MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voxl | 2025-05-13 21:27:57+00:00
Why did you deliberately leave out the whole quote?

"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."

Some emphasis: "We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."

So, let me get this straight. Your argument that Fauci "lied" is that he increased numbers for herd immunity beyond what he had said in the past. Yet you neglect to mention that he admits these numbers are sciences best guess and as the situation evolved it appeared the number would have to be higher. Moreover, a higher percentage is naturally going to benefit more people, if you buy into the premise that vaccines are very low risk and very high impact, so if you have a reason to believe that the number may be higher calling it a "lie" to shift the percentage higher is ridiculous.

Listen, I get that this sentence you simply don't agree with: "vaccines are very low risk and very high impact." Yes, that is part of the problem, you are brainwashed and anti-intellectual. I don't even know why I'm engaging with you! Partly because I was surprised at your quote, and then angry to learn you lied about it.

It's embarrassing to me, frankly. It's tiring to see that people like you exist.
by bgnn | 2025-05-13 21:28:00+00:00
Wow, this is very impressive. This reminds me of my years of designing the analog front end of ethernet PHYs (5 generations of 1G base-T, 3 geberations of 2.5G/5G/10G base-T, 1 experinental 7.5G, the first gen 25G base-T, 2 genetation of 1G-baseT1 and the first generation of 10G base-T1 over single shielded pair for automotive). I got my hands dirty with board level testing and a lot of the firmeare!

I'm curious if there are any 10G base-T or 25G base-T PHYs out there that one can buy at lower quantities.
by dang | 2025-05-13 21:28:37+00:00
SNOBOL-related. Others?

Eliza in SNOBOL4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41889284 - Oct 2024 (24 comments)

Spitbol 360: an implementation of SNOBOL4 for IBM 360 compatible computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38234319 - Nov 2023 (6 comments)

SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35800936 - May 2023 (56 comments)

The SNOBOL4 Programming Language [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345560 - May 2020 (6 comments)

SNOBOL4 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22233111 - Feb 2020 (1 comment)

Parsing with Snobol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20401576 - July 2019 (1 comment)

Dave Shields, the programmer maintaining SPITBOL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10211724 - Sept 2015 (23 comments)

SnoPy – Snobol Pattern Matching Extension for Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106008 - Aug 2015 (10 comments)

On being the maintainer and sole developer of SPITBOL (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103276 - Aug 2015 (95 comments)
by anigbrowl | 2025-05-13 21:28:58+00:00
That they didn't is not only because of German antipathy to origin of some of the ideas. Despite official condemnation, the Germans remained interested in the technology. One of the lesser-known allied successes in the war was a series of commando actions on a Norwegian power plant which was the largest producer of heavy water in the world at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage
by cccs-kevin2 | 2025-05-13 21:29:22+00:00
This happened to me when I was overseas recently. No phone, I needed to access my credit card website with Scotiabank. I had previously relied on having an option for the OTP to be delivered either by email or sms, but when I tried in March, Scotiabank had removed the email option! I ended up having to basically remove 2FA from my bank account as a workaround, after answering a ton of security questions.

Therefore for the entire time I was overseas after having done this, my bank account had no 2FA enabled... smh
by warrenski | 2025-05-13 21:29:28+00:00
Here in South Africa all the banks I know of moved away from SMS text messages for 2FA ages ago, and perform authentication in-app with biometrics instead. Having a banking app installed on your phone is pretty much mandatory, and criminals have no doubt grown wise to this fact. So what happens when someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to perform a large transfer of funds from your phone? I'm sure the banks will try convince you that their fraud detection systems will come to your aid.

One bank here recently introduced a duress-PIN, which when entered, will commence monitoring and send help, but they still don't offer any guarantee of a refund. Another bank allows you to change their app's icon and name, in an effort to masquerade as something less recognisable.

