Unlurker

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Cause of Death: > Scalded in a Brewer's Maſh, at St. Giles Cripplegate, 01. That's… quite specific. And then there is the joker who entered 'suddenly' as the cause of death.

If the main purpose of this was to satisfy people's morbid curiosity that makes a lot of sense. Maybe they made up some juicy deaths in slow news weeks even.

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Rethinking C++: Architecture, Concepts, and Responsibility (blogs.embarcadero.com)

"Many—especially historically minded—developers complain that modern C++ compilers take longer to compile. But this criticism is short‑sighted. You cannot compare C++ compile times with compilation in other languages, because the compiler is doing something entirely different."

This is also because llvm and gcc are just slow right? Are there any alternative c++ compiler that is faster maybe?

sorry, I can't take something that argues for "printf" in favour of anything else seriously.

I'll bite. printf might be unsafe in terms of typing, in theory, but it's explicit and readable (with some caveats such as "PRIi32"). The actual chance of errors happening is very low in practice, because format strings are static in all practical (sane) uses so testing a single codepath will usually detect any programmer errors (which are already very rare with some practice). On top of that, most compilers validate format strings. printf compiles, links, and runs comparatively quickly and has small memory footprint. It is stateless so you're always getting the expected results. Compare to <iostream>, which is stateful and slow. There's also std::format which might be safe and flexible and have some of the advantages of printf. But I can't use it at any of the places I'm working since it's C++20. It probably also uses a lot of template and constexpr madness, so I assume it's going to be leading to longer compilation times and hard to debug problems.

The article argues that modern C++ has type-checked string formatting, so it does not argue for (unchecked) `printf()`, right?

"The article" is ambiguous. The one this HN post is about does not argue for it, at all. But the one in the comment above directly says, > Don’t use stream (<iostream>, <stringstream>, etc.), use printf style functions instead. and has a code example of what they argue 'Orthodox C++' should be, which uses printf. I'm all for a more sensible or understandable C++, but not at the expense of losing safety. In fact I would prefer the other way: I still feel incredibly saddened that Sean Baxter's Circle proposal for Safe C++ is not where the language is heading. That, plus some deep rethinking and trimming of some of the worst edge behaviours, and a neater standard library, would be incredible.

What you can get for the price of a Netflix subscription (nmil.dev)

It's weird. When Netflix came about, I was excited to dump all the bespoke pirating stuff that it replaced. I didn't mind paying for content, in fact, I was glad to. Fast forward a while, and now Netflix seems to be an undiscoverable mess of old and foreign content while charging twice as much. Each IP owner felt it necessary to make their own way worse clone, and still, after paying more than a hundred a month, there are things just not available on any of them. And now, more than ever, the high seas seem so enticing again. I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented, but they really soured people on their value proposition.

> old and foreign content I don't really mean old, I'd even say old movies were "better" in the sense of more variety, also foreign is often not a problem provided it's good (my favorite genre here is comedies like Norsemen or British Ghosts). What I really dislike is this bland, characterless, boring, inauthentic, unengaging, but neverending stream of pulp that Netflix is producing and promoting. Most people I know just got fed up with it. Personally I watch maybe one movie a month, and when I do, I make sure my time won't get wasted.

You can happily ignore Disney. You are elevating it to status it does not have to have. Yes copyright should be shorter. Yes, these companies abuse artists to the maximum they can away with. But there is zero reason to create state monopoly around this.

> You can happily ignore Disney. You are elevating it to status it does not have to have. I'm not eleveating Disney to anything. It already is at that level . It owns huge swaths of, well, everything spanning back decades. For example there was a minor viral news that Winnie the Pooh finally entered public domain. Well, Disney owned it exclusively from 1953 to 2021. All of it, from print to video. Pooh is just the most famous and advertised example. Since Disney owns most of movie and TV production in the States, through that alone they own rights to a huge number of written works. That's before we go into how many audio and visual media they own. Disney isn't just Mickey Mouse and Marvel. There was an article on HN yesterday on how the author "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" finally got the rights back after 35 years : https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/18/im-not-bad/ Next time you watch a movie you like or even read a book you like there's a very high chance it's owned by Disney (or some other huge license holder). Or if you can't find that movie or book you like anywhere? Same reason. > But there is zero reason to create state monopoly around this. I didn't say anything about this or imply anything of the kind. Besides, copyright literally exists only due to state exercising its power.

