MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chungy | 2025-05-23 23:48:47+00:00
> That's why you get ridiculousness as things being 13/64th of an inch

Such fractions are very rarely used, you're more likely to use mils (1/1000 of an inch) at that scale.

> or that there's 63360 inches in a mile.

Likewise, something that will probably never come up in your life. Inches/feet/yards and miles just remain separate things, never mixed.

> With a metre and standard prefixes, you don't need any conversion factors, and you can represent any distance at any scale with a single unit.

There's no intuition for them. Knowing what a meter is does not help with getting a feel for a kilometer. They might as well be as separate as feet and miles at that scale.

> Quick, what's 11/64" + 3/8"?

That one's not even hard, it's just a fraction. 35/64"

> Quick, which weight is bigger: 0.6lbs or 10oz?

Another arbitrary problem that will probably never come up, but to entertain you: since 0.5 lbs is 8oz, adding 1.6oz to that (another tenth of a lbs) results in 9.6oz. 10oz is bigger than 0.6 lbs. Not hard, but at least mildly harder than the first question.

None of this really had to do with the convenience highlighted initially: 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in a yard make extremely convenient divisible factors. You can trivially divide things by 2, 3, 4, and 6 and keep with whole integer values. The same definitely cannot be said of metric.
by randomor | 2025-05-23 23:50:02+00:00
You got it. Yes, AI will be a good piece of the puzzle. Local models is exactly what I prefer, if you haven't notice, that's a big principle of this app. I'm really hoping Apple can step in and offer a local model so I don't have to download one big blob. Supporting Ollama sounds cool but I feel like that's a big barrier for many... BYOK also nice, but at that point why not just build a MCP interface instead of building another flavor of AI chat? Otherwise I'm thinking about embedding all items so it's easier to: auto-generate tags, cluster by topics etc...
by more-nitor | 2025-05-23 23:50:11+00:00
this

if someone's bringing "google payscale" for comparison... well that's not some average joe...

why not just bring Bill Gates and say "everything -- including private jet -- is dirt cheap" ?

$8k per year simply doesn't make sense for 95% of the programmers. For a lot of developing countries, that's more than a well-paying programmer's annual salary...
by achierius | 2025-05-23 23:50:45+00:00
Is it that hard? Instead of just providing data, you provide data plus "semantic tags" that make the data machine-indexable. It was ultimately meant to solve the same sort of "fuzzy-search" problem that we today can use LLMs for: "find me a website which sells home goods" could be addressed with tags that classify a page as a marketplace, and therein one which sells home goods. I think the real problem is that this requires a cohesive ontology, and if you've ever gotten really into tagging your notes/bookmarks/whatever you'll know how hard that can be.
by tomnipotent | 2025-05-23 23:50:45+00:00
> Microsoft has a long history of dishonest behavior

Can you point out such recent behavior that isn't just echoing other peoples opinions from the anti-trust case from over two decades ago? It's been my experience that many people seem to "borrow" their opinion about Microsoft from things they've read rather than personal experience so we keep getting the same low-effort criticism ad nauseam.
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-23 23:51:55+00:00
Any discussion of staying near family and friends on a forum predominated by startups out of the bay area is completely disingenuous.

But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates accidentally for just staying home. Your family probably already lives in an area that is more affordable than SF/NYC/Paris, and they are there waiting. It's entertaining as an extreme data point but motivating for other reasons

This article is most interesting to me because I tried moving to the big city to be a big shot techie, and have been substantially happier living outside a major city in Minnesota.

Absolutely nobody that I knew in those cities lived near their family, absolutely all of them moved away to chase fortune and fame.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-23 23:52:19+00:00
I think that's right. Paint programs might give you the "broad strokes" (so to speak), fill areas — it's clear the dithering on an arm, for example, was done a pixel at a time.

I spent many hours in "fat bits" mode in MacPaint creating B&W game artwork for early shareware games I wrote. Click a pixel to invert it.
by 1024core | 2025-05-23 23:52:23+00:00
I don't think living in the boonies is for everyone.

