MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _verandaguy | 2025-04-04 19:50:34+00:00
The Space Shuttle had the benefit of having some lift and some controlability via control surfaces (elevons and a rudder).

While it had a famously terrible glide ratio, it did glide, and this meant that it could use these control surfaces to steer without needing to carry or burn extra fuel -- which is very important in a weight-critical field like spacecraft design.

Capsules don't produce any lift, for all practical purposes. They can't be steered using control surfaces, at least not in the same way as the Shuttle orbiter; their best means of slowing down are either a chute or soft-landing boosters, or both.

Chutes are subject to the wind, while soft-landing boosters fire only a few feet above the ground, and neither give any real steering ability. Between this and trajectory variations on re-entry caused by wind throughout the atmosphere, you can't achieve the same level of precision when landing a capsule compared to the Shuttle orbiter.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-04-04 19:50:45+00:00
Adding fuel and engines to turn the last stage into a lander adds a lot of weight that has knock-on effects resulting in the launch vehicle needing to be much, much bigger for a given payload. Combined parachute and descent thrusters might be light enough, but I don't think that's ever been done for a human landing. Plus, if a chute fails but you still have fuel, the landing goes from being potentially rough to potentially explosive, which is much worse from a PR perspective for a crewed lander.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-04 19:50:55+00:00
It's more that, as I understand it, "fish" isn't a coherent phylogenetic category so much as a convention-based descriptive grouping of certain characteristics. I don't think of whales as fish, no. But an exclusion based on eg tail fin orientation or lack of gills is based on convention rather than strict taxonomic practices. So if someone wants to weigh the characteristics differently and include whales in the term fish I would at least hear them out.

Different category but well explained here https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
by freedomben | 2025-04-04 19:51:09+00:00
Can you say more about what a Martin Luther moment in MAGA would be? You mean like a MAGA person willing to rise up and (figuratively) nail theses to the door, aka call out the bad parts of the movement? Some people have tried and they get bounced out pretty quickly. Trump is the master at ending people for criticizing him, even lightly
by rfurmani | 2025-04-04 19:51:18+00:00
Completely agree on both counts! I loved those two games and felt Conquests of the Longbow didn't get the recognition it deserves.

On the second point, when I read his book (https://kensbook.com/) I was disappointed to not hear about the magic of the games themselves and the creative process behind them. It became clear that his primary goal was to grow a business, he thought being a game distributor was more exciting, but then was disrupted by Steam, shareware, and online distribution.
by derektank | 2025-04-04 19:51:26+00:00
Late reply but I did test this and I think the results show at least some originality when explicitly directed to not copy existing characters such as Indiana Jones[1] and the Predator[2]. Some elements of the original characters creep in, the archaeologist is wearing a fedora and the distinctly more skeletal bounty hunter appears to have a few dreads despite otherwise being bald, but they are distinct.

[1] https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr152s6seqct2qzgd1dz0qh2

[2] https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr14t6v3fzk8tx00aswwt4kx
by dylan604 | 2025-04-04 19:51:26+00:00
you just put bumpers on it to make a smart ass comment. Investing in the S&P is not the only way to invest with stocks. People trying to take money from people are not peddling S&P investments.

In every market down turn, those that are not wealthy end up having to sell of stocks to stop the bleeding. Those that are wealthy increase their wealth by buying up what the others are selling. The concept of a forced market crash is not unthinkable. Especially the current situation. Those that are friendly to the current administration are about to be greatly rewarded.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-04-04 19:51:34+00:00
The study found that for people who are lonely or sad, listening to music helped them.

Wow. How utterly expected.

Next, they will do studies and find that people who are lonely or sad, are helped when they attend a concert with their favorite band.

Or when they eat their favorite food.

"After two years of studies, we conclude that people who are feeling lonely or sad, eating their favorite food gives them a boost and feel better".

The metric that would be useful is "better" for how long?
by cyberax | 2025-04-04 19:51:50+00:00
Here's the thing, cities do not get cheaper when density increases. The reasons are complicated, but the end result is that not a single large city in Europe, US, or Japan decreased the housing costs by "just building more".

