MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SirMaster | 2025-04-29 16:08:02+00:00
Is there really even a risk of orbit pollution from multiple GPS satellite companies?

GPS has only 31 satellites and they orbit at a far distance of like 12,550 miles from earth.

Starlink alone has over 7000 satellites and plans for 12,000 by 2026 and possibly 30,000 beyond that. And they orbit at a distance of 340-382 miles.

You could have thousands of GPS satellite companies before even matching the orbit pollution of Starlink alone.

I am not saying that satellite internet shouldn't be done by a singular governmental org. But to say the reason they did it was to prevent un-necessary orbit pollution doesn't seem like a very strong reason.

I think that it was done because it doesn't really cost anything to allow the GPS signals to be used by everyone, and because it costs a lot to launch satellites.

Internet satellites are a whole different story because they deal with signal bandwidth limits in both directions, so there is a cost per user added to use them.
by sheepolog | 2025-04-29 16:08:12+00:00
I was surprised at how closely your experience (and a commenter's experience) mirror my own. During my life, I've had a few periods of a few months where I focus intensely and work nonstop, and the work does not feel like effort at all. For me, it also comes with a sense of complete confidence, a feeling like I am fulfilling my purpose in life and that everything is exactly as it should be. It is the best sustained feeling I've ever experienced.

Unfortunately I've only experienced this three times in my life; typically around major life events (once when starting a new job in a new industry, once when quitting that job to make my own stuff, and once in grade school: the summer between 10th and 11th grade, for some reason). I look forward to seeing more research, and hopefully one day can apply these learnings to manually trigger this intense focus and motivation.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-29 16:08:59+00:00
Related:

Mike Wood, Whose LeapFrog Toys Taught a Generation, Dies at 72 - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/19/business/michael-c-wood-d... | https://archive.today/QUhoj

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43757871 (1 comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43745410 (7 comments)
by hermitcrab | 2025-04-29 16:09:09+00:00
History shows that visual programming can work very well in particular domains (data wrangling, signal processing, 3d image rendering etc) but has never really been successful for general purpose programming.

A lot of the issues related to visual vs text based programming have been debated here many times. As someone with a foot in both camps, I tried to summarise the various arguments here:

https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/01/16/visual-vs-text-bas...
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-29 16:09:12+00:00
My impression is that the history for web browsers is excellent and it's usually pretty easy to find things, even in cases where I looked at maybe 100 images and have to actually look at the pages and not just the titles. I think though there are a lot of people who don't know the history is there, or don't use it, or don't psychologically want to accept that it exists or something.

I wish browsers had better APIs to get history and bookmarks out, so if I did decide I had to find one of out 100 images I looked at on a particular site yesterday I could write some script to download those images and show all of them on one page.
by crote | 2025-04-29 16:09:16+00:00
To be fair, a big deal of those 15GW probably went down as a result of the initial outage: equipment is designed to intentionally disconnect completely when the grid is behaving badly, rather than trying to force it into submission and potentially causing serious equipment damage.

In reality this means you might lose, say, 1GW due to a transmission line failing, have a big frequency dip as a result, and then have 14GW drop offline like dominoes because they sense a grid frequency outside of safe operating parameters; disconnect as they go into safety mode; cause the frequency dip to worsen; and pull even more plants offline with them. If you're not careful, a small outage can quickly cascade into an entire grid going offline.
by krainboltgreene | 2025-04-29 16:09:34+00:00
Yeah man, I'm not so sure about that. My father made good money writing resumes in his college years studying for his MFA. Same for my mother. Neither of them were under the illusion that writing/receiving resumes was important or needed. Nor were the workers or managers. The only people who were confused about it were capitalists who needed some way to avoid losing their sanity under the weight of how unnecessary they were in the scheme of things.
by incomingpain | 2025-04-29 16:10:11+00:00
I think there's 3 democrats who are STARTING to understand their problems.

Gavin Newsom suddenly talking to the enemy. Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon? Not that this has given the answer exactly but right direction.

