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mkhattab

Re:Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race on Wednesday November 05, 2025 @01:07AM (#45819776)
As a muslim, I hope he doesn't eff this up, Obama style. But the fact that he won, although not the blowout as some were expecting, restored a bit of my hope in the common man. Cuomo's attacks may have swayed some of the vote but ultimately failed.

I hope Mamdani succeeds for the sake of New York (California resident here) and hopefully this win inspires other young people around the country to participate in politics.

Re:OpenAI Signs $38B Cloud Computing Deal with Amazon on Monday November 03, 2025 @11:48AM (#45801148)
These deal numbers have lost all meaning for me.

There’s been some buzz around the official opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, which I visited last month. That project took 1.1 to 1.2B USD. Double its original budget estimate but still the museum looks fantastic and it feels, tangibly, like it’s worth a billion.

In contrast with all the money spent on AI, it just feels like monopoly money. Where’s the monument to its success? We could’ve built flying cars or been back to the moon with this much money.

Re:Cheating the Reaper in Go on Monday April 21, 2025 @10:57PM (#43758695)
> Go prioritizes not breaking the ecosystem; this allows to assume that Hyrum’s Law will protect certain observable behaviors of the runtime, from which we may infer what can or cannot break easily.

If this assertion is correct, then effectively Go as a language is an evolutionary dead end. Not sure if I would Go fascinating in this case.

Re:Fraud, so much fraud on Friday September 27, 2024 @04:46PM (#41675373)
Does anyone know of an up-to-date or live visualization of the amount of scientific fraud? And perhaps also measuring the second order effects? i.e. poisoning of the well via citations to the fraudulent papers.

It's hard to tell at this point if it's just selection bias or if the scientific fraud problem has outgrown the scope of self-correction.

Re:DuckDB 0.8.0 on Thursday May 18, 2023 @12:20AM (#35984095)
Sorry! Just realized that when I checked the docs again. My bad.
Re:DuckDB 0.8.0 on Thursday May 18, 2023 @12:18AM (#35984078)
Minor annoyance:

Yesterday I was reading the docs and one of the first things I tried is the following, copy and pasted, which didn't work, using version 0.71:

  COPY (SELECT 42 AS a, 'hello' AS b) TO 'query.json' (FORMAT JSON, ARRAY TRUE);

  >>> Error: Binder Error: Unrecognized option CSV writer "array"
Just tried the above again with this release and it's fixed now.

Ideally, all commands listed in the documentation should be tested or verified to work.

Aside from that, nice work on the release! And I'm learning more and find it pretty cool, especially WASM support.

Re:No Hello (2013) on Friday August 21, 2020 @07:54PM (#24240172)
My manager used to do this all the time.

Typical scenario:

Manager: hey

<an hour or so may go by>

Me: what's up?

Manager: nvm

I don't believe Arabs are under the illusion that their government is non-tyrannical. I live in Egypt and there's not a single person I've met that doesn't think their government is corrupt, oppressive and inept. So there's really nothing revealing or surprising that a newspaper could report.

"BREAKING: Egyptian government is corrupt. In other news, water is wet."

On the other hand, there are perhaps many Israelis who believe the false narrative that the Palestinians sold their lands and left, but changed their minds and started the aggression.

Re:History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive on Saturday June 29, 2019 @07:58AM (#20312081)
Yes, one usually does and can repair all those things. Except for the pacemaker, which I’m not sure.
Re:"DigitalOcean Killed Our Company" on Friday May 31, 2019 @08:19PM (#20066244)
I agree. Who are all these people that pull backups, that maybe GBs or TBs in size for offline storage? How does that even work in practical terms in disaster scenarios like this where resolution times are expected within hours and not days?
Re:Why don't I take military funding? (2004) on Wednesday December 26, 2018 @08:18PM (#18766408)
Perhaps we need to distinguish, if at all possible these days, between the military and the military industrial complex. I don't believe the military is inherently evil but think it's necessary to the defense of the country. The military industrial complex, on the other hand, is in the business of warfare and perhaps not as necessary as we might think.
Re:Ditching the MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air on Thursday November 22, 2018 @02:40PM (#18512056)
Over the years, I've had an older MacBook Air, pre-touchbar MacBook Pro 13" and 15", and the second generation MacBook.

Order of preference:

MacBook > MacBook Air > MacBook Pro 15" (pre-touch bar) > MacBook Pro 13" (pre-touch bar)

The MacBook is my favorite and I think is the proper evolution of the MacBook Air. I rarely need ports for doing day-to-day stuff like programming, reading and consuming content.

Also, as the OP mentioned, the tapered design makes typing a better experience compared to the hard edged MacBook Pros. The daily ergonomics of the MacBook is something that needs to be experienced and experience with the MacBook Air with respect to ergonomics was a factor in buying the MacBook.

Re:Rules for REST API URI Design on Sunday June 18, 2017 @07:17AM (#14580156)
I believe '/courses' and 'student/1234/courses' mean two different things. The former implies a list of courses and the later implies an association between a student and a course.

POSTing to '/courses' creates a new course. However POSTing to a 'student/1234/courses' creates a relationship/association between a student and a course.

So, it's two different things IMO and not a duplication of logic.