If you want to decrease costs, you have exactly two options:

1. Decrease the city population.

2. Build _more_ cities, or new suburbs.
by anthomtb | 2025-04-04 19:51:50+00:00
"If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'"

Reminds me of an incident early in my career. I was developing embedded software and needed an expensive, specialized signal analyzer. Management refused to purchase or assign one to me. I was stuck sharing with my lead, which was highly inconvenient for both of us.

Well, turns out one of those analyzers was assigned to a guy (Dave) about to retire. I wandered over to Dave's cube the day after he left and sure enough, there is my much-needed analyzer. It is poorly locked to a table leg by a rather long cable. So I tilted up the table, slid the cable off the bottom of the leg, lugged the analyzer to my office and enjoyed an relaxing afternoon of debug.

I got a nice talking-to from management once they realized what happened. And most importantly, became the new assignee of Dave's analyzer.
by 15155 | 2025-04-04 19:52:56+00:00
> Jan 6th

Folks who try to make "the insurrection!" a thing don't really have a good read on the pulse of the average American. This is a failed branding attempt for what amounted to an unscheduled tour around the Capitol.

The same people pushing "Jan 6th" can normally take home the gold medal in mental gymnastics when discussing the events ending with numerous American cities being on fire just 6 months prior. Multi-city infernos were "mostly peaceful" protests, but when a Republican is shot by Capitol security, it's an "insurrection."
by _kst_ | 2025-04-04 19:53:09+00:00
Different crew vehicles have different capabilities. Dragon is similar to Soyuz, Apollo, et al. It doesn't have a lot of maneuverability on the way down -- and if it lands in the ocean, it doesn't need it. (Soyuz lands on land; again, if it's off target it's no big deal.)

I think there were designs for a version of Dragon that could do propulsive landings, but that was abandoned.

Assuming they get Starship working reliably, it will do precise landings, probably with a tower catch, eventually with a crew on board.
by gavinray | 2025-04-04 19:53:13+00:00
One of the wisest things I've read all week.

I authored one of the primary tools for GraphQL server benchmarks.

I learned about the Coordinated Omission problem and formats like HDR Histograms during the implementation.

My takeaway from that project is that not only is benchmarking anything correctly difficult, but they all ought to come with disclaimers of:

"These are the results obtained on X machine, running at Y time, with Z resources."
by int_19h | 2025-04-04 19:53:17+00:00
AI-generated code is going to be a major influence going forward. Regardless of how you feel about its quality (I'm a pessimist myself), it's happening anyway, and it's going to cement the dominant position of those languages which LLMs understand / can write the best. Which correlates strongly to their amount in the training set, which means that Python and JavaScript in particular are here to stay now, and will likely be increasingly shoved into more and more niches - even those they aren't well-suited to - solely because LLMs can write them.
by ameliaquining | 2025-04-04 19:53:44+00:00
Indeed, everything's always easier when there's a greater wealth of transportation resources available and people have more options. Ideally there should be enough road and/or train capacity to get everyone where they want to go.

If that's not the case, then congestion pricing works by putting pressure on people to stay off the roads at peak times if they can. This is, in fact, a good thing to do; if not everyone who wants to use the roads can do so at once, because there aren't enough roads, then it's most efficient to give the space to those who most need it by willingness to pay. (Regressive distributional impacts of this can be addressed with the revenue that congestion pricing raises, e.g., by cutting consumption taxes.) Making people sit in traffic does no good at all and is just wasteful.

But if you want not just to eliminate that waste, but to actually increase people's mobility, then you need to build enough roads or trains. Whether that's worth the cost depends, as always, on local conditions.

(To be clear, the goal from this perspective is not to "shift transit modalities"; it's to get people where they're going without making them waste time in traffic. Sometimes that means getting more of them onto trains, and sometimes it doesn't.)
by kazinator | 2025-04-04 19:54:27+00:00
But the second sane_realloc now never frees. That's a problem shared by by the ISO C realloc.