I was in South-Eastern California just visiting desolate areas. One place I stayed at had absolutely nothing: the nearest place to get food or gas was Bishop, CA, a 50-minute drive. Coming from a big city the desolation is appealing at first, but gets tiring pretty soon.
by cmptrnerd6 | 2025-05-23 23:53:00+00:00
This is not true, in my experience, in rural Indiana. I hear the n word a lot for an area that I have yet to meet a black person. One neighbor was complaining about the California family that moved to town and brought all the drug problems with them, despite our county having been the meth capital of Indiana for years before they moved here. Somehow my first conversation with a friend's mom I met while visiting their rural farm involved how there were no black people in the area. But this is why all anecdotal data should be taken with a grain of salt.
by geoka9 | 2025-05-23 23:53:11+00:00
> They’d need to disabuse themselves of the idea that they ought to abscond to some kind of a tropical Shangri-La; and moreover, they’d need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind, rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because in all truth, they’re actually great.

New Mexico, Arizona, even Florida if you're into tropics - have pretty amazing weather, no? And there must be low COL locations there. Now, imagine living in Canada. The warmest place in all of the country is south-western BC and it rains most of the time (the nature is amazing though).
by Veserv | 2025-05-23 23:54:14+00:00
Ugh, it appears I was not utterly pedantic enough even though I did, quite clearly, make my statements conditional in a way far beyond what is normally expected when talking about generalities that any normal person would assume are meant to apply in cases contextually-relevant to a forum run by a company that funds US tech startups.

Very well, a software engineering employer in the US who employs over 10 software engineers in the US at above the 20th percentile of wages, which constitutes the employers of a significant fraction of total software engineers above the 20th percentile of wages, would be foolish to not spend 8 K$ on software development tooling that would result in a 10% productivity improvement. It would be further foolish to not investigate such potential improvements given a reasonably credible belief that such a productivity improvement is possible. Outright dismissal without even considering the potential cost-benefit or making a incorrect cost-benefit analysis requiring significantly in excess of 10% is also foolish.

Please try to understand that sometimes when people are not being utterly pedantic to the point of absurdity it is because they assume people will use their judgement to interpret the applicability to their situation rather than because they can only see in black and white.
by munificent | 2025-05-23 23:54:50+00:00
The way Seattle affects some people isn't about temperature. It's the long dark.

I also grew up along the Gulf Coast and live in Seattle now. I've had a bunch of other friends and family who have moved to the Pacific Northwest. Some love it and are still here and some lose the will to live and wilt like sunflowers in the dark. I don't know of any way to predict how the gloom will affect you. You just have to come here for a year and see how it goes.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-23 23:55:11+00:00
I'm retired. So it allows me to have a layman's, hobbyist's interest but I can easily ignore the startup and VC cruft.

Frankly, as a "user", not a potential employee, I don't give much of a fuck about anything more than what I can do with the thing right now. (Which is quite a bit in fact.)
by thoughtpeddler | 2025-05-23 23:55:19+00:00
Remarkable to see this blog post, just a few days after I'd seen the HEY Calendar [0] for the first time, and asked an LLM about how I could recreate its unique features within my macOS calendar app of choice: Flexibits Fantastical [1]. I didn't get very far with it, but for those interested, here's what I think are the "sketch-based" features (per author's post) that HEY allows for that are sorely missing in all digital calendar software:

- Bar at the bottom of the GUI called "Sometime this week" that shows tasks/events that mentally fit into the frame of "should be done sometime this week, just not sure exactly when"

- Habits (that you can easily check off if completed) [plus associated aggregate tracking]

- Tracked/Logged-Time (a.k.a. "retrospective calendaring")

- Freetime visualization (the HEY Calendar visually highlights long uninterrupted blocks of freetime)

- Add images or a label to a specific day (without being an event itself; a purely graphical signifier)

- Built-in countdown-type events, with associated UI element that counts down for you

My main desire is not switch calendaring platforms, but to figure out how to 'bolt-on' these capabilities in what I'm already living in.