AOC after she found out that her voters voted for trump and she changed big time. I doubt she will ever figure it out though.

Bill Maher who gets it, just doesn't agree and refuses to say the fixes. he also sees the big picture and is fine with the bipartisan destination. No doubt that future looks remarkable for the USA.

All other democrats have been misled and misdirected so badly.
by Zigurd | 2025-04-29 16:10:38+00:00
two things about that: First, employers do take local cost of living into account to set pay, some implicitly due to competition, but many of them explicitly adjust wages based on cost of living data from economists. Secondly your complaint about the wrong KPIs rests in part on conflating cost of living with inflation.

The problem the Democrats face is that wage prospects and social issues are segmented by level of education more than in the past. They should run on higher minimum wage, which will benefit rural workers more, and on making inclusive social views the key to social acceptance. Might be an unpopular opinion, but the Democrats won't get the sports betting crypto Joe Rogan incels anyway, so they might as well make the most stereotypical ones the symbol of how to keep you dick perma-dry.
by blackenedgem | 2025-04-29 16:10:59+00:00
The funny thing is Firefox already perfected this feature years ago with Panorama. Then one day decided to remove it because "less than 1% of users use it" (https://news.softpedia.com/news/firefox-45-will-drop-tab-gro...)

There's been community forks of it since then that I switched to and will continue to use instead. Grouping tabs at the top is much worse UX than an entire page you can drag and drop around, and blatantly copying Chrome.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-04-29 16:11:22+00:00
Disclosures: I’ve been a customer for almost a decade. I’m also an early (IPO) shareholder. I’ve never been employed by, or been a vendor to Backblaze.

To add some context and background —

Their “unlimited” plan has a few major capacity-saving caveats. For example, there are built-in exclusions you can’t modify to prevent the cruft and temporary files of supported OSs (and several common apps like Outlook) from taking up space. Backblaze Computer Backup won’t backup certain kinds of data like Time Machine backups on Macs. They also have an automatic policy of deleting backups of external drives that haven’t been connected to the backup host for 30 days. They have a long list of caveats that to their credit they do disclose, although it’s a bit hard to find and understand if you aren’t technical and aren’t looking.

Their backup service is built on their object storage infrastructure to prevent duplicating their own stack, and it also compresses the amount of overhead and capacity accounting they have to worry about between their two product lines. They don’t keep backups of customer data, but they’d need to suffer multiple hard drive and host failures effecting the same file at the same time to lose any single file. Their architecture is proprietary, which I expect adds a lot of human/payroll overhead they wouldn’t have if they just deployed endless ZFS pools “off the shelf”. They build their own servers which offsets the costs of going COTS from a vendor like Dell.
by specialist | 2025-04-29 16:11:36+00:00
FWIW, I use Null Objects to eliminate null checks. Makes recursion (tree climbing) more concise, legible.

Bonus: Java's HotSpot magick will NOP (most?) methods of Null Objects, making this a zero cost abstraction.

I should probably write a concrete example for a blog or something.

TLDR: For every base class such as TreeNode, create a NullTreeNode that does nothing, then replace all uses of null with NullTreeNode. Voilá, no more null checks or NPEs.
by sieve | 2025-04-29 16:11:54+00:00
As someone who knows four languages[1] (picked every single one up during childhood) and is currently learning Sanskrit, I have to say that Krashen's input hypothesis and Orberg's Lingva Latina is probably the way to go if you are learning languages as an adult.

The direct teaching method works but is time-consuming and generally used for languages that lead to an occupation, viz. English. The grammar translation method is a waste of time. It might satisfy your intellectual curiosity about the structure of the language but you won't be able to make yourself understood after a lifetime of study. I wonder at the sheer lunacy of dumping thousands of random sentences into your lap and translating it from one language to another.

