MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vlvdus | 2025-04-19 05:42:30+00:00
> If your workload is truly intermittent and stateless, and you want zero operational effort, serverless can work.

And it works pretty well. A lot of internal and external JSON APIs are a good fit.

I've found the article ok, but it would have been a much nicer read without all the emotional stuff and just kept - serverless is pushed as panacea but actually isn't a good fit because...
by mcv | 2025-04-19 05:43:21+00:00
I've had the exact same thing with an OSM map. Organic Maps showed a trail down, but if it was meant to be a trail, it hadn't been used or maintained in at least a century. It was completely irresponsible to go down it, but we did so anyway because otherwise we'd have to backtrack our entire hike. We got home, but it was quite an adventure.
by cryptonector | 2025-04-19 05:43:42+00:00
> Let's compare two vehicles - an EV car vs an ICE car -

Ok, but TFA is about planes (and boats), not cars. That's a big caveat because neither planes nor boats can do regenerative braking, and planes need to be light. Boats can get big enough to float even if the power plant is heavy, though there is a maximum to what is reasonable.
by ryao | 2025-04-19 05:46:37+00:00
I suspect that is the result of this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sales/comments/134u0mq/cloudflare_c...

They got rid of all of the “underperforming” sales people and hired new ones. That nightmare is the result. I suspect the higher the sales performance, the more likely they were doing things like this.
by mcv | 2025-04-19 05:49:35+00:00
Yes, walled gardens are bad, but in this case it was the combination of walled garden, region restrictions for vital health info, conflicting region restrictions, health info not being available outside the app, and a healthcare system that itself is completely broken. Each of these is stupid and dangerous, and if even one of them hadn't been the case, the author wouldn't have had this problem.

It's a whole ecosystem of enshittification.
by ryao | 2025-04-19 05:50:22+00:00
That is true. I was imagining the AWS egress costs at my own work where things are going to so many places with latency requirements that the idea of sending hard drives is simply not feasible, even with infinite money and pretending the hard drives had the messages prewritten on them from the factory. Delivery would never be fast enough. Infinite money is not feasible either, but it shows just how this is not feasible in general in more than just the cost dimension.
by notorandit | 2025-04-19 05:50:46+00:00
My first text editor has been vi on NCR Unix machines back in 1986 and DEC Ultrix in 1988. I fell so deeply in love that I joyed only when I could get a "copy" of vi.exe from MKS unix-like toolkit for DOS. That file only.

Nice read, indeed. Especially the final sentence.

> Also... Emacs sucks!
by huksley | 2025-04-19 05:51:48+00:00
I really loved serverless for while, particularly in the early days, when building small projects. But AWS Lambdas, for example, is constant maintenance hell for larger applications, including building and dependency issues, debugging and slow deployment.

One feat is still amazes me - my AWS Lambda React webapp example (Todo with server rendering) which were deployed in 2019, still works as today, and I have not changed, or redeployed it since.
by chongli | 2025-04-19 05:52:30+00:00
For people who love vi/vim, it's not really about being "a significantly faster programmer." It's about reducing friction between the changes you want to happen and them happening on screen. Editors with a lot of friction (that make you do lots of intermediate or repetitive steps to accomplish a task) can be really annoying to use. For some people, minor annoyances can be very distracting to the point where they take you out of your comfort zone and break your concentration.

Having your concentration broken when you're trying to solve a tricky problem can be a huge productivity drain. So in the end, an editor which may only save a keystroke here and there on average can end up being very productive for some people.
by wodenokoto | 2025-04-19 05:53:40+00:00
Newbies tend to be really afraid of the monsters early in the game. Maybe you are used to games that puts enemies there for players to kill. You’re supposed to sneak around enemies in the early game (you just woke up weak after a 100 years…)

With that being said I don’t think it is newbie friendly though. The controls uses all buttons and many with different modes. It’s can be quite overwhelming imho.
by m463 | 2025-04-19 05:54:11+00:00
I wonder if diesel electric locomotives are efficient at all.

I think the electric is for infinite torque to get lots and lots of cars moving. But to slow down, "electric" brakes are to bleed off power into resistor banks, not re-capture the electricity.

