MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TaupeRanger | 2025-04-02 16:09:24+00:00
Purchasing Power is a function of inflation and income - so it always "keeps up" with inflation. You might've been trying to say that income hasn't kept up with inflation, but that's not supported by any data. Real wages have remained roughly flat since 2021. https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-grow...
by foenix | 2025-04-02 16:09:35+00:00
> My mother was from Utah, and she always lamented at the small size of her flowers growing up in Chicago. They are much larger in Utah because they can get big without insects eating them.

Counter-anecdote from a Utah local: every time we travel to a "wet" area (any travel but Arizona / Nevada) we always find the climate to be more verdant and flowery. Perhaps ecosystems are more multi-faceted in nature.

Counter-counter-anecdote: Our Roses love the weather here.
by freedomben | 2025-04-02 16:09:36+00:00
I agree with you, but I would also add that real history is also typically much more uncomfortable, for nearly everyone. It can also be legitimately controversial as there's truly a lot that we don't really know, particularly around people's motiviations and sometimes true beliefs. For example it was common practice for people to burn any letters that didn't reinforce or support what they wanted history to remember. It takes someone with real dedication towards separating themselves emotionally from the topic to attempt an accurate portrayal, and that is a rare quality indeed. Certainly not a quality widespread enough to be present in every middle school and high school history teacher (though there are some excellent ones out there).

Some examples of the discomfort: to many white people now the history of slavery and racism is deeply uncomfortable. It's not even difficult to find hard evidence of such as many racist attitudes persisted well into the era of recordings and have been immortalized in movies and TV shows. I suspect a big part of that is the recency effect since we're still living with many follow-on effects of the practice even if we don't practice it actively anymore.

Much less talked about though is the history of racism and slavery among nearly all people at different times. For example a large majority of the black slaves that were sold to Europeans (including the Europeans living in the Americas) were originally enslaved by other black Africans and sold to the slave traders. Not all the slaves were sold either. To be fair the Spanish (at least in first half of the new world exploration) didn't have much of a problem doing the enslaving themselves as they routinely enslaved native people's after conquering them. We can also go back millenia and see the same behavior. Greeks, Romans, Persians, pretty much everybody had their slaves for as far back as history is recorded (and surely much, much farther).

We like to think we are enlightened nowadays, but I think history really demonstrates that as humans we are almost universally inclined toward enslaving other humans. Hopefully we're irreversibly past that now and well on our path to the Star Trek society, but even if that is the case it doesn't make the history any more comfortable.
by hgs3 | 2025-04-02 16:09:53+00:00
The "general category" [1] and "whitespace" [2] properties are real character properties defined by Unicode. Referring to them is, ideally, how a language that supports Unicode should do things.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/#GC_Values_Table

[2] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/#White_Space
by fluoridation | 2025-04-02 16:09:56+00:00
>Either way, I'm an idiot if I think I can eat those donuts now and just "pay them back" in a few months. That's not how food works. That's not how health works. It's not "good" that I'm packing on the pounds now.

In fact, that's exactly how food works. If you don't weight thousands of kilos right now it's because how much you've eaten and how much you've burned are more or less balanced, even if you're not at your ideal weight.

>It's going to be harder to work them off later.

Why? Literally, why? A Joule is a Joule whether it's now or later. It will literally cost you the same effort to burn a Joule's worth of fat now as it will ten years from now, because that's what effort is.

The way technical debt and "dieting debt" are different from financial debt is not in how (or whether) they're accrued and paid off, but in that financial debt has a time component, because the debt is with a second party. You can't hold a significant debt indefinitely, someone eventually comes to find you. Technical debt and dieting debt are debts you have with yourself -- or rather with your future self. There's no one to come looking for you, and you're only screwing yourself if you let the debt sit there unpaid and causing problems for yourself. That's why it's stupid to accrue it, not because of some effort calculus about how much more effort it's going to take to repay later.
by structural | 2025-04-02 16:10:01+00:00
One major difference is that while indexing, you're generating an internal data structure that represents that site. Once done, if the site doesn't change, you don't have any need to revisit it, and in fact, fetching the site multiple times just increases your own costs.

