MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gruez | 2025-04-10 02:35:21+00:00
Is that's what's happening here? The bit about suing her "even if the statements she is making are true" makes me think they're not trying to sue her via defamation, but through non-disparagement agreements. If that's the case, I'd hesitate to characterize this as SLAPP. If you voluntarily entered into a non-disparagement agreement and got something in exchange (eg. in exchange for severance or whatever), then at the very least it's slightly different than a journalist or whatever trying to expose some scandal.
by tikhonj | 2025-04-10 02:35:26+00:00
Yep, I was one of the people who originally started using Nix on that particular team at Target back in 2016. I wasn't the only person interested in Nix but, if I'm recalling correctly, I was the person who first set it up and supported our Nix environment on Linux and macOS for the first year or two. After we scaled up a bit we hired some more Nix-focused people and some consultants (for stuff like lorri), so I stopped having to do much Nix stuff day-to-day.

That was a really special team. Nobody "let" me use Nix, we just did it because it made sense to us, and I went out of my way to support it internally not because I felt pressured to do it, but because I was enthusiastic about making it work. The culture there reminded me of this story[1] about getting Python into production at Goldman—and it turns out that the VP who built the supply chain team at Target started his career in strats at Goldman and was heavily inspired by the same Armen from that story :)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104401

After leaving Target, I also used Nix for my own work setup at CX Score. That was a seed-stage startup and I didn't want to push Nix on anybody else, but it made my own work setup much nicer.

Most recently I moved to Mercury where we use Nix at a pretty big scale (several hundred developers). We have a team that handles most of it so I haven't had to do much myself, but I've helped a few people work through Nix issues just because I could :) I'm also one of the weirdos who uses NixOS on my work laptop instead of getting a macbook.

And, in parallel, I've been using NixOS on all my personal machines ever since I first discovered it. That was relatively shortly before joining Target, so, if I had to guess, late 2015 or early 2016. Coming up on 10 years shortly, even though it really does not feel like it...
by throw0101d | 2025-04-10 02:35:58+00:00
> On the other hand I read a long time ago 120 V causes way more home fires because of higher currents.

[citation needed]

All domestic mains plugs found in typical residential circuits all over the planet are ≤20A:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets#Com...

The vast majority of 120V plugs are 15A; if you want 20A it's actually a special case:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEMA_connector#Nomenclature

So there are no "higher currents" used. If you need more power then a higher-voltage NEMA 6 plug, or a two-phase NEMA 14, socket is typically used.
by wahern | 2025-04-10 02:35:59+00:00
Corporations are probably low down the list of drivers of cultural homogenization. Merely exporting (via social media, entertainment, cosmopolitan norms, etc) the Western conception of diversity as virtue, as well as the particular definition(s) du jour of diversity, is no less a form of cultural homogenization (or "colonization" using the parlance of some circles).
by thot_experiment | 2025-04-10 02:36:09+00:00
It's certainly an interesting experiment. Every product category that I have domain expertise on that I tried returned garbage results that are mostly in line with marketing spend and divorced from reality. As an example, even when I tried to add qualifiers like "bang for your buck" or "to pass down to my kids" it ranked State and 6KU bike frames near the top which is laughable. The Kilo TT didn't even make the list!
by victor106 | 2025-04-10 02:38:12+00:00
I thought the same as you. But I think not developing those skills will come back and bite you at some point.

For instance your point about: > reading a map to get around (GPS)

https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/16/alzheimers-disease-resea...

After reading the above it dawned on me that the human brain needs to develop spatial awareness and not using that capability of the brain very slowly shuts it off. So I purposefully turn off the gps when I can.

