MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-13 15:27:12+00:00
"The solution is to tax trucks 31,000 times more than cars."

OK, so what about consequences of that solution? With such taxes, I would expect the count of trucks to drop to ~ zero. Which, for many places in the world, means an abrupt cessation of any large-scale logistics.

Maybe big trucks could be replaced by a huge fleet of smaller trucks, but that also means 20x as many parking spots, drivers (there is a shortage of professional drivers almost everywhere) and much more congestion on the highways.

There aren't that many places that could shift their entire logistics onto rail. Even here in Czechia, where the rail network is about the densest in the world, we don't have much free capacity left on the main railway lines, and existing trains are chronically delayed.
by dfawcus | 2025-04-13 15:29:09+00:00
Context is not need for any code which can block.

Context is only needed where one has a dynamic graph where one wishes to cleanly tear down that graph. One can operate blocking tx/rx within a fixed graph without the need for any Context to be present.

Possibly folks are thinking of this only for "web services" type of things, where everying is being exchanged over an HTTP/HTTPS request.

However channels / CSP can be used in much wider problem realms.

The real gain I found from the CSP / Actor model approach to things is the ability to reason through the problems, and the ability to reason through the bugs.

What I found with CSP is that I accept the possibility of accidentally introducing potential deadlocks (where there is a dependancy loop in messaging) but gain the ability to reason about state / data evolution. As opposed to the "multithreaded" access to manipulate data (albeit with locks/mutexes) where one can not obviously reason through how a change occurred, and its timing.

For the bugs which occur in the two approaches, I found the deadlock with incorrect CSP to be a lot easier to debug (and fix) vs the unknown calling thread which happened to manipulate a piece of (mutex protected) shared state.

This arises from the Actor like approach of a data change only occurring in the context of the one thread.
by senderista | 2025-04-13 15:29:30+00:00
Several years ago when I was writing a deployment system for a cloud distributed database, I tried to automate everything with Ansible playbooks and the Ansible "API" (LOL). I pretty quickly gave up on implementing anything but the most trivial logic in templated YAML and switched to Python (wrapping maximally-dumb Ansible playbooks) for everything nontrivial.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-13 15:29:57+00:00
Coding itself can be fun, perhaps especially when one is trying to optimize in some way (faster, less memory usage, more minimal, etc), but at least for me (been S/W eng for 45+ years) I think the real satisfaction is conquering the complexity and challenges of the project, and ultimately the ability to dream about something and conjure it up to become a reality. Maybe coding itself was more fun back in the day of 8-bit micros where everything was a challenge (not enough speed or memory), but nowadays typically that is not the case - it's more about the complexity of what is being built (unless it's some boilerplate CRUD app where there is no fun or challenge at all).

With today's AI, driven by code examples it was trained on, it seems more likely to be able to do a good job of optimization in many cases than to have gleaned the principles of conquering complexity, writing bug-free code that is easy and flexible to modify, etc. To be able to learn these "journeyman skills" an LLM would need to either have access to a large number of LARGE projects (not just Stack Overflow snippets) and/or the thought processes (typically not written down) of why certain design decisions were made for a given project.

So, at least for time being, as a developer wielding AI as a tool, I think we can still have the satisfaction of the higher level design (which may be unwise to leave to the AI, until it is better able to reason and learn), while leaving the drudgework (& a little bit of the fun) of coding to the tool. In any case we can still have the satisfaction of dreaming something up and making it real.
by garciasn | 2025-04-13 15:29:57+00:00
As someone who was married and is now divorced, I can absolutely see the draw. I don’t think of it as “state intervention in relationships,” as I’m not a libertarian, but aside from tax breaks, which mean absolutely nothing when I have to pay for my ex-wife to live carefree for the rest of her life simply because we were married and she was lazy, doesn’t offset the 19 years of tax offsets she squandered.
by amy214 | 2025-04-13 15:30:05+00:00
Also before the discussion goes off in a random direction such as software frameworks, I want to point everyone to volume 37, book 5, chapter 72, pages 8843-9023 (2022 incremental update) of their feasibility report. In it, they introduce a new cryptocoin known as "HIGGSCOIN" which will help fund the reactor. It has some interesting innovations for realtime payment systems, something that can be a pain point for bitcoin
by strcat | 2025-04-13 15:30:16+00:00
Feature development is going to be a bit slower for at least a couple months due to several of our core developers being temporarily unavailable.