After a year and a half of false starts, I started reading a couple of Sanskrit stories every day. Because the context is maintained across the story, your brain starts recognizing patterns in sentences. You keep reading sentences like

sarvē janāḥ kāryaṁ kurvanti

sarvē janāḥ gacchanti

sarvē janāḥ namanti

and you automatically associate sarvē (all) with janāḥ (people) without needing to know the declension of those words. This applies to the cases as well.

To be able to converse about or understand a wide variety of topics, you will eventually have to move beyond stories due to restrictions on the tense/aspect/moods you encounter as a result of the nature of the material. But that is doable.

[1] Much of India is bilingual. A substantial minority might know four or more languages due to the many mother and father tongues and heavy internal migration across the states (whose boundaries were drawn on linguistic lines post-independence)
by KoolKat23 | 2025-04-29 16:11:58+00:00
Absolutely agree.

Although Google's kneecapped their own Google maps integration in the EU.

If it's of any help, on the top right there's a more shortcut to Google maps when searching an address in Kagi.

Although that's two clicks, would be to Kagi's advantage if they make this process one click or better, especially in the EU.
by mediaman | 2025-04-29 16:12:16+00:00
Out of curiosity, did you try this in o3?

O3's web research seems to have gotten much, much better than their earlier attempts at using the web, which I didn't like. It seems to browse in a much more human way (trying multiple searches, noticing inconsistencies, following up with more refined searches, etc).

But I wonder how it would do in a case like yours where there is conflicting information and whether it picks up on variance in information it finds.
by guywithahat | 2025-04-29 16:12:26+00:00
In my last startup, I built a parental filter which worked over VPN, could decrypt internet traffic (itself not a trivial feat), and then used small LLM's to remove portions of web pages that violated filters, without blocking the page itself. Highly technical, and I was always pushing for lower latency or better fault tolerance.

Unfortunately nobody cared, including the original customers I was talking to, and so I spent my days stapling flyers to polls and talking to parents trying to learn what their actual problems were. Every small startup I've been a part of looked like this. Companies live and die over whether they can find market fit, not whether the product could be built.
by jemmyw | 2025-04-29 16:12:36+00:00
If you search for declining sperm counts you'll find that the evidence is all over the place. It makes a good headline, but studies have it dropping, rising, staying stable.

There's no real evidence that people are having a harder time having babies at the same ages they did traditionally. The fertility rate is a social problem, probably (I guess it could be chemically induced behavior)
by SeanAnderson | 2025-04-29 16:13:23+00:00
I'm building https://www.howbazaar.gg/ which is a companion website for the video game https://playthebazaar.com/!

I was enjoying playing the game, there were some shortcomings in the info it provided, I dug around and found the info in game files, and decided to make that info more accessible. It was quickly a hit with the community and got official support from the game company. Trying to add enough features to take on the big players in this space and make working on it sustainable.
by pessimizer | 2025-04-29 16:13:28+00:00
It's a bad idea to imitate Duolingo, which has become VC without a purpose.

The gimmick behind Duolingo was that there were so many things online and in the world that needed to be translated, so training people to learn languages while translating them was a win-win. We don't really need humans to translate written material anymore (esp with AI advances), and they never seemed to find a business model for that anyway.

Since the gimmick is gone, it's just a generic language learning app with unimpressive results. And that still uses primitive spaced repetition algorithms. The bottom fell out. But since Duolingo had attracted a ton of cash on their founders rep from reCaptcha, it zombies on.

I've had my account since the beta, and while I think it's good because it exposes people to a ton of words and utterances in their target language which they will hopefully roll around in their mouths, that's like step 1 in learning a language. Anecdotally, I had to abandon Duolingo entirely in order to learn Spanish; and not for a class or tutoring, but for their competitors both online and traditional.

Techniques in language learning seem to be advancing quickly (like with spaced repetition, TPRS, and Krashen-inspired stuff), but Duolingo seems to be studiously ignoring them all, and plowing on doing the same thing. I think they should ditch everything but the cartoons, which are cute. But their base gets outraged whenever they change anything because Duolingo's changes were made in order to shift to getting revenue from the users rather than from "translation," so the users do not trust them.

