MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-05-13 21:47:46+00:00
Let me specify that what I'm calling interpreted (and I'm sure carmack agrees) is languages with a VM and JIT.

The JVM and Javascript both fall into this category.

The proof is in the pudding. [1]

The JS version that ran in 8.54 seconds [2] did not use any sort of fancy escape hatches to get there. It's effectively the naive solution.

But if you look at the winning C version, you'll note that it went all out pulling every single SIMD trick in the book to win [3]. And with all that, the JS version is still only ~4x slower (single digit multiplier).

And if you look at the C++ version which is a near direct translation [4] which isn't using all the SIMD tricks in the books to win, it ran in 5.15. Bringing the multiple down to 1.7x.

Perhaps you weren't thinking of these JIT languages as being interpreted. That's fair. But if you did, you need to adjust your mental model of what's slow. JITs have come a VERY long way in the last 20 years.

I will say that languages like python remain slow. That wasn't what I was thinking of when I said "interpreted". It's definitely more than fair to call it an interpreted language.

[1] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

[2] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

[3] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

[4] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
by enos_feedler | 2025-05-13 21:48:10+00:00
For travel it’s just an option and always will be. Thats okay because the travel use case only hits most people once or twice a year. The future of Airbnb was and always will be using that option as entry point into your life at home. The app update and launch into these lifestyle categories are the starting point of this.

They chose to stick experiences and services as a root choice in the mobile app, not something that is attached to a booking or stay you already have. While I expect the major use case to be using these new services during a stay, the app design shows they are paving a future where you take some of what you loved about your airbnb stay back home with you.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-13 21:48:19+00:00
The author apparently has never heard of microcontrollers, or in fact is aware that the 68000 is still in widespread use and in production to this day, nearly half a century later.

The author's entire argument seems to be that modern x86 CPUs are completely and totally distinct from the simple processors of yore, and one cannot apply the same mental model to them. That's fair, even if it's not strictly true.

Then they take a logical leap to say that nobody can program bare metal x86 like a 68000, therefore C cannot be a low level language at all in any circumstances for any platform. Which is just obviously false?

On simple CPUs like modern RISCs and AVRs or indeed 68000s, C is just assembly with extra steps. We still program these CPUs the same way we have for decades. In this situation, C is as bare metal as it gets without writing assembly. In C, you're still manipulating CPU registers, you still have to manage memory yourself, you're still programming the machine itself with only the lightest of abstractions.

If the author wanted to claim that there is no such thing as a low level language on x86, that's fine. I strongly disagree, but it's a valid argument. Asserting that C is not a low level language is not a valid argument.

Is C a bad model for modern processors? Yes, absolutely. Does that reflect on C itself in any way? No, these are two different things. We absolutely do need a better model and language than C for modern systems, but C is still the same as it's always been. It's still a low level language because millions of developers still use it on simple non-pipelined CPUs every day. The existence of other types of processors doesn't somehow change that fact.
by dang | 2025-05-13 21:48:31+00:00
Their whitepaper (https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf) had a thread last fall:

We should train AI in space [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41478241 - Sept 2024 (93 comments)

A bit more here:

Lumen Orbit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790424 - Jan 2025 (2 comments)

VCs wanted to get into Lumen Orbit's $11M seed round - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42518284 - Dec 2024 (2 comments)
by UncleOxidant | 2025-05-13 21:48:46+00:00
For whatever reason they weren't building domes anymore in Europe where they had been (the fall of the Western Roman empire sort of changed priorities for a while). And after a generation of not building domes the artisans (in Europe) lost the ability to do it.

There's a much closer example: The US spent the 60s developing the capability to land humans on the moon. And they were successful. They did it about, what, 7 or 8 times? But then they stopped doing it. And now some 60 years later they're having a hard time doing it again (see the woes of NASA's Artemis and Boeing's Starliner). Imagine if the pause wasn't 60 years, but several hundred years.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-13 21:49:03+00:00
It doesn't seem to be widely known but the Shingles vaccine will cost $400-$500 (total) for the millions and millions and millions of us who can't afford health insurance.

To that group I offer that if you're closing on 50 and your income isn't surpassed by your basic bills, you might want to start saving for that. It'll likely pay off in the long run.
by umanwizard | 2025-05-13 21:49:15+00:00
A modern processor pipeline is dozens of cycles deep. Without branch prediction, we would need to know the next instruction at all times before beginning to fetch it. So we couldn’t begin fetching anything until the current instruction is decoded and we know it’s not a branch or jump. Even more seriously, if it is a branch, we would need to stall the pipeline and not do anything until the instruction finishes executing and we know whether it’s taken or not (possibly dozens of cycles later, or hundreds if it depends on a memory access). Stalling for so many cycles on every branch is totally incompatible with any kind of modern performance. If you want a processor that works this way, buy a microcontroller.
by transpute | 2025-05-13 21:50:04+00:00
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/th...

