MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bestwillcui | 2025-05-13 21:59:47+00:00
Great points. Definitely will improve the section lectures on the left, some formatting stuff to think about with the bottom section/transcript as well.

Not completely sure about the AI tutor points though. I don't think the standard AI chat interface is the ideal form factor for the average person trying to learn something, and there's value in having pre-generated content that users can see instead of having to actively go to the tutor.

Also, a lot of people do like using flashcards specifically to learn! Granted, our current implementation is pretty barebones so it's not super useful yet. And definitely agree that things can be cleaned up quite a bit.
by anigbrowl | 2025-05-13 22:01:55+00:00
This book is a great (albeit drily written/translated) analysis of how an authoritarian state operated in practice on the day-to-day level, in contrast to the spectacular political turning points you mention. It documents the dull but important methodology of fiscal management, financial engineering, how the nazies restructured the existing bureaucracy to suit their own ends, and the legal and technical means they used to expropriate wealth from political enemies, out-groups, and eventually the subjects in annexed or conquered territories.

It's not an enjoyable read in either subject matter or style, but provides invaluable insights into the mechanics of authoritarian rule behind the iconic renditions of oppression in snappy uniforms.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805087260/hitlersbenefici...
by j45 | 2025-05-13 22:01:57+00:00
I appreciate the clarification. Should have been more precise with my terminology.

That being said, I think I'm talking about the forest of PDFs.

When I said PDFs have a "markup-like structure," I was talking from my experience manually writing PDFs from scratch using Adobe's spec.

PDFs definitely have a structured, hierarchical format with nested elements that looks a lot like markup languages conceptually.

The objects have a structure comparable to DOM-like structures - there's clear parent-child relationships just like in markup languages. Working with tags like "<<" and ">>" feels similar to markup tags when hand coding them.

This is an article that highlights what I have seen (much cleaner PDF code): "The Structure of a PDF File" (https://medium.com/@jberkenbilt/the-structure-of-a-pdf-file-...) which says:

"There are several types of objects. If you are familiar with JSON, YAML, or the object model in any reasonably modern programming language, this will seem very familiar to you... A PDF object may have one of the following types: String, Number, Boolean, Null, Name, Array, Dictionary..."

This structure with dictionaries in "<<" and ">>" and arrays in brackets really gave me markup vibes when coding to the spec (https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...).

While PDFs are an object graph with drawing instructions like you said, the structure itself looks a lot like markup formats.

Might be just a difference in choosing to focus on the forest vs the trees.

That hierarchical structure is why different PDF creation methods can make such varied document structures, which is exactly why text extraction is so tricky.

Learning to hand code PDFs in many ways, lets you learn to read and unravel them a little differently, maybe even a bit easier.
by lostmsu | 2025-05-13 22:02:03+00:00
I got to the point where he says the email she made a video about is probably her own making and stopped. It is a >1.5h response to a 10-minute video, and at minute 7 (of 1.5h) he proceeds to basically call her a liar in a fundamental way without having any strong evidence for it. Mind you the first 7 minutes were spent claiming she put forall quantifiers where she just implied strong prevalence and telling how much better the guy is for the society than her. From these things I would say you'd waste your time watching this unless you want to practice fishing for fallacies. The 3 I mentioned so far are: the leaky bucket fallacy (weak evidence for liar claim), straw man (arbitrary adding forall), and ad hominem (attack character instead of presenting argument).
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-13 22:03:05+00:00
I had the live tracking up and went to bed and apparently it fell out of the sky about 90 minutes later :-). I was hoping that if it started burning over North America I'd be able to go out and see it go over. Alas.

I heard rumors that it had a Plutonium RTG on it for power, that would have been a bit spicy if it had splatted across the ground somewhere. Does anyone have any primary sources on whether or not that was the case?
by lxgr | 2025-05-13 22:03:21+00:00
Well, I’m not doing business with a company that trusts any random phone carrier’s identity assertion more than me in determining what is and isn’t my phone number, so I guess it works out nicely.

