MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by floxy | 2025-05-13 21:02:23+00:00
>The Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA.

The Mars 3 landed on Mars in 1971:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3

The NASA Viking program landed on Mars in 1976:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program

...but I guess that didn't rove.
by itishappy | 2025-05-13 21:03:05+00:00
Glad I could help!

Also fun is that taking the magnitude involves a square root that can sometimes be avoided, but that doesn't really help us here because of the power of three. If the denominator were squared we could just use `r_mag^2 = r_x^2 + r_y^2`, but we still need the root to get the direction. It is kinda interesting though that in 2d it expands to a power of `3/2`:

F_vec = G * m1 * m2 / (r_x^2 + r_y^2) ^ (3/2) * r_vec
by cheema33 | 2025-05-13 21:03:39+00:00
> Investing in engineering quality is pointless if there is no headroom to deliver experiences that will make a customer say "Wow, I need to have that."

This. Per your example, this is exactly what it was like when most of us first used Google after having used AltaVista for a few years. Or Google Maps after having used MapQuest for a few years. Google invested their resources correctly in building a product that was head and shoulders above the competition.

And yes, if you are planning to sell beer, you are going to need the help of scantily clad women on the beach much more than anything else.
by keybored | 2025-05-13 21:04:14+00:00
> The loss of the ability to make many things, including computers but also other more important things like the industrial process for making ammonia, globally, simultaneously, is the end of humanity.

The end of us sedentary people. No more ammonia by itself won’t affect hunter-gatherers and uncontacted peoples. But if we’re talking about not the end of these things in itself but an event like a nuclear winter: sure!

We’ve been through population bottlenecks in the distant past. Again, if we (reading this) die out not due to very severe climate change or nuclear winter, other kinds of humans could live on. Maybe.

By the way I think old-school Preppers are funny.[1] What’s the point of prepping with a bunker and canned goods? Truly. You don’t have enough time to train for the skills, or to hoard enough stuff, to survive in a post-civilizational state. You’re just prepping for surviving a few months at best, that’s it.

[1] This OS guy is probably more reflected.
by IIAOPSW | 2025-05-13 21:04:19+00:00
I'm tempted to try it. My use case right now is a set of documents which are annual financial and statutory disclosures of a large institution. Every year they are formatted / organized slightly differently which makes it enormously tedious to manually find and compare the same basic section from one year to another, but they are consistent enough to recognize analogous sections from different years due to often reusing verbatim quotes or highly specific key words each time.

What I really want to do is take all these docs and just reorder all the content such that I can look at page n (or section whatever) scrolling down and compare it between different years by scrolling horizontally. Ideally with changes from one year to the next highlighted.

Can your product do this?
by vizzier | 2025-05-13 21:04:37+00:00
> Dex is annoyingly close to being really useful.

I feel this a lot. I use it daily, mostly as a thin client for remote desktop use but there are little niggles that would make it better. Examples:

- Let me control how the top bar and taskbar are viewed

- Let games capture the mouse in remote desktop (for fps type games)

- Fix the small issues that cause the mouse capture to fail on steam link occasionally

- Fix rendering issues with firefox while in desktop mode

- Let the youtube UI work in a more "desktop" way while in dex mode

These might be mostly app responsibilities, but if they could fix some of this stuff dex would be a dream instead of just being mostly useful.
by neaden | 2025-05-13 21:05:07+00:00
A big thing is that Bats have a really weird metabolism, during their day it can dip down to 50 Fahrenheit and then go up to 104 F at night when they are active. This can mean they end up carrying a lot of diseases but not dying/showing symptoms of them. They also have very strong DNA repair compared to other mammals. Then in addition many bats are very social and sleep in big groups, which means the disease can spread throughout the bat population.

Edit: Finally and relevantly they can come in close contact with people by coming into our homes, or people going into theirs. This can let the disease cross over.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-05-13 21:05:10+00:00
>there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living.

this seems a gross misunderstanding of how software companies work at scale. Twitter doesn't hire engineers to run a monitoring system cause they need it to stay alive (there are alternatives to building and running their own!), they chose to do it to save money or increase revenue.

