1. Radiation-hardened Quine (2014)
Total comment counts : 27
Summary
The article describes a self-printing program written in Ruby called “robust quine” that works even if one character is deleted from the code. It includes instructions for generating a broken program and running it, and provides three versions of the program, including the latest “ascii-art” version. The program is available for use under the MIT License.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the possibility of a script that can deal with general bit flips rather than just deleting one character randomly. According to the author, radiation typically causes bit flips rather than deleting characters. The chance of a bit flip deleting a character by mutating into 0x7F is 0.9%. The chance of a character mutating into a non-printable character is 8.3%. The chance of a character mutating into an extended ASCII character is 12.5%. The author mentions that there are many possible effects on the interpreter when dealing with these characters, and that control characters could be particularly troublesome. Despite the potential issues, the author concludes that the script is still a cool quine.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article mentions a developer known for creating a 128-language quine relay, in which the languages print a program in the next one, looping back to the original. The project is available on Github.
2. 27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
Total comment counts : 33
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses how we have become accustomed to powerful computers but have lost the ability to do general-purpose computing at a lower speed, such as the 8MHz computers of the 90s. The author yearns to be able to achieve more with less power.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author credits the Psion 3c, gifted by his grandfather, for getting him into programming. The built-in OPL language provided endless possibilities for the author to explore, with the 300-page language manual having a significant influence on his career.
3. How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap
Total comment counts : 25
Summary
The article discusses the author’s upcoming family road trip from Atlanta, Georgia, to Utah with stops in various states. To make the trip more memorable and educational for their children, the author’s wife created road trip journals, and the author used R packages like tidygeocoder and osrm to create maps of the trip and its routes between destinations. The author compares the costly Google Maps API with the open-source OSRM project as a more economical and accessible alternative for making maps. The article includes code and visual examples of the resulting maps, as well as statistics about the trip, such as the total distance and duration.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article is commended for sharing an amazing adventure he had with his family. The article praises the author for going the extra mile to make it a memorable experience for his kids. The use of screens is discouraged, and the focus is placed on the importance of attention and adventure for children. The reader, who is a father of three, wishes the author’s family an unforgettable time together.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article is about a map created by the author that shows the minimum number of Republican-voting counties one would need to pass through while driving from San Francisco to New York City. The map can be found on the author’s GitHub page.
4. Automatic emergency braking should become mandatory, feds say
Total comment counts : 47
Summary
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed a rulemaking that would make automatic emergency braking standard in all new light passenger vehicles. The feature, already included in many new vehicles, uses a forward-looking sensor to detect whether a vehicle is slowing down rapidly and alerts the driver to slow down if necessary. NHTSA predicts that the proposed rule would save 360 lives and prevent 24,000 crashes each year. While automatic emergency braking has been shown to be effective, NHTSA wants the standard system to include pedestrian detection, after tests showed that it didn’t work well in low light or high speed conditions.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author had a bad experience with a brand new car that had a safety feature that almost caused them to get into a serious accident twice. The feature could not be properly disabled and the author is disappointed with the car manufacturer and dealer. They ended up switching cars and now drive a 27-year-old car with no “features”. The author suggests that the government should outlaw touchscreens in cars to improve safety.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author of the article is responding to comments referring to automatic transmissions being only for teenagers and elderly individuals, stating that this sort of belief is misguided. The author then shared a personal anecdote about how their Toyota’s emergency brake saved their life in a potential accident. The author also received a discount from their insurer when they purchased the car due to the emergency brake feature.
5. It’s not wrong that “🤦🏼♂️”.length == 7 (2019)
Total comment counts : 45
Summary
This article discusses the different ways that programming languages handle the length of strings containing emojis. While JavaScript and Java count emojis as two units, Rust counts emojis as 5 Unicode scalar values (which constitutes a single countable unit), and Swift counts emojis as a single extended grapheme cluster. Python 3’s approach to string length is deemed the worst since it allows for surrogate pairs and inherently results in multiple interpretations of the same string. The article delves into the various ways that string length can be computed and stored, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of each approach.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the length of a certain string in Python 3, which is made up of five valid Unicode code units. The author argues that the correct length of the string should be five, not 17, which represents the length in bytes. The author also states that a programming language shouldn’t be concerned with how many glyphs it needs to draw until it actually tries to draw them. The article suggests that Python 3’s approach is the worst for this reason.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article argues against “everything you know about X is wrong” articles and criticizes how a particular article creates a false equivalence between UTF-32 code units and UTF-16 code units. While the article acknowledges that grapheme clusters exist and are useful, it argues that comparing these two encoding concepts is misleading. UTF-32 code units represent Unicode code points, a general concept in all Unicode encodings, while UTF-16 code units are an implementation detail specific to UTF-16.