> Their design calls for a cluster of shipping container-style boxes packed with high-speed AI chips. These would be anchored at the centre of a 16 sq km array of solar panels generating up to five gigawatts of power — about 25 per cent more than Drax, Britain’s biggest power station. The mammoth structure would circle the Earth in “sun synchronous” orbit so that it is never in shade
by Aurornis | 2025-05-13 21:50:08+00:00
> when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. 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.

I have to emphasize this a lot to mid-career developers that I've mentored. In the past decade it was really easy to find a comfy job and coast, or to job-hop every year to get incrementally higher salary.

Juniors are mostly a blank slate. Once someone has 10-20 years you should be able to see a trajectory in their career and skills. I've seen so many resumes from people who either did junior-level work for a decade, or who job hopped so excessively that they have 1 year of experience 10 times, almost resetting at every new company.

It's hard to communicate this to juniors who are getting advice from Reddit and peers to job hop everywhere and do dumb things like burn bridges on their way out (via being overemployed by not quitting the old job until they're fired, or by quitting with 0 days notice, or just telling them off as you leave). A lot of people are having a sudden realization about the importance of leaving a good impression and building healthy relationships in your network now that organic job offers are hard to find.
by dracodoc | 2025-05-13 21:50:12+00:00
Agree. I think all the AI stuff need to be removed. Are you seeing lots of open positions asking for people use AI to code? And if you are applying for VR, make resume VR oriented. If applying for web development, make resume focus on for web development.

No need trying to show everything you know and every experience which could be overwhelming and the HR probably will not feel you are a good match to their narrow definition.
by dfabulich | 2025-05-13 21:50:17+00:00
Their whitepaper explains their cooling "solution": https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf

> As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. To achieve this, 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...

They claim they can radiate "633.08 W / m^2". At that rate, they're looking at square kilometers of radiators to dissipate gigawatts of thermal load, perhaps hectares of radiators.

They also claim that they can "dramatically increase" heat dissipation with heat pumps.

So, there you have it: "all you have to do" is deploy a few hectares of radiators in space, combined with heat pumps that can dissipate gigawatts of thermal load with no maintenance at all over a lifetime of decades.

This seems like the sort of "not technically impossible" problem that can attract a large amount of VC funding, as VCs buy lottery tickets that the problem can be solved.
by senderista | 2025-05-13 21:51:01+00:00
Let's see, we have at least daemonize[0], nohup[1], and disown[2] for that. Some discussion of the differences: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3886/difference-bet...

[0] https://github.com/bmc/daemonize

[1] https://linux.die.net/man/1/nohup

[2] https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/bash/manual/bash....
by anon373839 | 2025-05-13 21:51:59+00:00
Tesseract was the best open-source OCR for a long time. But I’d argue that docTR is better now, as it’s more accurate out of the box and GPU accelerated. It implements a variety of different text detection and recognition model architectures that you can combine in a modular pipeline. And you can train or fine-tune in PyTorch or TensorFlow to get even better performance on your domain.
by awesome_dude | 2025-05-13 21:52:16+00:00
Businesses that expect me to hand over PII when they call me certainly do get upset when I point out that I have no idea who THEY are, and that THEY called me so the onus is on them to prove who they are (typically they will claim their phone number is enough, or that I should ring the phone number that they provide).

The actual truth is, though, that the security theatre that they put on is about all that can be done when two strangers meet to prove identity.

Hey you do you know a secret that we know about you? Here's a secret about us that you are supposed to know.
by dijit | 2025-05-13 21:52:19+00:00
> I've been saying for a long time that we should consider remote areas for building datacenters for batch processing.

FWIW there's a reason that Sweden has a bunch of datacenters in the north that are peanuts compared to hosting in Virginia.

They're "poorly" connected (by virtue of being a bit out of the way), but the free cooling and power from renewables make them extremely attractive. There was a time where they were the favourite of crypto-miners for the same reason as they would be attractive to AI training farms.

Fortlax has some I believe; https://www.fortlax.se

-----

As for the meat of the paper. Anyone with a passing understanding of space will be quick to point out that:

A) Heat is a problem in space, it's either way-way-way to hot (IE; you're in the path of the Sun) or it's way-way-way too cold (IE; you're out of the sun) and the shift between the two means you need to build for both. You also can't dissipate heat as there's no air to take the heat away.

B) Power is not so abundant and solar panels degrade; a huge amount of satellite building is essentially managing a decline in the capability of hardware. That's part of why there are so many up there.