Twitter doesn't need an ad network, they can use Google, or build their own and take more profit. They might know that for every 3 engineers they hire on their ad network, they increase their click rate and thus revenue.

The same can be said for any infra team. You don't need to build much infra, but companies do it because sometimes it's a way to save hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud costs or licensing fees.
by codingdave | 2025-05-13 21:06:09+00:00
> However some of it should be retained manually in some system - or at least I feel it should.

I question this premise. If the content you read on any given day did not the result in some change to your work product, it is really important enough to save it? Do you really need to remember all the messages, chats, articles that didn't give you any actionable answers? Or do you just keep the results that you created based on such things?

I keep none of it. I do, however, keep all my old code. Every throwaway line I've ever written is saved somewhere, even if it is just in git history on old throwaway projects. So when I do need to do something again, I don't need to re-do research or figure it out from scratch... I have my working solutions already stored.
by jkercher | 2025-05-13 21:06:39+00:00
Rust and Zig are both perfectly fine languages. Odin wins on simplicity and familiarity for me. I'm most productive in C which is what I use at work. So, for me, it's a better C with some quality of life improvements. It's not trying to be too radical, so not much to learn. The result is that I move can fast in Odin, and it is legitimately fun.
by LexiMax | 2025-05-13 21:06:57+00:00
Any social media site that delegates moderation responsibilities to its users will eventually run into these sorts of problems.

At a certain scale, you're almost guaranteed to get moderation via populism simply because the friction for using these tools in bad faith is far too low and there never seems to be enough of a punishment for misuse.

Shockingly, I've found Hacker News to be far worse about how it promotes echo chamber behavior than most subreddits, despite how much tougher it is to obtain access to these tools. On the other hand, it's far less of a problem on Tildes, and I suspect that's in large part due to there simply not being a explicit downvote button. However, the fact that "Noisy" and "Spam" tags haven't been abused might simply due to its smaller scale.

To be clear, I actually agree with the people downvoting you, despite not doing so myself. But if you find that distasteful, don't hate the player, hate the game.
by why-el | 2025-05-13 21:07:08+00:00
I am not sure if this will help you, but have an extended, deep conversation with ChatGPT about your resume. Tell it who you are, what you excel at, and list projects and technologies. Then, paste a couple of the job postings that did not work for you.

This might sound silly to you, but it absolutely works, because it will distill your experience better, ask you to re-arrange and generalize, and more importantly, it is far superior to us in finding unique key word combinations that work.
by shawnfrompdx | 2025-05-13 21:07:19+00:00
while i have a BACKGROUND in php, i have not been seeking php work and havent been working fulltime in php since like 2017. Since then i've been fullstack in typescript. i've been seeking typescript roles in apps & vr.

i have not been trying the same thing over and over. I have been continually trying something new every month or two of the search, seeing what works.

I have landed some interviews which was hard as hell, making it as far as fourth rounds, but no offers. I think you did not read the article but its ok.
by WillPostForFood | 2025-05-13 21:07:39+00:00
That's the exact argument that I was responding to! The parent post's claim that the current President's lawyer is unqualified, because? Surely you looked into the arguments, and judge them without bias, and didn't jump to a conclusion based on his associations.

They are both political appointees, you like one and don't like the other is just political bias.
by eigenform | 2025-05-13 21:07:51+00:00
Great read! Some boiled-down takeaways:

- Predictor updates may be deferred until sometime after a branch retires. Makes sense, otherwise I guess you'd expect that branches would take longer to retire!

- Dispatch-serializing instructions don't stall the pipeline for pending updates to predictor state. Also makes sense, considering you've already made a distinction between "committing the result of the branch instruction" and "committing the result of the prediction".