I'd much rather delete the apps, unlink my devices from my bank accounts and use a TOTP authenticator app instead.
by lupusreal | 2025-05-13 21:29:35+00:00
Right, NASA's first remote controlled rover (anywhere) was Sojourner in 1997. The first successful remote controlled rover was the Soviet Lunokhod 1 in 1970. That succeeded in driving around the Moon for almost a year.

Mars 3 didn't pan out but I still think that level of ambition from the Soviet Union, relative to NASA, is notable and worth celebrating.
by linksnapzz | 2025-05-13 21:29:51+00:00
Depends; they might not have had the most expensive materials available, or the trickiest assembly quality, but were often designed so that the inevitable repairs could be made quickly in the field by minimally-trained personnel.

See: Zaporozhets 968 vs. Hillman Imp, AK-47 vs. AR-15, T-72 vs. M1.
by gladiatr72 | 2025-05-13 21:30:04+00:00
Deal. However,that means the documentation has to be kept up to date, and your thing's log output has to emit useful information. Sometimes, alas, ya do exactly what the docs state, nothing happens and nothing is reported. It doesn't work.

The worst example (ok, top 5) was the wkhtmltopdf binary that Google used to distribute. It was billed as a static binary that should just work.

And it did, if you had the openssl dev headers installed. Maybe the in-house Linux distro had openssl dev headers 0as part of its base, but unless you were aware of strace you were not going to figure it out. it just didn't work.

edit: I don't hold it against whoever put that binary up. Webkit was an absolute beast to compile from source.
by codegeek | 2025-05-13 21:30:44+00:00
Depends on the type of person you are. Are you ok with uncertainty of not having projects in pipeline all the time ? Are you ok to go a few months without work while other months being intense with strict deadlines ? Do you like to work with multiple clients with different needs etc ? Can you switch context quickly ?

The answer to these questions will help you determine what should be your next thing. But just fyi, freelancing doesn't mean there are no deadlines. In fact, quite the opposite. However, you do have the option of being selective (if you get to that point) and that can be a good thing.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-13 21:30:52+00:00
I'm sure some CEOs followed the Twitter lead, but I also think the entire industry was already shifting with regards to headcount. A lot of companies were hiring excessively going into that period and middle management bloat was a well-known phenomenon.

The overstaffing problem was painfully obvious at many of the companies I spoke too as a consultant during that time. They'd have bizarre situations where they'd have dozens of product managers, project managers, program managers, UX designers, and every other title but barely a handful of engineers. It was just a big gridlock of managers holding meetings all day.

One friend resigned from Twitter prior to anything Elon related, specifically citing the fact that it paid well but it was impossible to get anything done. Not all of Twitter was like this, but he was outside of engineering where he was one of scores of people with his same title all competing to work on tiny features for the site or app.

The pendulum seems to be swinging to the other direction, where companies are trying to do too much with too few people. I still see a lot of growing (or shrinking) pains where companies are cutting in the wrong places, like laying off engineers to the point of having more people with {product,project,program}-manager titles combined than engineers. I hope we settle out somewhere more reasonable soon.
by o_m | 2025-05-13 21:31:14+00:00
I'd say anything new in 2025 that involves working with the DOM that doesn't use web component is a waste. Lately I have been porting some old JS libraries (7+ years old) that still are visually impressive to web components, and in my experience after porting some libraries there is about 30% fewer lines of code. Before web components there was so much work to get things up and running in the DOM. Alpine.js does this behind the scenes, but there isn't really a need for it anymore.
by georgeecollins | 2025-05-13 21:31:21+00:00
It's not even that you necessarily have a ceiling, some people work for twenty years and are lucky with success, some are unlucky. You can be 45 and not have reached your ceiling. But the perception is there and you have to think about ways to re-invent yourself. It's really hard when you have family obligations and can't take a lot of risks.

