MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dasil003 | 2025-05-03 20:34:56+00:00
This really resonated with me because I'm also working to avoid becoming more cynical as I gain experience and perspective on what problems "matter" and what solutions can gain traction.

I think in this case the cognitive dissonance comes from security-minded software engineers (especially the vocal ones that would chime in on such a topic) misunderstanding how rare their expertise is as well as the raw scope of risks that large corporations are exposed to and what mitigations are sensible. If you are an expert it's easy to point at security compliance implementation at almost any company and poke all kinds of holes in specific details, but that's useless if you can't handle the larger problem of cybersecurity management and the fallout from a mistake.

And if you zoom out you realize the scope of risk introduced by the internet, smart phones and everything doing everything online all the time is unfathomably huge. It's not something that an engineering mentality of understanding intricate details and mechanics can really get ones head around. From this perspective, liability and insurance is a very rational way to handle it.

As far as the checklists go, if you are an expert you can peel back the layers and realize the rationales for these things and adjust accordingly. If you have competent and reasonable management and decision makers then things tend to go smoothly, and ultimately auditors are paid by the company, so there is typically a path to doing the right thing. If you don't have competent and reasonable management then you're probably fucked in unnumerable ways, such that security theater is the least of your worries.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-03 20:35:08+00:00
you have panels connected to grid thru inverter and that can modulate output in any way needed in few milliseconds.

same as inverter in electric car providing power to motors.

or inverter providing power to coils in your loudspeaker/ headphones.

inverter can adjust phase, voltage, frequency. it can means it is job of inverter to provide that in normal operation. that is why it is there in first place.
by timewizard | 2025-05-03 20:35:44+00:00
> I care far far more that remote communities can now have meaningful access to the internet

Then can you tell me how many remote communities were not being served before that are now suddenly capable of accessing the internet now that these particular constellations exist? I mean just looking at Starlink's current availability map shows how little you might actually care about this particular outcome.

Even so was this the most affordable and sustainable option for these countries? Was there absolutely no way to achieve both goals at once?

> I don't really care that much.

Noted. We're just picking sides today, I guess. Bummer.
by johntarter | 2025-05-03 20:36:26+00:00
Warren Buffet has warned about the trade deficit problem since 2003 and has proposed an alternate solution called "import certificates" where exporters could earn them and sell them to the importers who must use them. This would result in an even trade balance. He admitted it's essentially a tariff by another name but a more fair and systematic one. In other words, he aligns with Peter Navarro in the problem but differs in the solution.
by bartread | 2025-05-03 20:36:30+00:00
I'm in the process of resurrecting an old blog of mine, which had used hexo back in the day with all the raw posts being markdown files that are statically rendered to HTML... and to be honest I'm pretty tempted by this very simple approach because hexo is, honestly, annoying me.

For whatever reason it's just not picking up themes even though I'm now using the most up to date everything. And actually I've realised I don't even like the vast majority of the themes anyway, including the one I used previously. And since developing my own hexo theme seems like kind of a faff, I'm pretty tempted to just throw together a Sass sheet, compile it to CSS, and use that as my theme.

I guess if I got into the detail of it - comments, archive pages, etc. - the complexity would start to creep in and I'd find that what I was doing was building my own home-rolled hexo-alike... so maybe I should persist with figuring out why themes aren't working for a bit longer.
by switz | 2025-05-03 20:36:38+00:00
So here's the kicker: React Server Components don't need a server. They are completely compatible with a static bundle and still provide major benefits should you choose to adopt them (dead code elimination, build-time execution). This is effectively the design of Astro Islands, natively in React Server Components. Letting you write static and client-side dynamic code in a single paradigm through componentization and composition.

If you are curious, my most recent blog post is all about this concept[0] which I wrote because people seem to be misinformed on what RSCs really are. But that post didn't gain any traction here on HN.

Is it more complex? Sure–but it is also more powerful & flexible. It's just a new paradigm, so people are put off by it.

[0] Server Components Give You Optionality https://saewitz.com/server-components-give-you-optionality
by gameman144 | 2025-05-03 20:36:40+00:00
> Hard to take him seriously when he doesn't himself pay more tax

Why? Advocating for a change doesn't imply that you need to act like that change has been made already.

For instance, I am a huge advocate for building out more sidewalks in my city. I don't currently walk everywhere, though, because the sidewalks today aren't suitable for that -- the change needs to be made first.

Likewise, I could donate all my spare money to the city to fund sidewalks, but this goes against my visceral sense of fairness: I am advocating for my local government to build sidewalks, not saying that sidewalks should be built by any means necessary and that I'm willing to foot the bill alone.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-03 20:36:57+00:00
All the closed addressing strategies mean more allocator burden. In this case, each of these trees needs to grow separately. But with open addressing we can avoid that.