- Privilege-changing instructions don't stall the pipeline for pending updates either. Also makes sense, but only if you can guarantee that the privilege level is consistent between making/committing a prediction. Otherwise, you might be creating a situation where predictions generated by code in one privilege level may be committed to state used in a different one?

Maybe this is hard because "current privilege level" is not a single unambiguous thing in the pipeline?
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-13 21:07:57+00:00
I do sometimes. If I go to a friend's house with a big-screen TV and stereo, I can connect my USB-C dock, plug in the hdmi cable, and control from a mouse or the phone. Nice big display with multiple windows. Same for when I stay at hotels. I believe you can still get phones that have an HDMI out that's not DeX, but then you just see a scrunched up mobile phone display on a big-screen TV and no multiple windows.
by int_19h | 2025-05-13 21:08:08+00:00
goto is bad when it's used in a way that makes it difficult to reason about code, but not all uses of goto are like that. The usual C pattern of `if (err) goto cleanup_resources_and_return_err;` is a good example of the use of goto that is not difficult to reason about.

Using unwrap/expect is still much better than using a language without null safety because unwrap/expect make it immediately obvious at which point a panic can occur, and creates some friction for the dev writing the code that makes them less likely to use it literally everywhere.
by syed123 | 2025-05-13 21:08:08+00:00
The problem with books in general and articles is that they always refer some more books to read or go indepth so it has caused me to move even far away from taking action- even the best/top 10 books is not the final list as they themselves refer another 20-50 books so i feel like its never ending cycle of slippery slope. I have completely given up on reading books and occassionaly chatgpt the problems i am currently faciing and go from there rather than ever reading a single book or article.
by garaetjjte | 2025-05-13 21:09:03+00:00
"Mission 3B is designed as payload retrieval mission with both shuttle launch and orbiter landing to take place at the Western Test Range (WTR). The mission is designed for direct rendezvous with a passive satellite in a 100 NMI circular orbit with an inclination of 104 degress. Rendezvous and return to the WTR occurs one revolution after liftoff"

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19760020214/downloads/19...
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-13 21:09:21+00:00
> to avoid a slow, painful, inevitable death in a hostile world surrounded by misery.

Well aren't you a bundle of joy, recommending death to people in bad situations.

A life of misery isn't all that bad. Much worse could happen.

This reminds me of A Man For All Seasons:

Thomas More: "At the worst we could be beggars and still be keep company and be merry together."

Lady Alice: "Aha, merry."

Thomas More: "Aye, merry!"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEa6XRZa9Vg&t=5459s
by ashwinsundar | 2025-05-13 21:09:36+00:00
For things online, I just bookmark web pages in a folder called "Other". For written materials/books, I write notes in the margins or write free-hand notes on a piece of paper and insert it in the book somewhere. Then when I'm bored, instead of infinite-scrolling some stupid app, I try to pick out of the "Other" folder or read a book off the shelf. At least, that's what I aspire to do most of the time...

I also decided that if something's worth remembering, I'll remember it. If it's not worth remembering, then I'm also not gonna both re-reading notes about it, no matter what note-taking tool or method I use...
by jongjong | 2025-05-13 21:10:01+00:00
This reminds me of how I wrote a simple query language which can be written inside HTML attribute tags. Its killer feature is that it doesn't need quotation marks to represent strings. It knows if something is a property/variable or a string (e.g. user input) just based on its position in the command. It achieves this by being very strict with spaces. It doesn't collapse/merge multiple spaces down to one because this can wreck edge cases where a user input string might start with a space.
by lykahb | 2025-05-13 21:10:08+00:00
I think that in the event of a such a collapse, there would be two new directions: turning the surviving advanced digital devices into general computers, and building new electronics. Reusing existing common software would be easier than building something from scratch. So, I'd expect that postmarketOS and flavours of Linux for low-power machines meets most needs.