I have a friend in a similar situation to the poster and tbh I don't have great advice.
by Retric | 2025-05-13 21:31:38+00:00
Fusion power plants aren’t like nuclear reactors where you keep years worth DT in the reactor. DT only works if you’re actively recycling a breeder blanket. They are also going to be working with gasses as unlike fission reactors it’s not produced in fuel submerged in water thus contaminating the water.

Nearly pure tritium is extremely valuable so we aren’t going to be dealing with some long term leak. You hypothetically might have a large tank with say 1 month of T2 fuel but that would be really expensive directly and waste quite a bit of fuel through nuclear decay over time. Having that much fuel across multiple different systems is more plausible but then requires a wide range of different failures. But let’s assume such an improbable tank catastrophically fails, outside of containment, and then completely burns so the tritium will eventually fall back to earth.

It then has to rain over land, though even then storms don’t release all the moisture in the air, that water must be absorbed into the soil rather than running off or evaporating, where it’s further mixed with groundwater as it slowly seeps deep enough to be collected in some well. Thus even if conditions are perfect you’d have trouble reaching above the legal limit for drinking water.

I mean maybe if you intentionally selected the perfect moment with the perfect weather pattern and the perfect local geography and geology perhaps you’d be over the legal limits for a few wells for a little while until it rapidly decays.
by exolymph | 2025-05-13 21:32:17+00:00
All of the above. I throw everything in that one file to keep it simple and prevent myself from spending unnecessary time organizing information that I don't end up needing again in the future.

I suppose the exception is when I already have a project-specific doc set up, then links or thoughts related to that project will go in there. But even then, sometimes I use the default scratchpad first, and move the info later, the next time I'm doing dedicated work on that project.
by kagakuninja | 2025-05-13 21:32:37+00:00
I am 61, and have been working for almost 40 years. I don't really have a lot of personal connections, because I am on the autistic spectrum. Yes, I have many former co-workers linked on LinkedIn, but to most of those people, I'm just an old acquaintance, not someone they are going to phone up with a hot new job opportunity.

The exception is one college friend who did help me get multiple jobs at startups, but he retired several years ago.

Establishing and maintaining relationships is hard, and many of us are simply not good at it.

Now I did make sure to stay in touch with a couple ex-managers who I knew would be good references. One of them even helped me get an interview. But even when I had a connection on the inside of a company, all that really does is move me to the head of the line, past the HR screen. I still have to interview, something I still suck at despite decades of practice.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-13 21:32:57+00:00
Most catastrophic scenarios I can imagine result in loss of advanced silicon production, but not necessarily all silicon production. More likely than not there would be ways to keep fabs for old well-trodden processes running. In that situation, there’d probably be a temporary shock of no computers followed by new computers being a lot less powerful… it’d be less “no more computers” and more “new computers are comparable to their Pentium 4/PowerPC G5 era counterparts”, in which case operating systems would still be graphical, just a lot more lightweight. Linux and BSDs would probably quickly take over desktop computing due to being able to run reasonably on such systems with minimal legwork.

If we can’t manufacture chips at all, yeah, things will be in enough of a pickle that computers will be the least of our worries.
by int_19h | 2025-05-13 21:33:17+00:00
> if someone asks how you're doing and you say "good" and don't immediately vent about issues, you're trying to create a different impression, and so on?

This is exactly how many people outside of US feel when they observe the customary American greeting exchange of "How are you?" / "I'm fine, thanks." when it's patently obvious that the person asking doesn't actually expect any other response even though the person responding is obviously not fine.