On the other hand, an unsupervised AI training algorithm may just need raw text, and as much of it as possible. It doesn't know what site it came from or much care, and it's not building any index that links the content back to its original source. So fetching the site on each training epoch might actually be viable: why bother storing the entire internet when you can just fetch -> transform -> ingest into your model? If your crawler is distributed enough, it won't be the bottleneck, either.

If this is the architecture some companies are using, this also means that these crawlers won't ever stop, because they are finetuning some model by constantly updating over time based on the "current" internet, whatever that might mean.
by devwithanxiety | 2025-04-02 16:10:04+00:00
Thanks for the advice and book recs! I will take a look at them. I have been given some CBT techniques by my councillor but always good to read up on other systems as well.

> Don't spend much time analysing some deep-seated reason for your anxiety.

Yeah I feel like I'm supposed to be able to instantly see the problem on a little introspection yet that never happens. Constantly wondering why I feel like this doesn't seem to help much.

> You will not be making good decisions while anxious, and other careers will not be less stressful.

Good point. Most well paid careers do pay well because there's a demanding aspec t to them.
by jamesjarvis | 2025-04-02 16:10:08+00:00
This is one of those projects every nerd loves to build :D

My first iteration back in lockdown [0] focused mainly on rain (I'm from the UK), but later versions used a colour e-ink, added a camera to change the background with a selfie and added train times from my local station, along with upcoming birthdays. Reminds me I need to try and write an update at some point!

[0] https://jamesjarvis.io/posts/2020/06/umbrella-e-ink-weather-...
by dralley | 2025-04-02 16:11:16+00:00
You're making a fantastic argument for why your earlier accusation that Ezra is advocating "the core ideas of the current administration" is completely ludicrous.

All of MAGA's most core policies are fundamentally degrowth. Tariffs, cancelling the CHIPS act, cutting funding for medical research, pushing expensive fossil fuels like coal above cheaper renewables or even natural gas, pushing resource extraction and commodity manufacturing and agriculture at the expense of advanced manufacturing.

The outcome of all of those policies will be degrowth, even if Trump isn't using that rhetoric.
by craigtp | 2025-04-02 16:11:27+00:00
Location: Liverpool, England

Remote: Yes (Remote only)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, SQL Server/MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/EventStoreDB/Redis, RabbitMQ/Kafka, CQRS/Event Sourcing, Azure/AWS.

Résumé/CV: https://cv.craigtp.co.uk

Email: craig [at] craigtp.co.uk

Hi. I'm Craig. I'm an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Systems Architect and Microsoft Certified Professional with a passion for software development.

I work primarily, but not exclusively, with Microsoft technologies and the .NET / .NET Core frameworks, leading complex and challenging enterprise software development projects to successfully deliver robust, secure, scalable and efficient software solutions, encompassing over 20 years of experience in the field.

An accomplished team leader, mentor and architect, I'm skilled at taking a leading role in the overall architecture of a project, in driving team developments and employing proven industry disciplines and best-practices to deliver successful software projects that frequently exceed client expectations.

I'm passionate about distributed systems design, CQRS and event sourcing and a proponent of domain-driven design to ensure that solutions are laser-focused on solving real business problems. I'm an open source enthusiast and advocate using the best and most appropriate tools available, providing for an effective and pragmatic solution that delivers genuine and quantifiable business value.

Throughout my career I've helped numerous businesses of varying sizes in varying industries get their technology investment right and I can do the same for you.

Recent projects include:

+ Architected and executed a comprehensive overhaul of a core legacy system, migrating it to a robust microservices architecture. By strategically applying Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, and Event Sourcing, we enabled a prominent African FinTech company to seamlessly scale from 1 million to 10 million active users while achieving a remarkable 30%+ reduction in cloud expenses.