We're actively working on several major improvements including automatic generation of random passphrases and PINs, further improvements to VPN lockdown mode, per-app toggles for access to clipboard content from other apps to go beyond the existing restriction of only the focused app and keyboard being able to read it, etc.

You can look through https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues with the Feature type and enhancement label. GitHub unfortunately didn't provide a way to automatically migrate the older enhancement label to Feature type. We could use the API for it but haven't yet so you'll need to use both the old and new methods.
by jmclnx | 2025-04-13 15:30:28+00:00
Yes, this is what I do:

* Linux: "/usr/local" or "/opt/local" depending on distro

* NetBSD: "/usr/local", NetBSD packages go into "/usr/pkg". I wish all other systems adopted pkgsrc :(

* OpenBSD: "/opt/local", OpenBSD packages go into /usr/local

If on a system I do not "own", like AIX at work or SDF, I use $HOME/local
by op00to | 2025-04-13 15:30:28+00:00
EPA’s guidance used to state that one gallon of petroleum can contaminate up to one million gallons of water. Unfortunately, sourcing specific federal data or risk assessments reflecting this magnitude has become difficult, as crucial information underpinning these kinds of impact and cost projections appears to have been purged from public EPA websites over the last few months. I guess you’ll just have to deal with this when you hide information.
by meesles | 2025-04-13 15:30:47+00:00
Agreed with this point. Folks are moving away from traditional relationship structures, and have been for a while.

If you want a personal anecdote - I'm partnered, not married, we don't plan to have kids or marry, and worry pretty much 0 about retirement or having enough funds to pass on to another generation. We're just enjoying our lives for however long that may be.
by sapiogram | 2025-04-13 15:30:51+00:00
> My rule of thumb is that the goroutine that writes to a channel is responsible for closing it. In this case, a deferred call to close the channel in HandlePlayer is sufficient.

This isn't your rule of thumb, it's the only practical way to do it. The problems arise when you have multiple goroutines writing to a channel, which is the case here.

> Still, this example has other issues (naked range over a channel?!) potentially contributing to the author’s confusion.

You sound way more confused than the author. I think you've misunderstood what the (admittedly very abstract) example is supposed to be doing.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-13 15:31:29+00:00
Seriously.

Nobody needs a package for "left-pad", which is the most infamous example.

But there are a lot of areas where it's not a good use of your time to reinvent the wheel. There's no moral virtue in writing everything yourself. And popular packages have gone through a more bug-finding and bug-fixing than your personal code probably ever will.
by shibaobun | 2025-04-13 15:31:30+00:00
Unfortunately, it only supports text currently :(

I also haven't really stress tested it, this was really more of a personal wiki that I wanted to create specifically with the hierarchical linking/backlinking that I didn't see any other notetaking applications having just the way I wanted. But since the application is relatively simple, I think Postgres should be able to handle the load.

It uses fulltext search built into Postgres for all the searching capabilities though, so hopefully it is good!
by shibaobun | 2025-04-13 15:33:00+00:00
I've been meaning to make a website for this like my other project [1], but I was lazy and just posted this to HN thinking it'd get like one upvote lol. It's really more of just my personal wiki that I wanted to create specifically with the hierarchical linking/backlinking that I didn't see any other notetaking applications having just the way I wanted.