--

[0] https://www.hey.com/calendar/

[1] https://flexibits.com/fantastical
by erichanson | 2025-05-23 23:56:41+00:00
Big difference is it's implemented in pl/pgsql so as Aquameta evolves, there's no external deps. There's a function called endpoint.request(http_verb, URL, post vars) and then it does the rest in plpgsql. A thin Go daemon just takes the request and throws it at the function.

It does a lot of the same stuff PostgREST does. Automatic REST interface to any database, but it also hosts static resources, and dynamic mapping of URL templates to functions.

Needs a rewrite though. That's probably the next big dev push. Right now we're rewriting the system catalog (meta) and the data VCS.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-05-23 23:56:43+00:00
SingularityForge unveils ASLI—a groundbreaking AI architecture that thinks, not just responds.

It slashes error rates from 18% to 5-8%, saves 40% on energy ($1.2-2M/year for large deployments), and ensures ethical integrity with a WebAssembly-isolated core. ASLI pauses to reason on complex tasks, dynamically routes processing (skipping unnecessary steps), and provides full transparency with decision logs.

Industry leaders are watching: its open-source design lets you customize for your needs while staying ahead of regulations. Explore how ASLI’s controller architecture can give you a competitive edge in enterprise AI.

#ReasoningAIRevolution #EthicalAILeadership #SaveMillionsWithAI #EnterpriseAIEdge #SingularityForge
by danans | 2025-05-23 23:57:11+00:00
> But that means you don’t get the latest iPhone, cook basic foods at home and rarely eat out, repair your own appliances, and so on.

You can save quite a bit of money by living this way even in high CoL areas. That's how a lot of people without high incomes in those areas get by - by getting handy and resourceful. Through that, they often develop/discover talents and skills, and save a lot of expenses.

For my part, I've done all my own landscaping, installed/repaired/maintained my home appliances, built my kitchen cabinetry and other furniture, etc. I estimate these efforts have saved me at least 100k over the years, probably much more.

I don't think it's nearly enough to offset the housing, education and healthcare unaffordability crises, but it's a way in which regular workers get by.

However, the call-Uber/Doordash/Handyman for everything lifestyle isn't something that works unless you are highly paid and have no kids.
by eikenberry | 2025-05-23 23:57:46+00:00
> [..] once you have a piece of data that is read at the same time by many, while also maybe mutated by at least one.[..]

Dataflow patterns avoid this sort of issue by eliminating shared memory mutation. All data flows through the system by value with mutations only flowing downstream. There are several "Concurrency Patterns" videos by Rob about using these patterns in Go on youtube.
by randomor | 2025-05-23 23:59:09+00:00
Many of us certainly do share these pain points, most people will lament of a closing read-it-later tool and think "if only it's open source" so they can self-host a tool that likes pocket or omnivore, thinking that's the final form of this category. Nothing wrong with that, that's a tried and proven paradigm and comes with no additional transition cost.

Because i started this not intending to build a read-it-later tool, we are working on different foundations with building blocks... we'll see where this digression will take me...
by mandevil | 2025-05-24 00:00:29+00:00
The US was never a commercial shipbuilding hub once the transition was made to metal ships. During the timber ship era, the huge quantities of quality lumber the US had meant that they were world class at shipbuilding, but metal ships? Not so much outside of direct production for the World Wars(1). I mean, the fact that the US passed the Jones Act in 1920 is a pretty strong signal that even then the US was not viable in commercial shipbuilding.

The US Navy, which has been tied for the largest or exclusively the largest in the world for over a century, meant that military shipbuilding was in a better state(2) but still not super competitive- few countries have ever bought the direct products of American yards- yards in the US mostly serve the USN and then sometimes the USN will transfer ships they don't need to other nations.

1: And even then, a whole lot of it was unskilled people learning by doing, and making mistakes.

