MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dgb23 | 2025-05-13 22:33:01+00:00
> Software costs money to build, and performance optimization doesn't come for free.

Neither do caching, operational/architectural overhead, slow builds and all the hoops we jump through in order to satisfy stylistic choices. All of this stuff introduces complexity and often demands specialized expertise on top.

And it's typically not about optimization, but about not doing things that you don't necessarily have to do. A little bit of frugality goes a long way. Often leading to simpler code and fewer dependencies.

The hardware people are (actually) optimizing, trying hard to make computers fast, to a degree that it introduces vulnerabilities (like the apple CPU cache prefetching memory from arrays of pointers, which opened it up for timing attacks, or the branch prediction vulnerability on intel chips). Meanwhile we software people are piling more and more stuff into programs that aren't needed, from software patterns/paradigms to unnecessary dependencies etc.

There's also the issue of programs feeling entitled to resources. When I'm running a video game or a data migration, I obviously want to give it as many resources as possible. But it shouldn't be necessary to provide gigabytes of memory for utility programs and operative applications.
by anyfoo | 2025-05-13 22:33:24+00:00
I'm not an expert, but I think you can only make this harder by intentionally making timers less precise (even adding some random fuzz). Someone may correct me if I'm wrong, but I think statistically, a less precise timer means you will just need a longer runtime.

Suppose you want to measure the distribution of the delay between recurring events (which is basically what's at the heart of those vulnerabilities). Suppose the delays are all sub-milliseconds, and that your timer, to pick something ridiculous, only has a 2 second granularity.

You may at first think that you cannot measure the sub-millisecond distribution with such a corse timer. But consider that event and timers are not synchronized to each other, so with enough patience, you will still catch some events barely on the left or on the right side of your 2 second timer tick. Do this over a long enough time, and you can reconstruct the original distribution. Even adding some randomness to the timer tick just means you need more samples to suss the statistic out.

Again, I am not an expert, and I don't know if this actually works, but that's what I came up with intuitively, and it matches with what I heard from some trustworthy people on the subject, namely that non-precision timers are not a panacea.
by alganet | 2025-05-13 22:33:43+00:00
Honestly, it sounds like quack to me.

I could say gravity could be proof of Decartes demon trying to drag us down to a world of heat, and symmetry is evidence of the eternal battle between good and evil. In fact, it sounds the same line of reasoning but with new buzzwords. Except it is centuries old.

I think philosophy is miles ahead anything computational regarding the nature of information. Specially in what we can and cannot know.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-13 22:33:46+00:00
Obviously use the heat pumps to concentrate the thermal energy up to 2700k, then conduct it along a bunch of tungsten filaments, now it's the world's biggest incandescent lightbulb on top of being the first datacenter in space. Maybe get it up to 4000k for a more modern lighting look. Guess we're gonna assume the dark forest hypothesis is false.
by ryandamm | 2025-05-13 22:33:53+00:00
Cooling in space was covered by XKCD's Randall Munroe in pretty entertaining detail here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUBRd1O2dU

TL;DR... cooling in space isn't passive, you're on the "inside" of an enormous vacuum flask. And radiative coupling with space is possible from the ground, if that's what you're interested in:

https://www.skycoolsystems.com

But god bless crazy entrepreneurs. Don't ask whether we can, definitely don't ask if we should, just ask whether it makes for good headlines...
by nine_k | 2025-05-13 22:35:23+00:00
My wife ran a restaurant that was relatively successful due to the quality of its food and service. She was able to establish it as an upper-tier experience, by both some word of mouth, but also by catering to right events, taking part in shows, and otherwise influencing the influencers of the town, without any massive ad campaigns. As a result, there were many praises in the restaurant's visitor book, left by people from many countries visiting the city.

