MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-08 00:20:23+00:00
Some mix of all the solutions depending on how bad it is. At some point the net social benefit becomes negative. When that happens incremental reform is not preferable to tearing it down, exploring alternatives (e.g. 501c(3)s), and rebuilding as government if and only if a reasonable mechanism for accountability can be created without the meddling of the people who messed it up before.
by blurker | 2025-04-08 00:21:42+00:00
I've seen some pretty good React codebases and I've seen plenty of backend spaghetti code. In all cases it's not the tools, it's the programmers and usually it's layers and layers of people not taking the time to write clean code. Probably because their management doesn't value it or they don't have someone with the experience necessary to guide them towards clean code.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-04-08 00:21:44+00:00
This sounds amazing. I use Lua a lot, and luarocks has been nearly useless for anything I need it to do because it's so heavily opinionated. For anything more than "install a library specifically for direct execution on the local system" or anything around that, it's a non starter. Have an embedded scripting environment that works with Lua packages and you want to package scripts with dependencies for use there? Give up.

I don't know if this is better for that use case, but even if not, luarocks is clunky and annoying to use at best.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-08 00:22:49+00:00
> For the deadnaming comment, it wasn't out of disrespect, but when referring to an email chain, it could otherwise be confusing if you're not aware of her transition.

I assumed it was innocent. But the norm when naming a married woman or another person who changed their name is to call them their current name and append the clarifying information. Not vice versa. Jane Jones née Smith. Olivia (then Matt).
by fsckboy | 2025-04-08 00:22:49+00:00
>This might have been a small detachment that was ambushed and utterly wiped out

or even three legions, 16,000–20,000 killed. "Teutoburg Forest is considered one of the most important defeats in Roman history, bringing the triumphant period of expansion under Augustus to an abrupt end. It dissuaded the Romans from pursuing the conquest of Germania, and so can be considered one of the most important events in European history."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
by jmann99999 | 2025-04-08 00:26:11+00:00
For those in the UK at the time, how was the code consumed? It sounds like the BBC Micro was somehow hooked up to the same "cable" as a TV. Is that right?

Did it decode the data automatically, or did programmers at home have to build something on top of it?

It just sounds incredibly ingenious on both ends. First, to invent the process and second, to use the data. I'd appreciate any knowledge that can help with the latter.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-04-08 00:26:41+00:00
I am keenly aware of how common Git is.

A whole generation of programmers have only ever known Git and GitHub. They assume that since it is the standard it must be good. This is a fallacy.

Bad things can become popular and become entrenched even when better things exist. Replacing Git today would require something not just a little better but radically better. Git was always worse than Mercurial. It won because of GitHub. If MercurialHub had been invented instead we’d all be using that and would be much happier. Alas.
by teleforce | 2025-04-08 00:27:56+00:00
> The Cloud made the crap data problem infinitely worse.

This article is mainly focusing about the unused data by website and enterprise databases, only toward the end of the article it barely touched upon "the elephant in the room" of data in cloud.

Now everywhere in the world data centers are being built at breakneck speed to cater for the AI data modeling, training and serving. Most of the AI based data are being kept in datalake in the form of raw data that will probably never see the light of that day i.e never being processed.

Bill Inmon warned us against this potential data swamps in data center due to the increasing popularity of the datalake [1].

Hopefully open table format like Apache Iceberg can rectify this unused raw data epidemic but time will tell [2].

[1] Lakehouses Prevent Data Swamps, Bill Inmon Says

https://www.datanami.com/2021/06/01/lakehouses-prevent-data-...

[2] What Are Apache Iceberg Tables and How Are They Useful?

https://www.snowflake.com/guides/what-are-apache-iceberg-tab...
by maxdo | 2025-04-08 00:28:27+00:00
That’s a false narrative about pricing. Battery manufacturing has a very low ratio of labor to cost.

Chinas secret ? Extremely protective tariffs + very selective smart RND incentives/ investments by government + biggest engineering pool in the world because of outsource to China due to free trade/ no tariffs in US/EU.

