MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dawnofdusk | 2025-04-18 20:13:35+00:00
Actually historically John Napier discovered the logarithm before Jacob Bernoulli computed e by his compound interest formula. IMO it would be more fruitful to teach the special functions exp(x) and ln(x) just as functions, which is more historical, with the important and unique property that they turn multiplication into addition and vice versa. The fact that exp(1) is some irrational number in between 2 and 3 is just a fun fact at this point, and the connection to compound interest is an even more fun fact.

My assumption is that some schools think the number e should be introduced much like the number pi. Except the number pi has a much more natural definition, relating to circles, and appears in important formulas like the area of a circle. Obviously it would be possible to first introduce the special functions sin(x), cos(x), etc. for which it is a fun fact that there is some irrational number between 3 and 4 such that sin(pi) = 0, but it's clear that this would be silly.

For the number e, however, this approach is not so silly, as what is important and useful are indeed the functions exp(x) and ln(x). The constant e itself does not appear in any natural or intuitive formulas, but only in connection with the function exp(x) evaluated at x=1 (or x = i*pi, in the famous formula, which should not really be taught at the high school level IMO).
by fernvenue | 2025-04-18 20:13:48+00:00
> You present sudo as a method of installing drivers; CLI-anything should be the last thing that makes "something better" for a bog standard Windows user!

I agree, and this is why I also introduced beginner-friendly systems like Ubuntu here, which provide graphical driver management. This is one of the reasons why Linux is better I think, it offers a simple way for beginners and alternatives for those who prefer command line or other methods.

> You misunderstand. Full screen exclusive mode does not exist in Windows. You can't say that it doesn't work in "full screen" mode but works in "borderless". They're one in the same.

My experience shows that there are differences in implementation, at least for some games. Because I did encounter issues with not being able to return to the desktop, and I'm not the only one, my friends tell me I'm not alone, as they have had similar problems.

> And you are aware of anti-cheat that will not function in Wine due to the anti-cheat being a kernel driver. I'm not saying this is good, it's quite bad, but it's there and prevents you from using a non-Windows OS.

Yea, I have actually introduced a lot of content on this topic in the articles, including the current support for a series of anti-cheat protocols. I don't deny that there are a few very specific games that can't be played on other platforms due to anti-cheat measures, but the vast majority of games can run normally on Linux even with anti-cheat mechanisms in place. By the way, the example of Rogue Company that I mentioned in the article has happened to me more than once. Most of the time, it fails to start on Windows, especially if I reinstall the system, it will almost 100% refuse to connect online, while it has never failed on Linux. My friend also encountered connection issues when trying to play with me on Windows. I think this shows that Windows is not always exempt?

> Every console you listed has an emulator on Windows.

It turns out that they don't always run smoothly on Windows, or rather, on various versions of Windows. However, on Linux, this is no longer a problem due to packaging options like flatpak, additional dependencies may need to be installed on Windows. Users don't need to search for them everywhere, they can simply search in the store.
by renewiltord | 2025-04-18 20:13:58+00:00
Here's one: 3 months emergency savings is the median position https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/sheddata...

There's a good summary on Matt Yglesias's blog of Matt Darling (economist at Niskanen Center and Twitter debunker of this paycheck to paycheck myth) on the subject: https://www.slowboring.com/i/149683266/the-median-financial-...
by hdjjhhvvhga | 2025-04-18 20:14:17+00:00
To people downvoting the above comment - could you explain your reasons? You may feel all arguments have already been said on this issue but the situation is different today. And especially young people, whether white or colored, feel they have more bleak future in front of them than the previous generations and basically refuse to reproduce globally. In this light, it's worth having this discussion again because it is not the same.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-18 20:14:54+00:00
These kind of convictions aren't rare in the firearms domain. People get arrested or convicted all the time for doing stuff they had no idea was illegal. More recently a Navy Sailor (Patrick Adamiak) in the pipeline to be a SEAL was convicted after selling an imported parts kit that had been destroyed per ATF guidelines from the early 2000s. But apparently when he resold it, (after buying it openly from gunbroker), the ATF decided the way the kit was cut up was wrong and put him away for 20 years. Oh yes they had a few other excuses -- he had a decomissioned RPG tube, so the ATF just put an entirely other gun inside the fucking tube and fired it to claim it still work.

In that case, even the Navy, which almost never does this to felons, terminated him with an honorable discharge and even let him run up all his liberty time before releiving him.
by sensen7 | 2025-04-18 20:14:55+00:00
>Yes, this is the downstream effects of designing APIs this way. Breaking them up into smaller chunks of state makes it significantly more pleasant.