Wouldn’t Disney just set an insanely high license fee in this case though? If they’re just paying it to themselves then they can make it high enough that nobody else can justify paying it.

Could borrow the concept of FRAND (Fair, Reasonable And Non Discrimatory IIRC) from tech companies licensing patents? I don't know much about it and I do not think it is perfect, but from what I remember from discussions here it prevents certain forms of abuse.

This problem was also an issue for movies and theaters. The "fix" is to ensure theaters (the distributors) cannot be owned by, nor can they own production studios. So under this rule, if disney wanted to have their own streaming service and used a high licensing fee to try stop competitors from their content, they'd pay high taxes due to the high licensing fees making huge (fake) profits for the parent company - it'd end in losses, as the streaming service (as a separate company) cannot bill their cost onto the parent company (to offset the profit). It's as if the tax man gets to sit in the middle, and siphon part of that license fee for free. Disney shareholders would never stand for that, and so they won't do it.

Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world (news.ucsc.edu)

I don't know if it's comedy or tragedy, but I've often considered the situation of what a newborn is "expecting". "Ok, first thing when I come out is I'm gonna meet the family. I'll try to get used to their face, whoever I see first. Maybe they'll show me around the savannah, should be a lot of sunshine, colours, blue sky. Then I'll sleep directly on my mom and get some boob milk." Kid comes out, everyone is wearing a mask, half of them aren't family, they're indoors with artificial light, and they have "clothes" put on them, and are put in a cot to sleep.

I've always found Retinal Waves[1] interesting. During development of the visual system, there are spontaneous bursts of activity without external stimuli, helping the synapses to organize properly. In my layman's view, it's like hallucinating shapes that are important to learn. Very similar to the "priming" described in the article, but easier to visualize (literally). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves

AFAIK the whole morphology is decided in distributed computation fashion via electrical potential changes, at least according to experiments by Michael Levin

This seems like it was proven ages ago with the no-free-lunch theorem. Humans could not learn to function unless their brains encode a useful prior for learning about the world. That prior means "preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world". The short form of the no-free-lunch theorem is that if there is no prior (i.e. all possible universes are equally likely) then for any learning problem P there are an equal number of universes that learning system A will outdo learning system B on that problem. If not all universes are equally likely, one learning system can vastly outdo another or even most other learning systems. Not equally likely is the assumption built into brains. Without that, you can't learn effectively. So the biology is just implementation of that general principle. The details of how that implementation works are interesting, but whether we are preconfigured for learning was never in question.

And we've proven empirically that this usable "prior" can be quite small. What exact assumptions does human brain encode and use, however, is an area of research. We are nowhere near being able to list out all of those useful inductive biases - let alone extract them and apply them to AIs.

Why is this a new knowledge? And why does it take a team of whole class to find this? I think universities have ran out of research areas.

To make sure and confirm, not guess and assume

How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible. Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information. Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only. And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly. I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.

It’s like one computer with program (DNA) and helper programs (RNA) creates second generation of computer and programs (proteins, lipids, carbohydrates) that essentially create their own version of computer system in which they govern things like enzymes, hormones etc But keep in mind that humans are not created in vacuum. After those two levels of computer create third level that is brain, actual programming of brain is done by other living humans. So actual „humanity” is what persists in living population and would reset when population is culled and newborn must live and learn on their own. Even if such newborn would live long enough to have access to things like books, computers, even sound and video records… those would be completely useless to them because they won’t even know language and skills required to use those.

Kant said it first! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/

If that's so, then we're back to Nietzsche's Perspectivism. The experiment is limited by what the experiment entails.

Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk. It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd. Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.

> They are born knowing how to walk. This is unlikely to be a good way to think about them. The norm is for animals to be born knowing how to move. Whether they actually can move shortly after birth is more of a question of muscle development than knowledge. For example, when birds are held immobile until they're old enough to fly, they fly normally.