It’s a talent pool they built last ~20 years to do outsourcing/offshore policies
by wholinator2 | 2025-04-08 00:28:32+00:00
This is a very interesting take to me. So you think language should be policed by a self selected cabal of experts? While i might agree for something like specific scientific findings being held tight by a small group of experts, i think language at large is a much, much larger thing. Mainly because literally everyone (okay 99%) use it pretty much all day every day. Very very few of the antivaxers are studying and using epidemiology and virology all day every day, but everyone talks.

As such, language evolves local dialects and accents just due to the fact that there's far too many people to corral into one way of speaking. How do you feel about regional accents?

Finally, i am very thankful for the experts who make dictionaries and find the origins of words i find interesting. However i _strongly_ doubt it would be impossible to understand the English my father spoke when he was a little under my age. Chiefly because, he's literally still alive and speaking? It sounds insane to assert that 50 years is enough to change language enough to become unintelligible unless i had a "1975 dictionary" in which i could look up all the slang and terminology. Sure, kids talk funny, jeepers man, it's like totally rad sometimes though. Far out dude. Did you have to look up what far out meant when you first heard it? Or did you understand it from the context and tone with which it was said.

Good luck telling me I'm not intelligent enough to decide what I say bud, even better luck telling that to the kids. Get with it or be history my guy.
by braxxox | 2025-04-08 00:29:16+00:00
Thanks for that suggestion.

I'm adding a few more limitations in this PR: https://github.com/brannondorsey/mem-isolate/pull/44

I know async-signal-safety is particularly important for, you know, signal handlers. But aside from those, and the multi-threading use case you describe, is there another use case where calling non async-signal-safe code from inside this module would lead to issues (that isn't covered in the new limitations)?

I can add another limitation is issues can transpire if the code you run in `callable()` isn't async-signal-safe, but I'd like to offer a few additional examples of gotchas or surprises to point out there.
by Sabinus | 2025-04-08 00:29:21+00:00
Maybe they shouldn't have, but the reasons were:

It'll make America richer. It'll encourage world peace. (It's hard to go to war with a country you trade with a lot)

The disadvantages of this were that high labour manufacturing left America and the poor had less jobs, and most of the wealth went to the elites and blue states. Funnily enough the politics of the red states was what prevented the (from free trade, in total greater) wealth from being spread around because it's apparently communism.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-04-08 00:29:25+00:00
That’s normally what this means, yes, with a few more intermediate steps. There’s only one bootstrap chain like this that I know of[1,2,3], maintained by Jeremiah Orians and the Guix project; judging from the reference to 180 bytes, that’s what the distro GP describes is using as well.

> This is a set of manually created hex programs in a Cthulhu Path to madness fashion. Which only have the goal of creating a bootstrapping path to a C compiler capable of compiling GCC, with only the explicit requirement of a single 1 KByte binary or less.

[1] https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

[2] https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0/

[3] https://github.com/oriansj/bootstrap-seeds
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-08 00:29:34+00:00
> I've never experienced any other software which has such a powerful mental model.

I hate to be that guy, but you should spend some time with jj. I thought the same, but jj takes this model, refines it, and gives you more power with fewer primitives. If you feel this way about git, but give it an honest try, I feel like you'd appreciate it.

Or maybe not. Different people are different :)
by js2 | 2025-04-08 00:29:52+00:00
> There’s this whole creation myth of how Git came to be that kind of paints Linus as some prophet reading from golden tablets written by the CS gods themselves.

What?

> Git isn’t just plain wonderful, and in my view, it’s not inevitable either.

I mean, the proof is in the pudding. So why did we end up with Git? Was it just dumb luck? Maybe. But I was there at the start for both Git and Mercurial (as I comment elsewhere in this post). I used them both equally at first, and as a Python aficionado should've gravitated to Mercurial.

But I like to understand how tools work, and I personally found Mercurial harder to understand, slower to use, and much less flexible. It was great for certain workflows, but if those workflows didn't match what you wanted to do, it was rigid (I can't really expound on this; it's been more than a decade). Surprisingly (as I was coding almost entirely in Python at the time), I also found it harder to contribute to than Git.