It was not a huge commercial success though, even though it wasn't a failure either; it generated just enough money to stay afloat.
Ask HN: AI Founders, how do you handle liability clauses?
by midgard27 | 2025-05-13 22:35:28+00:00
tldr: AI startup in compliance. About to sign first mid market contract but the contract has some clauses related to being held liable for potential damages in case our AI doesn't perform as expected. In a way, it makes sense because we are promising to replace critical workflows.

For AI founders selling to enterprise, ever come across something similar? I want to sign the deal but a bit worried about potential liability.
by eightys3v3n | 2025-05-13 22:35:31+00:00
I have been exploring using tags in file properties instead of a folder layout. Just so I can pull things like they are a person, they worked for this company. Or I'm only looking for project docs, or article summaries. I just haven't wholesale moved so I'm getting the disadvantages of both approaches :p

I generally think you're right though so I am moving away from folders. Especially when the notes are raw text (markdown) and can be searched by anything effectively.

I am also interested in graph searching but I haven't used it yet.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-13 22:35:43+00:00
> That cool-down really started in ~2021-2022 and really hasn't picked back up. When the market cools down, the unremarkable old-timers are sadly the first ones to be shown the door.

It makes me wonder if we're in a the early stages of some kind of economic depression or recession.

> In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.

Yes, this is something that is poorly understood. (And something that I fear, given that I'm middle-aged.) It's easier to take a risk on someone who charges less, than to take a risk on someone who charges more. Often budgets just won't allow for an expensive software engineer, especially when an overseas engineer is cheaper.
by maccard | 2025-05-13 22:36:36+00:00
My current machine I upgraded from win10 to win11 and I noticed an across the board overnight regression in everything. I did a clean install so if anything it should have been quicker but boot times, app launch times, compile times all took a nosedive on that update.

I still think there’s a lot of blame to go around for the “kitchen sink” approach to app development where we have entire OS’s that can boot faster than your app can get off a splash screen.

Unfortunately, my users are on windows and work has no Linux vpn client so a switch isn’t happening any time soon.
by stephenhandley | 2025-05-13 22:37:08+00:00
I was trying to put these sizes in rough perspective. ISS is the largest man-made object in space, which is basically the size of a football field (half a hectare) and cost $150B. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/comparison-of-size-of-int...

The whitepaper shows a 4km x 4km solar array, which is 1600 hectares (3200 International Space Stations). Would assume the array they're proposing would be cheaper since its structurally more homogenous, but $480 trillion dollars is a whole lot of money.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-05-13 22:37:08+00:00
Sometimes "bad at what they do" is a manifestation of the environment in which they're doing the thing as opposed to incompetence. If the environment is healthy and is understanding of the asking of "stupid questions", that promotes a better exploration of both the problem and the potential solutions, which act to help form the vision of the path to the solution.

This is much easier when the relationships within the work environment are "good".

I work with a bunch of different personality types and geniunely like almost all of them. It just takes time to work out each individuals quirks and work with / around them.
by shawnfrompdx | 2025-05-13 22:37:24+00:00
thank you for taking the time. If i was petty i could share the past 5 versions of my website and resume i created in the last year which precisely followed most of what you recommended here. I had a completely vanilla narrative resume by version 3, and was getting nowhere. analytics and my own vibe check was making me think that all of that was too verbose and it wasn't being read. I was feeling unseen and began retargeting things to create an impression in 2 seconds, enough to hopefully hook someone to want to talk to me to learn more. the latest strategy was to try to emphasize within 2 seconds the point that im all about ai coding, while having a conventional cs/agency background at the same time.

Because you have taken the time to review this stuff and make these same recommendations that everyone else has here, i am going to refactor the site and resume yet again according to these recommendations.

I would love it if my career arc had one through-line narrative that made sense, but I'm afraid it doesnt necessarily. I started as a data architect and backend developer for the first many years, never touching front-end. I had to expand to tackle front-end to meet the changing market demands. in later years, the distinction of what were primarily front end vs back end tasks or roles has become a lot more fuzzy, as things have turned into "all-js-all-ts-everything-everywhere!" I've adapted, and been working full stack ts roles.