And if a company can’t be bothered to have a fallback verification flow in case I do lose access to my phone number somehow, that doesn’t increase confidence either. I’m a person, not a phone number.
by 1attice | 2025-05-13 22:03:40+00:00
As I mentioned in my previous comment on this post, my overall sense is that HN commenters often struggle with fear. It's a scary time to be a professional in this industry, and to be a human on Earth more generally. Sometimes, one of the ways people here try to manage their fear is through skepticism of, and/or hostility toward, accounts where someone has suffered through no fault of their own, which I believe is your case.

Without anger or judgment, I think our industry's culture has room to grow.

I wonder what happens now to workers, who never really thought of themselves as workers, discover themselves as such. 'Individual Contributor' just means _worker_. It's like calling the barista a Customer Happiness Officer.

When we remember how to be on each other's side, this will change; but for now, I'm afraid, we self-perceive, as Cory Doctorow put it, as 'temporarily embarrassed founders'. And we act accordingly.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-05-13 22:03:57+00:00
I didn't understand it either, but on the "Security Now" podcast Steve said it's basically like using a FIDO2 key but virtualized in software. As I've used a yubikey and understand public/private keys (with ssh) I now have a vague idea.

As the sibiling comment alludes, FLOSS projects have been threatened for allowing (part of?) the key to be exported!
by CyberDildonics | 2025-05-13 22:04:15+00:00
Go ahead and give me examples of what you mean.

I'm talking about speeding software up by 10x-100x by language choice, then 7x with extremely minimal adjustments (allocate memory outside of hot loops), then 25x - 100x with fairly minimal design changes (use vectors, loop through them straight).

I'm also not saying people are lazy, I'm saying they don't know that with something like modern C++ and a little bit of knowledge of how to write fast software MASSIVE speed gains are easy to get.

You are helping make my point here, most programmers don't realize that huge speed gains are low hanging fruit. They aren't difficult, they don't mean anything is contorted or less clear (just the opposite), they just have to stop rationalizing not understanding it.

I say this with knowledge of both sides of the story instead of guessing based on conventional wisdom.
by entangledqubit | 2025-05-13 22:04:31+00:00
Microsoft had/has the Natick project which was an undersea data center testbed which allegedly had a bunch of benefits. That doesn't seem to have gone anywhere - or at least isn't really scaling up. I'd imagine the ongoing operational costs of space are worse than the ocean?

To me, the cost estimates seem a bit off and conflate capital with running costs.

The main benefit for space at the moment seems to be sidestepping terrestrial regulations.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-13 22:05:21+00:00
The rest of the quote makes no difference. He originally presented these numbers as based on science. Later, he admitted he actually made them up based on opinion poll results. Not science and not even "science best guesses", but numbers chosen to always be a bit higher than what most people said they felt comfortable with in order to create social pressure. It was pure social engineering, with no connection to science.
by dijit | 2025-05-13 22:05:41+00:00
Maybe since 1980.

I recently watched a video that can be summarised quite simply as: "Computers today aren't that much faster than the computers of 20 years ago, unless you specifically code for them".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7PVZixO35c

It's a little bit ham-fisted, as the author was shirking decades of compile optimisations also, and it's not apples to apples as he's comparing desktop class hardware with what is essentially laptop hardware; but it's also interesting to see that a lot of the performance gains really weren't that great actually. he observes a doubling of performance in 15 years! Truth be told most people use laptops now, and truth be told 20 years ago most people used desktops, so it's not totally unfair.

Maybe we've bought a lot into marketing.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-13 22:06:19+00:00
It's called Google Play Protect. Comparing it to a Windows malware scanner it like comparing a house door lock to security in a jail.

All Google Play Protect does is compare the installed apps on your device to a list of known bad ones, and uninstalls any Google doesn't like. For the most part all it's doing is looking for apps you've installed that Google later deemed bad and removed from the app store. That's a slight exaggeration, but not a big one. The performance impact is what you would expect from that description - almost none.

