MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beloch | 2025-04-11 15:12:42+00:00
Also, never dry fire your bow. (i.e. Never pull and release it if you're not shooting an arrow.)

When you pull a bow, you're putting a significant amount of potential energy into it. Your back and arms do work that becomes tension in the limbs of the bow. When you fire an arrow, most of that energy goes into propelling the arrow down range. The bow is designed to do this. If there is no arrow, that energy has to go somewhere. Typically, it goes into vibrations that the bow is not designed to handle. This can cause delamination, cracks or even catastrophic failure in your face.

Just because a bow survives one dry fire doesn't mean it'll survive two or three or more. A bow that has been dry fired is not safe to use and needs to be checked out.
by eyelidlessness | 2025-04-11 15:12:50+00:00
How is it implicit? The open parenthesis is before the function name rather than after, but the function isn’t called without both parentheses.

If you want to use commas, you can in Lisp dialects I’m familiar with—they’re optional because they’re treated as whitespace, but nothing is stopping you if you find them more readable!
by MarceColl | 2025-04-11 15:12:59+00:00
It's not really implicit though, the first element of a list that is evaluated is always a function. So (FUN 1 2) is an explicit function call. The problem is that it doesn't look like C-like languages, not that it's not explicit.

In theory ' just means QUOTE, it should not be overloaded (although I've mostly done Common Lisp, so no idea if in other impl that changes). Can you show an example of overloaded meaning?
by pjc50 | 2025-04-11 15:13:05+00:00
> It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.

Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense, including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became unworkably complicated.

PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value extraction layer on top of it.
by bluGill | 2025-04-11 15:13:22+00:00
IF you are running a successful business you are probably spending the majority of your time not on the thing you are enthusiastic about, but instead just business work. Many businesses fail because the owner doesn't spend enough time in the office - many businesses owners suddenly became a lot more successful when they spent more time in the office. They likely are good and and like doing what the business is about (running a backhoe, pulling wires, or whatever), but all the office work means they never get to do it. To the employees it looks like they sold out and don't get it anymore - but the employees don't realize it is because of that office work they get their paycheck on time.

As such it is not surprise things change. You can't go from making less money than you could elsewhere to making a nice income without a lot of office time.

Of course it is common to take the above too far. There is need for office work, but often those office employees forget that it is about the real world.
by acyou | 2025-04-11 15:13:23+00:00
That quote is pretty dumb, I see it quoted a lot. It's arrogant, assuming, demeaning, elitist. And I don't think it's true. Who would say "a faster horse"? It doesn't make any sense, because people know/knew that horses are what they are.

A better, more constructive approach is to proactively identify how emerging technology can fit people's needs. And for sure, you need to verify that there is an actual need for what you are building, and then go build it.

Netflix and TikTok are not the "faster horse" here. Generative AI is clearly the "faster horse". It's a disruptive technology that will change the entire structure of society, much like the internal combustion engine. And no one said they wanted that either, that doesn't make people dumb, or user surveys pointless. Who is currently saying they want a "faster computer"?

Henry Ford saying that would probably be like hearing Sam Altman say "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster computer". It's not true, it doesn't match reality.
by toast0 | 2025-04-11 15:13:39+00:00
A search for 'linux process live migration' picks up at least one repo that claims to have done it, and a bunch of other interesrting things.

For a very simple program, with limited I/O, it's not too hard; especially if you don't mind a significant pause to move. Difficulty comes when you have FDs to migrate and if you need to reduce the pausing. If you need to keep FDs to the filesystem or the program will load/store to the filesystem periodically, you'd need to do a filesystem migration too... If you need to keep FDs for network sockets, you've got to transfer those somehow.

If it's just stdin/out/err, you could probably do the migration in userspace with some difficulty if you need to keep pid constant (but maybe you don't need that either).

Minimal pausing involves letting the program run on the initial machine while you copy memory, setting pages to read-only so you can catch writes, and only pausing the program once the copy is substantially finished. Then you pause execution on the initial machine. If there's a significant amount of modified pages to copy over when you pause, you can still start execution on the new machine, as long as the modified pages are marked unavailable, if you background copy them before they're used great... if not, you have to block until the modified data comes through.

Probably you do this on two nearby machines with fast networking, and the program doesn't have a lot of writes all over memory, so the pause should be short.
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-11 15:13:40+00:00
> but also a huge rise in very explicitly leftist and anti-AI content in a way that did not previously exist - especially on economic/industry issues.

It's always existed; you just haven't been around it. It stretches back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; read about the Luddites, Blanketeers, and John Henry.