I often feel my data architecture / problem-solving skills are overlooked when my last few roles show that i've been developing with a vue ecosystem, pigeonholing me as a front-end dev, something i have never identified with.
by nradov | 2025-05-13 22:37:40+00:00
It's a lot harder to do clinical research in some areas than others just due to the availability of subjects. Like if you're developing a new drug to treat type-2 diabetes then it's a lot easier and cheaper to identify patients who meet the inclusion criteria than to find patients with some particular type of shoulder injury or whatever. And the study endpoints are also problematic since there are no clear objective signs; usually they have to rely on patient reported symptoms.

Some specialist physicians have a deep knowledge of exercise for injury prevention and rehab. But it also helps to get input from a good physical therapist and/or personal trainer. As a patient it can be tough to discriminate the good ones from the quacks.
by vdqtp3 | 2025-05-13 22:37:59+00:00
It's not an exaggeration.

I have a 12 core Ryzen 9 with 64GB of RAM, and clicking the emoji reaction button in Signal takes long enough to render the fixed set of emojis that I've begun clicking the empty space where I know the correct emoji will appear.

For years I've been hitting the Windows key, typing the three or four unique characters for the app I want and hitting enter, because the start menu takes too long to appear. As a side note, that no longer works since Microsoft decided that predictability isn't a valuable feature, and the list doesn't filter the same way every time or I get different results depending on how fast I type and hit enter.

Lots of people literally outpace the fastest hardware on the market, and that is insane.
by 000ooo000 | 2025-05-13 22:38:00+00:00
Are you me? I am an SE in a bank and I had this exact experience this week - though it relates to authing with the online banking system.

As I see it, it's an unfortunate combination of an extremely risk-averse environment, a total lack of trust in their IT staff, and - if I can be pointed - unqualified product teams. I can explain the the inadvertent drop from 2FA to 1FA, I can back it up with NIST, OWASP and Gov references explaining why it's a bad idea, but I am simply ignored because they are bent on execution of their 'vision'. At this point, I raise my concerns just to have my biases confirmed.

It's really frustrating and obviously as a banking customer I want sensible security features too, but if I can generalise, we devs are not driving the bus. We're stuffed in the luggage compartment, wheeled out as necessary.
by kmm | 2025-05-13 22:38:18+00:00
I thought coffee for people who don't like coffee was instant coffee? The linked Clever Dripper seems like it's comparatively a bit more effort and waste.

Apart from the advantage of instant preparation, to my undiscerning palate instant coffee has got all the qualities and taste of coffee I enjoy, and not being a coffee-connoisseur, I can't be disappointed by its apparent blandness or one-dimensionality.
by karmakaze | 2025-05-13 22:39:03+00:00
Yes in 2024 Asus and LG both had them. This one though has extras:

> Of course, the headline feature is the 500Hz refresh rate, but there's also a 0.03ms response time (GTG) and QHD resolution, VESA Display HDR True Black 500 HDR, and HDR10+ Gaming.

I might prefer the 4k LG that does 240Hz and can switch to 480Hz for 1080p (if I were a meaningfully competitive gamer, which I'm not).
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-05-13 22:39:49+00:00
Surely it couldn't be as bad as an unnamed Queensland (Australia) bank that did client side authentication by looking up the username and password if one giant

if username == "user1" && password == "password1" return true; else if username == "user2" && password == "password2" return true; else if ...

Yes, that was real.
by dgfitz | 2025-05-13 22:40:06+00:00
I haven’t read most of the comments here and none on substack, but looking at your resume, I’d spend some time making it look slightly warmer, throw some color in there.

I’d also consider re-working your job history, it “looks like a lot of bouncing around” which shouldn’t be a bad thing, but it can be if framed poorly.

Finally, I’d spend a few weeks with c++/java and slap it on the resume as a competency. Can’t hurt, and you’re just learning some syntax at this point.