According to ISO C, size zero can behave like this:

free(old) return malloc(0)

and if malloc(0) allocates something, we have not achieved freeing.

There are ways to implement malloc(0) such that it returns unique pointers, without allocating memory. Or at least not very much memory. For instance we can use the 64 bit space to have some range of (unmapped) virtual addresses where we allocate bytes, and use a compact bitmask (actually allocated somewhere) to keep track of them.

Such a scheme was described by Tim Rentsch in the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.c.

If an implementation does such a thing, adjusting the size to 1 will defeat it; allocations of size 1 need real memory.

(I can't fathom the requirement why we need malloc(0) to be a source of unique values, and why someone would implement that as efficiently as possible, when it's implementation-defined behavior that portable programs cannot rely on. Why wouldn't you use some library module for unique, space-efficient pointers.)

I would never rely malloc(0) to obtain unique pointers at all, let alone pray that it is efficient for that purpose.

I'd be happy with a malloc(0) which returns, for instance, ((void *) -1) which can be hidden behind some #define symbol.

saner_realloc isn't realloc; it is our API, and we can make it do this:

#define SANE_REALLOC_EMPTY ((void *) -1) void *sane_realloc(void *ptr, size_t size) { if (ptr == 0 || ptr == SANE_REALLOC_EMPTY) { return size ? malloc(size) : SANE_REALLOC_EMPTY; } else if (size == 0) { free(ptr); return SANE_REALLOC_EMPTY; } else { return realloc(ptr, size); } }

Now, a null return always means failure. The shrink to zero, or allocate zero cases give us SANE_REALLOC_EMPTY which tests unequal to null, and we accept that value for growing or freeing.

The caller can also pass in something returned by malloc(0) that is not equal to null or SANE_REALLOC_EMPTY.
by sejje | 2025-04-04 19:54:34+00:00
Why does the AI have to inject the creativity? It's supposed to guess what you want and generate it. The prompts in the article make it clear the author wants Harrison Ford.

If you ask it for a female adventure-loving archaeologist with a bullwhip, you think you'll get Harrison Ford?

What if you ask for a black man? Etc etc.

You're talking about how unoriginal it is when the human has asked it in the least creative way. And it gives what you want (when the content filters don't spot it)
by selimthegrim | 2025-04-04 19:54:50+00:00
>Well yeah, that's just some weird French place we bought and turned into a slave labor camp.

Well pack it up, that, the Evangeline legend and the Katrina episode of Boondocks round the tale out. Nothing else to see here.

(Actually, the slave labor camp is Mississippi these days [1])

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9354922; https://web.archive.org/web/20201108140152/https://in.news.y...
by jeffheard | 2025-04-04 19:54:58+00:00
Oh man, I remember in 2000 when I first started working in the industry we had this database build process written in Java that took almost 30 days to run. The delivery schedule was monthly, and if anything went wrong we'd have to restart from checkpoint and the database build would be late. It also pegged a 32-CPU SMP DEC Alpha machine for the entire time, which was, well... CPUs would regularly (once every other build or so) cook the socket they were in and have to be replaced. The GS-320 would hot-swap (semi-reliably) so it wasn't a HUGE deal, but it would slow it down and inevitably the build would be a day or two late.

Enter myself and a buddy of mine. First thing we discovered was that they were using regular java.lang.Strings for all the string manipulation, and it'd garbage collect for between 30 and 50 seconds every minute once the process got rolling. It used a positively criminal number of threads as well in our predecessor's desperate attempt to make it go faster. SO much time was spent swapping threads on CPUs and garbage collecting that almost no real work got done.

Enter the StringBuffer rotation scheme. John and I decided to use the backup GS-160 as a hub to read source data and distribute it among 16 of our floor's desktop machines as an experiment. The hub was written in C++ and did very little other than read a series of fixed-length records from a number of source files and package them up into payloads to ship over socket to the readers.

The readers gut-rehabbed the Java code and swapped out StringBuffer for String (and io for nio) to take the majority of garbage collection out of the picture.