A windows virus scanner tries to get itself involved in most mouse clicks. Open an email - it's reading it over your shoulder. View a web page - it's looking at it too. Copy a file from USB - it's inspecting every byte. Every time you write a file, it's sniffing over the new contents. The performance impact is what you would expect from that description, ranging from noticeable to crippling in the worst cases. When it does find a virus it can't "just uninstall it". It may well have replaced parts of Windows itself.

Google Play protect is all you need when you design an OS with security in mind. The situation on Windows is where you end up when focus on delivered features, security be damned.
by harmmonica | 2025-05-13 22:06:53+00:00
This all rings true to me. I would take it a step further and say that during normal times throughout the history of corporate America, and especially in boom times, management will let fiefdoms grow fairly unchecked. Then an external trigger causes them to re-evaluate and that's when they're like "holy shit we don't need nearly this many people."

For those of us who have been around the block (i.e., are old), the only times I've personally seen companies aggressively cut personnel is during economic shocks (dotcom bubble and housing crisis as two examples) and only then were the companies running lean (I wouldn't even say they were running bare bones; it's the only time I've seen headcount actually optimized for the work being produced).

I think the Twitter purge was actually an example of a major trigger. Not on par with the previous two I mentioned (obviously), but it was so high profile that anyone in tech took note of it, which is why I made the original comment. I've never seen so much discussion around a layoff for a company that was not imminently imploding (some may say Twitter was about to implode, but if you said that at the time I think you were wrong regardless of the state of its financials).
by bestwillcui | 2025-05-13 22:06:56+00:00
It's currently run on gpt-4o with some prompting guardrails, but I wouldn't trust it completely for younger (elementary school age) children.

Most of our courses are built for a slightly older age range, but we'd consider rolling out more beginner courses that are geared towards younger children and have more safety tests. If you have any thoughts let us know!
by brandall10 | 2025-05-13 22:07:37+00:00
What if you're not the type to maintain relationships w/ former coworkers?

Anyone I once had the personal contact info of - which could now be stale - is also a contact on LI. It just seems like a less weird venue to hit up someone you haven't spoken to since you last worked some position. That's also been largely the case when old coworkers reach out to me.

The key thing is he did hit up what could be defined as his network and got nothing.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-05-13 22:08:44+00:00
Javascript was made in a few weeks so that some sort of programmability could be built in to web pages. Python was made in the 90s as a more modern competition to perl for scripting.

Modern C++ and systems language didn't exist and neither was made with the intention that people would write general purpose interactive programs that leveraged computers 1,000x faster so that software could run 1,000x slower.
by Muromec | 2025-05-13 22:09:22+00:00
US government is deporting undesirables at will right now without any of that. On the other side of the world, where id is mandatory and e-id is used for everything that makes sense, the city hall gives free heroin injections to addicts as a last resort therapy and provides for illegal/undocumented homeless people so they don't shit on the street.

Neither of those prevents somebody from stealing bicycles zo.
by zeroq | 2025-05-13 22:09:30+00:00
Yeah, I've read that with the voice of Ron Perlman: "FAT, FAT never changes...".

I get that not every vault dweller will be technically apt enough to build a working computer out of a usb charger, but there is plenty of hardware and software that will be laying around in shrines near ghoul settlements.

Every store has POSes that can be easilly repurposed, there's DOS, Windows95 and if your tribe really wants to get an edge during a siege on enemy village you will most likely be able to calculate catapults trajectories on a PIP... I mean old android phone.
by comrade1234 | 2025-05-13 22:10:12+00:00
I used to travel to India a lot and would have this when staying with friends in Hyderabad, flies and all. My friend would send one of his servants out in the morning to buy it for us. The way he explained it - someone would climb the palm tree in the evening, make cuts in a place where the liquid would leak out and pool, then there would be fermentation overnight (bacterial, not yeast), and then they collect it on the morning.

It reminded me of a drink here in Switzerland made during grape harvest and also bacterial fermentation. Also sour cider in the babe region but that’s much more sophisticated.