Now, I'm just one random guy, but here we are, with the not plain wonderful stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager.
by kbenson | 2025-04-08 00:30:02+00:00
Funnily enough, I have indeed have had part of a tooth (an impacted wisdom tooth) come off when eationg something, and was kind of grossed out that my food could contain this small white hard stone-like thing... until later that day I realized I was missing a part of a tooth.

Actually, it's happened twice, as about 15 years after that I had a bad cavity and fracture in a forward molar, and a few days before a scheduled root canal it happened again, but this time I suspected what had happened as soon as I encountered something hard all of a sudden while chewing something that shouldn't really have bits as hard as that in it.

Which is to say, their response that perhaps it was your own tooth may not have been as out of left field as you might have thought. It's probably a somewhat common occurrence.
by brucehoult | 2025-04-08 00:31:13+00:00
I bow to both Dima and Charles on making practical physical hack projects!

I'm more of a software guy. I guess my biggest hardware project (other than building a 3D printer from someone else's plans) was in 2012 or so making a PID-based home heating controller using an Uno with a custom perfboard shield with a thermistor for measuring the air temperature and a 433 MHz transmitter for talking to a set of Jaycar 240V remote controlled power outlets to control primarily a 2400W oil column heater, plus a fan pointing at it which I turned on when it was at a high duty cycle. Plus switching the home water heating on and off on a fixed schedule just as a side thing from the same board. I used that in Wellington for 3 winters before moving to Russia for a few years and saved NZ$500 per winter on electricity bills compared to previous years using a mechanical Honeywell thermostat to control the heater.
by simonw | 2025-04-08 00:31:37+00:00
I tried that a couple of years ago with a CLI tool that uses Python functions called from SQLite - it worked with GPT-3.5: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/29/enriching-data/

Example usage:

openai-to-sqlite query database.db " update messages set sentiment = chatgpt( 'Sentiment analysis for this message: ' || message || ' - ONLY return a lowercase string from: positive, negative, neutral, unknown' ) where sentiment not in ('positive', 'negative', 'neutral', 'unknown') or sentiment is null "

I haven't revisited the idea for fear of the amount it could cost if you ran it against a large database, but given the crashing prices of Gemini Flash, GPT-4o mini etc maybe it's worth another look!
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-08 00:31:37+00:00
EDIT: Sorry! I answered without first reading the article. What I'm talking about below is different from TFA.

You could record the audio to an audio cassette tape. If you had a good enough cassette deck, you could use acoustic coupling (holding up the tape deck to the TV speaker).

The BBC Micro had a 7-pin DIN socket for audio in/out and remote control of an external tape deck.

https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-google&sca_e...
by textlapse | 2025-04-08 00:31:50+00:00
There is no animal on planet earth that functions this way.

Visual cortex and plenty of other organs compress the data into useful, semantic information before feeding into a 'neural' network.

Simply from an energy and transmission perspective an animal would use up all its store to process a single frame if we were to construct such an organism based on just 'feed pixels to a giant neural network'. Things like colors, memory, objects, recognition, faces etc are all part of the equation and not some giant neural network that runs from raw photons hitting cones/rods.

So this isn't biomimicry or cellular automata - it's simply a fascination similar to self-driving cars being able to drive with a image -> {neural network} -> left/right/accelerate simplification.
by hedgehog-ai | 2025-04-08 00:31:53+00:00
I created a 90s themed AI search tool and chatbot complete with .gif adds that works without JS. It works on dillo, elinks and other command line browsers. I'm hoping to get those with antique or retro computers to try it out as typically AI search tools are JS/client heavy apps that don't cater for computers with limited resources or out-dated browsers.
by stubish | 2025-04-08 00:32:17+00:00
The army of somebodies who don't want Trump or Tesla discussed veto upvotes, so on the surface yes. But turns out Hacker News is also siloed. Use https://news.ycombinator.com/active as your front page or an alternate like https://hn.algolia.com/ or https://hckrnews.com and you get the uncensored experience, with flagged articles clearly labeled but perfectly functional.
by folkrav | 2025-04-08 00:34:15+00:00
Anecdotally, working in profit centres (and being a productive member of said centres) somewhat protected me from large layoffs, but that’s pretty much it. There isn’t much otherwise that ever shielded me (or any of my team members, as a team lead somewhat involved in these decisions) from being expensive line items, in the eyes of people some levels above my pay grade taking business decisions looking at a balance sheet.
by timewizard | 2025-04-08 00:34:30+00:00
> Anytime the duty cycle is not 0%, 50%, or 100%, you will have non-zero even harmonics.