The trick we employed was to pre-allocate a hoard of StringBuffers with a minimum storage size and put them in a checkin/checkout "repository" where the process could ask for N buffers (generally one per string column) and it'd get a bunch of randomly selected ones from the repo. They'd get used and checked back in dirty. Any buffer that was over a "terminal length" when it was checked in would be discarded and a new buffer would be added in its place.

We poked and prodded and when we were finally happy with it, we were down to one garbage collection every 10 minutes on each server. The final build was cut from 30 days to 2.8 and we got allocated a permanent "beowulf cluster" to run our database build.
by bko | 2025-04-04 19:55:24+00:00
Not sure if you're up on the literature but the chemical imbalance theory of depression has been disproven (or at least no evidence for it).

No one is stigmatizing anything. Just that if you consume doom porn it's likely to affect your attitudes towards life. I think it's a lot healthier to believe you can change your circumstances than to believe you are doomed because you believe you have the wrong brain

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-cause-of-depression-is-pr...

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/analysis-depression-prob...
by inkcapmushroom | 2025-04-04 19:55:40+00:00
I'm no geologist but I would think it would be hard for the outer layer to stay stable enough to harden to that degree, while the inner part is still liquid and cooling. On our own planet the crust is incredibly thin compared to the other layers, even while the mantle is cooled enough to be solid, and the solid mantle still moves around enough to break apart the crust constantly. Seems impossible for the hollow eggshell of the crust to not break and crumble into the retreating center at some point.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-04 19:56:17+00:00
I read Ken Williams' book and found it meh. I'm fascinated by that era (after having read Steven Levi's account in his own book, "Hackers") but Ken didn't strike me as a particularly compelling narrator/person.

I came away kind of sickened by the "corporatization" of art (and I think game development is a kind of art when it's at its best). Budgets, deadlines... Gross.

Wild window in time though that was.
by fsckboy | 2025-04-04 19:56:17+00:00
>Here is her performance art, she is screaming in a microphone

anybody who judges an artist on the basis of one work is an ass. here are a number of those in a work that cleaved the art world into two hemispheres with a chasm between them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CbDkRFjLAQ

been a long time since I read about it, but pretty sure iirc those are celebs making cheeky cameos in that piece
by Straw | 2025-04-04 19:56:34+00:00
See https://ukfoundations.co/

Similar argument to the article, but in much more depth.

In a nutshell, the UK has made it legally difficult to construct new housing and many forms of infrastructure- electricity plants, roads/tunnels, railway, hospitals, etc.

As a result, these things take up a larger fraction of ordinary people's budget and also limit mobility and hence productivity, resulting in poverty or effective poverty even for someone with an income that would make them globally rich.
by hannasanarion | 2025-04-04 19:56:40+00:00
I think they're just trying to inform you that you're painting with a broader brush than you might realize.

There are lots of flavors of Marxism out there, the one you're describing is often called "Orthodox Marxism" or the closely related "Marxism-Leninism".

It's now considered pretty outdated, with most of Marxist thought having moved on to less rigid modes of conceptualizing history and geopolitics, like Western Marxism (Frankfurt School), Autonomist Marxism, Eco-Marxism, Libertarian Marxism, Structural Marxism, etc.

There is a reason that "leftist infighting" is a century-old meme. Leftism is fundamentally a political movement grounded in moral philosophy, but since moral philosophy is an unsolved and likely unsolvable field, fractionalism is guaranteed.
by nickff | 2025-04-04 19:56:56+00:00
I don’t know much about NYC, much less its transit issues, but it seems like congestion pricing is only marginally popular inside the city, and unpopular in the rest of the state: https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/traffic_and_transit/2025/03...

Whether congestion pricing is welfare-positive really depends on your utility function. I think rich commuters probably like it, and poorer people who need to drive for work probably hate it. My concerns are more related to political accountability, political incentives, and discrimination against non-voters, all of which exist here.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-04-04 19:57:04+00:00
In terms of use of hard power against religion: Mandatory prayer in school was outlawed in 1962. Teaching creationism in public schools was banned in 1987. Teaching the Bible (and other religious texts) in public schools is mostly banned. Title VII of the civil rights act prevented employers and many other institutions from discriminating based on religion in 1964. These were all passed by the left.