Humans generally don't like having their livelihoods threatened and that's happening more and more as the people who paid others for labor are finding ways to not pay people while simultaneously getting the fruits of labor. It used to just be physical tasks that were simple to automate; now, it's knowledge-based jobs.
by dtgm92 | 2025-04-11 15:14:00+00:00
still use my 2015 galaxy s6 every day

nothing has been repaired or replaced on it, same battery also

i was curious how long it would last so i kept using it. i run it in low power mode with screen dimmed. it only sees wifi, no actual phone calling. a lot of apps dont work anymore for it, but it plays videos fine, lets me take notes, and i can browse the internet so thats more than enough. fdroid app store is helpful to find older versions of apps that work
by Dylan16807 | 2025-04-11 15:14:30+00:00
If it's down on the day that submissions open, then don't rush it. But when the window is closing there are thousands of dollars at stake for millions of people and I consider that pretty critical. It's not a generic outage. And it's also not unexpected. There's a lot less "Sorry wife, I'm not coming home today" when you scheduled it three months in advance.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-11 15:15:02+00:00
[rant]

The thing that really pissed me off about Amazon Business is that they bought Small Parts and killed it off. Small Parts was a tiny version of McMaster-Carr that specialized in fasteners, small diameter fluid handling, short sections of specialty materials, and in general, quality "small parts."

If I bought directly from Small Parts, I knew I'd get exactly what I wanted. Ordering from Amazon Business? A complete crapshoot. Going to www.smallparts.com now just redirects to an Amazon 404 page!

[/rant]
by eadmund | 2025-04-11 15:15:04+00:00
> As a reader, I don't want page authors to start hard coding sizes into these elements, because then they'll be more likely to choose non-default values to make their page stand out a bit more.

Completely agree. In fact, this is what auditing tools should flag.

Let HTML be HTML!

Frankly, I think that the existing algorithm sounds correct, but I could be wrong.
by midnightblue | 2025-04-11 15:15:09+00:00
> I think there is a decent argument that some of the nihilism we see in the population comes from seeing a general unwillingness to jail or proportionately punish wealthy criminals.

You are so right. Whatever the benefit of having laws at all is, it evaporates when laws are selectively not applied.

We're seeing the consequencefs of it today, in the "content creation" business and many other. It's a dog eat dog situation. Truth lost any relevance. As the influencer you know very well that whatever you're feeding your audience is empty hope, dreams and fantasy. As long as the check from IG/YT/TikTok is big enough, you don't care. Why care?
by bigyabai | 2025-04-11 15:15:13+00:00
The issue is pretty obvious to most normal people. My ex bought a Purism phone and laptop, said he would switch to Linux the moment they arrived at his doorstep. He ended up buying a new Macbook and iPhone before any of his Purism hardware started shipping. He might still be using the Apple hardware too.

I love FOSS as much as the next guy but you're being outright facetious if you can't see Purism's problem.
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-04-11 15:15:33+00:00
I've long wondered why Amazon made it harder to buy products from them, why they've decreased the [customer] value of their search, decreased the value of the filters, decreased the value of the reviews...

I mean the answer has to be "they make more money this way" but for me it's means I groan internally before going to Amazon because finding the product I want will be almost impossible - it's even hard if I already visited and already found what I wanted to buy, finding it again, near impossible. Not even basics like search by product manufacturer actually work.

Sites with usable search are a relative joy.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-11 15:15:36+00:00
You cannot ultimately chain people to their desks. What you either get is a "soft" withdrawal of labour (people refuse to take the job if they have any other choice available, as we're discussing upthread, so you get dregs), or the whole thing explodes into "illegal" strikes. Which are harder to resolve, because you made sure there's no one organisation to negotiate with.
by sofixa | 2025-04-11 15:16:19+00:00
By almost everyone who has done a comparison.

VMs have a full OS that needs to be maintained (patched, upgraded when EOL, etc.).

Hypervisors traditionally cost a metric crapton of money per core. Yes, Proxmox is pretty good, but it's the exception, not the norm. They're also relatively slow in spinning up new VMs (kind of by definition, it takes a lot of time to emulate a full blown replica of hardware vs just starting a process in a cgroup/jail).

And most of all, VMs are just solving the wrong problem. You don't care about emulating hardware, you care about running some workload. Maybe it needs specific hardware or a virtual version of it, but more likely than not, it's a regular batch processor or API that can happily run in a container with almost none of the overhead of a full VM.
by 1024core | 2025-04-11 15:16:36+00:00
The Government _can't_ be streamlined because the right incentives are not in place, and human beings respond to incentives.