[1] https://cannery.app
by qgin | 2025-04-13 15:33:15+00:00
As someone who worked public-facing jobs for a long time, I can assure you that millennials are not any more clueless than previous generations. They have more self-awareness about what they don’t know and are more willing to joke about it (“adulting”) or ask for help (calling family members), whereas previous generations tend to handle something they don’t understand by faking it or getting mad at the person asking the question.
by strcat | 2025-04-13 15:33:21+00:00
You can use Curve Pay for tap-to-pay on GrapheneOS in most of Europe including in the Netherlands. It also works in the UK, not just the EU. It unfortunately hasn't launched in the US yet.

Some of those banks may also still support using their own tap-to-pay. Europe has a standardized system for it and many banks support it. Check https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa... for those banks. There was a major shift to using Google Pay to reduce their development costs but there may be a major shift away from it now.

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu... should be sent to companies banning using GrapheneOS via the Play Integrity API. They can keep doing that while permitting GrapheneOS in a more secure way. Our users recently convinced several banks to implement it. Swissquote implemented it for their Yuh app and will hopefully do it for their main Swissquote app soon. It would be nicer if they didn't add Play Integrity API in the first place but progress can be made if users leave lots of reviews, support requests, etc. until they realize it's a big issue and either remove it or implement this as a replacement.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-13 15:33:33+00:00
You can digitize and lossily compress an NTSC signal significantly without losing much detail; that's why I call it redundant. Compression removes redundancy.

In ATSC the tradeoff between compression and error correction is such that a noisy channel is far more likely to cut out or otherwise be unusable than it would have been in NTSC.
by stouset | 2025-04-13 15:33:36+00:00
If you don’t think the current people doing this work or funding it are appropriate, you should be able to give at least a vague idea of an entity you think is better suited for either.

The only qualification you managed to put out there is that they don’t have bias. This is literally unachievable and you know it, which is why you won’t even attempt to even hint at a better party.
by dbalatero | 2025-04-13 15:33:41+00:00
I'm both relatively experienced as a musician and software engineer so I kinda see both sides. If musicians want to get better, they have to go to the practice room and work. There's a satisfaction to doing this work and coming out the other side with that hard-won growth.

Prior to AI, this was also true with software engineering. Now, at least for the time being, programmers can increase productivity and output, which seems good on the surface. However, with AI, one trades the hard work and brain cells created by actively practicing and struggling with craft for this productivity gain. In the long run, is this worth it?

To me, this is the bummer.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-13 15:33:54+00:00
If you want to build a two-stage water rocket, Air Command Rockets has detailed build series over on YouTube[1], from simple soda bottle setups to a custom rocket that they got[2] to over 1600m (5000 ft).

That's air and water propelling a rocket a mile up!

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@AirCommandRockets

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCaiK3Zqs4M
by 9dev | 2025-04-13 15:34:34+00:00
That isn’t what TypeScript is for, you’re describing a similar but unrelated problem, namely runtime type validation. There’s a reason why JSON.parse() returns any. However. TS allows to avoid logical errors in the program's source, which is a class of errors historically very important, since JavaScript is so highly dynamic.

The debug mode sounds interesting at first thought, but quickly explodes in complexity when you deal with more complex object types and signatures. To enable automatic runtime validation for all cases, you would need to rewrite programs so thoroughly that you’re pretty much guaranteed to introduce bugs and behaviour changes that were not present in the source code.

In my opinion it’s great that TS draws a strict boundary to avoid runtime impact at all cost, and leave that to libraries like Zod, which handle dealing with external data.

> to catch all the "somebody fetched a wrong type from the backend" or "someone did some stupid ((a as any) as B) once to silence the compiler and now you can't trust any type assertion about your codebase" problems. Nada.

Those type casts are sure annoying, but what’s the alternative? Even in your hypothetical debug mode, you would not be safe here, since you’re effectively telling the compiler you know better and it’s supposed to transform that type, not assert it. Or do you want to remove the escape hatch „as“ is? Because that would be a major pain in the ass in situations where you just do know better, or don’t want to ensure perfect type safety for something you know will work.