Meanwhile an electric bus actually has to be efficient, which means batteries and regenerative braking.
by qingcharles | 2025-04-19 05:54:40+00:00
I just helped a guy get 14 crimes removed from his record that he didn't commit. Someone in Texas just continuously committed heinous crimes over a decade or more and they were all just added to this other guy's criminal record. They seemingly had the same first name/initial/last name (fairly common name). I'm assuming dude in Texas was allowed to commit a crime spree because every time he was pulled in front of the court it looked like he was a first time offender.
by hilbert42 | 2025-04-19 05:55:17+00:00
"They had an apartheid up to 60 years ago."

For many of us outside the US there's a dichotomy here. The North won the bitterly contested Civil War and freed the slaves but never really afforded them true freedoms. Why?

The perception from the outside is that conscience over slavery per se drove the North to war and not concern for the fact that slaves were actually people who were suffering enslavement and or unfairly treated.

Edit: Given the Civil War why was the Civil Rights Movement 100 years later necessary?
by ehnto | 2025-04-19 05:56:31+00:00
Warzone became my friend groups defacto 3rd space during covid, and I don't love shooters but the game loop had considerable down time where you were just exploring the massive map with friends while preparing, and able to chat like you were at a cafe or a pub. We had lockdowns here, so that social interaction was so important.

After the lockdowns people slowly drifted back into normality, full time work etc, and we all stopped playing together.
by Jensson | 2025-04-19 05:57:03+00:00
Of course there is, you just train it on questions where you know the answer, then it will always get caught and it wont even think of the possibility to get away with a lie since that never happened.

Creating that training set though might cost many trillions of dollars though, since you need to basically recreate equivalent of internet but without any lies or bad intentions etc.
by felipeerias | 2025-04-19 06:01:18+00:00
Medieval alchemy gave us modern chemistry, just like ancient and medieval astrology gave us modern astronomy.

The Enlightenment age brought about an increased interest in occultism right next to an increased interest in science, often by the same people.

When a new knowledge area is starting out, it can be pretty hard to discriminate between the real and the imaginary.
by specproc | 2025-04-19 06:01:29+00:00
Fair critique on the promotion, but you do see that a lot round here.

I share the frustration though and the article resonated with me. I'm currently working on a project that's being inappropriately done in cloud functions, and it's just dumb. We'll never scale beyond a few hundred users, but there's a load of considerations and hoop jumping we'd have completely skipped if the org had stayed off the Kool Aid.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-04-19 06:01:55+00:00
This might be heresy to many JS devs, but I think 'state' variables are an anti-pattern.

I use webcomponents and instead of adding state variables for 'flat' variable types I use the DOM element value/textContent/checked/etc as the only source of truth, adding setters and getters as required.

So instead of:

/* State variables */ let name; /* DOM update functions */ function setNameNode(value) { nameNode.textContent = value; } /* State update functions */ function setName(value) { if(name !== value) { name = value; setNameNode(value); } }

it would just be akin to:

set name(name) { this.nameNode.textContent = name } get name() { return this.nameNode.textContent} /* or if the variable is used less than 3 times don't even add the set/get */ setState({name}){ this.querySelector('#name').textContent = name; }

Its hard to describe in a short comment, but a lot of things go right naturally with very few lines of code.

I've seen the history of this creating spaghetti, but now with WebComponents there is separation of objects + the adjacent HTML template, creating a granularity that its fusilli or macaroni.
by jader201 | 2025-04-19 06:02:41+00:00
You’re referring to a lot of mainstream games, but it’s not hard to find relaxing (cozy) games.

Also, many of Nintendo’s first party titles still have the same charm as their old school titles.

I’m not a fan of a lot of the gory, hyper, crazy games you’re referring to, either, but there are no shortage of games that stick to the traditional charm, and I can always find something to enjoy.

I’m playing through Unicorn Overlords right now, and while I wouldn’t consider it “cozy”, it’s none of the adjectives you use, and reminds me a lot of Ogre Battle on SNES, or Final Fantasy Tactics on PS1.