I think not fully developing each of those abilities might have some negative effects that will be hard to diagnose.
by egberts1 | 2025-04-10 02:38:15+00:00
Yes

Paul Feyerabend, a philosopher of science, argued that true freedom and liberty arise when individuals actively and democratically shape their societies, free from the dominance of any single ideology, including science. He contended that science, often regarded as the ultimate path to knowledge, is merely one of many traditions and should not hold a privileged position in society. Feyerabend advocated for a “democratic relativism,” emphasizing equal rights for all traditions and proposing a separation between the state and any specific ideology, akin to the separation of church and state. He believed that this approach would allow individuals to live according to their own values and beliefs, fostering a more inclusive and liberated society.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0020174800860189...

Feyerabend, P. (1980). Democracy, Elitism, and Scientific Method. Inquiry, 23(1), 3–18.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00201748008601890
by droopyEyelids | 2025-04-10 02:38:48+00:00
Those last two are not actually related.

This review was about testing supplementation of vitamin D, what you posted is mostly about correlation between serum levels and health outcomes, and those levels are largely about non-supplemented “natural” vitamin d.

The distinction is important because science has been trying to figure out whether vitamin d itself has the benefits, or if it is a marker for a larger salubrious process.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-10 02:40:00+00:00
> Fire is not caused by electric current. Fire requires a source of ignition and that's not EMF.

All electrical cable/wire is rated for so many amps and a certain temperature: if you mismatch the breaker and the cable ratings then you could allow too much current through, and because of I^2 resistance, a fire could happen.

Do a search for "Ampacity Chart".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampacity
by windowshopping | 2025-04-10 02:40:24+00:00
I built a complete working application (errortexts.com) using an AI tool, so I have a little insight on this.

At first, the product I was using (lovable.dev) seemed to me exactly as you described. I gave it a basic app outline and hit run, and it produced something that superficially looked right but did nothing.

So I asked some other people for advice, and they said you have to hold its hand and go step by step. So I did.

I told it, give me a landing page that matches [product description], but implement nothing else. Then, ok, let's set up auth - add a sign in and sign up dialog. Then, ok, let's create a user account page. Bit by bit.

It succeeded wildly. I was able to build the whole thing in 3 days. I'm not capable of that on my own, it would have taken me 3 weeks. Sometimes the AI got stuck and I had to manually go in and accomplish what I wanted. It took over 100 steps to complete the product, and probably around 10-20 times I had to revert its changes and give it more specific instructions. I had to check its work at every iteration, just like with a junior developer.

But it worked. And it's going to get better. Would I use this for "something important"? Depends how you define that. I used it to build a working product. Would I start letting it modify an existing mature codebase willy-nilly? No, probably not. Would I let it write cryptographic logic or trust that it wrote bulletproof code from a security standpoint in a sensitive context? No.

But for a simple application, it was an incredibly powerful tool. Especially for something that didn't even exist just 2 years ago. Give this a decade and it's going to change all our careers even more than it already has.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-04-10 02:40:34+00:00
Oh, I was actually wrong. It's not coming next week, it's coming this week:

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-trump-tariffs-...

I would say it's even more brazen than Russia in the 90s. It's all done in the open, in the face of the institutions that were supposed to limit his power.
by btbuilder | 2025-04-10 02:40:48+00:00
The shutter prevents someone (including children) shoving something metal into the live/hot. I have never heard of it failing. Newer US outlets (TR/tamper resistant) are way more finicky because of the optional ground pin. Sticking the little plastic covers over the outlet is a workaround.

The reason for a fuse is because of the high current capacity of ring circuits vs branch/radial. The fuse protects the power cable of appliances catching fire as they can’t handle the current available on the circuit .

Ring circuits are a thing due to minimizing copper usage when rebuilding after ww2.
by hackyhacky | 2025-04-10 02:41:17+00:00
> Sure. But somebody has to know these things. For many jobs, knowing these things isn’t beneficial, but for others it is.

I think you're missing the point of my comment. I'm not saying that human knowledge is useless. I'm specifically arguing against the case that:

> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions.