The article is specifically trying to achieve those harmonics. This is the initial problem.

> A linear combination (scaled sum or difference) of two balanced square waves will necessarily still have all even harmonics at zero

Yea, that's why you need the phase offset, as I mentioned.

> and thus cannot emulate a square wave with a duty cycle different from 50%.

You can /synthesize/ a square wave at any duty cycle you like. We're still doing Fourier just without the whole transform.
by femto | 2025-04-08 00:35:11+00:00
Related, the ambulance system where I live has been running a clinical trail using a mobile ECMO unit (Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) [1,2]. An invasive procedure that oxygenates and pumps blood. It's boosted survival rate for those who are not responding to CPR (15-20 minutes duration) from 3% to 28%. The general CPR survival rate is an exponential looking curve: starting around 20%, reducing to 10% at 10 minutes and 3% at 20 minutes [3].

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-07/nsw-ambulance-ecmo-tr...

[2] https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/mobile-cardiac-treatme...

[3] https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-076019

Edit: The numbers in [3] are optimistic, as they are for in-hospital CPR, not out-of-hospital CPR.
by arealaccount | 2025-04-08 00:35:31+00:00
I was hesitant to give tailwind a try, like most aging web developers I couldn't stand that it breaks the "cascading" part of CSS.

But eventually I didn't have choice as I inherited a web app that has all of the newfangled build components that web apps come with. I love that we're coming full circle back to MVC with server components.

After getting used to it, I ended up liking Tailwind, mostly because it breaks the cascading part of CSS. There are so many unique parts to webpages these days that I think it makes sense to keep the styles close to their components, as opposed to global cascading components.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-04-08 00:35:57+00:00
I've worked in an org that used S/MIME heavily.

In a managed environment, you also get the advantage of certificates stored in a central directory (LDAP etc), and so certificate selection for the client is seamless.

All you have to do is hit "encrypt" in your mail client, enter your smart card PIN and the machine does the rest.
by masswerk | 2025-04-08 00:36:37+00:00
Regarding the display, it's a point plotting display, which is really the major performance bottleneck, as each dot has to be drawn individually and each dot takes 50 nanoseconds to display. (You can interleave computations and display operations in an asynchronous fashion, but this takes you only that far.) And you have to maintain the screen programatically, redrawing each dot periodically.

As there is no memory or frame buffer involved, the display resolution is pretty high, at 1024 × 1024 display locations (with a "visual resolution" of about 512 × 512, because dot size depends on the intensity and display locations may overlap), but drawing a line across the screen is pretty expensive in terms of runtime. Hence the complexity and fluency of a "display hack" depends largely on the number of dots drawn and maintained.

On the plus side, display commands are pretty simple and straight forward, put one coordinate in the accumulator and the other one in the IO register and off you go. Acording to Marvin Minsky computer graphics just went into decline after this.

Regarding modern and contemporary coders, there are really few tricks that haven't been explored with Spacewar! already. (Mind that Steve Russell was also the programmer, who gave us Lisp.) Spacewar! does all calculations in realtime, without referring to lookup tables, but, otherwise, this is pretty advanced, even featuring a JIT compiler (by Dan Edwards, who is important for the history of Lisp, as well) for the configurable spaceship outlines.