What they're describing is the downstream effect of not designing APIs that way. If you could have a single giant GraphicsState and define everything as a method on it, you would have to pass around barely any arguments at all: everything would be reachable from the &mut self reference. And either with some annotations or with just a tiny bit of non-local analysis, the compiler would still be able to ensure non-aliasing usage.

"functions that each take 20 parameters and return 5 values" is what you're forced to write in alternative to that, to avoid partial borrowing errors: for example, instead of a self.resize_framebuffer() method, a free function resize_framebuffer(&mut self.framebuffer, &mut self.size, &mut self.several_other_pieces_of_self, &mut self.borrowed_one_by_one).

I agree that the severity of this issue is highly dependent on what you're building, but sometimes you really do have a big ball of mutable state and there's not much you can do about it.
by metalman | 2025-04-18 20:15:24+00:00
I am now waiting for news that someone has bio hacked a cockroach or a fruitfly to play doom, if not autonomously then for the full cold shivers, they are now robotisising insects, which could then be accesed through an interface to play doom on a toothbrush booted from a qr code. Sci-fi is lagging
by mrweiner | 2025-04-18 20:15:37+00:00
Aside from any diagnoses or assessing burnout, I’d suggest thinking about what is actually causing the lack of motivation when you sit down. Working on a business is different from coding, per se. You might lack motivation to work on your business specifically or to generally be figuring out business problems. All coding is not equal — are you coding bug fixes, new features, solutions architecture? These all kind of have different underlying requirements and you might find that some motivate you more than others. For me, bug fixes are necessary but draining. The days where I spend 8 hours putting out those fires absolutely suck. Doing the “create a puzzle and build the solution” stuff is way more exciting, fulfilling, and motivating for me.

Your business revenue can really help you out in this department. If it happens to be that you lack motivation for specific things, can you hire those out and focus on working on the things that actually give you joy and satisfaction?

The suggestion of therapy is a good one, but I think that figuring out the root causes of your lack of motivation is also a good first step. So when you sit down to work and can’t get going, ask yourself “what am I trying to do, why am I doing it, why don’t I want to, and would handing this off to somebody else give me motivation to move onto the next thing.”

Maybe the answer is to sell the business and find something else that’s exciting to work on, or just to give your mind the space to recover.

Best of luck!
by Timon3 | 2025-04-18 20:18:14+00:00
> To begin with, they often are. A lot of school libraries actually have test prep materials available.

They have some materials available, but often older or less specialized ones. That's my whole point: rich people have access to better materials. This is simply a fact.

> This is the thing where perfect is impossible. If you live in an urban area, having a library within walking distance is feasible because there are enough people there to justify it. If you live in a rural area, it isn't. What do you propose to do about it?

How about introducing DEI programs that help these disadvantaged people access the same materials? Again, you're basically saying that they have to suck it up and accept their position. That's not meritocracy.

> Rich people will pay for things that aren't scalable. If your parents make $20M/year, they can spend $1M/year on their kid. If you spent $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US, the cost would be $74 Trillion, which exceeds the US GDP. And there is a threshold past which additional spending has diminishing returns.

There's obviously an incredibly large gap between "spend $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US" and "poor kids should either have no access at all, or have to walk large distances to public libraries, only have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available". The latter simply isn't meritocracy, yet you keep arguing that it is, and keep arguing against DEI programs.
by SomeUserName432 | 2025-04-18 20:18:20+00:00
> For mIRC's first 20 years when you bought it, the license was for all future versions for life. In ~2016 though that changed and they expired all previous lifetime licenses. Now you get a license only for a year.

That does not seem to hold true..

I do recall that the older licenses expired, but my current active mIRC license was issued September 2018.
by Jimmc414 | 2025-04-18 20:18:50+00:00
Interesting that the recent ruling against blanket cell tower data searches wouldn't have affected the Mark Gooch case. In that insatnce, investigators used targeted cell phone data (ie "geofencing") to track his movements, not a mass data collection. Under the new standards, this type of focused surveillance would still be permitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBBTfy29WKI

They absolutely wouldn't have caught him without the cell phone data, highlighting in my mind, the fine line between privacy and safety, which is something I personally struggle to articulate clearly. While it's reassuring this ruling wouldn't affect this case, I can easily see how "tower dumps" could be misused. It's confusing, though, that the judge ruled this unconstitutional action permissible "just this once." Either it's unconstitutional or it's not. Judges shouldn't have the authority grant one-time exceptions.
by jeffbee | 2025-04-18 20:19:06+00:00
Part of that statement is correct, part of it is misleading.