Like, we get that this is a cultural thing and that it would be wrong to ascribe some profound meaning to such individual interactions. At the same time, it does make the overall culture look bad when that sort of thing is expected and even enforced.
Ask HN: Can anybody please explain this hack?
by GWBullshit | 2025-05-13 21:33:17+00:00
Suppose you were having a conversation with a demonstrably capable hacker and it doesn't go so well, after which, the following happens:

- You hear what sounds almost like a power generator going off in the distance, except it's a "softer", more "bass"-boosted and buzzing sound and doesn't have that final "crackle" exploding sound at the end; more like a slowed-down version of the sounds leading up to that final "generator blew out during the storm" sound - During this, the light in your room noticeably dims for a brief moment, but then goes back to normal (the nearby cable TV box if fine, not rebooting or anything) - However, your laptop (Mac, if it makes a difference) that you reasonably recently updated the battery for at a reputable, licensed location inexplicably shuts off (no warning, no fan overheating sound (no fan at all, actually), not a lot of apps open to stress processor or memory - Your laptop at this moment was not just fully charged, but also plugged in - The laptop self-reboots, whereupon you notice your battery charge is now inexplicably "0%"; opening up the settings panel, the graph shows that your laptop was in fact fully charged until just a moment ago when the charge inexplicably nose-dived to "0%" (when that outdoor "power generator humming buzzing sound happened and the light dimmed) - This part didn't happen exactly this way and I don't want to go into details of how it did happen, but let's say something like this happened: Upon your laptop rebooting, let's say there is an open sticky note or a notepad app that inexplicably opens also and something like the following was typed in: "Hope you saved your work at (hour)(minute) on (day)(date)" – so basically you do not have doubts that "this was no accident"

My question is 2-fold: (1) How is it possible to instantly discharge your laptop's battery so that it goes from 100% to 0% in a split second, and, more importantly (2) how is it possible to rewrite your laptop's "whatever" so that if the battery suddenly has 0% charge, the hardware is reset to ignore the fact that it can draw power from also being plugged in?

I'm not expecting (though I'd love) any "As a hacker who used to do just this sort of thing to people, I know exactly how they did it" answers, but ANY ideas about how this may have been possible would be greatly appreciated, thank you.
by divbzero | 2025-05-13 21:33:24+00:00
I was wondering if these server racks in space would need to be specifically designed for enough radiative cooling. Apparently the answer is yes: the radiators would be expansive and placed on the reverse side of the solar panels.

Starcloud is developing a lightweight deployable radiator design with a very large area - by far the largest radiators deployed in space - radiating primarily towards deep space, which has an average temperature of about 2.7 Kelvin or -270°C. The radiators can be positioned in-line with the solar arrays as shown in Figure 3, with one side exposed to sunlight.

…

Figure 3. A data center in Sun Synchronous Orbit, showing a 4km x 4km deployed solar array and radiators.

https://www.starcloud.com/wp
by MetaWhirledPeas | 2025-05-13 21:34:19+00:00
> everyone with a flagship phone is "wasting" so much good compute resources

Are they though? Phones already have a broad range of uses. I've seen people try to make laptops out of them and it just doesn't make sense for a number of reasons:

- As screen size goes up so do battery requirements, so you're already paying for a screen, a chassis, and a physical keyboard. Why not go the whole way and pay for the silicon?

- When your phone is being a PC it's no longer being a phone; you can't do phone calls and camera photos (at least not well) while it's a PC.

I have a Samsung and use Dex occasionally, but the uses are limited. In my case it's to check personal emails, which is not allowed on the corporate network. But outside of cases like this I can't imagine ever preferring Dex to a laptop or a dedicated computer. It's much better at being a phone.
by fn-mote | 2025-05-13 21:35:49+00:00
> When calling my bank I have to enter my entire CC number AND my PIN code.

YOU calling THEM is not an issue. That's the secure connection. There's not (afaik) a way to hijack the receiving phone number.

The issue is when somebody calls YOU. Faking the originating number of a phone call is easy, happens all of the time. That's the scammer route.
by Alcatros552 | 2025-05-13 21:36:03+00:00
As it seems a lot of people are not aware that this one is a newer generation of branch predictor issue. You can see that Intels eIBRS doesn't mitigate the problems and make them susceptible to attacks. To prevent bigger issues the issue was released after Intel has been informed of the Issue and most systems are patched in the meantime.
by nemo44x | 2025-05-13 21:36:26+00:00
It’s really important to build and maintain your network, especially as you get older. It’s nearly mandatory to know someone to get your foot in the door today. Especially today where we have a saturated market and dim prospects for future demand picking up like it was in the 2012-2022 era. Seriously, go through your contacts and just say hi every now and then. A career has to be groomed and managed today.

