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Time to put glue on that pizza, folks.

[num**2 for num in numbers]

There's no way that C implementation is easier to read than the Python one. There's no high-level abstraction going on there and the list comprehension reads like natural language.

I agree Rust often gets distracting with unwrapping and lifetime notation.


I know it is easier to read, and it is not difficult to figure out what is going on (in this case), but many languages do not support list comprehensions (for example), so you have to implement it in a way that is similar to the C version, making the C version more helpful.

The example above may not highlight what I was trying to, however.

Perhaps Ada could work even better than C? It is verbose, yes, but you will immediately know what is going on.

My point is, that in my opinion verbosity is better than conciseness in cases of reference implementations.


You're mistakenly throwing books and music into the same bag.

I often download books before buying them because I otherwise have no reasonable means to judge their content. This is not much different from flipping through the pages of a book in a library before buying it. The appeal of reading from an actual physical book is not something that any digital form can replace, so the book being available in digital form won't stop me from buying a copy. I also have no interest in Kindles and DRM.

Music, on the other hand, might be a different story except for select audiophiles who prefer vinyl.

So I don't think we can generalize to "product" like you do in your argument. Details and facts actually matter.


I think you meant "man pages", but "ma pages" works for me.

Even for non-impaired people, the lag on a touch screen is utterly miserable.

Touchscreens are also extra bad in the car. The hands have mass and the motion of a car is shaky due to bumpy roads, curves, braking, etc.

This makes it hard to hit the desired area on a vertical touchscreen at near full extension of the arm.


Accessibility problems just mean systems are a pain to use. So much so that we describe easy to do things in terms of impairment. I could do it blindfolded, with one arm, two fingers in my nose, in my sleep etc.

The ultimate form of accessibility is not 'designed for impaired people' it is a system that does what you want without having to think about it or lift a finger.


Software lag isn't unique to touchscreens. Software lag is always a terrible thing, and developers who de-prioritize performance should be ashamed, but that is true regardless of what input is used.

It's kinda bearable with buttons because you get feedback. The ATM I use isn't the speediest thing but the buttons have a very tactile feel and it beeps at you for every press. It might not be "impressive", but it does cause forty dollars to appear and that's really all I wanted from it.

Now ask anyone with a touch screen in their car what their error rate on that thing is. Even the really good ones are pretty bad.


Physical buttons allow for memorized action sequences, though. As long as the input layer has some kind of FIFO buffer, it doesn't really matter how much lag the actual application has. If "call home" is always just "button A, 3x button B, button C" it is absolutely trivial to repeat that without even looking at the screen.

Touchscreens don't work quite as well for this. Even if it allows for input queuing, you often still need the previous screen to finish drawing to have a frame-of-reference for your presses. Even the slightest delay turns into an annoyance, and when it involves some kind of drag-scrolling a 50ms delay already becomes unbearable.


A touch screen imposes additional lag, though. Detecting finger swipes for left/right, for example, requires more processing than spinning a fucking dial or pressing on a button. But, like you said, performance doesn't matter anymore to the companies that design these interfaces. We should have criminal laws for this type of thing along with the return to proper hardware interfaces. Lack of performance should be a criminal offense.

Is this Da real Walter Bright? Hello, sir.

It says I am on my passport!

Why is it unsettling?

The US thinks of Chinese prosperity as a threat in and of itself. The US wants to call the shots, and the reason it has been able to since WWII is because it is wealthy (due to its innovation of not being a country in Europe during WWII.) It's not simply racism, though. The US also thinks of European prosperity as a threat.

These sentiments are not hidden. They are openly spoken during policy discussions and in policy papers. Fake concerns about the nature of Chinese governance have nothing to do with it - the problem the US has with Chinese governance is that China is not governed by the US. The US is jealous of China's tools for censorship and the tight top down political control.

edit: the US government is not at all concerned about the citizens of China. It also did not invade Afghanistan for women's rights, and it is not helping Israel to preserve gay rights. These are barely even serious pretenses. It is not in Ukraine because it cares about the freedom of 2/3rds of the population to suppress the other third. These are stories for children.


This right here.

China - under Xi specifically - doesn't have rule of law, acts as an agent of chaos on the world stage, doesn't care about international order, bullies its neighbors, and critically, has become a 1-man dictatorship in the past ~10 years. Under Xi, it's an aspiring evil empire that considers all humans of Han ancestry to belong to it, and genuinely doesn't care about the rest. Pre-Xi, China was on a positive trajectory. Post-Xi, hopefully that'll return.

Your first sentence is exactly what the US has done since the Cold War through recent history. Why is it different when China does it, which it also hasn't to the scale that the US has?

