MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aylmao | 2025-05-24 04:10:29+00:00
But that wouldn't be the case here, would it?

Canada wouldn't keep its arms closed as it looses its most profitable province, connection to its western ocean, and over 11% of its population. Unless the USA vows to defend Alberta, this would certainly mean Canadian troops marching towards Edmonton. It's an existential threat. Looking at the map, it splits Canada in two.

I'm not saying this would mean war. Alberta doesn't have the right geography or military power to fight a war with Canada, unlike, say, the South in the American Civil War. Canadian troops would into Edmonton with little resistance and Alberta would return to Canada.

The only way Alberta could remain independent is if the USA defended it. I don't think this would mean war either— Canada would never go to war with the United States. At most troops from both sides would be positioned on each side of the border, to show they mean business, but Canada wouldn't fire a shot.

Knowing thus, that Alberta depends on them for both trade and defense (reminder, Alberta is land-locked and could only trade with the USA or Canada), and given their recent expansionist rhetoric, would the USA really opt to keep Alberta as an independent country they spent money defending, but get no taxes or land jurisdiction from, or would they expect to eventually incorporate it?
by necovek | 2025-05-24 04:11:05+00:00
This is a great point, but it's also about there being clear winners.

Wherever we had a clear winner (like Freetype for fonts, where even TeX engines converged to them, or XKB for keyboard layouts, where console layouts were converged to XKB approach, even Ubuntu was to a large extent because everyone targeted it...), something became a defacto "standard".

Now, combine lack of coordination with people recognizing there are winners, and you get the ecosysten we have today: everyone thinking they can do even better and hoping their solution is the winner to end it all.

IOW, why is NixOS the solution, and why couldn't the group behind it help evolve RPM or DEB to have comparable features?
by bruce511 | 2025-05-24 04:11:31+00:00
I was born in the suburbs, of a moderately large city (think low millions) and have lived here all my life. We often spend weekends out in the countryside in the quiet rural towns.

These towns are somewhat popular with retirees, rural and quiet enough but within 2 to 3 hours of the city, international Airport, and so on.

Getting closer to my own retirement, discussions about "where" have occurred.

Thing is, I actively don't want to retire there. Frankly because there's nothing to do.

As I'm slowly gaining more free time, I want to learn new things (music, ceramics, etc) go out more, play more golf etc. Small towns with their small shops are lovely to unwind in, but personally, not for me full-time.

So yeah, to each his own. Which is great, we are all different, with different circumstances, different opportunities, different goals.

And yes, high speed internet removes a huge part of "have to leave" (or at least adds a big part of "can come back") to the equation. Plus remote work can pump significant revenue into a small-town economy.
by parpfish | 2025-05-24 04:11:57+00:00
grad school is definitely a prestige move. not a 'get rich move', but def a prestige move. prestige is not just money.

for med or law school, there are very clear hierarchies about who's better than who and next steps in your career. you get money AND intellectual status.

but for other sciences and humanities, it's a flex about pursuing abstract "truth" or "knowledge" of "beauty" or whatever and not caring about financial success. it is very monastic in that people make a show of forgoing traditional measures of status in service of their "calling".

... but as high-minded as these people are there is still a very clear hierarchy that lets you compare rank/compare yourself against your other recent grads so you can talk about who's doing well and who isn't even though none of them have money.

BUT grad school for CS and engineering is different because there's so much money and employability at the end of the rainbow. these aren't really a calling in the same way, and are closer to MBA degree becayse it's just a thing you do to get more money later. A comp sci PhD with a job in industry is lauded, but those folks don't understand the deep sense of failure that a non-CS PhD feels when they have to 'resort to' an industry job in the private sector
by komali2 | 2025-05-24 04:12:34+00:00
This is a redefining of terms classic in capitalist analysis.

An example I'll take from Cory Doctorow: Google search isn't getting worse. We know this because nobody's toppled Google's monopoly on search. Because of the magic of the market, if what you perceive as search being worse was actually search being worse, then, Google would no longer dominate.