Try sending your CV directly to recruiters. If you find a job you’re a great fit try and find a recruiter on LinkedIn for the company and send them a note. Easier when company isn’t huge.

This works on hiring managers too. Be aggressive in how you send your CV out - direct to the stand holders. Show initiative.

Likewise if you see a job check your network to see if anyone works there. Send them a note. Even if you’re not that close they will recommend you in holes of getting the recruiting bonus.
by juancn | 2025-05-13 21:36:44+00:00
Another possible mechanism for doing GC at scale (a variation on Asynchronous Reconciliation in the article) in some file/object store, is doing a probabilistic mark and sweep using bloom filters.

The mark phase can be done in parallel building many bloom filters for the files/objects found.

Then the bloom filters are merged (or'ed together essentially) and then a parallel sweep phase can use the bloom filter to answer the question: is this file/object live?

The bloom filter then answers either "No" with 100% certainty or "Maybe" with some probability p that depends on the parameters used for the bitset and the hash function family.
by aziaziazi | 2025-05-13 21:37:05+00:00
Many comments strawman the author then argue with what they imagine he images. Guys just read the 'Why' page [0] and argue with his thesis. I'm not sure to agree with everything but it still is a very interesting and questioning read. Kudos to the author for writing it.

This OS is not for:

- you or your child

- a planet with working computers

- a planet with cheap and abundant 'bootstrap' energy like we had from 1850 to 1960

- a planet where humans really struggle to get food ("you're running away from cannibals", but I think this metaphor is a bad choice after the mad-max refutation)

That page [1] is also a core part of the theory: "What makes collapse inevitable and imminent".

[0] https://collapseos.org/why.html [1] https://collapseos.org/civ.html
by jedberg | 2025-05-13 21:37:18+00:00
I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing.

At first I thought the poles (of the planet) might be good. The cooling is basically free. But the energy and internet connectivity would be a problem. At the poles you can really only get solar about three months a year, and even then you need a lot of panels. Most of Antarctica is powered diesel because of this.

So the next thought was space. At the time, launching to space was way too costly for it to ever make sense. But now, with much cheaper launches, space is accessible.

Power seems easily solved. You can get lots of free energy from the sun with some modest panels. But to do that requires an odd orbit where you wouldn't be over the same spot on earth, which could make internet access difficult. Or you can go geostationary over a powerful ground station, but then you'd need some really big batteries for all the time you aren't in the sun.

But cooling is a huge problem. Space is cold, but there is no medium to transfer the heat away from the hot objects. I think this will be the biggest sticking point, unless they came up with an innovative solution.
by thih9 | 2025-05-13 21:37:21+00:00
This and more is addressed on the "why.html" page. E.g.:

> (...) you and I are likely to be dead before Collapse OS is actually useful.

or:

> People who are less technical have trouble seeing the point of this project and ask "why can't we just use Linux?". People who have actually lifted Linux' hood don't ask that question because they actually understand the magnitude of complexity involved, but if you haven't, it's a legitimate question to ask.

https://collapseos.org/why.html
by abanana | 2025-05-13 21:38:15+00:00
Powerless, that's exactly it. I pushed back when asked to implement email-based "2FA" on a website account (nothing like as important as a bank though). I pointed out that the username is the email address, and password recovery works by emailing a reset link, therefore emailing a login code wouldn't be two-factor, it would be the same factor. Of course the response was: doesn't matter, the client's asked for it. I didn't have the authority to push back any more, but luckily in this case it was just a simple website login that had no real need for 2FA anyway.