Suppose we have 10'000 key->value pairs to store. A Swiss Table (a popular open addressed hash table design) will need space for 16384 contiguous pairs plus metadata†. So it'll do that allocation once, but with the closed addressing and trees you're paying to grow trees during insertion, you can't know which trees will grow and which are unused.

You're correct that the Swiss Table will see collisions, but an attacker can't choose them, so they're rare. Each collision costs us a search step, but because the Java design incurs a pointer chase (to find the tree) for every lookup that's actually the same price [one memory fetch] as a single collision for the Swiss Table, yet most of the time the Swiss Table sees less than 1.0 collisions per lookup.

† It's ensuring no more than 87.5% of the storage is used and then rounding up to a power of two because that means less work for each look-up step. 11429 would be enough space, but 16384 is the next largest power of two.
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-05-03 20:37:52+00:00
I’ve been saying this for a long time. It takes very little effort to spin up a react app so there’s little point in starting a project without it or whatever front-end framework you prefer.

As I’ve become more senior I’ve realized that software devs have a tendency to fall for software “best practices” that sound good on paper but they don’t seem to question their practical validity. Separation of concerns, microservices, and pick the best tool for the job are all things I’ve ended up pushing back against.

In this particular case I’d say “pick the best tool for the job” is particularly relevant. Even though this advice is hard to argue against, I think it has a tendency to take developers down the path of unnecessary complexity. Pragmatically it’s usually best to pick a single tool that works decently well for 95% of your use cases instead of a bunch of different tools.
by Animats | 2025-05-03 20:37:57+00:00
Agreed. He's just running off press reports.

We haven't yet seen the sequence of breaker trip events. We haven't yet seen the graphs of power flows at tie points, and of frequency and voltage error.

The closest thing to a useful fact visible from Google seems to be: "The network lost 15 gigawatts of electricity generation in five seconds at around 1033 GMT, the Energy Ministry said on Monday evening, without explaining the reason for the loss." That's not a cause. Losing 15GW all at once, more power than any one plant generates, indicates some previous event had caused breaker trips somewhere. No indication of the previous event.

We do know this wasn't a supply shortage. There was plenty of generating capacity online.

Here's an analysis of the US Northeast blackout of 2003.[1] Until we start to see that level of detail, it's just blithering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
by motorest | 2025-05-03 20:37:58+00:00
> This not useful. More data is required.

I don't agree. You do not need a thorough root cause analysis to acknowledge the fact that a) some invariants in the system were violated, b) some of the people accountable are already making claims that fly in the face of reason.

Also, Spain has a regrettable track record of covering up the responsibilities of state institutions in major disasters.
by throw09093 | 2025-05-03 20:38:11+00:00
I read quite lot about connecting Ukraine power grid to EU. Small variations in frequency and phase are quite real problem. It is quite a big problem to synchronise large international grids, and tiny PV inverter is really not build to do that!

Plus from manual, most AC inverters have parasitic power factor on AC side. Some part of power inverter sends to grid, can be out of sync junk!

Large spinning turbines with generator, are capable of absorbing out of sync junk to huge extend. But that may put turbine out of phase slightly.

Current power grid was build around huge wheels spinning at the very same frequency.
by neuroelectron | 2025-05-03 20:38:14+00:00
So glad I decided early in my career to not do webpages. Look how much discussion this minor feature has generated. I did make infra tools that outputted basic html, get post cgi type of stuff. What's funny is this stuff was deployed right before AWS was launched and a year later the on prem infra was sold and the warehouse services were moved to the cloud.
by whstl | 2025-05-03 20:38:20+00:00
From my side it feels like customer support systems are designed purely to trap customers in the system so they are unable to cancel.

In my last day in South America I spent about two hours cancelling my cable and even though I was very soft spoken and super patient (I was playing Mario Kart on mute so not really uncomfortable), but the customer support person actually CRIED to me because she would “miss her quota” if I cancelled.

I had no means of paying anymore (I cancelled my bank account the day before and was about to move to another country) so there was nothing I couldn’t really help her, so I fail to see how I deserve the treatment from the company.
by bediger4000 | 2025-05-03 20:38:29+00:00
Most certainly, I agree with you. I'm just surprised that the folks who insisted on the merits of absolute free speech, and that "big tech" was biased against them are using the levers of state power to do exactly what they accused others of. You'd think the investigators of "The Twitter Files" like Matt Taibbi, would be all over this. Nary a peep. I guess I'm misunderstanding.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-05-03 20:38:57+00:00
it's a language that's trivial to implement because it's well designed and simple, it embeds very nicely, and it's fantastic for use as a debug shell and to implement guis. it's a great technician's language, if you work with technically-minded people who aren't necessarily programmers, it's a great way to hand them deep interactive power without the footguns of a forth.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-03 20:39:03+00:00
> The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.