> They are born knowing how to walk. I'm not aware of any way we can know this. We do know that those species are born with the physical ability to walk within the first few hours after birth. How could we distinguish between whether they were born with the knowledge of how to walk as opposed to them learning it quickly since their body can physically do it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_pattern_generator#Locomotion

is it true that it's a tradeoff ? the "more precocial" the less flexibility to learn new things ? on the contrary knowing less equals less assumptions, which needs more flexibility in exchange. Would be true that what is precocial in us is the ability mimic and abstract specific patterns into general rules ?

It must be a tradeoff. I don't have any proof, but my thinking is that we pay an extraordinary price in terms of resources required to keep human babies safe for years before they can keep themselves safe. That is a strong selection pressure on everyone involved. The fact that it still happens means it must somehow be worth it.

One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up. But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.

One of my kids could stand on the day she was born. She seemed super strong, so while I held her I just took my hands away, and she stood there and stared at the rest of the family. Lasted a good 10 seconds, then I thought it was enough.

IMO TFA doesn't map too cleanly onto the concept of "bootloader" (nor "microcode" for that matter). But I guess the question is, as always, can you unlock it.

Do you want to? The range of computational processes a human brain could perform is quite large. The range of computational processes that resemble the behavior of a sane human? Far less so.

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How the Atomic Tests Looked Like from Los Angeles (amusingplanet.com)

This is Twin Peaks season 3

The UK also nuked the US 24 times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_testing_in_the_United_States Then there was that thing where RAF bombers pretended to bomb US cities... which had to be hushed up as it made it clear that US air defence systems weren't nearly as good as the public had been told.

It’s all good.

The article doesn't generally read like AI to me, though I can't discount the possibility that I have been fooled by a new and more advanced slop machine. I think HN is probably biased towards a subset of the population that is perennially interested in nuclear explosions. They surely occupied a much greater part of the public consciousness in the 50s than they do today (and certainly much greater than a few years ago, before a nuclear power invaded Europe).

There is also very high overlap with engineers and guns. Also jet engines. But yes, things going boom too.

Why I (Still) Love Linux ? (it-notes.dragas.net)

For me Linux distributions have always been a way to have cheap UNIX like systems at home, any POSIX like system will do, it could equally been one of the BSDs or Windows NT/POSIX, had Microsoft been actually serious about it. Actually I was more found of Solaris, Irix, NeXTSTEP in how they approached the whole development experience. Still got some nice memories of Aix and HP-UX as well, with Xenix and DG/UX as introductory experiences to the UNIX world. Something like Android is closer to how Plan 9/Inferno got to be, than most GNU/Linux distros, regarding a managed userspace, and more interesting to see where it all goes. Or modern approaches like Unikernels (even if POSIX based), managed runtimes on top of type 1 hypervisors, immutable container based OSes,.... Also commercial UNIXes never followed the "Unix philosophy" that keeps being endless recited in Linux circles, ironically, given that GNU tools are hardly anything to go by, given the endless list of options they have available.

A kernel is a very special program, and splitting it into individual components would be orthogonal to the Unix philosophy, which is about user space programs. Besides, Linux is quite modular, and only loads what it needs, so the fact that it's monolithic is not a major concern. Yes, it would be better if kernel panics wouldn't impact the system, but nowadays these are very rare, and are usually related to hardware rather than software issues. As for GNU utils and the examples you mention, those indeed align with the Unix philosophy, which you clearly misunderstand.

Is it clear enough that you could explain why tar has multiple zip options and why find has a DSL? Is it clear enough that you could explain to Rob Pike why he's wrong about cat -v?

This is precisely why it is valid to say that systemd doesn't align with the Unix philosophy, and yet it's also valid that many people such as yourself like it. I don't want my init system to replace cron. I don't want it to manage logging. I don't want it to have any debugging capabilities. All of these things can be done with other programs, arguably in a much more flexible and robust way. An init system should do one thing (well): manage system services. Within that context, it should start services on boot, keep them running in the background, and allow the user to create, stop, and start services. That's it. And it could be argued that even those responsibilities are too broad for a single program. So I understand that you and many others like that systemd provides solutions to all of these tasks in an integrated way. But you should also understand that this does in fact go against the Unix philosophy, of small, independent, but composable programs with a single responsibility. It "proposes" alternatives to many other tools for no particular reason, until users are effectively using GNU/systemd/Linux. And, yes, I know that technically systemd is not a monolith and is composed of many programs, but that is a moot point. It is a single project, maintained by a strongly opinionated team, and given the importance of it, most distros go all-in, so users are strongly recommended, if not forced, to use all of its programs. In many cases it's not even possible to use one individual systemd program idependently from another. This is why systemd is seen as a kraken that takes over the entire system if you do decide to use one part of it.