It's not different. Peace is always a temporary illusion, a cloaking of the war, and one shouldn't expect any consistency in these cases (akin to the peacock's tail-feathers, too much consistency costs).

[flagged]


You could say something similar about the Mongols (Pax Mongolica). Of course, they weren't very nice to other states when establishing that order...

China doesn't really have stable rule of law, but "agent of chaos on the world stage"? It's the most stable and predictable major power, by far.

China hasn't fought a war in 40 years. It's been too busy focusing on its own internal economic development. In terms of the international order, China is much more committed to institutions like the UN and WTO than the US is, because China wants a stable international framework in which to continue its own internal development.


>doesn't have rule of law, acts as an agent of chaos on the world stage, doesn't care about international order, bullies its neighbors

This also describes the actions of the US in many circumstances in its history.


Dude you need to chill. Xi is just a man in China. You need to take a trip there to get a different perspective and make sure to talk/interact with the local people.

Unlike several other authoritarian regimes, this is very much constitutional in China. Every institution pretty much reports to the CCP.

Really? That's fantastic. In the US, three-letter government agencies work outside the scrutiny of the law.

In China, "there are no three-letter government agencies".

Yikes. Propaganda runs DEEP in the west.

Everything you said describes the US and other western nations better than any other civilization in history. The US backs genocide after genocide, consistently breaks the international “laws” it pushed for. From the start of the empire, that’s been the explicit policy of the American empire. Trail of tears anyone? Hiroshima? Agent Orange? East Timor? The banana republics? It’s a really long list…

Students really need to be taught their actual history. It’s really quite horrific.

This comment displays not even a shred of understanding regarding China or it’s history.

How dare China have territorial sovereignty. How dare they have security in their own region. How dare they build infrastructure in the global south, when everyone knows they should be pillaging those regions instead! Unthinkable! That all belongs to the west!

That comment represents an insanity in the west that may just be the downfall of organized human life.



Lol yes exactly like this. Tides have turned eh? The American elite are doing a very good job of distracting the public from problems at home.

They get people riled up about Taiwan or Ukraine, meanwhile the education system, the housing supply, job market, healthcare system, etc... are all in shambles.

Americans don't even question it anymore! It's now fair that housing should be >=40% of your wage. It's fair that companies that are propped up by the American people can screw over those same people.

But when you see how modern and lively China is and how they live, compared to the crumbling, old United States... oh boy. Strange how they can afford it but we, the supposed 'richest country in the world', can't.


Because of how they treated Hong Kong.

The way they curb free speech, even projecting that internationally.

Their announced intention to become the world's superpower and displace the US militarily, technologically, and economically, and the risks to US interest which tie to that.

Their active pursuit to enact that claim, specifically with rapid military technology development, and international organization of BRICS.

Their aggressive tendencies towards US allies.

Their aggressive spying on US military and industrial facilities.


To a non westerner, this doesn't seem like a bad thing. A world where US sanctions are useless is a good world

    > Because of how they treated Hong Kong.
Taiwan, too.

China has barely started with Taiwan. There are projections of China moving to forcibly take Taiwan within the next two years. It may be a bit later than that.

If the US doesn't take a strong stance in support of its ally in Taiwan, China will only take it sooner. Once China invades, that begins the massive expansion to WWIII that JP Morgan CEO claims has already begun with Ukraine.

The US can't lose Taiwan as an ally, strategically or economically. If we give up our support of Taiwan we've as good as handed over hegemony to China. And we'll have lost the AGI race in its infancy.


We deserve this treatment. Their entire personality on the international stage was created by the west.

It could of course be that they would be much worse without us but that didn't happen.


It depends on how long you're willing to roll back US interventionism. If you're talking about pre-WW1, maybe. But even by the mid-late 19th century the US started sticking its nose in the Pacific (which alarmed Japan, which contributed to that countries subsequent militarism). So I'd say you'd have to go back even further.

If not the US, it would probably be Europe and/or the Soviet Union. China and the Soviet Union nearly came to blows in the 60s.

Europe decolonized largely because Hitler wrecked major continental colonial powers France and the Netherlands) and put Britain with their backs against the wall such that it had to partially abandon its empire in order to defend itself and avoid a complete disaster. So they let India go, but tried to hold on elsewhere. This worked to some extent, but not in others. What remained tried to morph into the Commonwealth, this was only partially successful.

The US assumed the crown, this time with a different model, hegemony vs. colonialism. They had a rival in the Soviet Union, which funded Communist revolutions in many parts of the developing world. With the exception of Vietnam, something the Chinese did not do. They valued North Vietnam as a buffer against Wester imposition, but were not too keen on a reunified Vietnam, indeed they invaded a few years after South Vietnam collapsed.