Best of luck to you. Market is tough, and there are a lot of sw folks looking around right now.
by h4ckerle | 2025-05-13 22:40:07+00:00
As a european I again find it crazy what kinds of insecure stuff the banking industry in the US does. Chip+PIN arrived long after they did here, SMS Tan is still a thing while EU Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) forbid this in 2018, 7 years ago. Many transactions are still authenticated via signatures on paper cheques, you can use your credit card without a second factor (also regulated by PSD2). I just can't understand why they continue doing this, when I'd assume fixing this would cost less than what fraud must be costing them today.
by jrflowers | 2025-05-13 22:40:21+00:00
It’s only a grift if they know they can’t solve the cooling issue and they falsify data around their proposed solution and they publicly embarrass their investors a la Theranos.

Outside of that, accepting money and saying “I will simply solve the enormous problem with my idea by solving it” is not only normal, but actively encouraged and rewarded in the VC sphere. Suggesting that that way of operating is anything short of the standard that should be aspired to is actually seen as derisive and offensive on here and can get you labeled as gauche or combative.
by conn10mfan | 2025-05-13 22:41:06+00:00
that semaphore article is pretty interesting, there is a whole body of work being developed by folks like Gil Duran, Naomi Klein, Emil Torres, etc. right now diving into the Tech Right and characters like Andreessen

one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science?

take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers

Thiel on Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0

(aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")
by youdont | 2025-05-13 22:41:18+00:00
Looks very interesting, but I've seen these kind of multi-paradigm databases like Gel, Helix and Surreal and I'm not sure that any of them quite hit the graph spot.

Does Helix support much of the graph algorithm world? For things like GrapgRAG.

Either way, I'd be all over it if there was a python SDK witch worked with the generated types!
by UncleOxidant | 2025-05-13 22:41:51+00:00
> The idea that humanity somehow went back is a fantasy pushed forward by catholic commentators.

A tangential aside: Wouldn't that make the catholics look bad and as such why would they spread it? ("We had all this great tech before the catholic/christians came along and ruined everything and now we don't have nice things" seems like another way to look at it)
by nsagent | 2025-05-13 22:42:02+00:00
It really depends on the software. I have the top-of-the-line M4 Max laptop with 128GB of memory. I recently switched from Zotero [1] to using papis [2] at the command line.

Zotero would take 30 seconds to a minute to start up. papis has no startup time as it's a cli app and searching is nearly instantaneous.

There is no reason for Zotero to be so slow. In fact, before switching I had to cut down on the number of papers it was managing because at one point it stopped loading altogether.

It's great you haven't run into poorly optimized software, but but not everyone is so lucky.

[1]: https://www.zotero.org/ [2]: https://github.com/papis/papis
by BonoboIO | 2025-05-13 22:42:07+00:00
This has to be one of the dumbest ideas I've seen posted here.

Just think about the sheer effort required to dump 1 BILLION watts of waste heat into space - the engineering challenges alone make this completely impractical.

Compared to this, Theranos actually looks like a solid investment. At least Holmes had working demos and big-name backers before it all fell apart. This doesn't even pass the basic smell test.
by semi-extrinsic | 2025-05-13 22:42:09+00:00
Their whitepaper clearly demonstrates a profound lack of knowledge of thermal engineering. E.g. heat pumps are described as magical things.

They are literally planning to feed the radiators using a coolant like water and sensible heat at 35 degC to 5 degC. At 5 GW, you then need to be pumping 60 000 liters of water per second.

That's like a tenth of the Sacramento river, going through a 16 sq km array in space and hoping that nothing leaks.
by slg | 2025-05-13 22:42:15+00:00
>I don't know.

Which invalidates the whole point. There are countless ways that the healthcare industry could save time if it was willing to sacrifice an unknown number of lives.