C) Getting reasonably sized hardware up there is beyond improbable, though I'll grant you that most of the weight in a computer is the cooling components and chassis.

D) Cosmic Rays. No electromagnetic barrier from earth and extremely tight lithographies. I mean... there's a reason NASA is still using CPU's measured in the megahertz range.
by deafpolygon | 2025-05-13 21:53:49+00:00
that's a myth; while it's true that handwriting does lend to better recall, it's the process of breaking down what to write down (thus spending more time making sense of it) that helps you remember.. not the 'muscle memory' everyone talks about. You can do the same thing in digital tools (typing out notes, structuring notes, etc) and sometimes you can do it faster.
by keen99 | 2025-05-13 21:54:00+00:00
f you’ve ever called yourself a “consultant” and then had to explain what that actually means, this might hit home. I mapped out the mess of titles and labels — consultant, freelancer, advisor, coach, fractional, etc. — and what they signal to clients. It's part taxonomy, part rant. Hope it’s useful to others trying to describe what they do.
by AnonymousPlanet | 2025-05-13 21:54:13+00:00
Let's see what kind of socialists the encyclical actually argues against.

> 4. To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man's envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies.

> 5. [...] Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life.

This sounds exactly like the definition I referenced.

> 15. [...] Hence, it is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. (sic!)

I guess this is part of the argument the poster I replied to was talking about.

In the last years I have seen more and more posters here, especially American, abuse the word "socialism" to describe anything implementing social institutions or worker's rights, even calling very capitalist countries like Sweden "socialist". For a person who has experienced first hand what actual socialism is like, this gets old very fast.

The parent sounded like they had misinterpreted the text's reference of "socialism" in exactly this way. That is why I placed this little reminder.
by k4rli | 2025-05-13 21:54:22+00:00
This yet another USA defaultism post.

I have developed for several banks in Europe and EIDAS + other national ID based systems are the standard. Some also allow authentication with their own apps, but still having alternate options smartcard with reader or smartcard based national app.

Most seem to favour using apereo CAS for it even though it seems overkill and overly complicated (especially upgrading it, lacking documentation) most of the time.
by mplanchard | 2025-05-13 21:54:58+00:00
I worry about this, having moved away from a tech center for a better QoL. My current fallback plan if I can't find remote work on the next search is to look for hybrid jobs in NYC, which is a long-but-less-than-a-day's train ride from here, and to try to negotiate being in the office for either just a couple days a week or doing like a week on and a week off or whatever. It'd eat into salary to have to pay for somewhere to stay in the city for sure, but it'd be better than nothing.
by vardump | 2025-05-13 21:55:04+00:00
> 6.6 megaflops vs the original 6.6 gigaflops.

Hmm... I think 9800X should be able to do at least 32 FLOPS per cycle per core. So 1.3 TFLOPS is the ceiling for the CPU. 1/100000 leaves you... 12 MFLOPS.

Then there's the iGPU for even more FLOPS.
by amluto | 2025-05-13 21:55:50+00:00
Space (with a sunshade) is a nearly perfect medium into which to radiate heat, in the sense that there’s nothing better.

But I agree with your general point. At 100°C, you can radiate about 1kW/m^2. That’s 1000m^2 of radiator per MW of datacenter, assuming you can operate with the radiator at 100°C. You can fudge this a bit with a heat pump (to run the radiator hotter, paying a linear-ish power penalty and gaining a fourth-power radiation benefit), but that’s expensive and that power isn’t free.

Here on Earth, you can cool by conduction or evaporation, which isn’t an option in space.
by g_p | 2025-05-13 21:56:22+00:00
There are absolutely ways to intercept a call from a targeted user that would be viable to use to gain access to a mid to high value user's funds.

SS7 call routing and rogue 2G base stations are some potential approaches.

In terms of banking security, a good (ideal) architecture would treat the user PIN as a credential which is not transmitted over insecure means. Unfortunately many banks don't do this right, and still support bank-side PIN verification (with the PIN sent over the wire to the bank), rather than using the bank card's smart card features to carry out on-chip PIN verification.

If you built a bank from scratch, for security first, you'd likely still use smart cards as bank cards, but you'd only do PIN verification on-card, so the user PIN is never exposed to even the bank - the card can securely vouch for the PIN in a manner that's far more costly for an attacker to defeat than using a $5 wrench against the user of the card to make them reveal the PIN (h/t to XKCD).

