MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vkou | 2025-05-23 20:38:56+00:00
> this would not at all directly advance their goals of getting more of their oil product to tidewater, one of their main political grievances

It's a manufactured grievance. Alberta's been pumping and selling more oil than at any point in its history under Trudeau's liberals.

https://economicdashboard.alberta.ca/dashboard/oil-productio...

Trace this separatism bullshit back, and you'll find the fingers of the American right fully entwined in all this.

What all the separatists fail to be aware of is that 98% of Alberta is treaty land. It can't secede as a land-locked province, it could only secede as a bunch of fragmented municipalities surrounded by First Nations.

The only actual way towards it would be invasion and annexation by the United States. I hope that anyone looking forward to that timeline is also looking forward to IEDs.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-05-23 20:39:39+00:00
On the second point it should be noted that the awful FPTP system creates the regional distortions that make it appear that the regions are more divided than they really are. One looks on the map and it seems like Alberta is near uniform blue but that's because of FPTP. The reality is that ~64% voted one way and a sizeable amount of Alberta voted in opposition.

If we fixed our voting system to be more truly representative I think some of these divisions would go away.
by jagger27 | 2025-05-23 20:41:32+00:00
There was plenty of opportunity for a sovereign wealth fund for decades within Alberta and for all of Canada. You’re saying now it’s only on the table that the filthy liberal coastal elites won’t be on the unfair dole?

The unaccountable extra-national corporations who control most of Alberta’s oil production won’t suddenly become more generous and compliant to the needs of Albertans upon separation. You don’t have the balls or the leverage to control them. The province will have less leverage in the long run than before without the other two thirds of Canada’s economy to lever with in trade deals.

The main selling point it seems is to make the rest of Canada suffer as hard as possible. Make no mistake, we absolutely will suffer from the withdrawal of being cut off that black tar we’re addicted to from you. But you’re far more addicted to it than the rest of us are. What comes after?
by reichstein | 2025-05-23 20:42:59+00:00
JSON is a text format. A parser must recognize the text `2` as a valid production of the JSON number grammar.

Converting that text to _any_ kind of numerical value is outside the scope of the specification. (At least the JSON.org specification, the RFC tries to say more.)

As a textural format, when you use it for data interchange between different platforms, you should ensure that the endpoints agree on the _interpretation_, otherwise they won't see the same data.

Again outside of the scope of the JSON specification.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-23 20:43:03+00:00
Something I wish was discussed in the article was the fact that shipbuilding salaries in Japan, while low compared to developed countries at the time, was around 160% the average salary a Japanese employee could demand in the post-war era [0]

A similar relative difference didn't seem to exist in the Canada (which I'm using to extrapolate for the US) around that time [1].

It appears that this incentivized higher skilled workers to work in the shipbuilding and steel industry in post-war Japan. Essentially, shipbuilding in Japan in the 50s and 60s would have been the equivalent of being a Software Engineer in the US today, and it was treated as an engineering/STEM disciple [2] instead of as a blue collar semi-skilled discipline in the US.

I can safely say a similar trend happened in South Korea in the 1970s-80s as well according to one of my professors back in the day who specifically specialized in Korea and Japan policy and advised Hyundai and Samsung back then, which lead to a similar decrease in shipbuilding capacity in Japan.

Unsurprisingly, this trend can be seen to this day in any industry - be it chip design, VFX, battery manufacturing, etc.

I've noticed a similar trend in distributed systems/infra/os/networking/cybersecurity as well, where American schools skip teaching systems or architecture fundamentals in order to overindex on Theory/Applied Math whereas NAND-to-Tetris is the default philosophy in programs in Israel, India, and the CEE.

[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2519602

[1] - https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/statc...

[2] - https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1966/august/japan...
by perihelions | 2025-05-23 20:43:18+00:00
> "Opening them from dired-mode already puts them into emacs, so"

This also works globally with #'find-file-at-point (which isn't bound to a hotkey by default, but should be: this is one of my most satisfying hotkeys. That function opens any filepath appearing as a string, in any context, in the working directory of that context—filepath strings in files, and filepath strings as outputs from shell commands, being the top two).

(It's like converting every file reference into a clickable URL—only, implicitly).
by Calzifer | 2025-05-23 20:43:41+00:00
And since benchmarking is hard is also has a helper to actually "waste" time. [1] The implementation [2] might give an idea that it is not always trivial to do nothing but still appear busy.

Btw I found most of the jmh samples interesting. IMO a quite effective mix of example and documentation. (and I'm not sure there is even much other official documentation)

[1] https://github.com/openjdk/jmh/blob/master/jmh-samples/src/m... [2] https://github.com/openjdk/jmh/blob/872b7203c294d90c17766d19...
by xp84 | 2025-05-23 20:44:08+00:00
What?