+ Successfully delivered an ambitious project to re-engineer a number of monolithic applications to cloud-native, event-driven distributed services for a leading hospitality software provider as part of a company-wide effort to modernise their entire software estate including training and mentoring staff on event-driven architecture and distributed system design.

+ Designed & delivered a large, global SaaS product to manage and automate music royalty collection and payment for one of the UK's largest and most demanding independent music publishers including full cloud geo-distribution & redundancy to ensure high availability & reliability for the worldwide client base.

+ Spearheaded the creation of a groundbreaking anti-motor fraud solution for a prominent UK law firm. This industry-leading platform combined a user-friendly web application, powerful API, and sophisticated data systems, including Europe's largest anti-fraud database, giving the firm an edge in fraud detection.
by abeppu | 2025-04-02 16:11:32+00:00
Actually, the (in)famous "sparks of general intelligence paper" about GPT-4 included tasks such as "Draw a unicorn in TikZ" which really is not that far off from this task. There were also examples for drawing cars/trucks/cats etc with SVG.

But I do think that evolutionary algorithms or MCMC variants could do a better job of this, especially if paired with an auxiliary model for scoring their intermediate results.
by PeterStuer | 2025-04-02 16:11:45+00:00
What is worse, our real consumption based per capita emission is still rising (+8%)! We love importing stuff that polluted elsewhere.

Local reasons:

Belgium has a highly industrialized economy, with significant sectors like chemicals, steel, cement, and refining which are energy-intensive and heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Antwerp’s port, with very high and very dirty maritime transport, hosts Europe’s largest petrochemical cluster.

Belgium's car culture, company cars as a tax benefit, and a well-developed fossil-fueled freight transport sector. One of the most dense road networks in the world leading to heavy road traffic and congestion.

Belgium also hosts the capital of Europe. The diplomat and CxO consultant class flies in and out of Zaventem almost daily.
by craigtp | 2025-04-02 16:12:28+00:00
SEEKING WORK

Location: Liverpool, England

Remote: Yes (Remote only)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, SQL Server/MySQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/EventStoreDB/Redis, RabbitMQ/Kafka, CQRS/Event Sourcing, Azure/AWS.

Résumé/CV: https://cv.craigtp.co.uk

Email: craig [at] craigtp.co.uk

Hi. I'm Craig. I'm an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Systems Architect and Microsoft Certified Professional with a passion for software development.

I work primarily, but not exclusively, with Microsoft technologies and the .NET / .NET Core frameworks, leading complex and challenging enterprise software development projects to successfully deliver robust, secure, scalable and efficient software solutions, encompassing over 20 years of experience in the field.

I'm passionate about distributed systems design, CQRS and event sourcing and a proponent of domain-driven design to ensure that solutions are laser-focused on solving real business problems. I'm an open source enthusiast and advocate using the best and most appropriate tools available, providing for an effective and pragmatic solution that delivers genuine and quantifiable business value.

Throughout my career I've helped numerous businesses of varying sizes in varying industries get their technology investment right and I can do the same for you.

Recent projects include:

+ Successfully lead a multi-team effort to re-engineer the core domain of a legacy monolithic application to a suite of well-designed, modern microservices utilising Domain-Driven Design, CQRS & Event Sourcing where appropriate for one of Africa's leading FinTech companies allowing them to scale their transaction processing from over 1 million active customers to over 10 million whilst simultaneously reducing their cloud spend by over 30%.

+ Successfully delivered large section of an ambitious project to re-engineer a number of monolithic applications to cloud-native, event-driven distributed services for a leading hospitality software provider as part of a company-wide effort to modernise entire software estate including training and mentoring staff on event-driven architecture and distributed system design.

+ Successfully designed & delivered large, global SaaS product to manage and automate music royalty collection and payment for one of the UK's largest and most demanding independent music publishers including full cloud geo-distribution & redundancy to ensure high availability & reliability for the worldwide client base.