For example: if a bureaucrat does not use up their budget, it is (often) reduced proportionately in the next iteration. So these people have an incentive to use up the entire budget, if they want to have any hope of getting their requests next year. As a result, they will often do wasteful spending. I know this from experience, because in my previous life as code monkey in a small-ish government contractor, my boss had made it an art form to figure out who had extra money left over near the end of the fiscal year and pitch them ideas. A few 100K here, a few 100K there and the company was making decent money just mooching off of the leftovers from Federal budgets.

If you want to fix the Federal government, you have to incentivize the officials to be rewarded for saving money.
by whimsicalism | 2025-04-11 15:16:38+00:00
i think we are approximately 30T beyond "slow and thoughtful approach to cutting". if you want your program to be considered carefully, pass it with the necessary tax increases to fund it. don't just punt the tax receipts problem to the next guy.

of course, if Trump is doing this all so he can pass his tax cuts as seems almost certain, he is no better. but frankly yes, the US needs deep cuts and concordant tax receipts increases to maintain a sustainable debt trajectory and price stability/productivity for the middle/working class.
by WorldMaker | 2025-04-11 15:16:41+00:00
ES2015 template strings from the beginning supported "tagged template literals" where the tag is a function that gets the template itself and the objects passed to the "holes" in the template as separate arguments. From there that function can do things like turn the holes themselves into something like SQL Parameter syntax and wrap the things that go in those holes in properly escaped SQL Parameters.

`some template {someVar}` was f-strings and someFunction`some template {someVar}` was more like what these t-strings provide to Python. t-strings return an object (called Template) with the template and the things that go into the "holes", versus tagged templates are a function calling pattern, but t-strings are still basically the other, richer half of ES2015+ template strings.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-11 15:17:06+00:00
Htmx is the exact opposite of what they're talking about. There are two concepts here: how you render and where you keep state.

HTMX is real time in the sense that it updates over the wire, but you're still keeping all state on the server side.

I don't want to reload the page to open a drawer. You'll notice HN isn't exactly mobile friendly because that requires hiding enough options that you need drawers or other ways to shrink and expand. You can do that with CSS, but that's still state, just state localized to that page load.

And there are sites that have unavoidably complex session state. You can have a resource that's on half the pages but is expensive to compute. I don't want to load it every time when almost none of it changes. I don't want to cache it on the server if it's a big payload

There's a world of difference between no state and over bloated SPAs
by bo1024 | 2025-04-11 15:17:11+00:00
Communication and customer relations issues. My experience, and that of many others online, was that Purism was not transparent or apparently honest about things like timelines and delays. People also had problems with getting Purism to honor refunds, warranties (I had this issue), and similar, exacerbated by communication. This continued to happen over a period of years.

I'm not here to relitigate the whole Purism saga. I bought 4 Purism products, was one of the first people in the world to own a Librem 5, I invested (donated?). I love the company mission, I think it's fantastic that you're daily driving a Librem 5. But I'm not ready to engage again myself, and that's too bad, but I think a lot of people ended up feeling the same way.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-11 15:17:16+00:00
I thought that was pretty clear; I mean that Grok's "unbiased" training seems to align it with anti-Musk positions pretty regularly. As such, I'm not super fearful of it being picked to run the US government right now.

Further examples: https://decrypt.co/310771/elon-musks-grok-ai-is-turning-agai...

> For instance, if you ask Grok: “Who is the biggest spreader of misinformation on X?” it replies that “Based on available reports and analyses, Elon Musk is frequently identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X."
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-11 15:17:49+00:00
I don't know about the standard navy officer school but the naval academy only stopped teaching it for like a ten year period and then brought it back.

Funny enough though serious rec sailors are the most likely to know it well I think. They are much more likely to be in a situation where it's necessary and they have fewer shipboard obligations compared to a naval officer so more time/boredom to use futzing with it. It does take practice.
by SirMaster | 2025-04-11 15:17:50+00:00
This seems so far from the truth IMO.

I go and play pickleball outside at the park with friends for several hours a week.

All I spent was $50 on a paddle and $70 shoes and a $2 ball, and I could have spent less...

I play about 3 times a week for 2-3 hours at a time, so about 6-9 hours a week.

The paddle will last years, not exactly sure about the shoes, but still, you can play with your street shoes and it would be fine...

Anyways, even for a single 5 month stretch of warm weather for me way up in Wisconsin, this is less than $1 per hour. I spent $122 and I will play 120-180 hours easily from May-Sept outside for free.

This is the same for playing tennis, or basketball or soccer or frisbee golf, etc etc at the park with friends, or even with meetup groups if you don't have friends to play with.