6. Show HN: HN Resume to Jobs – AI Powered Job Matching Tailored to Your Resume
Total comment counts : 29
Summary
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Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article questions whether being perfectly qualified for a job is too safe, as they have taken jobs requiring skills they didn’t previously have and enjoyed learning new things. However, they acknowledge that having all the required qualifications makes it easier to get a job.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author suggests a new feature for job search where one can filter out onsite jobs as well as jobs limited to only the US or the UK and would like it to extract job features and show them. The author is interested in filtering by type of employer, ethical orientation, technologies used, role type, and salary range, if available.
7. Ask HN: Who got hired from HN?
Total comment counts : 122
Summary
The author joined a company in a non-technical role they weren’t qualified for, in an industry they knew nothing about, but was able to succeed because of their hustle. The company scaled to 200 employees in four years and had a cross-functional role working on sales, biz dev, product, legal, and support. They raised a few rounds and got acquired for a lot of money, and even though they left the company due to growing pains and some mistakes, they look back at the experience with fondness. The author also shares how they found a homebuilder through a YC company called BuildZoom, despite not being a fit for the job opening they initially clicked on.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author shares their experience of joining a startup as employee #8 in a non-technical role despite not having any qualifications or knowledge of the industry or technology. The CEO believed in their demonstrated hustle and the author became successful. The company was bootstrapped and scaled to 200 employees, the author worked on cross-functional roles, raised rounds, and eventually got acquired. Despite some growing pains and mistakes made, the author fondly looks back on the experience.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author got hired for a famous, then pre-IPO company through a “Who’s Hiring” post in 2012. This opportunity changed their career trajectory and led to exposure to smart people and cutting edge technology. The experience helped to open doors for the author’s career. The author also hired about three people from these threads who turned out to be great hires. Additionally, the author met the builder of their dream home through HN.
8. The work is never just “the work” (2022)
Total comment counts : 19
Summary
The article discusses the challenges of accurately estimating the time and effort required for software development projects and proposes a framework to help improve future estimations. The author shares their personal experience of underestimating a project and the process they went through to understand why the estimation was so far off. They identify common blind spots and challenges, such as not accounting for invisible tasks and complexity. The proposed framework involves breaking down work into before, between, and around the actual development work, and visualizing the overall project lifecycle. The author acknowledges that the framework is not scientific and may not be applicable to all projects, but suggests it can be a useful tool for improving estimation.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article outlines five reasons that make estimating difficult. Firstly, people often think they have done something before but have not done it exactly the same way, which can affect how long it takes. Secondly, external factors such as changes in the work environment can impact deliverability. Thirdly, the person who is doing the estimating may have changed, and this can affect how much time things take. Fourthly, estimations can be wrong due to human error. Finally, estimating is a skill that improves over time but cannot account for external factors or human error. The author also expresses frustration when they have a strong feeling about an estimate, but their boss does not believe them and tries to find a better estimate, only to end up with the same result.
Top 2 Comment Summary
This article suggests that while estimating a project’s cost may lead to fewer failed projects, the amount of time and effort required to create a reliable estimate doubles the project’s completion cost. Many developers choose to jump into coding instead of giving up accurate estimates to reduce costs. Unfortunately, businesses only see the overshoot on time, which they incorrectly equate with project cost, rather than the undershoot on budget relative to a fully-planned project.
9. Falcon 40B LLM (which beats Llama) now Apache 2.0
Total comment counts : 20
Summary
The article informs the reader that JavaScript is currently disabled in the browser and advises them to either enable it or switch to a supported browser in order to continue using Twitter’s website. It also provides links to their Help Center, Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, and Ads info page. The article is copyrighted by X Corp and is dated 2023.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article is a link to a benchmark for Open Law Language Models.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses some concerns about a marketing strategy used by Hugging Face, a tech company. They have been showcasing their open-source AI models like Falcon on a leaderboard and social media, and there have been complaints about lack of attention for the model. The author finds the strategy sketchy and suggests that it might indicate the bro-ification of AI.
10. Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs
Total comment counts : 51
Summary
The article discusses various topics related to web browsing, such as the factors affecting browser speed, the best private and secure browsers, the fundamentals of Web3 and decentralized technologies, and the features of the Brave browser, including its push notification ads and vertical tabs feature. The article also mentions new developments, such as the release of Brave Search API, and partnerships with Transak to enable the purchase of crypto assets directly within Brave Wallet.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the benefits of using nested vertical tabs which allow users to group related tabs together and easily minimize or close them. The author mentions that they hope the Brave browser’s implementation of vertical tabs allows for mouse wheel tab switching, which is a favorite feature of Firefox’s vertical tabs addons. The author also recommends Sidebery, a browser extension similar to TST, which offers more features and is more polished.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author wishes for a browser that functions like an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), with multiple panes and tabs that can be resized. While this may be too complex for a general purpose browser like Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, the author believes that a more information-dense browser would benefit those doing research.