> go against the Unix philosophy The Unix philosophy is not an end goal neither. It's not even something well defined. Everyone seems to have their own view on what it is. I personally take the "everything is a file" and "do one thing well and be composable" rules as a guideline, an ideal to consider when designing stuff, but not as a strict thing to adhere. It might be something that's nice to have in some contexts and something that's useless or even counter productive in others. What I mean is that I take "does not follow the Unix philosophy" as something to look into to find potential improvements or design issues, but not as blocker or a counterpoint in itself. To me, the Unix philosophy discussion is quite moot. Those discussions are often very vague. I don't care much that systemd follows the Unix philosophy or not. I'm more interested in what actual problems this does cause in practice. You do, however, point out something practical here: > An init system should do one thing (well): manage system services I suppose one could consider that to manage system services well, you have to manage "everything". I also suppose systemd's scope is way bigger than "managing services", they do want to "fix/figure it all". It seems reasonable to me not agree with any of these things. I do believe the uniformisation systemd causes is a good thing, but I absolutely understand that the big scope can be seen as an issue, and I almost fully agree with your last paragraph. I would object to the statement that systemd is not a monolith and is composed of many programs is a moot point: this modularity still means that you can replace individual systemd programs with your own implementations if needs be… … as long as you provide the expected features / APIs, yes, you are totally forced into this indeed. systemd is a de facto API. It brings / forces standardization at the cost of diversity. It broadens the standardization that comes with UNIX/POSIX and XDG. I'm sure this can be criticized in a few ways: the API design, the scope, the featureset, the way the project is lead… The alternative to systemd is non-existent standardization and each alternative designs stuff its own way on their side. For the better and for the worse. I can see how systemd can be criticized for when we are in "the better" cases. I personally easily see the worse side where several projects (for instance desktop environments) would each have to implement features that come with systemd. And programs on top of these environments now have to implement APIs of each desktop environment to be well integrated. This is more work for everyone. I guess this is a diversity vs efficiency balance to strike and we don't all see it at the same place. I suppose another alternative would be to have different people working on different implementations that are then grouped in some common "system core" package or set of standards that everyone adopts. I'd probably be happy with that, if this is at all possible.

BSD is given as an example of the cathedral in the book.

indeed, iirc, the 1998 usenix presentation by mckusick et al, seems to be an earlier record (than the book) these s/w development models. fwiw, both the gnu project and freebsd champion this (cathedral style of) development model. however, i don't think linux or bsd is *purely* either approach. w.r.t `user-facing software` which seems to be central thesis of gp, both the alternates (bsd/linux) offer almost an identical choice.

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How did the Win 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base? (devblogs.microsoft.com)

What's the reason for moving from ASCII CHAR to UTF16 WCHAR rather than UTF8 CHAR? I wouldn't think any parts of the codebase that don't need to render the string or worry about character counts would need to be modified.

I wonder what percentage of people on HN have ever used subversion or cvs, let alone older systems.

sccs, I was using it as late as the 90s. But the percentage is probably small, yes.

I remember the days of NT4 and the guy that would lock a file, leave for the day and you couldn't check it out :D Good times! Same year I deleted all our customer's websites by simply dragging the hosting folder somewhere into C:\programs or something by mistake... A double click + lag turned into a drag and drop! Whoops! I was pale as a ghost as I asked for the zip drive. We had to reboot the file server first, which we did a swift kick to the power button. At least today we employ very secure mechanisms; like YAML rollouts of config, to keep things interesting.

Perforce also did exclusive file locking (and I believe Microsoft ended up using a customized Perforce internally at some point).

sd was a light customization of p4

Microsoft never used SourceSafe for anything important internally.

This I can believe.

The extra 84 win have to go somewhere

Only two more to go for the LLM to hallucinate x64-86 into existence.