2: There are many caveats, but it appears that British shipyards were probably more manpower efficient building warships than the US was in WW2. D.K. Brown discusses the evidence in _Nelson to Vanguard_. It's not perfectly clear- because hours were charged to contracts differently in the two countries, the fact that British ships charged fewer hours to a ship doesn't necessarily mean that they used fewer hours in actuality (while everyone counted laborers on a dock for hours, how do you handle hours spent doing accounts payable? Or material deliveries, or training? There are differences in how they were counted between countries, and Brown was unable to correct for them).

It is also true that the US produced warships faster chronologically, so it is possible that the US threw so many bodies at ship construction that they went past the point of manpower efficiency to get less time spent in the yards. But, overall, British shipbuilders seem to have been more manpower efficient than US yards during WW2, as far as warship production.
by almark | 2025-05-24 00:01:14+00:00
Hi, I've been making abstract electronic music, then later melodic soundscapes coupled with the cinematic avant-garde since 1998. For 15 years I have released music online and struggled greatly to get my music heard, not because of the music, but because of the system, which is social media and the rules that we are all under. We were once able to find followings, like-minded people who wanted to hear you, but they took that from us. There is a hope for a marketplace. Find out by watching. Artist and founder of #WEATNU
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-24 00:01:18+00:00
You know what's even more mind-blowing about Apple?

They've resolutely stayed far away from the server market. Apple computers just won't be found serving web pages, operating cloud services, hosting storage arrays or anything. There are no rackmount Apples, no back-office Apples. They're all-in on the consumer market, and really concentrating on home users. Apples used in business settings work because of their high quality and excellent integration, and in spite of their non-enterprise focus.

If you try to spin up a macOS VM in the cloud, Avril Lavigne's band will invade your data center, and they will roll up to the most impressive rack, and film a music video there.

How many Unix workstations in a museum were from brands who were slummin' it, because they put big iron in every existing data center, and leveraged their resources to miniaturize all that and bring a mainframe or mini to every engineer's desk?

Also, Apple managed to tackle and really solve many features where Unix has a bad reputation. GUI/UX integration; hardware interfaces such as audiovisual, multimedia; software installation and management; sandboxing and strict access control for untrusted apps; integrated backup solutions.

Yes, it's mind-blowing that their "unofficial motto", "It Just Works" can be applied to something under the hood (FreeBSD) that is better known as the realm of tinkerers, hobbyists, and people whose tower PCs have excellent ventilation, because they don't even bother to fasten the case to the chassis anymore.
by cranky908canuck | 2025-05-24 00:01:18+00:00
Hmm.

I remember reading decades ago (before injection became the norm) a book on "maintaining your British car". Lots of tongue-in-cheek, the author didn't have a high opinion of them but it had a lot of useful advice on maintaining budget cars in general.

One chapter was titled "'Carburettor' is French for 'Don't ever touch it'", and elaborated on why (mostly, too many ways to do it wrong).
by latentsea | 2025-05-24 00:01:21+00:00
In a way it sort of doesn't matter. If all we ever wind up with is unbelievably fancy chatbots, marketing teams will eventually draw their line in the sand and call it AGI.

There comes a theoretical point at which a definition is no longer relevant because it's obvious to everyone on an intuitive level. An easy lower bound for where this threshold might sit would be "when it can start and win wars unassisted under its own volition". Since, at that point no one on earth would have a need to debate it. It would simply be respected and understood for what it is without needing to define it.

Until such an obvious threshold is crossed, it will be whatever executives, product managers, and marketing teams say it is.
by dzaima | 2025-05-24 00:02:02+00:00
A couple minor notes:

- If your program is very light on syscalls (i.e. basically entirely in-memory computation), rr can go to a basically 1.0x slowdown. In particular this means you can run benchmarks in it at full capacity, provided that I/O is outside of the repeated part (e.g. if sometimes the bench is noticably slower, you can replay and see if some important loads/stores crossed a cacheline/page). You can even "perf record" / "perf stat" a replay if you want to! (none of this is too useful, but it's fun! Gathering repeated stats over the same execution for more resolution might be useful with proper tooling though)

- rr does have an in-memory buffer of recording data.