First of all, unless you're 18 you should, if you're playing the game correctly, be saving for retirement already, right? That money, which you get to bring with you, will go a lot further in the country.

Plus, Social Security exists, and again, that check will be the same amount regardless of where you live in retirement, so that'll go a lot further there too. The longer you've worked for "city money" already, the bigger your SS check will be.

Even if you wait until you're just before retirement, moving out of the expensive market is one of the best ways to ensure a retirement secure from the worry of having to keep being economically productive till death.
by sham1 | 2025-05-23 20:44:13+00:00
Number bases are arbitrary. Like, base 12 certainly has interesting properties since it is a highly composite number, but a lot of the convenient representations can be achieved by using actual fractions instead of insisting on radix points/commas.

For example, 1/4 being 0.3 in base 12 can make certain computations easier (just as a 1/3 being 0.4_12 would), but again, what's wrong with 1/4 and 1/3 respectively.

Of course, things like duodecimal and base-6 are interesting to use, but at this point the convention is base-10 and it probably won't change for a while. It's kinda like the \pi Vs \tau debate, where even with all the elegance and easier pedagogy brought by the use of \tau as the fundamental circle constant, the existing convention does matter, and probably matters a lot more in general than the better alternative.

Of course, this also applied to the SI units. It literally took a major historical revolution for these units to be a) defined and b) getting used over the old units.
by harrall | 2025-05-23 20:44:17+00:00
I used to write a ton of SQL and I could write a query for anything you asked for, no matter how incompatible the schema was to your request.

My first step was to look at the data using the UI. Then when I tested my queries, I also just ran them in the UI.

It’s just faster.

I never used the UI for “simple” queries since there wasn’t anything to test.
TacoGuru: Lessons from a failed $5M taco tech startup in Mexico
by bredee | 2025-05-23 20:44:49+00:00
We built TacoGuru to be the Yelp for tacos in Mexico. The vision: map every taquería, let users review, and empower vendors with modern tools.

There are over 150,000 informal taquerías across Mexico — we wanted to arm them with tech: digital payments, loyalty systems, even loans. A fintech backbone for the taco economy. I still believe it could work if done right.

Why it didn’t work:

Market Reality: Most vendors didn’t care about tech. No POS. No email. No bank accounts. Many were cash-only, under-the-radar, and skeptical of change. User Mismatch: Consumers wanted quick taco recommendations, not a full-blown community or marketplace. Revenue Mirage: We focused on scale too early. Beautiful app, no monetization flywheel. Execution Gaps: Burned too much cash on dev and marketing before validating product-market fit. Timing + Fatigue: We pivoted to fintech for food vendors — payments and credit — but we were late, drained, and out of capital. What I learned: Vision isn’t enough. PMF is everything. Local behavior trumps Silicon Valley logic. And if you try to digitize 150,000 taquerías, you better speak their language — literally and culturally.

I still believe in the mission. Just not how we went about it.

AMA.
by henrikschroder | 2025-05-23 20:45:23+00:00
If Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because the units are smaller, doesn't that mean that the kilometre is better than the mile because it has smaller units?

It is all subjective. You like what you grew up with because it is familiar, not because it is better. You know by rote memorisation how much 100 feet is and what 75F feels like, the same way I know by rote memorisation how much 50 meters is and what 25C feels like.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-23 20:45:55+00:00
What has "Graphics Carmack" actually done since about 2001?

So, his initial tech was "Adaptive tile refresh" in Commander Keen, used to give it console style pixel-level scrolling. Turns out, they actually hampered themselves in Commander Keen 1 by not understanding the actual tech, and implemented "The Jolt", a feature that was not necessary. The actual hardware implemented scrolling the same way that consoles like the NES did, and did not need "the jolt", nor the limitations it imposed.

Then, Doom and Quake was mostly him writing really good optimizations of existing, known and documented algorithms and 3D techniques, usually by recognizing what assumptions they could make, what portions of the algorithm didn't need to be recalculated when, etc. Very talented at the time, but in the software development industry, making a good implementation of existing algorithms that utilize your specific requirements is called doing your job. This is still the height of his relative technical output IMO.

Fast Inverse Square Root was not invented by him, but was floating around in industry for a while. He still gets kudos for knowing about it and using it.

"Carmack's reverse" is a technique for doing stencil shadows that was a minor (but extremely clever) modification to the "standard" documented way of doing shadow buffers. There is evidence of the actual technique from a decade before Carmack put it in Doom 3 and it was outright patented by two different people the year before. There is no evidence that Carmack "stole" or anything this technique, it was independent discovery, but was clearly also just a topic in the industry at the time.

"Megatextures" from Rage didn't really go anywhere.

Did Carmack actually contribute anything to VR rendering while at Oculus?