Having said that, I’m also a huge fan of breaking out a deck of cards or board game and enjoying a quiet game with family/friends.

Heck, I’ll even spend a couple days playing through a solo game of 1862. [1]

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/66837
by ehnto | 2025-04-19 06:02:43+00:00
I have long lamented the over use of combat in games, not for pacifist ideology, it's just a cop-out as a game mechanic for a lot of games. The medium can represent a chasm of possibilities but usually all the focus goes of AAA titles goes into combat.

Which is to say the indie game and cozy game niches respectively have a lot of scope, because their possible gameplay is "everything that isn't combat", and I welcome the variety and creativity.
by stevekemp | 2025-04-19 06:03:42+00:00
Interesting that you picked out the use of different API calls for writing to terminal, printer, and the tape. There was at least an attempt at unifying that with the "IOByte" configuration.

The idea was that depending on the state of the IOByte the actual destination of "stuff" could vary.

Of course in the CP/M emulator I wrote/maintain I ignore that byte, because it turns out everybody else did too. (Kinda like user-numbers/areas, most people ignored them.)
by eimrine | 2025-04-19 06:04:21+00:00
> That's why we got commands like d), d{, D, etc. Trying to achieve the goal in one go, without any intermediate redraws.

This is 1/2 of explaining why vi family is the GOAT. The remaining explanation is that vi family is the only text editor which is able to be used completely without looking at the keyboard or touching the mouse even once. You can not achieve this if you have to use accord commands which are typically binded to what is selected by mouse. No vim-less text editor can ever provide one-click analog of o command (make a new line under the cursor from wherever column the cursor is at the moment of clicking).
by nine_k | 2025-04-19 06:04:25+00:00
At about 700 km below the cloud tops, where the gases start to liquefy under pressure, the pressure is estimated to be merely 700 bar, less than half of the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana trench. Earth-made cameras should have no trouble operating there, given an adequate enclosure. The temperature might be a problem, but I could not find any estimates for that depth.

We could certainly put a plane / balloon deep into the Jupiter atmosphere, if we were able to slow the arriving spacecraft to subsonic speeds in the atmosphere. Given that the low-Jupiter orbital velocity is 41 km/s, it's not an easy feat, even if the spacecraft brings enough reaction mass for a retro burn to slow down and insert itself to the low-Jupiter circular orbit.
by Jensson | 2025-04-19 06:04:26+00:00
> One thing I keep wondering though is why we can’t teach them logic at some sort of base layer

That is what they did with these "chain of thought" models. Maybe they didn't do it in the optimal way, but they did train them on their ability to answer certain questions.

So the low hanging fruits from this style of training has already been plucked.
by shoo | 2025-04-19 06:04:44+00:00
when i interviewed candidates for software engineering roles in $non-tech-megacorp i was primarily interested in how folks did in the problem solving / coding / API design interviews.

but, we also asked some behavioural questions about past experiences. we don't say it explicitly, but we're looking for responses like --- can you say some words that suggest you have demonstrated initiative at work, or you can sometimes influence others and build support for a decision rather than unilaterally doing stuff without consultation (we're $megacorp, not $startup...) . you don't need to be able to talk at length about all aspects of your past job, but you do need to be able to offer a few examples of That Time When I Demonstrated Initiative, or That Time When I Influenced The Stakeholders that can be mashed into a digestible Situation / Task / (your) Action / Result format & where you can give a few reasonable answers to follow up questions from interviewers who probe and ask annoying questions like "so, what exactly were your responsibilities?"

another thing we'd be probing for is "growth mindset" type stuff. a bad response to "if you were in a similar situation in future, what would you do differently?" is "nothing, everything i did at $oldjob was optimal". a response that shows some reflection, a willingness to admit not everything you do is perfect, and concrete ideas for improvements to behaviour or process comes across much better. no need to enumerate all your worst failings, cherry-pick and offer one or two lesser ones.

for these kinds of behavioural questions based on past experience, we didn't really care if junior / intermediate hires struggled to give strong responses. We would be a lot more concerned about poor responses to these questions for engineering managers or other positions with a leadership component.

having a prepared short form answer to "why are you applying for a job here" is also a good idea.

if you have friends or acquaintances who regularly interview folks who you can hit up for a favour, you could see if they'd be willing to conduct a mock interview and then give you feedback about things you could improve on.
by vasco | 2025-04-19 06:06:09+00:00
There's plenty of checklists in the medical field as well. Specially during triage of all kinds.