You can’t make things idiot proof, no matter how hard you try. That doesn’t make preprocessing type hints useless.
by delichon | 2025-04-13 15:34:42+00:00
My brother was a never-married single in Seattle, and it was the cause of his death at the start of the pandemic. He was terminally lonely and without purpose and suicided. But he was a tremendously loyal person. If he was able to make a connection and form a family, he would have been full of purpose. Instead he lived quietly in a small house in a quiet neighborhood, and after he died none of his neighbors could even recognize his photo. He lived within a community but never reached out to it, and nobody ever reached in. Socially he might as well have been living in a cave on a remote island. He was a free proton in an atomized society. Aka an acid. I blame society, my brother, myself, and probably you too if I can figure out how.
by fatalhesitation | 2025-04-13 15:35:26+00:00
I find this site extremely valuable to fact check hype-driven speculation in all things tech. I work in metal processing, downstream from battery tech, so I thought I might contribute here with a bit of cautious skepticism:

"It’s long been possible to charge so quickly once, twice or perhaps even a handful of times over the 1,000-cycle lifetime of a typical EV battery with the 300-mile driving range most motorists demand, they said. But such a battery would burn up, and possibly catch fire, if subjected to consecutive five-minute charges for many hundreds of cycles, industry hands said."

and then,

"Batteries are all about trade-offs between range, weight and charging time. Building a battery that can handle a huge jolt of electricity at once would limit the EV’s range to 100 or 150 miles. The reason is the balance between the electrodes. To enable lithium ions to move that fast into the negative electrode—the anode—it must be made ultrathin. But if you make the anode thinner, you have to make the positive electrode—the cathode—thinner, too, which reduces its capacity to hold energy. That decreases the driving range.

In addition, producing that huge jolt would require costly upgrades to charging stations and the power grid, which at the moment can’t meet such a demand. The cost to build a small four-charger station would be well over $1 million, according to Quincy Lee, CEO of Electric Era, a charging station company. Part of that cost is the large batteries the stations would require to buttress grid power."

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/electric-battery-han...
by pfdietz | 2025-04-13 15:35:59+00:00
I've come to a conclusion that the solution may be somewhat radical.

If coupling is reduced, it should become the norm for women to have and raise children alone, or at least without a male partner. This increases the burden on women, so at the same time the number of children they must support would have to decrease.

This could be achieved technologically, by filtering sperm to remove Y chromosome carrying gametes. As a result, the female/male ratio of newborns would dramatically increase. At the US TFR of 1.66, a 2:1 female to male ratio would be more than enough to maintain the population. Even higher ratios could be imagined, leading to an almost entirely female population.

Social engineering to reach this state is left as an exercise to the science fiction writer.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-04-13 15:36:27+00:00
But what if someone had to a do a trip where the gas stations where clearly out of the way of their route? That adds more time.

Gas stations are ubiquitous simply because they are 100 years worth of infrastructure roll out.

If you're saying that EV infrastructure isn't there yet, then you're stating the obvious.

But, and hear me out :

a) Will it stay that way? If 50% of vehicles are EV's then 50% of gas stations could be out of business, and that's a re-enforcing spiral of inconvenience. My view is that there some cases where a fossil fuel vehicle is the best choice. But when they're under 10% of all cases, will the infrastructure agree, or nix it by being 10% as common as it is now? Past a certain point the whole distribution system is unprofitable and just folds up. Then gasoline engines go the way of the horse: A few people still ride them, but it's mostly an impractical, expensive hobby with known issues with the smelly stuff that comes of of the back of them.

b) Gas stations of any kind, even bad ones, are rare at a home. Electrical plugs - wall sockets - are EV chargers usable for some purposes, and almost all homes have them. That level of emergency infrastructure is hard to beat.
by DannyBee | 2025-04-13 15:36:34+00:00
This is also true of course, but i'm using "best" more colloquially - let's assume it's top 10%.

