For someone like me that is less versed in these things, could you explain why bootstrapping a language is a required check for taking a language seriously? My criteria is far less stringent (is it stable? is it popular enough? is the toolchain mature? etc..), so I wonder what I am missing here.
The Haskell compiler creates a slightly different output every time you compile a program[1]. This makes it difficult to ensure that the binary that is free-to-download downloaded is actually malware free. If it were easy to check, then you could rest easy, assuming that someone out there is doing the check for you (and it would be big news if malware was found).
If you're a hardened security person, then the conversations continues, and the term "bootstrap" becomes relevant.
Since you do not trust compiled binaries, then you can compile programs yourself from the source code (where malware would be noticed). However, in order to compile the Haskell compiler, you must have access to a (recent) version of the Haskell compiler. So, version 10 of the compiler was built using version 9, which was built using version 8, etc. "Bootstrapping" refers (basically) to building version 1. Currently, version 1 was built approximately with smart people, duct tape, and magic. There is no way to build version 1, you must simple download it.
So if you have high security requirements, then you might fear that years ago, someone slipped malware into the Haskell compiler version 1 which will "self replicate" itself into every compiler that it builds.
Until a few years ago, this was a bit of a silly concern (most software wasn't reproducible) but with the rise of Nix and Guix, we've gotten a lot closer to reproducible-everything, and so Haskell is the odd-one-out.
[1]
The term is "deterministic builds" or "reproducible builds". Progress is being made to fix this in Haskell.
Unlike Nix and Guix, Stagex goes much further in that it has a 100% mandate on supply chain integrity. It trusts no single maintainer or computer and disallows any binary blobs. It is thus not possible to package any software that cannot be bootstrapped, reproduced, and signed by at least two maintainers.
Haskell and Ada are the only languages not possible for us to support, or any software built with them.
Everything else is just fine though.
I do hope both languages address this though, as it is blocking a lot of important open source software like pandoc or coreboot from being used in security critical environments.
I'm not the OP, but for me their comment sparked an association to the famous Ken Thompson lecture called 'Trusting Trust'. Could be a good starting point.
I am not sure if this considered an anti-pattern, but in one of my teams, we wrote a lightweight generic Secrets library with configurable/pluggable backends (such as AWS Secrets Manager). It had a configurable local cache, with per-parameter overrides to bypass the cache. It meant vendor specific fetch logic was in the pluggable backends, while the app and the secrets lib remained vendor neutral.
When we moved it to Vault, it was seamless. Just meant adding our Vault backend wrapper as a dependency and updating the config to use the Vault backend.
Thank you for this, what a great perspective! I've never been on a cruise because I always figured "but what is there to do?". But you're right, that's the point. I might actually book one now.
Just remember, you’re just as much a stranger to them as they are to you. Just make sure you buy the drink package because you don’t want to be paying per pour.
Not everyone is aware of the details of AI/ML, "transformer" is actually a specific term in the space that also overlaps with "transformer" in other fields adjacent to Software Development. This is when we all need to wear our empathy hat and remind ourselves that we exist in a bubble, so when we see an overloaded term, we should add even the most minimal context to help. OP could have added "AI/ML" in the title for minimal effort and real estate. Let's not veer towards the path of elitism.
Also, the majority of developers using version control are using Git. I guarantee the majority of developers outside the AI/ML bubble do not know what a "transformer" is.
Fair enough! Bubble or not, I certainly have very regularly (weekly?) seen headlines on hn about transformers for at least a few years now. Like how bitcoin used to be on hn frontpage every week for a couple years circa 2010 (to the derision of half of the commenters). Not everyone is in the crypto space, but they know what bitcoin is.
Anyhow I suppose the existence of such questions on hn is evidence that I'm in more of a bubble that I esteemed, thanks for the reality check :)
(also my comment was in defense of parent who linked the wiki page, which defines transformer as per request, and is being downvoted for that)
I, too, haven't seen the word "transformer" outside an ML context in months. Didn't stop me from wondering if the OP meant the thing that changes voltage.