This palm juice alcohol is very primitive and probably something monkeys drank.
by dijit | 2025-05-13 22:10:28+00:00
You're a pretty bad sample, that machine you're talking about probably cost >$2,000 new; and if it's an M-series chip; well that was a multi-generational improvement.

I (very recently I might add) used a Razer Blade 18, with i9 13950HX and 64G of DDR5 memory, and it felt awfully slow, not sure how much of that is Windows 11's fault however.

My daily driver is an M2 Macbook Air (or a Threadripper 3970x running linux); but the workers in my office? Dell Latitudes with an i5, 4 real cores and 16G of RAM if they're lucky... and of course, Windows 11.

Don't even ask what my mum uses at home, it cost less than my monthly food bill; and that's pretty normal for people who don't love computers.
by tikotus | 2025-05-13 22:11:12+00:00
Regarding implicit context, it could be nice to use it for time. Games often have different parts running with different speeds, during for example a slowdown effect, or pause, when the game simulation runs slower but the UI should still run at normal speed. They run in different time contexts. You could be passing a time struct around, but slapping it into the context is tempting.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-13 22:11:20+00:00
What does the bloom filter solve?

The expensive portion of the mark and sweep for the object store is the mark phase, not the storage of what's been marked. 100s, 1000s, or even millions of live objects wouldn't hardly take any space to keep in a remembered set.

On the other hand, querying the S3 bucket to list those 1M objects would be expensive no matter how you store the results.

But this does tickle my brain. Perhaps something akin to the generational hypotheses can be applied? Maybe it's the case that very old, very young, or very untouched objects are more likely to be garbage than not. If there's some way to divide the objects up and only look at objects whose are in "probably need to be collected" regions, then you could do minor fast sweeps semi frequently and schedule more expensive "really delete untracked stuff" infrequently.
by al_borland | 2025-05-13 22:11:26+00:00
I don’t have a good way to authenticate someone is calling from the bank on my end.

I ask what the basic issue is, then call the general bank number (or a number to their department, which I validate online before calling it). That way I’m initiating the call to a trusted number, and they can go through their process to authenticate me. Every time I’ve done this the person calling has understood and seemed to appreciate the caution.
Ask HN: Relational DB to Graph DB?
by mysteriousBag | 2025-05-13 22:12:05+00:00
I recently began spitballing the idea of creating a companion SaaS app to ServiceNow (https://www.servicenow.com/) that would use a graph DB to model the relationships between all of the logic (JavaScript scripts, mainly) used in a SN instance. The idea is to allow for much easier understanding of how the logic in an instance is connected and what the downstream effects of a change would be.

ServiceNow is built on top of a relational DB so I've been grappling with a schema for the graph and how to best model the relationships. To clarify, the app would be wholly separate from SN and only use a connection to an instance in order to retrieve the base schema and records related to logic.

So, even though I'm not changing the back-end DB of ServiceNow itself, I'm still curious to see if anyone here has moved from a relational DB to a graph DB for their/their company's app. If so, what was the experience like? How did you approach moving from a tabular schema to a graph-based one?

And if anyone here is familiar with ServiceNow's back-end specifically, I'd love to chat (high level) about what I'm trying to accomplish as well.

Thanks!
by deathanatos | 2025-05-13 22:12:08+00:00
> Why Not Just Use a Bucket Policy?

I've heard these words so many times, it's refreshing to see someone dig into why bucket policies aren't a cure-all.

As for "Why not use synchronous deletion?" — regarding the pitfall there, what about a WAL? I.e., you WAL the deletions you want to perform into an object in the object store, perform the deletions, and then delete the WAL. If you crash and find a WAL file, you repeat the delete commands contained in the WAL.

(I've used this to handle this problem where some of the deletions are mixed: i.e., some in an object store, some in a SQL DB, etc. The object store is essentially being used as strongly consistent storage.)