The main issue is that in most jobs people will say new checklists won't work for /them/ because they understand it better than the checklist, or because the checklist will slow them down. Think about your own work and you'll find reasons why checklists don't make sense, I bet.

I once went in for a surgery on a foot and when rolled into the room the doctor asked me if I had any last minute questions and I asked only 'which foot are you operating on'. After a few seconds of confusion he gave a decisive right answer and even told me 'here, if it makes you feel better I'll sharpie your leg'. And it did make me feel better - there's so much that can easily go wrong by a minor mistake from them which will be life changing for you.
by anal_reactor | 2025-04-19 06:06:45+00:00
Yes. I never enjoyed "cozy" games. Whenever I see them, I recognize that I'm supposed to feel coziness, but I don't. They're just boring, nothing happens. They remind me of places where I have to behave, which makes me stressed out.

Violent games, on the other hand, will take my attention, and have me stop thinking about the real-world stress. I really miss the craze of violent and edgy games of 2000's. Any recommendations?

I guess the bottom line is "people relax when doing hobbies" which is not a revolutionary take.
by anonzzzies | 2025-04-19 06:08:44+00:00
> it's going to cost me close to nothing

Until it does and then you are screwed without an easy way to get out if your application is anything else than trivial. It has it's uses; a simple page/site which won't get any users and a system that needs to elastically scale forever, but in between, you are just burning (your company) money for no reason other than HN said it is the best (a lot of people here are working at FAANG; it's baffling why anyone would take any advice from architecture ran at a company with 100k more employees than their own startup with all this cloud / devops garbage and resulting costs and headaches).
by Wilder7977 | 2025-04-19 06:09:17+00:00
The point is that this is not a punishment against "them", it's a loss for everyone (human kind), who affects for the vast majority innocent people both in Iran and all over the world. I don't see a world where this is "ideal", even if you agree with the block.

We don't know where the people who will make scientific breakthrough will be. Imagine losing the cure for cancer, or a form of clean energy (or anything that could change the world for everyone) due to this.
by breppp | 2025-04-19 06:10:29+00:00
> But they’re not the first games that came to my mind when I see “cozy video games that can quell stress and anxiety”.

I think what quells stress is the lighting, a game which is mostly outdoor sunny is relaxing in my experience compared to mostly dark games. I had that experience with rocket league of all games

Haven't played BotW though, so this was my impression from gameplay videos
Show HN: Goldbach Conjecture up to 4*10^18+7*10^13
by jay_gridbach | 2025-04-19 06:11:37+00:00
Achieved a new world record in verifying the Goldbach Conjecture using grid computing, by extending the verification up to 4 quadrillion (4×10¹⁸) + 70 trillion (7×10¹³).

My grid computing system - Gridbach is a cloud-based distributed computing system accessible from any PC or smartphone. It requires no login or app installation. The high-performance WASM (WebAssembly) binary code is downloaded as browser content, enabling computation on the user’s browser.

[Website] https://gridbach.com/

[Medium] https://medium.com/@jay_gridbach/grid-computing-shatters-wor...
by fendy3002 | 2025-04-19 06:12:16+00:00
this is what I did in jquery era and it works very well, since it seldom to have state management at that era. Sure there's data binding libs like backbonejs and knockoutjs for a more complex app, but this approach works well anyway.

Having a manual state that do not automatically sync to elements will only introduce an unnecessary complexity later on. Which is why libraries like react and vue works well, they automatically handle the sync of state to elements.
by mabster | 2025-04-19 06:13:02+00:00
For the range reduction, I've always been a fan of using revolutions rather than radians as the angle measure as you can just extract fractional bits to range reduce. Note that this is at the cost of a more complicated calculus.