I don't snore. What do you mean by "post-nasal drip"? I do have allergies to environmental stuff like dust and hay fever, and my nose is running / sneezing from this. Some weeks more, some weeks less. But it's not new, I've had that for years. Do you think this could be related?
I am not an anything, but allergies can cause inflammation in your nasal passages, which results in post-nasal drip. Post-nasal drip is where you get a lot of mucus being produced that drips down the back of your throat, which can make you cough or get a sore throat. It's pretty bad when you're lying down and asleep.
For me, when I have to deal with seasonal allergies, if I am feeling particularly bad that night, I will take an allergy pill to make sure I don't wake up with a sore throat.
> coupled with all other stuff like illegal border crossing
I've seen a few comments talk about this, but this doesn't affect my day-to-day literally at all. This never crosses my mind because there aren't illegals I come across or maybe just don't ever cross paths with. Is this primarily a border state thing? If so, wouldn't that limit it to just CA, TX, NM, AZ? And only one of those is a swing state.
Impossible to say, but as someone who lives in Texas and has actually lived on the border, it's simply not a real problem. Nobody notices, or cares, about it. What happens is people attribute seemingly random events to illegal immigration.
Higher prices? Immigration! (never mind that immigrants are cheap labor, which should lower prices). Crime? Immigration! (never mind crime continues to go down and has been for decades). Your shoes untied? Immigration!
It's just such a stark disconnect from reality. They're just used as scapegoats, enemies of the American people.
The housing crisis is caused primarily by middle class and rich domestic white people. The problem is we're not building affordable housing, the reason being housing is the primary and most effective investment for the middle class. People who already own property have the highest incentive imaginable to NOT build more housing. Affordable housing means your investment depreciates.
No, the housing crisis is caused by an imbalance of supply and demand.
Immigration (legal or otherwise) increases demand for housing. Your argument that immigrants are poor doesn’t change that, immigrants still live somewhere, and that drives the demand for housing up.
Increasing the housing supply is a solution, but allowing demand to increase is also exacerbating the issue
Yes, that's what I said. Housing isn't being built due to low supply - and immigrants actually RAISE the supply, not lower it, because they are cheap labor.
Demand has not been the issue nor is it solvable. You can't make people go away, you can only increase housing (supply).
We're not increasing supply enough because domestic Americans are greedy. We've set the incentives up in such a way to maximize the amount of friction to building new houses. Nobody with a house wants more homes built.
The math isn't this simple, because immigrants are willing to work jobs domestic people won't, and they're willing to do it for a low wage. Sometimes, even a wage below the federal minimum.
But even past that, what I'm saying isn't "demonstrably false". I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.
Suppose I work for a contractor, and it typically takes a crew of 20 to build a house. I'm being incredibly generous to your argument here, because in the neighborhoods I've seen it's done with 5 people. But suppose 20.
I would only need to be involved in 21 jobs across my career to produce more than I've used. Really, it's even less than that, because homes house multiple people.
To me, that not only seems achievable, that seems obvious.
This is a misunderstanding of the US housing crisis. The problem with housing in the US is that it's an investment, so there's a real cost to Americans when it comes to building affordable housing. That's why nobody would do it - it's bad for the people with capital, and the people with capital matter more. The people with hypothetical future capital don't matter much.
Net change in the amount of known immigrants who live in the US in 2023: 1.6M
% of immigrant workers in construction, natural resources, and maintenance industries in 2023: 14%
If we can generously attribute that 14% of the new housing supply is because of the immigrant labor force, then that’s 190k housing units attributable, to house an increased population of 1.6M.
Again, you're simply blaming the wrong people because it's easy and intellectually lazy.
New housing isn't being built not because we don't have the workforce. That is not the limiting factor on new housing.
New housing isn't being built because local governments DO NOT APPROVE new housing. They purposefully limit it, because the residents do not want their investments to go down in value. They go so far as to put laws in place to prevent affordable housing being built altogether. In many cities, you can't even put more than 1 unit on a lot and you need a special approval process to build apartments. Duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, dingbats - these are straight up illegal to build in a most areas.