> AMP required allowing any AMP CDN to cache your pages.

Sort of correct: this is true if and only if you wanted the rank boost for Google search. If you just wanted to serve AMP and have snappy page, not entirely correct.

> other scripts on your site might be incapable of running on your AMP site

Correct, because that's the entire point of AMP. It is a straightjacket intended to make it technically impossible for your "other scripts" to run, because actual users hate your "other scripts" and they make users' phones overheat etc.
by olyjohn | 2025-04-18 20:19:09+00:00
I mean, that's fun that your kids can play Minecraft and build in it. But does that teach them anything about technology?

Half the fun of having a computer back in the day was digging through the filesystem, mucking with settings and breaking things... looking at what was on floppy disks and CDROMs (I found Weezer's music video and a Pinball game on the Windows 95 CDROM, it was thrilling). You learned how the computers worked, and that was powerful. It enabled you to do so much more than just play games. You could view source, and suddenly you were a web developer. You could hit up Warez sites and get access to all the professional software that you couldn't afford.

10 year old me now, would have ended up playing with my parents smartphone, then getting sucked into endless feeds of shit, and actually learning nothing. I might have given up. There's no curiosity on the dominant computing platforms because you can't do what you want with them, you can only do what you're allowed to do. A pocket computer could be so powerful, and indeed they do a lot, but they could be so much more than a conduit for middlemen to take your money.

Yes I know that ESP32s and Pis and lots of cool experimental things exist. And they are cool. But the initial experience of using a computer back in the day was what sparked my interest. Locked down iPhones and Android tablets let you run Apps. What a discouraging experience that must be.
by const_cast | 2025-04-18 20:19:09+00:00
> Private businesses are accountable to their customers

Lol no, not at all. They actively try to deceive consumers through propaganda campaigns (marketing) and deception.

For example, did you know J&J knew about the asbestos problem in their baby powder in the mid 70s? They decided to just lie about it, because they knew cancer agents in their baby powder makes it unappealing to mothers and fathers. We didn't find out about this until 2020. That's 50 years of cancer baby powder.

You don't have any insight into how companies operate. You don't vote on anything. You have zero guarantee they have your interests at heart. How, then, are they accountable? They can do whatever they want, whenever they want.

> Government can have the disapproval of over half the population and continue to operate.

Yeah, until the next election.

I mean, how many people "approve" of the CEO of their company? Surely way fucking less than 50%. Most of the time these CEOs are blatantly evil and stupid. But they call all the shots and you don't get any vote at all.
by asksomeoneelse | 2025-04-18 20:20:05+00:00
It will never cease to shock me how enslaving men for military purpose is still considered an acceptable thing to do in developed countries. Always with the same excuse "It's necessary for the common good". More like "I won't be part of the conscripts going to the battlefield, but will benefit from it, so I'm ok with it".

Even pro-equality and "My body, my choice" people seem content to just pay lip service on the matter, if even that.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-18 20:20:26+00:00
In the US, the majority of federal government spend is on old people (between social security, Medicare, health services, and VA benefits).

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

It’s always been interesting to me that healthcare for kids is not as popular as healthcare for old people, such that there is no Medicare for kids. There is Medicaid, but it pays healthcare providers less…why?
by dogacel | 2025-04-18 20:21:03+00:00
> A counter that can be synchronized on demand is kinda superfluous --- not really secret and not terribly relevant either. All else being equal, an attacker can sync up just as easily as a legitimate client so why bother with the counter?

A unique counter for each authorization attempt ensures the resulting key is different for each attempt, which makes replay attacks not possible. I agree if you sync the counter two ways, it is better to use a "nonce", a totally random secret each time.
by SomeUserName432 | 2025-04-18 20:21:20+00:00
> I started coding in the early 2000s in mIRC Scripting. It felt like magic. With only a few lines I could add stuff to the context menus, write auto responses, etc.

You could write entire projects in mIRC, there was more or less nothing you could not do.

You can write custom UIs, use raw TCP/UPP sockets.. you could write mIRC in mIRC.

It was in its time quite empowering. Very few languages were mature enough to truly compete with it for simplicity in it's time (even Visual Basic, which would win out on UI, but lose on sockets etc)
by MrJohz | 2025-04-18 20:22:19+00:00
One of the big advantages of Rust's type system is that, if you decide you want to change something (add a parameter, give a type a lifetime, rewrite an entire module), you can just do that, and then follow the errors until they're all gone. Often, once the types have been fixed again, the result will work first time when you try and run it.