I can't for the life of me find the Sony presentation, but the fastest polynomial calculation is somewhere between Horner's method (which has a huge dependency tree in terms of pipelining) and full polynomial evaluation (which has redundancy in calculation).

Totally with you on not relying on fast math! Not that I had much choice when I was working on games because that decision was made higher up!
by m463 | 2025-04-19 06:14:17+00:00
I like the simplicity of controlling everything with a hypothetical scp.conf:

default access none /dev /sys /proc user foo access ro /var/scp/firmware access rw /var/scp/user-foo user anonymous access w /var/scp/dropbox user joe access rw /home/joe user fred access rw / user backup access ro /
by elric | 2025-04-19 06:18:29+00:00
It's still being taught in schools AFAIK.

Had an intern a year ago whose school forced them to go the whole nine yards with UML. Our company gave them a project to build, and their school made them draw use-case diagrams, class diagrams, sequence diagrams, and activity diagrams, before the student was allowed to write any code.

This was a waste of everyone's time, and we gave the school some choice feedback which I'm sure they'll ignore.

Sequence diagrams are still used quite a lot, and for good reason, they're incredibly useful. I see simple class diagrams quite frequently as well, but without the poorly designed arrow nonsense (shaded? open? closed? argh!).
by Timon3 | 2025-04-19 06:18:36+00:00
> But the economic disparity is the reason for the racial disparity, because otherwise we expect people of different races are equally intelligent, right? So the economic disparity is the real one and accounting for that inherently accounts for the racial disparity as well, and you don't need both.

That's only true if you assume prejudices like racism and sexism don't exist anymore, but they do. Even today, these are the lived experiences of many people in society. As examples, there are black people who don't get jobs because they are just assumed to be worse candidates, even when they are more qualified and put in more work. There are women who don't get jobs because they are just assumed to be worse candidates, and so on.

These are real implicit biases, and they don't go away by just ignoring them.
by hakfoo | 2025-04-19 06:18:49+00:00
As I understand it, straight electric locomotives would use the 'dynamic' braking to send current back up the wires. Apparently this would make for entertaining economics-- a section of the rail network where most of the tonnage went downhill could produce a net negative power bill.

With diesel-electrics, there was nowhere to the braking power, so resistor grids were the order of the day. I wonder if it would be possible or worthwhile to outfit them with battery tenders to recapture the current with modern batteries and power-management circuitry.
by flomo | 2025-04-19 06:20:07+00:00
Absolutely, some people just love vi. Sometimes it fits their mental model, other times someone told them "real programmers use vim/emacs" and so they internalized and studied it. That's why most modern editors still have a vi mode. Obviously it works for people.

But if the 1980s UI Scientists came back with their stopwatches, I don't think the median vi-mode user would "win". Unless they were using a really slow terminal. (obv, we probably have some 1%ers on HN)
by Izkata | 2025-04-19 06:20:40+00:00
I don't think it's even so much about keystroke count as it is the "commands" are more like a language that you can keep getting better in. For example, from above:

> d), d{

That's not two different commands, it's one action (delete) and two different motions (forwards one sentence, backwards one paragraph). Motions work on their own for moving the cursor, but can be combined with different actions and repetitions to multiply the sentences (commands) you can make. As you increase your vocabulary over time (there are a lot of motions and selectors (which are slightly different but used similarly)) you can keep reducing that friction between thought and screen.
by eastoeast | 2025-04-19 06:21:42+00:00
This is super cool. Recently, I tried making an offline, P2P chat program that fits inside of a QR code. In case network was down, the code could be scanned by mobile, allowing users to join a chat room. However this doesn’t seem possible at the moment, as 1. browsers don’t allow offline direct communication for safety reasons 2. couldn’t fit all needed data/prereq modules within the QR.
by msadowski | 2025-04-19 06:22:21+00:00
Anyone has any stories on companies overusing AI? I’ve had some very frustrating encounters already when non-technical people were trying to help by sending AI solution to the issue which totally didn’t make any sense. I liked how the researchers in this work [1] prose calling LLM output “Frankfurtian BS”. I think it’s very fitting.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20250001849