So Duolingo really have nothing but cute cartoons and a brand name. LibreLingo looks like they have cartoons, too. Other than those, there's nothing to distinguish Librelingo from any other Spanish-learning website.
by reginald78 | 2025-04-29 16:13:30+00:00
It is particularly bizarre to me that the tab bar is horizontal on browsers. We switched to wide screen monitors close to 20 years ago, then stubbornly continued to waste vertical real estate for UI elements. Then webpages all went hard on mobile oriented designs and literally throw away the extra horizontal space by forcing portrait layouts. Yet we still use horizontal bars that make it hard to display tab titles and can't show more than a handful of tabs without a scrollbar showing up.
by abhisek | 2025-04-29 16:13:31+00:00
Very curious about the exploitation of CVE-2025-24252, a use-after-free (UAF) using which they achieved zero-click RCE on MacOS. This is inspite of ASLR and heap exploitation mitigations in place to mitigate such vulnerability classes

https://security.apple.com/blog/towards-the-next-generation-...
by surajrmal | 2025-04-29 16:14:22+00:00
Sometimes I go through email, open a bunch of links as things to follow up on. I keep the tabs open until I've finished with them. I also keep tabs open per doc I need to review, code review still pending completion, etc. For a given project I keep a host of tabs open for things like documentation and research. Organizing these ephemeral tabs into groups (docs, code reviews, project abc, etc) keeps me organized. It's far more lightweight than bookmarks and works great with tab search. It keeps me from losing track of things while also being able to focus better.

Think of it like organizing papers on your desk vs putting them in the filing cabinet.
by jfndbdbdb | 2025-04-29 16:14:25+00:00
Nice write up! Nevertheless, these are very specific circumstances:

* They didn't select Rust as the best tool available to create a game, they decided to create a Rust project which happens to be a game

* When the objective and mental model of a solution is clear, the execution is trivial. I bet I could recreate a software which took me 3 months to develop in 3 days, if I just have to retype the solution instead of finding a solution. No matter which language

* They seem to struggle with the most trivial of tasks. Having to call out being able to utilize an A* library (an algorithm worth like 10 lines of code) or struggling with scripting (trivial with proven systems like lua) suggests a quite novice team

That being said, I'm glad for their journey:)
by ses1984 | 2025-04-29 16:14:36+00:00
The client might have a feature to retry certain failures, and it’s using a particular rate, probably not retrying n times one right after the other in rapid succession. This is called backoff.

The server can return an override backoff so the server can tell the client how often or how quickly to retry.

It’s nice to have in case some bug causes increased load somewhere, you can flip a value on the server and relieve pressure from the system.
by Olshansky | 2025-04-29 16:14:46+00:00
Reminds me of some Twitter lore from 2012. I was just an intern....

This is back in the Rails days, before they switch to Scala.

I heard that there was a fail-whale no one could solve related to Twitter's identity service. IIRC, it was called "Gizmoduck."

The engineer who built it had left.

They brought him in for half a day of work to solve the P0.

*Supposedly*, he got paid ~50K for that day of work.

Simultaneously outrageous but also reasonable if you've seen the inside of big tech. The ROI is worth it.

That is all.

Disclaimer: don't know if it's true, but the story is cool.
by kristofferR | 2025-04-29 16:14:56+00:00
This is pure speculation, but perhaps it is a way to prevent being forced to do a corporate breakup? I guess it's harder to split up if it seems less like separate products. Zuckerberg tried sucking up to Trump, but the FTC case against Meta is still in full force.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/4/15/mark-zuckerberg-...
by rafaelmn | 2025-04-29 16:15:05+00:00
I feel like model improvement is severely overstated by the benchmarks and the last release cycle basically made no difference to my use cases. If you gave me Claude 3.5 and 3.7 I couldn't really tell the difference. OpenAI models feel like they are regressing, and LLAMA 4 regressed even on benchmarks.