+ Successfully lead project to develop industry leading anti-motor fraud web application and API with advanced OLAP & OLTP system and data warehouse including one of Europe's largest anti-fraud databases for a Top 40 UK law firm.
by ilamont | 2025-04-02 16:12:30+00:00
Excellent reporting, particularly concerning the rivalries in the top levels of the Ukrainian military leadership. If only it was possible to do a similar deep dive into the Russian side.

One "what if" I am left wondering about concerns the U.S. frustrations and Ukrainian reluctance to lower the draft age. Maybe that ties into Zelensky and Budanov's belief that Putin has been "approaching death" for 2 years?

https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/ze...
by miki123211 | 2025-04-02 16:12:32+00:00
THe original version of that idea seems to come from "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost Its Mind", by Dan Davies (the "Lying for Money" guy.)

There's a shorter interview with him (in podcast form, includes a well-made transcript) going into these ideas at https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-davies-or...
by mmooss | 2025-04-02 16:12:37+00:00
>> Russia is not a democracy

> How do you determine this though?

By not wasting time on intentional time-wasting arguments.

> That democrats think of this as a defeat is amusing to me.

Not most Democrats that I've seen - they wanted the law followed (for future reference: Democratic party members are Democrats, those who favor democracy are democrats).
by rwyinuse | 2025-04-02 16:12:51+00:00
You don't need an "extinction event" to hurt coffee production so much that drinking it (especially Arabica) becomes an expensive luxury due to lack of supply. Crops that are grown only in particular parts of the world will suffer the most from localized unusual weather patterns, as there won't be production from elsewhere to compensate.

Also, it takes some time to move production elsewhere. And if climate change continues to get worse, you can't really trust any place to have a consistent climate.
by ptx2 | 2025-04-02 16:12:59+00:00
Location: USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, C, C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node, Ruby, Rails, Django, Express, React, PostgreSQL, Linux, Bash, AWS, HTML, CSS. Trying to find time to play with Go and Rust. Resume/CV: 15 years experience as a full-stack engineer (web, native, frontend/backend, firmware, devops). Contact for resume. Email: ptx2 at-sign ptx2 dot net

Product-minded full-stack engineer with 15 years experience.

Recent technical write-up and open-source project I made that reached #1 on HackerNews: https://ptx2.net/posts/unbricking-a-bike-with-a-raspberry-pi

Some things I've designed/built/launched/maintained professionally: high-traffic web frontend/backends, realtime interactive graphics apps, data visualizations, computer vision apps, firmware, reverse engineering, video/image processing, apis, api integrations (payments/social/data), distributed systems, linux sysadmin, refactoring/maintaining legacy systems, managing small engineering teams, remote work, customer facing work.

Some areas of interest: the outdoors, health and fitness, art, music, environment, games, human computer interaction, product design, ui/ux, embedded/iot devices, privacy, security, networking, optimization, unusual companies/products, web, linux.

Looking for interesting software engineer or tech co-founder/director/advisor opportunities!
by NickM | 2025-04-02 16:13:36+00:00
What I find hard to imagine is how the app should respond when synchronisation fails after locally committing a bunch of transactions... Manual merging may be the only safe option in many cases.

Yeah, exactly right. This is why CRDTs are popular: they give you well-defined semantics for automatic conflict resolution, and save you from having to implement all that stuff from scratch yourself.

The author writes that CRDTs "don’t generalize to arbitrary data." This is true, and sometimes it may be easier to your own custom app-specific conflict resolution logic than massaging your data to fit within preexisting CRDTs, but doing that is extremely tricky to get right.

It seems like the implied tradeoff being made by Graft is "you can just keep using the same data formats you're already using, and everything just works!" But the real tradeoff is that you're going to have to write a lot of tricky, error-prone conflict resolution logic. There's no such thing as a free lunch, unfortunately.
by j-pb | 2025-04-02 16:13:45+00:00
Yet they are bad at every one of those points.

* An auto increment ID is just as human non-readable as a UUID, it's just easier to get silent collisions from typos.