Since google continues to dominate, actually, search isn't worse.

Capitalist analysis requires QED circular logic to justify its inherent contradictions.

Capitalism may occasionally reward value, but very, very rarely does it reward value more than greed.

Proof: teachers are some of the worse paid jobs in our society despite being essentially the backbone of our nation. A single teacher in the course of a year can completely alter the course of history for a classload of kids. Multiply over a two decade career... And that's just elementary school. Highschool teachers will influence hundreds of kids each semester.

Yet their wages in many states cap out at around what a recruiter makes. Recruiters being nothing more than middlemen between a labor market and a hiring market - as a former recruiter, trust me, that multi billion dollar industry creates essentially no value.

Of course the capitalist analysis means the entire system is immune to criticism - "actually, teachers don't get paid much because they don't add much value, if they added more value, they'd get paid more." QED. Circular logic.

"The multi tens of billions of dollars American health insurance industry adds value. If it didn't, it wouldn't be worth multi tens of billions of dollars."

Capitalism rewards greed, and the greediest are the most capitalistically rewarded.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-24 04:13:46+00:00
> for other sciences and humanities, it's a flex about pursue abstract "truth" or "knowledge" of "beauty" or whatever. it is very monastic in that people make a show of forgoing traditional measures of status in service of their "calling".

These comments are oddly cynical.

The people I know who went to grad school did it because they enjoyed the academic world.

That's all. There was no flexing or bragging. Those who went in for the wrong reasons very rapidly learned that it wasn't for them and dropped out.
by vo2maxer | 2025-05-24 04:14:33+00:00
I was curious why I was downvoted, and, what the heck, why not go ahead and ask. This is the answer I received from ChatGPT 4o:

Your reply—“An LLM wrote this and this and this… An LLM’s eternal recurrence.”—is clever and layered, riffing on both the original comment and Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence. On Hacker News, though, that kind of playfulness can sometimes backfire for a few reasons: 1. Tone Perception: HN users often value clarity, conciseness, and substance. Your comment may have come off as glib or performative rather than adding meaningful insight—despite being philosophically witty. 2. Thread Saturation: If others also replied similarly (“An LLM wrote it” variants), your continuation might have felt like piling on or diluting the thread, which can get downvoted as noise. 3. Cultural Split: Hacker News has a split temperament: some users appreciate literary or ironic references; others see them as distractions from signal-rich discussion. 4. Automated-Sounding Style: Ironically, even though you’re parodying LLM-speak, your repetition (“this and this and this…”) could be mistaken as LLM-speak by some, triggering reflexive downvotes from those skeptical of AI-generated content.

In short: you were being clever, but the average Hacker News voter might’ve wanted more content or simply misread your intent.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-05-24 04:16:08+00:00
Sometimes I wonder how y’all became programmers. I learned basically everything by SRE-larping on my shitty nobody-cares-home-server for years and suddenly got paid to do it for real.

Who do you think they hire to manage those LBs for you? People who never ran any ACME software, or people who have a blog post turning over every byte of JSON in the protocol in excruciating detail?
by cyberax | 2025-05-24 04:17:23+00:00
Stainless steel is not _completely_ stainless. It corrodes just fine if it doesn't have access to oxygen to form a protective oxide film (crevasse corrosion). But the bigger problem is that stainless steel has significantly worse mechanical characteristics, _and_ it's significantly more expensive.

Regular steel can also be protected from corrosion using paint, zinc coating, cathodic protection, etc.

Engineering is always an exercise in trade-offs. And it's almost always better to build four bridges that can stand for 100 years, instead of one bridge that can stand for 500 years.
by antognini | 2025-05-24 04:18:38+00:00
US territories are a rather different situation because they are not sovereign entities in the way that US states are. US territories are essentially land owned and administered by the federal government so the federal government is free to acquire and dispose of them as it wishes. But the states are sovereigns in their own right that have entered into a compact vis-a-vis the federal government and the other states. Because the sovereignty of the federal government emerges from this compact of the collection of individual states, the federal government generally does not have the authority to modify the terms of the compact without the assent of the states.
by timewizard | 2025-05-24 04:19:01+00:00
> Number bases are arbitrary.