(Perhaps this is essentially the same as your "delayed queue"? All I've got is an object store though, not a queue, and it's pretty useful hammer.)
by anyfoo | 2025-05-13 22:13:06+00:00
> Or people could just understand the scope of the issue better

Do you understand the scope of the issue? Do you know that this couldn't personally affect you in a dragnet (so, not targeted, but spread out, think opportunistic ransomware) attack?

Because this statement of yours:

> Its not like you can write JS code with this that runs on browsers that lets you leak arbitrary secrets.

was not true for Spectre. The original spectre paper notoriously mentions JS as an attack vector.

If you truly disable all mitigations (assuming CPU and OS allow you to do so), you will reopen that hole.

So:

> The only real way this could ever be used is if you have direct access to the computer where you can run low level code.

I'm a low level kernel engineer, and I don't know this to be true in the general case. JITs, i.e. the JavaScript ones, also generate "low level code". How do you know of this not being sufficient?
by dylan604 | 2025-05-13 22:14:31+00:00
If it's in your pocket, then you might leave it in your other pants. Better to just have that chip embedded in your palm. You can even fashion it with LEDs that change color with your age. When you reach 30, you can then be told your Last Day has arrived and they are ready for Carrousel. I'm sure we can fold in plenty of other sci-fi tropes all at the same time too
by vacuity | 2025-05-13 22:14:57+00:00
We don't need to talk about theoretical risks. Is there not something wrong about a calculator app asking for contacts and location permissions[0]? Are ads fine if they can be used to track every detail of what you do and want? Was it fine when CrowdStrike caused Windows systems in airports BSOD and lead to massive delays? I'm not even talking about threats to life here. There is plenty of evidence that a lot of software has...issues. If you haven't come across one that you consider indicative, try waiting a few years. Time doesn't heal bugs that don't get fixed, and the best case scenario is a headache or some lost money. You can say "in practice most people only need lazy evaluation" because the reality isn't that software quality is overall mediocre, it's that there aren't delightfully convenient alternatives to switch to. In practice, most people only need something that somewhat works, even when it often doesn't, because complaining otherwise is unproductive.

And you seem to have ignored a lot of what I said, as if I was just talking about a few rare, critical problems.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/d6g6qr/it...
by innocentoldguy | 2025-05-13 22:15:40+00:00
What do you mean by "develop environment"? Are you referring to IDE support or features like mix, IEx, pry, releases, etc.?

If the latter, Elixir has one of the best development environments, in my opinion. Mix is fantastic, releases are easy, and Elixir's error messages in IEx are the clearest I've seen in my 30+ year career.

I use Emacs to write code, and beyond syntax coloring, I don't want anything else, so you may have a point if you're talking about IDE support.
by hex4def6 | 2025-05-13 22:16:41+00:00
Some of my most stressful times at work have been when I had the least stuff to do. It's nice for a few days, but when it stretches into weeks I start feeling queasy.

Obviously, being buried under an avalanche of thankless work is just as bad.

My ideal life would be some sprints of large effort (maybe pulling the occasional all-nighter once in a while), followed by rest / low work times.

A constant amount of work, all the same, blurs the days together. Too little, and you start feeling useless. Too much (consistently) and you're overwhelmed.
by lerno | 2025-05-13 22:16:57+00:00
Oh `.elements` would you believe that this is a remnant of C2's builtin function `elemsof`? Its used so rarely (I think two uses in the entire stdlib), so it hasn't come up. I opened an issue for it: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c/issues/2130

This is a good example of the sharp edges I hope to smoothen out in 0.7-0.9.
by gmuslera | 2025-05-13 22:17:53+00:00
Consolidate? All in a single place? Information comes from a lot of sources, in a lot of ways to be accessed, and a lot of ways to be shared and with who.

A lot are notes or links collections in obsidian. Others may be canvas on slack channels or conversations, some cloud note taking apps depending on with who I am sharing or collaborating on them, bookmarks in browser or RSS reader, even chats with ChatGTP.

In general it depends on where I got that piece of information or knowledge, what I plan to do with it, who I want to share it with and so on. There is no central consolidation process for all the diverse kinds of information, as there are "right" places to have them depending on it.