People treat him like this programming god and I just don't understand. He was well read, had a good (maybe too good) work ethic, and was very talented at writing 386 era assembly code. These are all laudable, but doesn't in my mind imply that he's some sort of 10X programmer who could revolutionize random industries that he isn't familiar with. 3D graphics math isn't exactly difficult.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-05-23 20:46:44+00:00
This can and should be a separate tool, probably called a linter. The compiler dealing with codegen can then just say "nope, that's not a program in this language, try the linter", optionally calling into the linter for you.

This does of course mean that divergent ideas of "correct" between linter and compiler are confusing and really do need to be avoided for happy developer times.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-23 20:47:18+00:00
Yes it's true that people shuffle in and out, but you're making it seem like a lead researcher on a project leaving suddenly would have no impact on the work. Often times yes, a project can fail if key personnel leave. Many labs are just a professor and one grad student who they had to work for years to get up to speed. Many times that grad student is the one person in the whole world who has the specialized knowledge they do. Such is the nature of researching at the bleeding edge of a field. If they were to suddenly leave it would have a noticeably negative impact on their research output, even if the best American student stepped into the role immediately.

That you fail to consider that possibility but you are very keen to claim "racist and just hate Americans" leads me to unfortunately quote the HN rules at you:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-23 20:47:35+00:00
>Nobody said that the sky would be falling. Nobody sane, anyway.

At a previous job I worked, there were lunchroom conversations among the younger developers (in their 20s), all of a leftist persuasion. They were convinced that people in the UK would be dying because there was no access to medicine (that came from the mainland), and even in some cases hunger (though they didn't go so far as to claim starvation).

For the rest of you it may be the case that the people saying these same things were online, and therefor suspect (as it should be), but for me these were real-life conversations that I overheard. Perhaps this phenomenon was atypical, and almost everywhere else it was untrue, and of course you shouldn't take my word for it either, but with proper skepticism keep in mind I'm reporting something different here.
by antognini | 2025-05-23 20:48:02+00:00
There is no recognized mechanism for states in the US to secede. Probably the consensus view among constitutional scholars is that accession to the United States is permanent --- that is, there is no way for a state to secede once it joins the union. There is a minority view that a state could secede with the consent of the Federal government or other states, but what would constitute agreement is not spelled out. If there were a serious attempt at secession it would probably require a constitutional amendment, so in practice it would require the consent of 3/4 of the states.
by Xevion | 2025-05-23 20:48:15+00:00
I don't know myself, but it seems to give boids their own unique state and add another layer of influence to their acceleration.

https://github.com/attentionmech/genetic-boids/blob/485fe482...

I'm reading the code but I don't know what it actually DOES in practice; my guess is that Boids with opposite genomes (binary strings with default length 6) are slightly attracted to eachother.
by dmurray | 2025-05-23 20:48:34+00:00
A really good point.

So what's the rate of this photodisassociation?

I found it weirdly hard to Google an answer on this. Firstly, rates are given in terms of decays per second instead of in half-life which would be more relevant for our purposes. Secondly, it seems to be well studied in the interstellar medium than in atmospheric conditions.

Anyway, the most relevant measurements I could find [0] say photodisassociation of N2 in the interstellar medium happens at a rate of approximately 10^-10 s^-1 - i.e. every 10 billion seconds on average.

Caesar died about 60 billion seconds ago [1] so at that rate, many of the molecules would still be alive.

However, we don't live in the interstellar medium. By interstellar standards, we pretty much live on the surface of the sun. The average point in the ISM is maybe 2 light years from the nearest star [2] but we are only 10^-5 ly away. They're all the same photons, but radiation intensity diminishes with the square of the distance, so our nitrogen molecules should disassociate every 1 second instead. If that's true, Caesar's last breath had its last surviving molecules persist for only a minute or two after Caesar himself.

[0] https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2013/07/aa20625-... https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2013/07/aa20625-...

[1] https://math.answers.com/math-and-arithmetic/How_many_second...

[2] https://www.livescience.com/space/how-far-apart-are-stars
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-23 20:48:53+00:00
MCP is just RPC over a long-lived connection, most cases being a Websocket. IMO RPC is easier to setup because:

1. There's less bikeshedding for the authors about whether modifying a field in a user object should be a PUT or a POST replacing the original user object. I've spent a non-trivial amount of time bikeshedding over REST verbs.

2. LLMs don't need to understand the REST semantics of the API. It can just look at available RPC methods and make the RPC call it thinks will work.