How is this scenario any different from some other arbitrary decision made for the sake of expediency such as doctors deciding to no longer collect medical histories from new patients? Think of all the time that could be saved if you never had to fill out those forms the first time you saw a doctor. Who cares if that leads to more people dying, it saves some time!
by esperent | 2025-05-13 22:42:21+00:00
> There is no easy passive cooling in space, getting rid of heat is a major problem

Nonetheless getting rid of heat (by radiation) is possible, otherwise people would be roasted inside the ISS.

I'm sure all of these companies are advertising "ChatGPT in Space!" because that's what will generate hype and money, but what they'll actually be planning is very small edge data centers whose job is to reduce latency.

Whether that makes financial sense, I have no idea. But I am sure it's at least physically possible for a small enough data center.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-13 22:43:43+00:00
> I'm surprised there's room for tmux on something that tiny.

A question that comes to mind is, under what circumstances would you expect a TUI based program that processes streaming text not to fit on a system that is otherwise capable of user interaction? It seems vaguely in the vicinity of the simplest possible interactive task you could come up with.

Certainly it generally isn't worth hyper-optimizing mainstream desktop applications to wring out the last few MB, let alone KB, of RAM in this day and age. However that doesn't answer the question - why would more than 1 MB of program binary be required for multiplexing text in a terminal? At least at first glance it honestly seems a bit outlandish.
by maccard | 2025-05-13 22:43:52+00:00
Even 4-5 seconds is long enough for me to honestly get distracted. That is just so much time even on a single core computer from a decade ago.

On my home PC, in 4 seconds I could download 500MB, load 12GB off an SSD, perform 12 billion cycles (before pipelining ) per core (and I have 24 of them) - and yet miro still manages to bring my computer to its knees for 15 seconds just to load an empty whiteboard.
by zamalek | 2025-05-13 22:43:54+00:00
Power in needs to equal heat out, and that isn't easy in space. They, deceptively, claim that their novel solution is radiative cooling. Relying on radiation for cooling in space is the problem statement! Convective (as on Earth) is significantly more effective.

I'm not one of those idiots who would claim that "we should focus on terrestrial problems instead of space," but this idea seems to have only downsides.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-05-13 22:43:57+00:00
You're laying it out like it's universal, in my experience there are products where people will seek for the cheapest good enough but there are also other product that people know they want quality and are willing to pay more.

Take cars for instance, if all people wanted the cheapest one then Mercedes or even Volkswagen would be out of business.

Same for professional tools and products, you save more by buying quality product.

And then, even in computer and technology. Apple iPhone aren't cheap at all, MacBook come with soldered ram and storage, high price, yet a big part of people are willing to buy that instead of the usual windows bloated spyware laptop that run well enough and is cheap.
by nativeit | 2025-05-13 22:44:51+00:00
This article is thick with tribalism, but I personally found it to be a mixed bag. For open source software and self-hosting enthusiasts, NextCloud (OwnCloud, et al) makes you feel really empowered to sort of build out your own personal cloud and/or groupware, and in many of the most salient aspects it delivers.

But like anything so ambitious in scope, it doesn’t take much before you begin to push up against its boundaries (even as generous as they are). This is the kind of software that the biggest players in the industry devote armies of highly paid developers and billions of capital to. The accomplishments of the OSS community should not be diminished. I personally will continue to use and support these tools in my own capacity. But it’s kind of inevitable that, while they offer lots of cool major features, they won’t ever be quite as polished or refined as competing solutions from industry giants, or even other OSS apps that take a narrower, more uni-tasked approach.

Having read through most of these comments, I think the truth is probably somewhere between competing ideas, and everything else is subjective and context-dependent.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-13 22:44:56+00:00
Isaac Arthur on YouTube makes videos on sci-fi ideas that we might be able to do within the laws of physics, albeit not with today's technology. He did a video on Colonizing Venus some years ago, and an updated one a few months ago, and some others around colonisation and teraforming of the planets in the Solar System:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=isaac+arthur+ve...