Also, it'd be fantastic if iPhones have a doomsday switch that untethers them from Apple - that'd be the difference between a useless brick and a precious artifact of a bygone era. The post-apocalyptic setting has potential for a game that comes from the perspective of a builder, and goes deeply into civil engineering and IT - build architecture that can withstand the elements, design a water chip, write embedded software for it.
by idontcareatall | 2025-05-13 21:10:13+00:00
I. don't. care. Because we have to cater to the absolute lowest denominator, I now can't use my credit card 90% of the time because I can't receive SMS when I'm traveling aboard? No, not everyone has a fking iPhone and iMessage. Nothing in your comment serves as a defense of most places only having SMS 2FA. Why can Capital One email me every critical account notification, but can't email me 2FA/OTP codes for confirming transactions when I'm on the other side of the world? Why?

It is flatly absurd that my Xbox account can be more secure than most of my bank accounts. I am tired of hearing people justify the utter laziness of US financial institutions. Everything about dealing with money in the US has become increasingly incredibly user hostile. Fidelity won't allow ANY integration with apps like Lunch Money and have some impressive automation detection that blocks headless Chrome usage better than anyone else. I'm completely at their mercy, and cannot sanely manage my money because of them. It's complete god damn garbage.
by sargstuff | 2025-05-13 21:10:28+00:00
hint: silk spider webs & fabric threads.

Guess 3d printing should have been clarified as linear, fused deposition. Melted plastic line gets scraped along plate/material.

The 3d printed web reference, in this instance, being the in-fill pattern. [0]

Robotic metal pinching / incremental sheet forming might be bit more clearer example. [1]

-----

[0] : in-fill pattern : https://jlc3dp.com/blog/choosing-the-right-infill-structure-...

[1] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc16Ob-yoDs
by jmye | 2025-05-13 21:11:24+00:00
Meta is probably the better example, here - dropped 20% of it's headcount (11% in Nov-22 and another ~9% subsequently, plus whatever's happened since Jan-24) and then 7x'd it's stock price. You can probably argue about decommitting from the "metaverse" fever dream idiocy, but a lot of companies looked at the deep cuts to headcount and certainly thought "AI or no AI, a lot of these people aren't adding value and Meta (and possibly Twitter, depending on what you believe) prove(s) it."
by kristianp | 2025-05-13 21:11:37+00:00
The newish windows photo viewer in Win 10 is painfully slow and it renders a lower res preview first, but then the photo seems to move when the full resolution is shown. The photo viewer in windows 7 would prerender the next photo so the transition to the next one would be instant. The is for 24 megapixel photos, maybe 4mb jpegs.

So the quality has gone backwards in the process of rewriting the app into the touch friendly style. A lot of core windows apps are like that.

Note that the windows file system is much slower than the linux etx4, I don't know about Mac filesystems.
by leksak | 2025-05-13 21:11:39+00:00
I understand that and from the rest of your writing on your site that very much shows. I use AI professionally to great avail. Personally, I wouldn't put something similar in tone on my resume and when I review resumes this language is not something I'm looking for either.

I'll point out that what is your reality in your job market might be far different from mine. I'm in Europe.

I try to screen out people who come across as zealots or dogmatic about just about anything. Everything could have it's time and place - PHP included ;)

I look for people who are pragmatic and doubt I represent the "people who are hiring pool" to a great extent. But I am hiring and I can just tell you what I see here and how I see it.
by ben_w | 2025-05-13 21:11:57+00:00
> how can people not know about astronomers?

Light pollution. Lots of people now live in places where the stars are hard to spot.

And now we also all have infinite distraction cuboids, many who can still see them if they look, won't look.

And if you don't know what's out there — or mistakenly categorise all of space as scifi — then why would you be curious about it? Why even ask who might research it?
by wbl | 2025-05-13 21:12:02+00:00
That actually doesn't work. The evaluation of the branch condition may be at some point far away from where the privilege update is recognized and executed. There is no current state to update, it's only recognized in retrospect what the state was. And carrying along data is pricey in a CPU: the instruction pointer isn't even available because of this.