Welcome to modern day customer support. Phone or email agents have zero agency and their jobs are more often than not outsourced to some ultra low wage country... the only ones with actual authority tend to be C-level executive assistants and social media teams because a bad experience gone viral can actually threaten a massive financial impact.
by kyledrake | 2025-05-03 20:39:30+00:00
At least some of the blame here is the bias towards HTML being something that is dynamic code generated, as opposed to something that is statically handwritten by many people.

There are features that would be good for the latter that have been removed. For example, if you need to embed HTML code examples, you can use the <xmp> tag, which makes it so you don't need to encode escapes. Sadly, the HTML5 spec is trying to obsolete the <xmp> tag even though it's the only way to make this work. All browsers seem to be supporting it anyways, but once it is removed you will always have to encode the examples.

HTML spec developers should be more careful to consider people hand coding HTML when designing specifications, or at least decisions that will require JavaScript to accomplish something it probably shouldn't be needed for.
by bitmasher9 | 2025-05-03 20:39:44+00:00
I doubt we’ll end up with 200+ of these consolations in 100 years. Probably not even 20.

It’s just a physics problem. Rocket launches are expensive from an energy standpoint. These satellites will have a decaying orbit that requires replacement. It won’t look appealing to most net-importers of energy (which is most countries, but the whole EU might bear the cost for one network for strategic reasons).

Not to mention most countries just don’t operate enough military assets outside of their borders to justify their own network. Non-military applications will be just fine with E2E encryption over public channels. More localized military operations can have communication needs served other ways.
by rubenfiszel | 2025-05-03 20:39:56+00:00
> That said, we tried Windmill first and while it was cool for the devs who were able to see the vision, the non-technical users hated it

Founder of Windmill here. This is not too surprising although we are working on it by leveraging AI and just better DX/design. Pleasing devs in the most demanding orgs and the ever-changing expectations is challenging by itself. Pleasing both devs AND non-technical user is a monumental task that we are now giving more attention to by focusing on 2 aspects:

- A better DX/UX that does not sacrifice power-user capabilities but has a less step learning-curve and more intuitiveness to it. That is mostly about good design and hard work. We are taking inspiration from the best and on the intuitiveness, we've learned a lot from n8n and other leaders in the space.

- leveraging AI capabilities in a state-of-the-art way to have the best models generate the code for non-technical users. That is basically just adopting the best practices inspired by cursor such as great auto-completion, great inline code-gen, excellent semantic search.
by nerdjon | 2025-05-03 20:40:17+00:00
I really really hate that the science behind GMO’s gets clouded by the business practices of some of these companies.

You can separate the 2. Being anti gmo is being anti science. Decrying all GMO as bad, unhealthy, or whatever is as illogical as trying to make any blanket statement about any food. It just so happens that this one gets headlines.

We should be concerned about the businesses like Monsanto. But that is completely different.

Personally I have been trying to avoid any product that goes out of its way to claim “non gmo” because it just signals to me that they don’t care about sustainability and science.

It’s almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than the “organic” crap.
The engineering interview process is broken, AI cheating is exposing it faster
by ssistilli | 2025-05-03 20:40:46+00:00
I've been thinking a lot about how technical interviews have hardly evolved in the last decade, and how AI is accelerating their collapse.

We're still using Leetcode-style problems that barely reflect the actual work engineers do. Candidates are expected to grind 50+ algorithm questions just to get a shot—even if the job has nothing to do with algorithms. Now, AI tools are being used to pass take-home assignments, do live coding rounds, or even write resumes that bypass ATS filters.

And the thing is, it's not even cheating in the traditional sense—it's just people using the tools available to them. The problem is deeper: we’re assessing the wrong things in the first place. Should we care if someone uses AI to solve a take-home if they’ll use AI on the job anyway? Should we really be judging an engineer’s ability based on whether they remember how to reverse a linked list under pressure?

We’re stuck in a system that’s easy to game and hard to justify. Has anyone seen companies doing this better? How are you adjusting your hiring process in the age of AI?
by tene80i | 2025-05-03 20:41:02+00:00
You’re confusing social interactions with abstract interpretive exercises.

In social life, what someone presents to another person, and how successfully they do it, matters. Not just intention.