This is so much cheaper entertainment than video gaming.

What about meetup groups that I go to play board games with people? I do this several hours a month too and it costs me nothing but the gas to get there. The meetup group often provides all the board games for free and there a dozens to choose from.

I can come up with tons of more examples of basically free or very cheap entertainment.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-11 15:18:16+00:00
No, those are very different. If the alternatives did not exist, or even if its as though they did not exist, then you are looking to produce something new for the sake or delivering any solution.

If the alternatives just suck and you realize you can do so much better then your goal is wildly different. Its not about any solution because you already know what the baseline and acceptance criteria are. Its only about not feeling the pain that other solutions provide. You are otherwise providing the same solution and just doing it in a way that's like chocolate and caviar.
by hedora | 2025-04-11 15:18:17+00:00
They’re missing multi-machine orchestration: Run thousands of jails on these dozen machines. Don’t bother me with the details at runtime.

They are also missing an ergonomic tool like dockerfiles. The following file, plus a cli tool for “run N copies on my M machines” should be enough to run bsd in prod, and it is not:

“FROM openbsd:latest ; CMD pkg -i apache ; echo “apache=enabled >> /etc/rc.defaults ; COPY public_html /var/www/ ; CMD init”

I don’t think writing the tooling would be that difficult, but it was missing the last time I looked.
by kevindamm | 2025-04-11 15:18:42+00:00
There is a difference between thinking about the context of a problem and "critical thinking" about the problem or its possible solutions.

There is a measurable decrease in critical thinking skills when people consistently offload the thinking about a problem to an LLM. This is where the primary difference is between solving problems with an LLM vs having it solved for you with an LLM. And, that is cause for concern.

Two studies on impact of LLMs and generative AI on critical thinking:

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6

https://slejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40561-...
by throw310822 | 2025-04-11 15:19:00+00:00
These methods are typical of authoritarian regimes to crush any protests that threaten the dominant powers. We can easily see that one of the dominant powers in this authoritarian regime is Israel. (Not "the Jews", many of whom took part in the protests- but Israel and its Zionist supporters in the US).

And it is so powerful that even in the face of repression and limitations to freedom of speech that clearly go to its advantage, you don't dare to point your finger at it but claim that it's just an excuse for something different.
by whimsicalism | 2025-04-11 15:19:11+00:00
the US has at-will employment, save it with the hyperbole. There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people would love to have.

Collective bargaining against private actors is fine. There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people, any more than some random group of federal workers has veto power over law passed bu congress. It is simply not how democracy works.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-11 15:19:13+00:00
This is a misframing of the sentiment. No one believes there isn't waste in government. We just don't believe 5 under 20 year olds, some with criminal backgrounds, others whose only qualification is Elon Musk likes them, are good at identifying what's waste and what's important.

And we would like to see a measured approach to reducing waste, with some findings released to the people about what the plan is going forward and why the cuts make sense, rather than "just fire every probational employee" or "just 50% slash the SEC" or whatever else they are doing currently.
by palmotea | 2025-04-11 15:19:48+00:00
> I think it’s fair to believe that democracy has failure modes where we say, “Nope, this outcome didn’t work.” For example, if fellow citizens start getting rounded up in camps or deported, regardless of due process, what the electorate wants and the votes communicate are no longer relevant.

That's a tricky line, because it's on the path to: "You have the 'freedom' to vote for whoever you like, just as long as they're a Communist who will loyally implement Communist policies."

Personally, I don't think many people in the US are actually committed democrats. They're mostly partisans committed to their party/ideology, and there's a lot of maneuvering to confuse people that their party's policy is set in stone ("constitutional/constitutionally required") and entrench it against democratic action.
by eadmund | 2025-04-11 15:20:15+00:00
> YouTube. YouTube: Once a video catalog with social discovery. Now? TikTok.

I hate YouTube Shorts with a passion. They are low-effort engagement bait. They cannot be disabled.

Even worse, my Google TV will not play them when my phone is connected to it, and my phone will not play them when it is connected to my TV. Both devices can play them fine, they just don’t want to play them when they are connected.

There can be no good technical reason for this. It’s just delivering a bad experience because it can.
by cryptopian | 2025-04-11 15:20:16+00:00
I think the most important word in the OP is

> My kids all love _making_ art

There's a real human sense of accomplishment and ownership when you put your own effort into making your own creations real. Typing words into a box to make a picture is a fun novelty, and might be useful to people who have to shovel images out the door, but I've never felt anything like the same satisfaction, and I'd imagine kids feel that innately.