That would match the rough stratification of doctor salaries (accounting for specialization, etc).

The average primary care family physician earns 350k in the us. The top 10% earn 1.3 million. The top 1% earn 4 million[1].

So enough people are hiring the best, or paying the best, to get a 4x difference and 10x difference in yearly pay.

I chose family PCP's because it seemed more unlikely that the top family PCP should be worth 10x more than the average. Whereas in something like neurosurgery, maybe? It felt at least arguable. Happy to be shown i'm wrong here.

In any case, it seems like this level of stratification would not exist if people weren't trying to get to see the "top" doctors all the time.

[1] There are lots of different data sources, but they all roughly have the same relative stratification even if the exact numbers are different. Since the actual numbers don't really matter to the point i'm making, i didn't try harder. But i will say all the data I find seems a bit of a mess.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-04-13 15:36:49+00:00
I don't know that stochastic terrorism is actually illegal in the US, especially if you're not a person of note. I'm pretty sure it's legal to say "Someone should really shoot that guy, he deserves to die and I hope someone does it."

Now, it might violate Hacker News's policies and get deleted, but that's different from it being against the law.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-13 15:37:34+00:00
In my experience it's for calendar-related stuff. You need to store things permanently with the timezone, especially for recurring events. You don't want your scheduled lunch to move from 12 to 1 because it's DST.

And so anything server-related with calendars will be making tons of these conversions constantly. And you can't cache things long-term in UTC because the conversions of future events can change, when countries change DST etc.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-13 15:38:12+00:00
(some of those thousands signals can be dependent on GPS too...)

it is possible to listen to small part of spectrum thru receivers which enthusiasts connected to internet, without buying anything for example -http://kiwisdr.com/public/

but "high performance signals" are not in frequency range of those radios. but it is possible to hear ham radio, aviation, military, maritime, not only voice but weather fax, other digital signals, all sorts of timing signals...
by nopeYouAreWrong | 2025-04-13 15:38:36+00:00
"The game called for picking six numbers from 1 and 54. For a pro gambler, some sets of numbers—such as 1,2,3,4,5,6—aren’t worth picking because so many other players choose them, which would split the pot. Marantelli’s operation bought 99.3% of the possibilities."

Wouldn't this be 54x53x52x51x50x49 = 18,595,558,800 therefore 99.3% is 18,465,389,888.4 or basically over 18 billion dollars in tickets (at $1 per ticket)?
by stouset | 2025-04-13 15:39:18+00:00
> However, I no longer accept published reports at face value, unless I check who the authors are, and who funds them.

No, you use this as a cop out to deny results. In this case you have done this check and you have decided you do not want to believe the outcome so you wave around a vague charge of bias in a lame attempt to discredit it.

Please show me one single scientific report or conclusion you’ve accepted that passed this same “bias test”. Neither the authors nor their funding source may have a particular interest in the outcome. Any such example will do.
by clbrmbr | 2025-04-13 15:39:22+00:00
I had a lot of fun building rockets in a similar way as a kid. We also tried PVC but discovered that it fails in a dangerous way, after which we used only copper. I had fun programming a PIC16 in assembler to read from the accelerometer and fire the home made igniters of black powder, nitrocellulose laquer, and nichrome wire.
by stonogo | 2025-04-13 15:40:40+00:00
I'm sure you know this, but for those who might not, US sci-fi was just as varied as anywhere else... except in the domain of John W. Campbell, for decades the editor of the biggest-circulation sci-fi magazine in the country, where he very much explicitly selected for that kind of story. Lots of famous authors active in the era have tales of how they edited their work to meet Campbells demands -- I recall one where the author switched the 'human' and 'alien' species because Campbell wouldn't print a story where humanity 'lost.'

Truly a fascinating character, and an author in his own right, responsible for the story that John Carpenter would adapt for his film The Thing. I don't share his taste in science fiction, but he had a massive impact on the genre.