In terms of soft power: Huge cultural movements (driven by left-leaning people) against church attendance and in favor of atheism really began in the 1960-1990 period. The hippie movement and all things associated with it, as well as the new age movement are big parts of this.

In general, I think you underestimate how much power religion had in 1950's America. It was constantly pushed on young people, and if you wanted to get a good job, you had to have "strong moral character" that was demonstrated by where you went on Sundays.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-04 19:58:03+00:00
The historical answer is because Congress wanted to be sure that employers could fire Communists for being Communists.

Of course, that's not my view. I think political affiliation should probably be protected, but it needs to be very narrow. You shouldn't be able to be fired for being a Republican. But if you post "Gay people should be executed," you shouldn't be able to hide behind "I'm a Republican, that's a political view!" any more than you should be able to hide behind "I'm a Christian, that's a religious view!"
by kristopolous | 2025-04-04 19:58:06+00:00
Not only but now the trust is broken

Let's say this was SomewhereElsistan and they elected someone who just cancelled contracts, backed out of treaties, refused to pay balances, fired entire departments and maybe even arrest your international colleague working there and sent them to a foreign concentration camp.

Afterwards they elect Johnny Reasonable who doesn't do this.

Would you go back with any kind of assurance it wouldn't happen again? Nobody stopped the first guy.

The US reputation in international markets is hosed for decades unless some dramatic reversal and patching comes in, by both Congress and the courts or some wild thing where the states override the federal government somehow.

Otherwise the trust is gone for decades, perhaps forever.
by bestouff | 2025-04-04 19:58:10+00:00
And then that's more or less what I remember from my history classes in France (30-35 years ago) : they were broke because of how we put way excessive sanctions on them, and Hitler was seen as (and partly really was) the savior who put the country economically back on track.

That was in public school so the same program as for the vast majority of French students.
by nyrikki | 2025-04-04 19:59:01+00:00
While I agree with a lot of what you said.

In my experience, it was the need for orchestration that killed it but we are probably using different definitions of "immutable", where in Chef context I think of it as the infrastructure.

For me the killer feature of ansible for me was the ability to gate based on remote state, which really was incompatible with the foundational engineering choices that were almost ideal for its original target.

When you were upgrading rabbitmq, postgres, etc... the view from other cluster nodes was critical, not the local view.

Both chef and puppets tried to graft on what they called orchestration, but was really just batch jobs.

Immutable infrastructure was fairly easy IMHO with chef if your architectural quantum was a machine, but not for situations where that quantum was a cluster, especially with data that needed to persist like with Cassandra etc...
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-04 19:59:05+00:00
there was some guy on hackernews whose post I had read who had actually compiled .net entirely from source.

Like the issue I think becomes that .net itself was written in .net and so you needed the earlier proprietary versions right?

But Gnu also had a .net compiler and he had actually used it on guix (basically like nix) to really create sort of reproducible .net , I am sure that some reader of this comment will attach the post on which I am talking
by toddmorey | 2025-04-04 19:59:37+00:00
The design is fun and gave me a lot of nostalgia, but I admit they overdid it. They could have made that piece feel the same without so much distraction. And please people, support reader mode. It's not hard and it shouldn't be optional.

EDIT: Good god they animated EVERYTHING. It's not even readable... also... not one inline code sample? This is the designer trying to get an awwwards site of the day without any interest in the actual content. It's like a guitar player that solos over everyone else's solos.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-04-04 19:59:41+00:00
Yep. I’ve installed $700 ERV myself. Probably less than $400 if you omit NZ tax. Meanwhile people are dropping $10k on ducted heat pumps.

Same with 10kWp of solar. $4k in gear plus $700 for electrician. Easily half of paying someone else for full solution.

(Prices converted from nzd to usd).