In this regard, Rust (and other languages where lots of data invariants can be encoded in the type system) is very flexible and easy to maintain indeed, because you can easily make changes, even in very old or poorly-maintained code, without having to worry about the consequences. Moreover, rather than writing all the unit tests yourself, it's as if the compiler is writing the unit tests for you.

In fairness, you can't encode everything in the type system, so you still need unit tests in top of that, but in my experience you can get away with far fewer. In general, I would say that Rust's type system, when combined with unit tests, is far more flexible, powerful, and easy to maintain than dynamic Python with only unit tests.
by Zeetah | 2025-04-18 20:22:54+00:00
I know nothing about sailing. I've been on a few sailboats. I love the idea of wind power - probably why I like flying remote control sailplanes.

I would love to volunteer on someone's race/sail boat to get some experience. I'm happy to take the ASA introductory course or ? course.

Any advice on how to move forward? I'm in the Seattle area.
by scoofy | 2025-04-18 20:23:45+00:00
There is a conflation in the idea behind this comment that drives me crazy. This version of equity based on race is using race as a proxy for outcomes in life that are actually based on a wide variety of factors. Equality based on race is treating peoples race as equal.

The idea that we care about equity is important, but using race as a proxy means we need to care especially about the proxy and making sure the proxy is representative of the outcomes and how the inputs are effecting the outputs. And, if we're being honest, it's kind of an arbitrary proxy beyond the correlation.

We are already seeing huge problems here with men vs women using gender as a proxy for outcomes, where we've basically flip-flopped graduation rates, but since it's a lagging indicator, we've really gotten ourselves into a pickle where we are creating an equity problem while trying to solve an equity problem, because we're so focused on outputs throughout every stage of the life process that we're missing a massive shift in the inputs (like who we're graduating).

Equality is important. Equity is important. They are different things, that should have different attention. Equality uses identity directly. Equity uses identity as a proxy for outcomes. We need to be very careful when we focus too much on one over the other.
by Baeocystin | 2025-04-18 20:24:06+00:00
If I said "gosh, I can't believe you can actually think at a human speed, having to use words for everything! It's like having to speak out loud when you're reading, so slow! Have you been diagnosed by a professional on how to deal with this obvious handicap?" it would be pretty insulting, yes? Even if I said I wasn't trying to put someone down, because the implicit assumptions baked in to the very statements themselves.

All I can say is, as someone who also does not have an internal monologue, and can easily and happily go days without thinking in words (which is very, very different than not thinking at all), please just accept as a given that people like me exist, we're fine, do not feel like we have any deficits, and it's exceedingly frustrating to come across comments like yours whenever the subject comes up, because of the raw arrogance of it all. I can completely and honestly believe that you have a rich, engaging internal life, even if the quantity of words involved would drive me mad, because we're different people with different thinking styles. All I ask is for the same respect in return. If we can start there, then we can have a real conversation, which could be fun. I know that when I first learned that 'internal monologue' wasn't just a literary, poetically-descriptive term, but that people actually heard voices/words in their heads while thinking, it utterly floored me. That I'd made it to college without knowing this really threw me for a loop, and made me think about what other seemingly-core differences in cognition are out there. It really is a fascinating subject to think about.
by nneonneo | 2025-04-18 20:24:07+00:00
In my setup, I have one host that can take multiple actions on a second host, with a restricted set of file paths.

I created a shell script on the second host called "from_host_1" which implements the logic to parse the first host's request and any file paths it supplies, validates them, translates the paths as needed, and then executes the corresponding program.

This way, I can just use a single SSH key which can perform multiple functions. On the first host, I have a bunch of tiny scripts like `~/bin/func` which basically performs `ssh secondhost func "$@"`.

In the OPs case, they seem to have two different hosts which can run two different commands. Two separate SSH keys seems like a reasonable thing to do, because sharing the same key across two systems increases your risk if one machine is compromised.
by dawnofdusk | 2025-04-18 20:24:12+00:00
>The problem with this approach is that, since we were already introduced to exponents and logarithms in algebra but via different definitions, it always left this unanswered question in my head about how we knew these two definitions were the same, since everyone quickly glossed over that fact.

They just shouldn't be taught in algebra. There, one is thinking about oh how do I extend the definition of exponentiation from integers to real numbers. But thinking about continuous extensions of an integer function to the real line is really something that should be saved for calculus.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-18 20:24:43+00:00
“Tilting at windmills” makes it sound like a pointless and impossible task. I don’t even agree that this is a culture problem. It’s an infrastructure problem wrapped up in tyranny of the minority NIMBY politics.

But even if we accept your premise that American “culture” prefers cars (rather than being a result of decades of expanding as fast and as cheaply as possible across the country), culture can change. It does change.