My logic being that we are already irreversibly dependent on supply chains.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-10 02:42:08+00:00
Obligatory Tom Scott video on the topic:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEfP1OKKz_Q

Bonus: "Why Britain Uses Separate Hot and Cold Taps":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfHgUu_8KgA
by da_chicken | 2025-04-10 02:43:46+00:00
The problem with investment dollars is that they're typically "spent" (invested) only when they can extract more wealth than they create. You invest $10,000 now so you can have $15,000 later. Where did that $5,000 come from? Well, someone gave it to you in exchange for that $10,000.

In other words, they're effectively rent-seeking dollars. The whole hope of investment is that you get more money without doing any labor yourself.

And if you invest and they're lost? Well, now it's not even rent-seeking. It's just burning money.

This isn't to say that there's no benefit from that money being available. The issue is that the real value that investment creates isn't really the money going back to the investor. It's the value of the labor and products generated by whatever the money fronted costs for. The actual value is still generated by the labor. The investor does help start the ball rolling, but is still a leech.

Once we get to shareholders, things don't really improve. Shareholders are also only interested in dividends. They want dividends at the cost of the company. At the cost of the product. At the cost of the customer. There's no responsibility to society or to the customer in the face of a shareholder.

Shareholders are like employees that don't do any work but still want a paycheck. "Oh, but they're owners," is kind of a poor excuse when these owners do no work. Stock is like buying a box of Crackerjack and letting your brother take the whistle and sticker.

> Also, as for JK Rowling specifically, she had donated a significant amount of her wealth to charity.

Which she does because donations offset the taxes she owes. She's no Dolly Parton.
by CyLith | 2025-04-10 02:43:55+00:00
Speak for yourself. Some of us see the difficulty in sustaining and maintaining this fragile technology stack and have decided to do something about it. I may not be able to do all those things but it is worth learning, since there really is no downside for someone who enjoys learning. I am tackling farming and cpu design at the moment and it is tremendously fun.
by lgessler | 2025-04-10 02:44:21+00:00
Sure, this is a common sentiment, and one that works for some courses. But for others (introductory programming, say) I have a really hard time imagining an assignment that could not be one-shot by an LLM. What can someone with 2 weeks of Python experience do that an LLM couldn't? The other issue is that LLMs are, for now, periodically increasing in their capabilities, so it's anyone's guess whether this is actually a sustainable attitude on the scale of years.
by spudlyo | 2025-04-10 02:44:38+00:00
Rhetoric is part of the part of the Trivium[0] and was taught to elite American kids getting a Classical education starting around the age of 15. By this time they would have already studied Latin grammar and a bit of logic and dialectic.

I imagine some advanced students also read some selections on the topic by Cicero.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-10 02:45:07+00:00
Further, any hit it might want to take at the other powers would be either not cost effective (against Russia) or would harm them very badly in short and medium term (China or moves regarding Taiwan.)

Moving against EU would not get them anything and the same bit as regarding China applies.

Truth is, war is an expense. You need to count on a serious long term benefit to wage it.
by anarticle | 2025-04-10 02:45:54+00:00
We stan a mito story! My old lab discovered some of what we called "kiss and run" dynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss-and-run_fusion

Which had to do with watching live mitos exchange their insides. Specifically, to watch this process, you load your mitos with photoactivatable fluorophores, then use a laser to tag some which changes say your green emitting protein to red. Then you follow the color changed particles being exchanged between mitos. Same mechanism probably used here to watch cells swap mitos. Oh, and this has to be done with live cells.

Very cool stuff, mitos are so important to metabolism and more I hope we see mitohacking, as mentioned by perrygeo. A much safer performance enhancer when it's your own mitos.
by disqard | 2025-04-10 02:46:13+00:00
I think you're operating in Marx's C-M-C circuit. Nothing wrong with that, of course (I'm that way too).

A lot of the finance folks work in an M-C-M' world, where Money (M) is the alpha and the omega, so you see this kind of (IMO) perverse behavior.

I've found this mental model helpful in explaining these kinds of behavior.
by rayiner | 2025-04-10 02:47:08+00:00
> No it isn't, productivity has to increase, that's why we constantly get rid of jobs that do not provide much value.

Our measures of “value” are wrong.