Sending the card number and PIN over the phone is just asking for trouble - mobile phone calls are decrypted at the base station and available in the clear, before being transmitted up into the wider telecoms network.
by cebert | 2025-05-13 21:57:17+00:00
> The screenshot was shared by a Reddit user biebrforro on the r/Piracy subreddit, and the user claims it was on Amazon Prime Video. However, it is unclear if the screenshot is indeed real or fake as there appear to be no other reports of this.

It’s frustrating that publishing an article based on a single user’s claim passes as journalism. I went to see if I get a banner on my phone when taking a screenshot when playing an Amazon Prime video, and I do not see a message. Would it be to much work to validate the claims before publishing?
by Muromec | 2025-05-13 21:57:25+00:00
Because the government said so. Why did the government say so -- because the bank is the only place that can see your transactions and has a profile on you and has a dedicated person to call you and ask about that cash withdrawal on the Turkish side of the Syrian border or regular cash deposits of 100k each week in addition to your cop salary.

Alternatively you can just not do anything with money laundering and all that or let the government do the monitoring itself.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-13 21:58:13+00:00
If you're up for some unsolicited feedback from someone who has read a lot of resumes:

This is one of the more chaotic and difficult to parse resumes I've seen. Can I suggest you try returning to a standard resume format where you simply list jobs in chronological order with short bullet points underneath each one?

You lead your Professional Summary with a point about using AI coding tools and the #1 skill you list in the skills box is "Vibecoding". It's good to keep up with AI-assisted tools, but putting "Vibecoding" in your resume is an instant turn off for most people. Vibecoding is associated with poor software quality, not professional development. I'd remove that word from your resume and never put it back.

Your job duty bullet points are very wordy but convey little at the same time. You have 3 jobs in a row where you "Built award-winning state of the art web experiences" but I have no idea what technologies you used, what your role was on the team, what the websites actually did, how many users were served, or any other useful information. At minimum you need to list some technologies.

Your entire personal brand is "shawnfromportland" but you apparently live on the other side of the country? I understand the attachment to your username, but you have far more "Portland" on your resume than "New York". If you're applying to any local jobs, the Portland branding is an obstacle for anyone scanning 100s of resumes who doesn't have time to consume every little detail and resolve ambiguities.

Using 1/5th of the page for context-less name dropping of skills isn't helpful. Delete that box and list specific skills in specific jobs. With 20 years of experience it's impossible to know if each skill you list is something you read a Wikipedia page about or used at 5 of your jobs.
by benlivengood | 2025-05-13 21:58:18+00:00
You might be surprised (or not) to learn that some modern cars are fully brake-by-wire; no mechanical connection between the pedal and the hydraulics [0]. Mostly hybrid or fully electric cars. Many "emergency" brakes are now merely parking brakes driven by an electric motor. Afaik there are no fully steer-by-wire cars on the road today, thankfully.

I am similarly confused at the lack of sustained training in direct law/mode flight. The primary reason for the difference in operation is convenience and smoothness of flight achieved by intentional control stick movements as opposed to direct aerodynamic surface control, but like the article said pilots should have a comprehensive mental operating model of what the "normal" law/mode is producing at the control surfaces.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-13 21:59:04+00:00
Single GPU passthrough my solution to any game that requires kernel level anticheat (lmao, no, you're not getting it on my Linux box, silly malware game devs) or does not run under Proton.

Run Linux on the host system all the time, run Windows in a VM only when necessary, and give Windows a GPU only when necessary.
by ecshafer | 2025-05-13 21:59:27+00:00
Your resume might need to be rewritten then. Schools do pay very poorly, thats an undisputable fact, but their benefit of free tuition for you and your kids is pretty good.

I would reiterate that most jobs in syracuse are basically C, C++ or Java. The only real web shop is TCG Player, I think theyre C# and god sold to ebay so its the same high competititon. Equitable might have some stuff, not sure how things are going there but they are a java shop. Out to rochester you get a few more web places. But most of the web jobs even are corpro enterprise jobs, they probably dont have a ton of need for php or javascript front end really. Theres plenty of cloud out in Rome. Rochester has more than syracuse, from syracuse its doable, I know people that did that commute.
by carderne | 2025-05-13 21:59:44+00:00
Haha that colour scale on the area variance page makes it a bit hard to see whether nearby H3 hexagons are very different in size...? I've never really investigated, but my baseless assumption was that nearby hexagons (at a high zoom level) would be pretty similar size? But maybe that's completely wrong.

But yeah, will definitely reach for A5 at some point just for the aesthetics!

My favourite DGGS (this is a new term to me) is water basins as created by HydroSheds [1]. Different area, unpredictable shape, basically no usefull properties but they conform to topography! Can get a feel for them with this little thing I made several years ago [2] (your Cells example reminded me of this).

[1] https://www.hydrosheds.org/

[2] https://water.rdrn.me/