Re:'Oldest' Koran fragments found in Birmingham University on Thursday July 23, 2015 @01:37AM (#9934165)
> At times Mohammed only spoke to one or two people when revealing surah. Having thousands of people memorise a number of separate orations exactly without any problem of conflicting versions is really impossible.

And that's the point of why it is considered a miracle. Transmission of the Quran has always been orally and will continue to be. The general meaning is preserved within the text, however, the correct recitation(s) are not.

You can't pick up the Quran and expect to be reciting it correctly.

Re:'Oldest' Koran fragments found in Birmingham University on Thursday July 23, 2015 @01:24AM (#9934128)
Variations existed in the written form not in the recitation because diacritics (tashkeel) were not standardized. It's a common misconception that the Quran is memorized through the written text. This is not how it is transmitted. Look up Tajweed, which are the rules of pronunciation of the Quran.

Furthermore, memorizers of the Quran can trace the chain of narration back to Muhammad himself. So there couldn't be any forgery or manipulation. Uthman doesn't have the power to erase people's memories.

I'm curious as to why this project is using Django templates (as opposed to Jinja2)? Django is a heavy dependency if you're just planning on using Django templates. Also, from what I've read, it appears that Jinja2 is more extensible.
Re:Why Remote Engineering Is So Difficult on Wednesday December 31, 2014 @12:48AM (#8818389)
How about the Linux kernel? Essentially, it began as something very basic in 1991 when communication methods were much different than we have today (e.g. video conferencing, etc.)[0]. There are many other examples of high quality open source projects that were born or greatly improved on the Interwebs, e.g. Git, Apache, ...

---

[0]: http://oldlinux.org/Linus/911010.pdf

I'm reminded of a scene in Louie where Louis CK is approached by a Hollywood producer to discuss movie ideas[0]. The producer asks him for his best idea for a movie.

Yeah? All right, well well, you know how movies, there's always a guy and his life is, you know, okay?

And then something happens, like a conflict and he has to resolve it, and then his life gets better?

Well, I always wanted to make a movie where a guy's life is really bad and then something happens and it makes it worse but instead of resolving it, he just makes bad choices and then it goes from worse to really bad, and-- and things just keep happening to him and he keeps doing dumb things, so his life just gets worse and worse and, like, darker and-- Like-- like he has-- lives in a little one-room apartment, he's not a very good-looking guy, he has no friends and he lives-- he works in, like, a factory, where they-- like a sewage-disposal plant, and then he gets fired, so now he doesn't even have his job at the shit factory anymore and he's-- and he's going broke and he takes, like, a trip and it rains, like, just stuff, just shit keeps-- horrible.

But then he meets a girl and she's beautiful and he falls in love, so you think that's gonna be the thing, the happy thing, but then she turns out to be a crook and she robs him, she takes his wallet, and now he's, like, stuck in the middle of nowhere and he's got no wallet and no credit cards.

---

[0]: Louie S2E10 "Halloween/Ellie"

Re:Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics on Sunday December 28, 2014 @08:21PM (#8808166)
The full transcript of Crichton's lecture at Caltech: http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers...
Re:Programming languages and Frameworks to learn in 2015 on Saturday December 27, 2014 @05:06PM (#8804132)
I'm planning on going old school and re-learning C and Assembly for x86 and, in particular, ARM architectures. My reason for doing is that I want to get back into embedded systems.

I also plan on picking up Rust and somehow integrating it into my workflow (I'm a web developer).

Ideally, for the future (2015 and beyond), I want a basket of languages I could use for building web-scale applications. So, for example, within a single application:

  * Erlang -- distributed messaging
  * Rust -- heavy lifting for various tasks
  * Python -- various data munging tasks and rapid development
  * Javascript -- client side applications (e.g. Ember.js)
  * C -- in those rare cases where it would be needed
I think I would stick with these languages for the next ~10 years and try not be distracted by anything else.
Re:Ask HN: What do you use for PDF reports these days? on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @01:17PM (#8459995)
I haven't personally run any memory or cpu performance tests. There are online LaTeX editors out there; ShareLaTeX comes to mind. My point being that if online services like ShareLaTeX exist, then the conversion process shouldn't be horribly slow. As always, YMMV.
Re:Ask HN: What do you use for PDF reports these days? on Sunday October 12, 2014 @02:04AM (#8444544)
I'm using Org-mode which can export to LaTeX -> PDF [0]. I use Org-mode for invoices [1], reports, time-tracking, etc. Using org-babel you can use Gnuplot[2] or R [3] to embed charts and other visuals.

[0]: http://orgmode.org/manual/LaTeX-and-PDF-export.html#LaTeX-an...

[1]: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/

[2]: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-g...

[3]: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/ob-doc-R...

Re:Who Killed Lard? (2012) on Monday September 15, 2014 @09:46AM (#8318797)
Very true. I'll often ask when I'm dining out whether something was cooked with lard, especially at Mexican restaurants. Nearly everything in Mexican restaurants is cooked with lard.
Re:Swiss to vote on $25 an hour minimum wage on Saturday May 17, 2014 @02:49AM (#7759432)
Let's say the Swiss set the minimum wage to $25/hr or even half that, $12/hr, what kind of ripple effect would we expect on other salary groups? Would they increase by the same proportion?

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