> I don't know what you are ranting about

My point is that a lot of what we think of as “higher value” activities are actually derivative of and downstream of our industrial supremacy. As China takes up that mantle, the higher value activities will go along with it. E.g., how long do we expect the US to do the cutting edge nuclear power and weapons research when China is the one building all the nuclear power plants?

I mean look at the path dependency that led to Silicon Valley. Why did the software revolution happen in the same place we were building the microchips?
by thescriptkiddie | 2025-04-10 02:48:08+00:00
Ok, I'll elaborate.

US freight railroads used to carry a larger variety of goods and serve a larger variety of customers than they do today. They were never in the business of delivering finished goods directly to retail stores, but they did transport a large amount of single-carload and less-than-carload deliveries between factories and warehouses. This is why if you visit older industrial areas you will see train tracks everywhere, including in the middle of the street and sometimes directly into buildings.

When the trucking industry was deregulated in 1980, trucking companies undercut railroads on low-volume high-profit routes, leaving the railroads to focus on low-value bulk goods like coal. The total volume of freight actually went up, but both revenue per unit and gross revenue fell. The railroads struggled to justify the cost of maintenance on now less busy lines, so they abandoned many of them and neglected the maintenance on others. That made it impossible to win back the lost business from the trucking industry even as the cost of trucking skyrocketed. Everyone is now worse off except for the owners of the trucking companies.

As for Switzerland, they invented a special kind of shipping container and that can be loaded/unloaded from a train or truck with no need for a crane. This allows them to make carload and intermodal deliveries without building any new infrastructure.

https://actsag.ch/index.php/de/system
by andsoitis | 2025-04-10 02:48:20+00:00
Life is a canvas for experience, love, struggle, beauty, boredom, surprise. Inanimate matter or energy cannot birth these.

Life can track changes in the environment over time and respond. Inanimate matter is inert.

Feeling pretty lost IS part of life, thus. Your curiosity is an expression of life. Seeking peace, solace is not something non-life can do.
by kazinator | 2025-04-10 02:49:30+00:00
I remapped K to :grep for the word under the cursor instead. The way I did it, though, is such that if I give it the numeric prefix, it will do the man lookup in that section.

:nmap K "_y:execute count ? ( ":!man " . count . " " . expand("<cword>") ) : ( ":grep \\<" . expand("<cword>") . "\\>")<CR>

I have it mapped to do :grep in visual mode also, without the fallback on man.

:vmap K "zy:execute ":grep " . getreg("z")<CR>

Maybe newer Vim has a solution for "grep word under cursor"; it's such an obvious use case. I'm trained on K though.
by overfeed | 2025-04-10 02:49:37+00:00
Austerity measures predate Brexit by quite a bit as a result of deliberate choices by a conservative government. Brexit accelerated pre-existing downtrends.

Many parallels may be drawn: austerity vs DOGE in gutting government services, the deluded nativist/isolationist core of Brexit vs the tariffing the entire world, xenophobia, and most obviously a nostalgia of past-greatness that doesn't quite fit the present circumstances.
by prawn | 2025-04-10 02:49:44+00:00
I'm possibly a similar vintage and enjoy telling my kids about changes that have happened within my lifetime, and not just things I've read of. TVs without remotes, to corded remotes, to normal remotes, all-in-one things, remotes with touch pads, everyone watching shows on personal devices with touchscreens, etc. Or from rotary phones to corded to cordless to early mobile phones, to what they're familiar with now. Record players, rewinding cassette tapes with a pencil, recording songs from radio, carrying around CDs with your Discman, minidiscs, MP3s, streaming. Such an interesting and wide series of changes.

Meanwhile, earlier this week my otherwise-clever 12 yo tried to pinch zoom a paper map...
by the_king | 2025-04-10 02:51:16+00:00
thanks!