Well for starters, Xi Jinping being the most powerful person on Earth is probably a bad sign for democracy.

In their time as the dominant world power, the US hasn't always used their influence for good, but at least its a democracy with some form of constitutionally protected human rights in charge. I much prefer that to having a country with a permanent ruling party where critics go missing being the dominant force in world affairs.


> the US hasn't always used their influence for good

This is a bit of an understatement for anyone in latin america.

> but at least its a democracy with some form of constitutionally protected human rights in charge

as far as i can tell, those only apply to US citizens, not humans in general.


America only cares about spreading democracy if some country they have beef with isn't democratic. America had no issue replacing democratic (and sometimes secular) goverments with dictatorships if dictatorship was more friendly to the US.

If you want to see how much the US cares about democracy, read Noam Chomsky's How The World Works. Or just look down south to Latin America.

A common refrain in american homes and schools is about american superiority over all other countries, especially their rivals like china.

Is that perception why everyone online constantly shits on America and proclaims that every other country is superior? For as much as people like to accuse Americans of being "'Merica, fuck yeah!" the truth sure looks like it is mostly other countries with the arrogant attitude.

Capacity for self criticism is part of what lets America reïnvent itself.

yes and it's deeply ironic that you just quoted an American film which was satirizing that attitude twenty years ago!

if anything I feel like Americans have become extremely self loathing in the passing generation since the release of Team America: World Police


Interesting that the self-loathing seems to be associated with waging unpopular and losing wars. I didn't live through it but the Vietnam War seemed to have some similar impact that persists to this day with the utter loathing of conscription. It seems to be the same underlying cause: that bad leadership essentially permanently burned credibility for their country for no gain for their country.

Lots of gain for those in charge, and their cronies.

Americans may feel that way, but "Team America: World Police" still applies to US foreign policy in 2024.

Xenophobia

Stop playing dumb, superiority is everything.

And how much do you trust that shit? Has anyone set up a honeypot as an experiment?

possibly unpopular opinion, I trust the bigger companies more than small ones on stuff like this. It would be so much easier to not offer anything, rather than intentionally create a potemkin setting and risk the blowback that would occur if discovered. Hopefully this comment does not age poorly.

full disclosure: worked there [edit: google] a while ago, not in search, not in AI.


You can trust Google to do what it says, and yes I've seen Google obey robots.txt. You can't trust Google to do what you think is right.


I'm a bit in a hurry, don't have time for close reading. Does that article say some Google apps (notably Maps) store locations on your device even if you have configured them to not store it in your Google account? I may miss something, don't have time to read between the lines today.

You don't. Theoretically, they would respect the user agent, but who can trust that anymore?

And it is a fine pickle we jarred ourselves into. We thought it would be sweet but it just came out dill.

More than user-agent, because user-agent cannot be trusted.

Great! Well then... how?

HAProxy Edge is their product, and akin to Cloudflare and other competitors the heuristics to stifle bad actors is likely the secret sauce. Disclosing it would only lend bad actors the advantage in their game of cat and mouse.

tl;dr the crawlers do not respect robots.txt or the user agent anymore, but you can drop big bucks on the enterprise HA offering to stop them through other means.

It’s relatively simple to detect crawlers writing one from scratch could take a few weeks if the infrastructure was in place.

With salaries though finding an externally managed solution might be cheaper.


Should we webmasters just start blocking user agents wholesale?

I mean except known good actors.

I guess known actors would need a verifiable signature


Not viable. They are going to use user agents that look like those coming from completely normal human users.

"Verifiable signature"? That's a dangerous road to go down, and Google actually wanted to do it (Web Integrity API). Nobody supported them and they backed out.


Search engine crawlers do have verifiable signatures, if a client claims to be Googlebot or Bingbot you don't have to take their word for it.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3...


But the converse is not true? There is no guarantee the crawler is not amassing data for model training, or that a crawler (AI or otherwise) does not disguise itself as a normal user?

Yeah, but traffic appearing to come from normal users can be throttled and/or CAPTCHA'ed while still allowing Google and Bing to crawl to their hearts content so your SEO isn't affected.

I would think rate-limiting would be good. Crawlers are not patient enough to operate at the speed of a real human user.

Greedy crawlers will use fake user-agent strings.

[Shameless plug] I'm building a platform[1] that abides by robots.txt, crawl-delay directive, 429s, Retry-After response header, etc out of the box. Polite crawling behavior as a default + centralized caching would decongest the network and be better for website owners.

[1] https://crawlspace.dev


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