”, which includes a, the, some, other, no (as in “no man”) etc. A determiner is just a word that selects/determines an element of a larger assumed universe of discourse.

Some grammarians deny the existence of determiners, as they are not found in traditional grammars of the language, with the words now considered determiners placed in other parts of speech.

The bad press was because after some people tried to call them out for not shipping features that were claimed in the release, those people were banned from further contribution/commenting on github.

Probably, actually. “Primitive” societies survived the ice age. Modern societies depend on a relatively fragile system of infrastructure and many of the individuals in modern society are utterly dependent on it. Technology only works within its rightful context, and 99% of it is completely useless after infrastructural collapse.

Meanwhile, premodern societies depend on the ecosystem as a whole which tends to adapt over time; the individuals in such societies are more self sufficient in terms of ability to survive the elements.

So it’s just as likely those not dependent on modern technology will do fine against the vicissitudes of climate change as much as those who are dependent on it. At least in terms of ability to survive. At least, their expectations of survival baseline won’t change nearly as much in the face of natural disaster.

private podcasting is right up there with using ChatGPT in your head.

But it runs on Qt, which is most certainly not.

I suspect the u ubiquity of electron persists more because maintaining both web and desktop interfaces is somewhat simplified, and as a corollary, you don’t need a separate JS and C/C++/QML team. Qt has gotten pretty good, but JavaScript and typescript are easier to hire.

As I’ve come to understand it, standards simplify intensionally, not extensionally. For those who select a part that is compliant with a standard, more standards to choose from is better because engineers are able to make better tradeoffs; they’re not forced to select a part that does way more than the application needs thus making the product more expensive if there are lots of “competing” standards: some do less some do more.

For RV, a litany of standardized modules creates a system where each capability that the module provides will have a standard interface. No manufacturer is forced to invent extensions bespoke to their implementation, but they’re not forced to support everything the most powerful models do either.

Just my two cents.

Richard Hipp's recent talk at Software Should Work explains that AI agents have been testing SQLite and they've gotten a deluge of new bug reports from the fuzz-like testing they can do. But they do not do this in house; hobbyists and other organizations do this in their own internal agent-driven fuzzing.

The question is whether the method is sufficiently novel or specific enough to the problems/difficulties of solving a specific domain’s problems to warrant a patent.

It’s one of those kinds of patents i assume I’m violating every 100 lines of code I write.