And the hype was insane in 2023 already - it's useful to compare actual outcomes vs historic hype to gauge how credible the hype sellers are.
by feoren | 2025-04-29 16:15:43+00:00
Computations are finite, but that limit keeps going up. If we picked a number that seemed like "way more than enough" in 1960, it might be less than our phones can do now. If we picked a number from cosmology, what happens if that science changes? "Heat death" is the current consensus of our distant future, but even that is challenged. Until we know what dark energy is, we can't be sure about "heat death". So if cosmology has some breakthrough that changes our understanding, why make it so we have to go revisit all our CS proofs? Using infinity decouples the proofs from irrelevant externalities.

> the indispensability of modern math is still hotly talked about in philosophy

Meh, philosophers have to talk about something. I'll worry about what philosophers say when I see a single useful insight from the entire field. We've been waiting thousands of years, but I'm sure a useful thought is right around the corner.

And the concept of infinity is hardly modern.
by mettamage | 2025-04-29 16:15:51+00:00
> I didn't study CS. I studied how to learn as fast as possible. I happened to have studied CS.

That's an example

As for the Spotify example. I just like listening to my playlists, every task becomes more chill. Also, I like working on a Mac more than a Windows laptop. I've had one company restricting my choice there to Windows. Me sort of hacking their company policies such that I could work on a Mac made me feel a lot better.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-29 16:16:02+00:00
My biggest concern about AI is that it will make us better at things that we're already doing. Things that we would've stopped doing if we hadn't had such a slow introduction to their consequences, consequences that we're now accustomed to--but not adapted to. Frog in slowly warming water stuff like the troubling relationship between advertising and elections, or the lack of consent in our monetary systems.

I'm worried the shock will not be abrupt enough to encourage a proper rethink.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-29 16:16:13+00:00
I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management.

> Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting?

Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time.

Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages etc. Once I'm done with the purchase, I'll close them all.

I sometimes use sideberry's ability to have tab groups, but not much.

To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar. Most of the tabs at the bottom of my sideberry tab list are ones I have not visited in many months. There's very little point having them there. However the cognitive cost and computational costs are close to zero.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-04-29 16:16:24+00:00
Henry George, Georgeism, the Land Value Tax, Thomas Paine, and the modern versions of their ideas (i.e. Andrew Yang's platform) are LITERALLY the best ideas we have ever conceived in regards to economic policy making. Milton fking Friedman agrees that the LVT is the only "good" tax.

Unfortunately, parasites get fucked up by these policies, and so they will fund right wing fascist revolutions to make absolutely sure that NOTHING that Henry George ever proposed is implemented.

Henry George is among the greatest humans who ever lived.

Free Trade! Free Land! Free Men!
by chneu | 2025-04-29 16:16:43+00:00
Except what you're saying isn't true.

There is a lot of evidence that fertility, especially male, is dropping. This isnt societal. The actual fertility rate of sperm has been measured to be dropping.

This isn't "people aren't having kids." It's "male sperm is less fertile".

This is in addition to societal trends in developed countries to have less kids.
by gamblor956 | 2025-04-29 16:17:02+00:00
For a lot of the foods on the list, the DEHP, BPA, etc., come from the packaging materials.

So, for example, Whole Foods organic grass fed beef appears to be very high in DEHP...if you get it in the plastic wrap container, but would have almost none if wrapped in wax paper (note: not the same thing as parchment paper). Similarly, a lot of restaurant to-go orders will test high for endocrine disruptors because they come in plastic containers, but would be low in these chemicals if tested at the restaurant.
by hirako2000 | 2025-04-29 16:17:06+00:00
OK. Thanks for your projections.

I generate on GPU I can barely fit a large scene on 12GB of memory, and it takes many hours to produce 30k steps gaussians.

I'm sure the tech will evolve, hardware too. We are just 5y away.

I respect you open sourcing your work, it is innovative. Feels like a trophy splash, I suggest putting a link to something substantial, perhaps a page explaining where the tech will land and how this project fits that future, rather than a link to some LinkedIn.