Having said that, the PDP-1 has a pretty fascinating while simple instruction set (including universal indirection), which lends itself especially well to assembler programming, and should be a source of previously unknown joy for any modern coder.
by quadragenarian | 2025-04-08 00:37:45+00:00
I may be wrong but shipping via a third country doesn't work - I believe that Section 301 allows the US to re-assign the correct country of origin. Sure, some product may come in via this trick, but anything at scale would be found out. I doubt anyone in the US would mistake a BYD car from being a product from a country other than China.

I know very little however, so if someone with more knowledge on this can chime in on how this works practically, it would edifying.
by skulk | 2025-04-08 00:40:24+00:00
As per their landing page, yes.

> stage0: < 190 byte x86 assembly seed is reproduced on multiple distros

> stage1: seed builds up to a tiny c compiler, and ultimately x86 gcc

> stage2: x86 gcc bootstraps target architecture cross toolchains

very impressive, I want to try this out now.
by sksxihve | 2025-04-08 00:41:12+00:00
Use AI to generate AI prompts while you continue on with your normal work. How will they know if your code was not written by AI?

The "look at Tom" thing isn't new, there have always been sloppy engineers that crank out bad code faster than their peers and got praised for it while slowing everyone else down because they had to actual debug and integrate the garbage.
by quadragenarian | 2025-04-08 00:43:00+00:00
As mentioned in the article you linked, the president has a veto over any law to restrict his own tariff powers; the only way to override his or her veto is to pass the law with 2/3rds majority in BOTH chambers, the House and Senate.

That does mean a fair number of Republican Congresspeople would have to join Democrats. This level of cooperation seems to be in itself anathema to Republicans, notwithstanding the actual principle of the bill itself.
by tikhonj | 2025-04-08 00:44:32+00:00
Another alternative is the patch-theory approach from Darcs and now Pijul. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking about version control—I haven't actually used it myself but, from reading about it, I find thinking in patches matches my natural intuition better than git's model. Darcs had some engineering limitations that could lead to really bad performance in certain cases, but I understand Pijul fixes that.
by elliotto | 2025-04-08 00:47:40+00:00
Can't read the actual study because it's behind a medical journal paywall. It looks like they speculate that improved CPR training and AED use has caused this.

My speculation would be that these mega running nerds all wear watches that track their heart rate 24/7 now. I suspect if something is wrong then you get an earlier detection rather than only discovering it on a race day.
by mmcclure | 2025-04-08 00:48:04+00:00
Yeah, I've been a fairly vocal curmudgeon about Tailwind within my team. Some folks really like it. They're doing the work and I trust them, so I rolled with it.

I still have qualms with Tailwind. My classic CSS sensibilities are offended, but whatever. The part that I still don't like is really what this post boils down to: a massively complex build system that creates footguns in the weirdest places.

That being said, Tailwind that's set up well in coordination with a complex design system really does feel like it's a win. Seeing that in action was an aha moment where I was able to see value that made some of the tradeoffs worth it.
by arunabha | 2025-04-08 00:48:53+00:00
> It becomes a hard job the instant that you have some passion or ethical concerns that drive you to create software that holds up to your own high standards and requirements.

This is the hardest lesson to learn for a lot of software engineers. By nature, computers are unforgiving, so a lot(most?) of us are wired to do things 'right'. The apparent fundamental incompatibility of that mindset with modern corporate environments is a pretty painful lesson to learn.

This is not to say that any one of the approaches is the one true approach. To a company software is a means to its ultimate goal of more profits.

To an engineer though it's often both, a means of livelihood and a source of joy. Reconciling the second with the first is easy in theory and hard in practice.
by hx8 | 2025-04-08 00:49:32+00:00
Often when the conversation of drinking comes up it becomes a contest to see who can drink the most. The WHO actually keeps track of this data on a population level[0]. Right now the country with the highest alcohol consumption per capita is Romania, with an average consumption of >2.9 units of alcohol a day for the entire population 15 years old or older. In case there is some national pride in your comment about Germany, rest assured they are 5th place. I'll leave the readers to decide if that is an enviable position.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...