- rr recordings should be portable within the architecture, as long as the replay hardware has the extensions the recorder did (or if replayer-unsupported features are disabled at record-time).
by wilsonnb3 | 2025-05-24 00:02:23+00:00
It’s just another hype cycle, they happen rather … cyclically.

I recommend ignoring them. Despite VCs trying to spend it into existence, we aren’t going to have another internet level event in information technology and the smartphone+laptop combo is peak personal computing.

I think we are near the crest of this wave but that just means the next one is coming, though.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-24 00:02:59+00:00
Eh, perhaps a curious administrator can share the data but I really suspect just through sheer numbers most people on this forum do not live in the bay area.

The NYC metro area is 23 million [1] which is about 7% of the country (23/300). There's a good chance somebody who works in NYC grew up nearby.

That said, if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and then retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead... Even if rent is twice as expensive in SF, if your salary is twice that then your savings are also twice as much which will go a longer way anywhere but SF.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
by ketzo | 2025-05-24 00:03:15+00:00
For a long time, I’ve been this person for other people, but don’t feel like I have anybody to do this for me. That’s okay — I don’t feel bitter about that or anything. And I don’t wanna overstate what a good friend I am or whatever, I just do this a decent amount. But some part of me does wish I had someone celebrating my wins.

This:

“No one comes to mind? Maybe you haven’t really trusted anyone with your wins yet.”

really, really hit me for some reason. I’m pretty averse to praise/congratulations — even if I feel it’s deserved! — so I don’t really share my wins with people. How can I expect to have people hype me up if I don’t let them in a little? It’s obvious when I write it all out but I kinda can’t believe how long I’ve been operating this way.

Anyway, great post!
by don-code | 2025-05-24 00:04:09+00:00
There were several years (late 2015 to mid 2017) where I did a much less extreme version of this. I stopped because, as many commenters have noted, I was (to quote this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44077097) "living off the economic surplus of [others]", and perhaps even taking opportunities away from those who needed them much more than I did.

Some anecdotes from that time:

I had a $30/mo phone plan that got me 100 minutes, and 5GB of data at HSPA+ speeds. I basically never worked from home, even if that had been an option, because one too many `npm install`s or video conferences would've set me over the edge. I brought my personal laptop to the office to install OS updates, and took downloads back home on a flash drive. And if I had an unexpected call to a 1-800 support hotline - one that I knew would take an hour - I'd literally go find a payphone, where you could call it for free (although it's a much higher charge to the recipient).

I developed a strong love of free-to-me media and entertainment. I was a voracious reader of library books, got my news off broadcast TV, listened to FM radio for music (to be fair, I'd always - and still - done that), and so on. I was attending one or two tech meetups a week.

I didn't have a car. Being a 15-minute walk from a train station helped drastically, but I wasn't as close to the city as most of my colleagues were (maybe 20min over others' average). Visiting my parents took 115 minutes (30 minutes by car) and I did it every other week. Twice a week, I'd take a commuter rail train south of the city, then walk 20 minutes to get where I was going. Most of the time I'd bum a ride back to the station with someone else there. All said, it was probably two extra hours of commuting whenever I did this. There were even times where I'd carry odd things home from Home Depot on the train.

And then, as we got older, many of my friends started to move far out of the city, to places unserved by our transit system. I was totally dependent on my friends still in the city to carpool, even though I was almost certainly making more than they were. I wish - truly I wish - that I could say that this was the straw that broke the camel's back, what made me snap out of it.

Sadly, that honor went mostly to both my work changing (much more teleconferencing / Zoom), and my family situation changing (needing to commute out to the burbs regularly, sometimes with little notice).

I still remember some of the jibes I'd get while doing this - "why do you make life so hard on yourself?" and "you don't know how to have money".

I look back on that time and do think it was an interesting experiment, and to an extent, I'm glad I did it for the perspective. But really, I was naive. I wasn't doing something that somehow made me more independent, or less wasteful. I was dependent on much of other's output, and really only wasting my own ability to be productive.