You could say we only update the predictor at retirement to solve this. But that can get a little dicy also: the retirement queue would have to track this locally and retirement frees up registers, better be sure it's not the one your jump needs to read. Doable but slightly harder than you might think.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-05-13 21:12:02+00:00
Until you mentioned the E6B I totally had forgotten that half a lifetime ago, as a student pilot I programmed my Radio Shack Pocket PC to do some of the E6B calculations.

It worked, but the usability of the tiny keyboard was crap in a bouncing, vibrating Cessna 152, forcing me to look down at my lap while flying. My instructor once said "you're going to kill yourself using that thing" so I eventually just gave up and bought the electronic E6B.
by hex4def6 | 2025-05-13 21:13:22+00:00
They can make their own ingots and ultra pure chemicals, and turbopumps and ion implantation machines and spin coaters CVD machines and and the HEPA filters for the cleanroom, and the remote servers that control the licensing dongle for the robot arm that movies the thingie from "A" to "B"?

Sand to "hello world" is a tall order. There is a pyramid of industry that supports the entire thing. Even Sand -> 99.9999 % Si (purification & Czochralski crystal growth) needs multi‑story furnaces, vacuum pulling stations, 10 MW of steady power, and months of process engineering. All of have huge dependency chains.

Even modern "mild" events like supply chain disruptions would be enough to shut down any sort of non-toy level production in short order.

So yeah, a university as it currently stands can make a microchip, relying on all of these dependency chains being in operational order. But I don't doubt that would quickly no longer be the case if you had a hot war or societal collapse.

The exponential growth in processor capabilities relied on a global manufacturing infrastructure from the 1970s until today. To do the same level of progression would require much of that infrastructure.

Assuming someone managed to strategically nuke every major foundry / chemical / machine supplier, but leave everything else the same? Sure, maybe we get back to our present tech in 15-20 years.

Assume it's the result of a societal collapse? No way in hell.
by georgeecollins | 2025-05-13 21:14:10+00:00
>> Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.

I had the same impression. Anyone reading this who is younger: at some point in your life your employment will probably mostly depend on the connections you make to your successful peers, the companies you start, or the products/ technologies you are associated with. When you are starting, strangers will hire you off of your resume. At some point this effectively stops and if people aren't familiar with you or your work they will not consider you. This has been true long before LLMs existed.
by actinium226 | 2025-05-13 21:15:03+00:00
Pretty much the same thing with Chase. I had to access my account while overseas and had a somewhat similar story.

The mobile app doesn't require a second factor, so I was able to log in there, but I couldn't transfer funds or something on mobile, and buried in a deep section of the settings I found a way to get the OTP via email.

Really disturbing the banks still haven't secured this.
by mmooss | 2025-05-13 21:15:09+00:00
> you quickly learn the sad fact that quality is just not that important to your success.

Doesn't that depend on your audience? Also, what do you mean by quality?

Where I live, the best food can lead to big success. New tiny restaurants open, they have great food, eventually they open their big successor (or their second restaurant, third restaurant, etc.).
by beret4breakfast | 2025-05-13 21:15:41+00:00
I’ve been using obsidian for this for the past couple of years. I have lots of folders and notes for work projects along with notes for learning topics. I keep track of tasks and to do lists for me and people in my team (using #people/name tags).

I have specific updates notes for each project. I add a weekly header (via a template) in reverse chronological order. Pull the key updates into that (I also have a todo for each project that pulls in tasks from all files in that project subfolder - so picks up meeting actions)

I also put them all in a canvas so when I doing updates about projects they’re all in one place.

I do the same for people I manage so I can keep track of updates and todos when I’m meeting with them.

My go to start point is a daily not where I throw in new tasks (tagged to projects or people) and those get pulled into the corresponding project/person file.

Because it’s markdown with lots of plugins it helps me do things like diagrams (mermaid diagrams) etc and excalidraw/canvas for architecting/mind map style ideation.