timruffles

Import dependency. The UK government put it at 43.5% in 2025 and 43.8% in 2024: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69cd1451b5210...

> EDIT: maybe you meant the UK total primary energy? I feel like that's extending the boundary a bit far.

If we're talking about 'sovereign', is it too far? I think the history of conflict in the modern era, hot and cold, shows that your rivals' ability to disrupt your energy imports matters a lot.

> Sovereign capability just means that no foreign government can pull the plug

OK, fair enough on 'pull the plug ~instantly'. But models and chips age fast. If another country can stop you getting new models and chips, this means you're sovereign in state-of-the-art AI for only a window of a year or two (maybe this will widen if model progress tails off).

If it is a short window, strategically, that doesn't seem worth much given the timelines of: a) inter-state conflict, or trade wars b) cold-start time to be able to make your own models and chips

> Maybe that's not how you like the term to be used but it's widely used that way and widely understood.

Noted. But as a data-point, the audience at the event I mentioned (various AI builders and founders) made it clear from their questions to the speaker that the 'sovereign' that sov/ai was aiming at was hollow, for exactly the reasons I've stated.

Firstly, congrats! As a Brit this looks cool, and I'm happy to see it. I wish you every success.

Secondly: I get that 'sovereign' is probably an important sales term for your company. But this, in common with the government's 'sov/ai' fund, does not deserve to be described as sovereign. This is other countries' models served on chips designed and manufactured abroad, powered by a grid which imports 44% of its power.

Of course this isn't your company's fault. Last week I went to an event where the sovereignai.gov.uk people presented. In a very Keir Starmer way (spiritually, he wasn't there), they said in as many words 'oh but I'm sure all reasonable people would agree _really_ sovereign AI would be too hard. So let's all agree to pretend that just popping a bit more money into the AI startup ecosystem is a sovereign AI strategy'.

I'm unsure if the UK does need to be sovereign in anything; it certainly doesn't seem to want to be. But I will continue to poke fun at anything using the pompous phrase 'sovereign' for anything that isn't.

If sovereign AI is a problem you're in earnest about, I hope you go after it seriously, and fix the rest of the stack. I'll cheer you on!

The Economist is a British newspaper. HQ London, editors British.

That said, ‘America’ is synonymous with the USA in writing and conversation here (and elsewhere in Europe in my experience).

> nowadays every 16-year-old web-dev reaches for Array.map(x => <div>{x}</div>) when they write their pages in the most popular framework. These higher-order functions have now become part of the “hello world”

It's just wrong to ascribe the popularisation of HOFs like `map` to Haskell. `map` was there in good old (practical) Lisp 1.5 back in the 1960s. Why ascribe this to Haskell (released 1990) rather than Lisp? Guido said Python v1 (1994) got HOFs "courtesy of (I believe) a Lisp hacker who missed them"[1], Ruby had blocks in V1 (1995). Haskell's research direction was not about very, very old news like HOFs, it was about non-strict evaluation, and cool type system stuff.

[1] https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650662

Not so - it was the majority of their music industry earnings, and they are apparently quite haunted by it to this day!

If you live in or near London, go for a (free) tour of the Linnean Society. Worth it to see his beautiful notebooks alone. Also learned that he included phoenixes in his original taxonomy!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animalia_Paradoxa

One of the best things about living in London. If you visit, take a walk there and then end up in one of the many brilliant pubs nearby - The Holly Bush, Wells, Spainard’s Inn, Magdala, Garden Gate, or sit in Keats’ house’s garden.

Also probably of interest to the HN crowd: in years past I set up a philosophy meetup on the heath that is still going strong (thanks Sam!) - https://www.meetup.com/london-philosophy-walks/events/290653...

Your take is cliché, factually wrong, and makes you look callous all at once, congrats! Any other major religions' holidays you'd like to dismiss while you're at it?

Cal Newport is a tenured theoretical computer science professor. Seems like an accomplishment in an actual specialized domain to me!

Sounds wonderful! Would love if this were a thing elsewhere. I don't think I've experienced anything similar since I left uni, where unplanned, all-night conversations might happen randomly in halls' kitchens, pubs etc.

I don't know enough (anything) about how market works, but that appears to be a crank article. It got zero interest before the WSBs/GME thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Anatomy+Of+A+Short+Attack...

See also: https://www.truthorfiction.com/what-is-a-short-ladder-attack...

A lot of Brits would like the British Museum to give the marbles back too! <3

Principled - bravo!

Because the number of death from smoking or traffic accidents doesn't grow exponentially, as they're not caused by an infectious disease. You don't go from 100 lung cancer cases to 80,000 within a matter of weeks.

Also, consider second order effects. What happens to hospitals when you get 20k cases of something in a month, vs 20k over a year.

Sure, but since that’s a median not a cap, doesn’t that point to ‘a more realistic cap is not even half that’ (75k) being a bit pessimistic?

There are a lot of people in finance in London, also a lot of big tech (seen the current, and new, Google buildings at KGX?), quite aside from a lot of contractors :)

I’m actually very surprised, and interested, to hear this. I’ve never felt software was looked down on in any middle class/professional circle I’ve mixed in. Perhaps a generational/geographic/tribe thing? 32y/o, London for 13 years, left of centre.

Conversely, when I’m in SF I do feel a bit anxious about saying what I do - when I’m talking to people who aren’t in tech - due to the inequality/negative image of techies.

Definitely higher than half that. SWEs at FB, Google etc will get >100k. Even aside from that I regularly see higher than half that - e.g random example from a quick Google at 85k https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salary/Travelex-Backend-Engineer... - 90th percentile of Java roles are over 100k - https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/java.do.

Secondly a pretty average contractor day rate is 500pd, which is over 100k, and there are a lot of contractors. I think it makes eng salaries in the UK seem lower than they are. Many of my friends went contract and would never go back. The senior market is therefore hard to hire for, outside trendy/exciting companies, unless you pay for contractors.

That said, we should all be asking for raises <3! By all I mean everyone apart from the C suites of public companies

"LP dollars", LPs = Limited Partners = https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-limited...

Oh sure, it's just for fun/learning! Check my first post.

I went for longjmp(), non-local goto, for precisely the reason you highlighted: I realised pretty well everything in JS can throw, so needed something easy to trigger from anywhere

See https://github.com/timruffles/js-to-c/blob/1befbf4220753576e...

Sounds like quite the challenge!

> Built in, in the sense that they're first class statements built into the language.

:O

> 94 year old hacker in the great state of Texas

Wow, I hope I'm coding at 94!

I'm doing this for Javascript - finding it a lot of fun! https://github.com/timruffles/js-to-c

I'd recommend it as a project to any wanting to learn more about a particular language (implementing a language teaches you how it works in painstaking detail), and get a better 'feel' for how languages and compilation works in general.

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We're building a data-visualisation platform using some great tech (TypeScript, D3, Node, React+Redux, Postgres) and using it to deliver data stories for clients like Barclays, IBM and startups including fintech + smart energy companies.

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https://gist.github.com/timruffles/825fa496406c95f19ce44760a...

Not well reasoned. Mostly of the complaints boil down to 'not knowing' whether a given piece of data is mutable or not.

If you're doing FP with immutable data, there is no ambiguity: you never mutate. Doesn't matter which language you're in, nor whether the data-structure is mutable or not (e.g Redux mostly uses normal mutable JS objects, with the spread operator to avoid mutation when returning a new state).