You're talking about demand because you won't acknowledge the supply side part of the problem!
You're not making an argument; you're being purposefully dense. Talking about demand and then straight up ignoring supply makes no sense, you gain absolutely no information from that.
I don't know why I continue to argue with dishonest people. This is exhausting. If you won't even begin to touch the core of my argument then why even bother?
There're two solutions here. One works and the other just doesn't.
We can reduce demand by getting rid of immigrants. This will be extraordinarily expensive and will backfire - this is a bad, bad non-solution.
OR we can increase supply by building more housing, which we will be required to do no matter what. We can't keep up, we need more affordable and middle housing.
I'm sure you've heard of renting. It doesn't matter whether the people seeking housing can buy or only rent -- either way if there's more demand than supply, costs must go up. I wrote "housing costs" earlier rather than "prices" precisely because of this. I'm rather shocked that you ignored rent in your reply.
I didn't ignore rent, rather I did not fall into the intellectually lazy trap of blaming whatever poor and exploited minority of the day for economic struggles.
I'll say it again - new housing isn't being built to keep up because domestic people, that means you and me, do not want it to be built. New housing is purposefully limited by local governments in order to preserve the value of existing housing.
In most cities it's illegal to build more than one unit on a lot. You also typically require a special approval process to build apartments. If you look at the states, HUGE cities will often approve only half a dozen or so new apartments a year. Duplexes, triplexes, dingbats, townhomes - these are straight up illegal in most of the country.
You can't have a city that gets ~100 new units a year and expect prices NOT to go up.
If you want an example of what to do right, look at Austin Texas. Austin built 100,000+ new units in the past couple years and average rent actually decreased ~10% between 2023 and 2024. Yes, you heard that correctly - decreased.
The reason why this works should be obvious, but Americans suffer such severe cognitive dissonance around housing they refuse to admit it. They'd rather blame random poor brown people. We require more housing, particularly dense affordable housing. And yes, that includes in your neighborhood. The sooner people admit this reality the sooner we can fix the housing crisis.
You have people looking out for your future regarding topics you don’t know to watch out for. This happens all the time everywhere around you, that people are fighting silent battles so you don’t have to.
You are clearly not representative, as so isn't most of HN, of the average demographic that has to worry about their blue collar jobs (whether that be a real risk or not)
People who worry about immigration, have their own job security in mind, rather than worrying about crime, you're saying?
(Makes sense to me I guess, just sounds different from what Trump seemed to be taking about: crime and eating people's pets. I'm in Europe and don't know much.)
Outsiders coming in and changing the society. People who don’t speak English sending their kids to their schools. Moving into their neighborhoods and making it more competitive for their friends and family to move into their neighborhoods. Creating “bad neighborhoods” and increasing crime.
The university could even setup their own private self-hosted Gitlab and use it as part of assignment submission.
10 years ago, my no-name college had a CS degree that required us all to take a "Software Engineering" course that covered the fundamentals needed once you graduated, including Git. We did group-style large coding projects where teams had to submit their GitHub repo at the end.
The prof was able to review who committed what and then hammered us on good commit messages, clean coding style, testing, etc.. I feel that a large part of my career success was due to the early start I had from that course.
I think that this would be a great idea, and could also help combat students not doing anything in group projects.
I lone wolfed most of my group projects in college, and don't have any regrets, but, of the projects that I didn't loan wolf, most people didn't write a single line of code, or only contributed in relatively inconsequential ways.
I think that adopting distributed version control systems in higher education would be mostly good.
I'm in the PNW and the gray gloomy weather is a delight for me. I love mushroom foraging, love being surrounded by trees, the beautiful waterfalls, the wet hikes, the moss everywhere, the berry picking, everything! I used to live in a VERY sunny state, I found it depressing. Sun irritates me. I never realized how uncomfortable it made me until I moved to a rainy cloud region and felt at home for the first time. Really shows there's something for everyone!
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