* The Source is metadata that belongs in a metadata system, not into the ID itself

* the veracity is worthless without verifiability

* gated-ness is just an anti-feature caused by the lack of verifiability

If you you classify identifiers along different axis of their properties, you'll notice that DOIs actually inhabit the completely wrong quadrant for their use-case. (https://docs.rs/tribles/0.5.1/tribles/id/index.html)
by devwithanxiety | 2025-04-02 16:14:17+00:00
Hey thanks for the tips!

> Don't accept a job where teams do Scrum.

Yeah I haven't enjoyed working under points and sprints. There just never seems to be a logical end to your work or even a pause.

> Find a place where you are helping the business run, but not directly producing the product that defines the business.

I like this a lot and it makes perfect sense. Thank you very much.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-02 16:14:28+00:00
I went through a long period of maintaining an intense exercise regimen and intentionally compared my experience without using protein supplements and using them over longish time periods. Personally, I can't say that saw that they made any real difference in any aspect of it. However, bodies differ, and YMMV.

My suspicion is that if your diet is otherwise appropriate and healthy, these supplements won't matter.
by wruza | 2025-04-02 16:14:40+00:00
You want to train the rational part of your brain to disregard the anxiety signals coming from your amygdla; and over time, the amygdla's messages will become less and less intense

Can that really be more effective than/without digging to the cause? My personal experience with downward arrow is that on success, it doesn't reduce anxiety by itself, but it adds lots of courage and knowledge to intentionally face situations where it comes up and to go through aware. If you don't know what's wrong... hmm I'm not a therapist to figure it out. Do you really feel it less, or do you accept it like a tinnitus? (I mean the latter is a solution but personally I'd rather not feel it).

You will not be making good decisions while anxious, and other careers will not be less stressful

Mostly agreed. Because (from CBT perspective) while it's nice to take a break and relax, the crucial reflection info disappears. It's sort of a pointless pause and the issues will find you anyway.
by aeve890 | 2025-04-02 16:14:52+00:00
Bubbles of expanding change in the structure of spacetime. Spoiler ahead. In the book, under the "Dark Forest" game theory setting, super advanced civilizations wipe lesser ones out in increasingly complex ways, for example, triggering a spacetime flattening in the target solar system, creating a bubble where s-t collapses into 2D. Also, scars in s-t when reckless young civilizations use FTL technology.
by NickC25 | 2025-04-02 16:14:57+00:00
As someone who has done biz with China (specifically with Tsinghua University) - the key phrase is "for now". China's strength in economics is to take what works elsewhere, bring it to China to understand what about that product or service works domestically, and then China-fy / reverse engineer what's great about the product, and then get Party backing to scale it in order to beat the foreign competitor. This is their default strategy and no matter how many factories Tesla might have in China now, it's not a certainty that those factories or technologies will be in Tesla's hands in 3-5 years from now.

Specific to the automobile industry, remember what VW's mistake in China was. Long story short: they taught the Chinese how to really build and scale auto production. The Chinese learned, and then shut VW out of the domestic Chinese market once they had a strong Chinese competitor - they were able to scale and produce cars for significantly cheaper.
by boshjerns | 2025-04-02 16:14:59+00:00
Basin amplification refers to the phenomenon where seismic waves are intensified as they pass through sedimentary basins, typically causing stronger ground motions than would otherwise occur. This effect is particularly pronounced in regions like Bangkok, which is situated in the Chao Phraya River Basin—an area underlain by soft, sedimentary layers. When seismic waves encounter these soft materials, lower frequency waves can resonate, leading to amplified shaking in structures above. The mechanics behind this amplification stem largely from the interaction of seismic waves with the geological structure of the basin. In studies of past earthquakes, recorded peak ground accelerations (PGA) within the Bangkok basin have consistently surpassed 1 cm/s² during significant seismic events. This amplification can lead to severe structural damage, even hundreds of kilometers away from the quake's epicenter.