I share the same sentiment. I remember thinking in college how annoying it was that I was reading low-resolution, marked-up, skewed, b&w scans of a book using Adobe Acrobat while CS concentrators were doing everything in VS Code (then brand new).

but we do think voice is actually great with Cursor. It’s also really useful in the terminal for certain things. Checking out or creating branches, for example.
by moregrist | 2025-04-10 02:51:35+00:00
It’s not only PCRE. Any dialect with back references will require a backtracking engine that can go exponential with the wrong expression and input.

This includes most flavors of regexp you find in the wild: Python’s re module, JavaScript regular expressions, Ruby’s regular expressions, Perl, PCRE, and even basic and extended REs used in grep.

Russ Cox has written some very accessible posts on the linear (in input) properties of NFAs and the equivalence of Thompson regular expressions [0]. There’s also quite a bit of literature on the Glushkov construction of regular expressions (and its NFA equivalence) [1] that’s worth reading if you find the topic interesting.

Both Go and Rust have non-backtracking regular expression libraries, and you can find solid non-backtracking C and C++ libraries for regular expressions (eg: libfsm and Hyperscan).

0: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/ 1: My favorite is _Flexible Pattern Matching Strings: Practical On-Line Search Algorithms for Texts and Biological Sequences_ by Gonzalo Navarro
by maxbond | 2025-04-10 02:51:52+00:00
I've been working a lot with parser combinators lately, they are a really nice compromise between using grammar languages (I'd put regexes in this category, as well as parser generators) and hand-rolled imperative parsers. The parser combinator library ends up being a DSL for describing grammars in your preferred language, but the boundary is fluid, and you can move back and forth between writing grammars and writing code in your preferred language.

The bold implementer could integrate regexes into their parser combinator library, and you could move between all three.
by ifyoubuildit | 2025-04-10 02:53:08+00:00
Things like this give us enshitification. When the consumer has no understanding of what they're buying, they have to take corporations at their word that new "features" are actually beneficial, when they're mostly beneficial to the seller.

Kind of like how an ignorant electorate makes for a poor democracy, an ignorant consumer base makes for a poor free market.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-04-10 02:55:18+00:00
Interesting comparison towards the end.

> SpaceX has launched at a rate nearly 34 times higher than United Launch Alliance since the start of 2023, but ULA has more experience with high-energy missions, featuring more complex maneuvers to place military payloads directly into geosynchronous orbit, and sometimes releasing multiple payloads at different locations in the geosynchronous belt.

> This is one of the most challenging mission profiles for any rocket, requiring a high-endurance upper stage, like Vulcan's Centaur V, capable of cruising through space for eight or more hours.

> SpaceX has flown a long-duration version of its upper stage on several missions by adding an extended mission kit. This gives the rocket longer battery life and a custom band of thermal paint to help ensure its kerosene fuel does not freeze in the cold environment of space.
by roncesvalles | 2025-04-10 02:55:41+00:00
Why do you keep saying "fake money"? China can use that fake money to buy real things from anyone in the world.

It's improbable that Trump has Klinefelters because people with Klinefelters tend to be infertile. It's more likely that he got forged results from a shady clinic.

Countries with excess USD buy T-bills because it beats holding it in a bank account, and converting it to CNY would be bad for exports. But some other countries also put it to more creative uses like sovereign PE funds.
by troad | 2025-04-10 02:57:01+00:00
To be fair, pages like the one you link only talk about the official standards, which mean very, very little in most of the world.

I wouldn't assume anything about voltage in much of South America / Africa / Asia. You're going to get a frankenstein NEMA-Schuko-Chinese power outlet that will give you some amount of power for some amount of hours in the day, for a definition of 'some' that no one will be able to specify for you with any great precision and that will vary from town to town.
by milesrout | 2025-04-10 02:57:57+00:00
In full context, it was implicitly "as opposed to anywhere else".

I look at many documents every day. 90% of them are PDFs and most were Word docs before that. Pages on the web are incredibly unreliable. In the programming world random websites are more commonly used but I don't think they are actually much more reliable. A lot of online resources are just some guy's blog post. Sometimes they're great. Sometimes not.