In this case, you’re defending just sitting silently and expecting the other party to keep asking you questions. It doesn’t matter if you want to show interest and are failing - social interactions don’t work that way. If you’re not doing your part, people get bored or confused. Like if I wanted to show I agreed with you by giving you a thumbs down. Or yawned even though I thought you were interesting, and didn’t explain it’s because I’m tired.

Intentions matter, yes. But they’re not the only thing that matters. And what’s happened here is a failure to follow commonly held standards of social interaction in a given cultural context.

If you’re saying you shouldn’t _blame_ the person not asking questions, then sure, I agree. It’s not necessarily their fault. But it’s still reasonable to find their behaviour lacking and go talk to someone else.

(And yes, fair point about interruptions. More complex case, and can signal engagement. Depends how it’s done.)
by Someone | 2025-05-03 20:41:33+00:00
Having enormous synchronized grids helps a bit with that.

It’s highly unlikely to be abnormally cloudy/calm over the whole of Europe, for example, so Europe’s large grid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...) can be used to move electricity from where there’s excess energy from solar or wind to where there’s a deficit.

That requires large capacity connections, though that aren’t everywhere yet.I understand electricity was restored in the south of France much more rapidly last week than in Spain and Portugal because it’s much better connected to the rest of Europe.
by canucker2016 | 2025-05-03 20:42:14+00:00
From Paul Allen's Idea Man autobiography, he wrote that he had written an Intel 8008 emulator/assembler on PDP-10 for their Traf-O-Data company.

So adapting the Intel 8008 emulator/assembler to the Intel 8080 was easy, compared to starting from scratch (and wondering if it was even possible that writing an 8080 cross-assembler/emulator would work).

Monte Davidoff has written a math package for PDP-8 so he was hired to write the math package for their BASIC for $400 + more in consulting fees.

Both the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were introduced at $360 - many references to the IBM 360 mainframe computers as the inspiration for this price.

Ed Roberts was able to negotiate thousand Intel 8080 CPUs at $75 (vs $360 list price). A retro computing website mentions that these CPUs were less than perfect somehow, though still functional.

Back to Paul Allen's book, the MITS Altair was originally introduced with a whole 256 bytes of memory. To increase profits, the included memory card was ditched and you had to buy a memory card ($176 or 1K or $264 for 4K - amazon.com sells DDR5 64GB for US$150-$200 today)

When Intel and Texas Instruments ran short of memory chips, Ed turned to an off-brand called Signetics, whose chips were hopelessly flaky. I started getting calls, less friendly this time, from people who’d invested in 4K of memory and still couldn’t load BASIC. I’d see Bill Yates tearing his hair out in the engineering department over defective Signetics cards. As David Bunnell and Eddie Currie later acknowledged in PC Magazine, “. . . the probability of getting a 4K memory board to work when assembled from [an Altair] kit was remote. And the likelihood that it would continue to work would easily have been rated zero.”
by pythonguython | 2025-05-03 20:42:55+00:00
I agree, and I think most people would say the current models would rank low on creativity metrics however we define them. But to the main point, I don’t see how the quality we call creativity is unique to biological computing machines vs electronic computing machines. Maybe one day we’ll conclusively declare creativity to be a human trait only, but in 2025 that is not a closed question - however it is measured.
by metalman | 2025-05-03 20:43:06+00:00
your thinking is good, but there is a linguistic sublty, in that AI is not bieng used as a noun, but rather as an adjective, or part of a string of adjectives.....extra super power and just to see if you have any eye roll left.... I took one and a half tractors, and built a whole machine combining parts from both, one was a Fordson Super Major, the other an earlier Fordson Major, so I call it the major super major, but I suppose I could get some sort of device involved and it could be the AI power major super major, as there was actualy a "power major" as well. The modern company JCB got it's start doing mad mods to fordsons, and no doubt are getting ready to roll out some sort of AI gimrackery for heavy equipment, I have zero interest in looking, dont want to know, but accept that knowledge is inevitable, hallucinating heavy equipment here we come, maybe we should just go for it and train AI on gaudi,and dali, and give it heavy equipment and monster sized 3d printers
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-03 20:43:15+00:00
The encouragement was mostly post-9/11 and the recession ended in November, so if it wasn't effective, it sure at least coincided with recovery.

(The recession started in March, well before 9/11, but the attempt to encourage shopping to deal with the perceived problem was a post-9/11 thing.)

The Bush recession is often perceived as longer and deeper than it was because of the poor distribution of gains (in part due to the tax burden shift of the Bush tax cuts) of the expansion that started in late 2001 and ended with the Great Recession.