I think that's really it.
by dustbunny | 2025-05-23 20:49:09+00:00
As a Western Canadian, I actually think it's the media attention on this that has made it more popular. The vast majority of people in my life think this is a terrible idea. Western Canada, and Alberta, have been shafted by federal Canadian politics for a long time, but Carney seems to be saying the right things ("energy super power", "energy corridor", "streamline infrastructure").
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-05-23 20:49:37+00:00
The parent is explaining why it’s hollow instead of being a truss. They accurately explain that the hollow tube is optimal to counter the wind loads. Your criticism is that they didn’t discuss gravity loads, but that wasn’t “in the prompt” — the gravity load doesn’t explain why they’re a hollow cylinder. There are a wealth of other irrelevant things that could be discussed, but have been neglected because they are irrelevant to the question.

Frankly your comment disappoints me. wizardOfScience gave a _great_ answer, that would make any solid mechanics professor proud.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-23 20:50:04+00:00
Is it actually morally correct? Philosophically, this ends up with the ideal government being every single person determining their own rules, doesn't it? The ideal state of things would be to reject democracy and move to libertarianism? I'd argue that such a society does not function, and having a functional society is also a moral good.

On a more practical note, the Alberta government is currently actively meddling in municipal politics and policies, so in the currently discussed application it seems more of a "I want to have a government that's as large as possible that I can still have power over".
by trey-jones | 2025-05-23 20:50:08+00:00
dired-mode is fairly necessary in emacs to preserve the continuity of what you are editing.

For example, if I'm editing a file called originalfilename.txt, and I decide it should be called newfilename.txt, I can mv originalfilename.txt newfilename.txt in the terminal and it's all good, but you're still editing the buffer originalfilename.txt in emacs and if you save it you will have a new file with that name.

Using dired to change the filename updates all the buffers that are using that file.

dired gets some hate, I think because it creates a lot of buffers and they tend to stick around, but it's never bothered me.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-23 20:50:41+00:00
When I last checked this client is a classic example of OpenBSD philosophy not understanding why security is the way it is.

This client really wants the easy case where the client lives on the machine which owns the name and is running the web server, and then it uses OpenBSD-specific partitioning so that elements of the client can't easily taint one another if they're defective

But, the ACME protocol would allow actual air gapping - the protocol doesn't care whether the machine which needs a certificate, the machine running an ACME client, and the machine controlling the name are three separate machines, that's fine, which means if we do not use this OpenBSD all-in-one client we can have a web server which literally doesn't do ACME at all, an ACME client machine which has no permission to serve web pages or anything like that, and name servers which also know nothing about ACME and yet the whole system works.

That's more effort than "I just install OpenBSD" but it's how this was designed to deliver security rather than putting all our trust in OpenBSD to be bug-free.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 20:50:41+00:00
Well no...

Firstly, we can divide a cup by 2, 3, and 4 in the kitchen because those are common measuring-cup sizes. Nobody is prevented from using a fractional size: if I divide a cup by 5 then I have 1/5th of a cup, nothing more and nothing less.

While 1/4th of a cup is 2 oz, and 1/3rd of a cup is 16 teaspoons, 1/5th of a cup doesn't divide evenly into a smaller unit and that's why "we don't do it", but there is nothing to stop the chef from using 9 teaspoons. [Or he can instinctively go up to 45mL on his graduated measuring cup, which almost always has both systems on it!] Teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, cups, quarts and gallons are all inter-related multiples, and once you internalize it, you can convert like a boss.

While I'm sure it's lovely that metric measures divide by 2 and 5, that's all they divide by, so in terms of divisors, you've lost 3, 4, 6, 8...

So if it really is about dividing things usefully without resorting to fractions, then using a system that is nothing but multiples of 10 is a handicap, when we've had systems with lovely 12s and 16s with many different options for dividing them up.

But the metric people can simply chop up the measures even more finely and claim victory. For example, currency: it was in multiples of 16 or 8 which allowed for limited permutations. Decimalization chopped it into pennies, and we find 100 gradations in every pound sterling. All that did is make base-10 math easier for bean counters, and confuse people on the streets with a mystifying array of coinage. [Mental math indicates that it must increase the volume of coins per average transaction, as well.]

If a basic customary unit of length is an inch, many people can put two fingers together and estimate that on the human scale. But who can estimate or eyeball a millimeter?

Oh, and, have you ever found a nice British recipe in metric, shopped at your American grocery store, and prepared that in your American kitchen with your Fahrenheit range? You will eventually want to tip it all in the rubbish bin. Adam Ragusea suggests as much: https://youtu.be/TE8xg3d8dBg?si=SD8wLxD6ib6InLX4
by yamazakiwi | 2025-05-23 20:50:43+00:00
The state was red but all those foundational industries come from traditionally "Blue Cities" that have expanded to fill the state as those industries have grown.

A faster time to market is beneficial for companies, but it's also an excuse to avoid quality, safety, and ethics.

Sure there are groups and legislation that slow things down to the point it becomes a problem, but with most things, it's about balance and context, but I guess it's easier to speak in extremes and act partisan.