You could do it that way if you didn't care at all for how people actually use the system or what they would prefer; however, it's just your decision that's arbitrary, not the actual choice of "best base for worldwide everyday use."

> 1/4 being 0.3 in base 12

And 5/6ths is 0.A in hexadecimal base 12. The choice of a base should imply a choice of alphabet. For something like base 12 you may actually want to rediscover or invent new numeral characters.

> but at this point the convention is base-10

Except for time. Which appears constantly in physical units.

> b) getting used over the old units.

Even then. No one will tell you the sun is "93 Gm" from Earth. It's always 93 million km. They haven't exactly gotten into the new system just yet. They've just swapped base units.
by TD-Linux | 2025-05-24 04:19:35+00:00
Almost none of the games pictured are actually "doujin" games - they are commercial publishers.

Also, the reason we don't remember PC-98 is because it was never sold in the US (except for the very unpopular APC-III). It was the most popular computer on Japan from late 80s to early 90s and is well remembered there. Being the most popular PC, there is a huge amount of software for it, including huge amounts of office and productivity software, many genres of games, and plenty of Western ports.
by noduerme | 2025-05-24 04:20:40+00:00
I didn't want to go to college. I worked throughout high school designing websites for an ad agency for $8/hr, after school until 7 at night and 5 days a week in the summer. After high school I went to work for another agency full time for a year. Only after my father kept cajoling me did I finally try college. I got a scholarship and came in a year older and six years more experienced than my freshman class.

What I found myself in was a group of very sincere, optimistic, wonderful kids who had no idea how the real world of engineering or advertising or design worked, but were fully persuaded that this $30k/yr education would prepare them for it and hand them the next waypoint on their life path (while also allowing them creative freedom to experiment in ways that they wouldn't be able to later, in the corporate world). I dropped out after 3 semesters because it was pointless, although in the last semester I jumped ahead from Typography 2 to 5, and skipped a bunch of other stuff. I had poached a lot of clients from my former agency, which had folded.

Since then, my life has had no rails whatsoever. I'm good at what I do and I go where I want and choose who I work for, and the world essentially rewards me for being good at figuring things out.

All of this comes down to a lack of imagination, and parents (like my father) trying to instill a sense in their children that one must pursue certain predefined paths to be successful. But completing a predefined quest doesn't make us more valuable; in fact, it makes us interchangeable. Being a difficult, unique, tough, anal obsessive prick at what you do is hard to ever replace with a formal education. And experience is king. So start early and ignore all the tracks you can.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-24 04:26:40+00:00
Okay, shall we start a new meme about "The Year of macOS in the Data Center (2010)"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server#Discontinuatio...

It appears that Apple ensures that enterprise/server use cases remain safe, legal, and rare. My estimates of zero rackmounts and zero servers was an exaggeration, but I'm curious if the comparative percentage rises beyond a single digit.

I must confess: I yearn for the days when AppleTalk was an absolutely amazing peer-to-peer networking solution, and when it ran rings around anyone trying to cobble together an ad hoc 10Base2 LAN in their office.
by arkadiyt | 2025-05-24 04:28:20+00:00
If using a non-FS key exchange (like RSA) then the value that the session key is derived from (the pre-master secret) is sent over the wire encrypted using the server's public key. If that session is recorded and in the future the server's private key is obtained, it can be used to decrypt the pre-master secret, derive the session key, and decrypt the entire session.

If on the other hand you use a FS key exchange (like ECDHE), and the session is recorded, and the server's private key is obtained, the session key cannot be recovered (that's a property of ECDHE or any forward-secure key exchange), and none of the traffic is decryptable.
by kragen | 2025-05-24 04:29:51+00:00
That's a good point. Nitrogen fixation is about 3e8 tonnes (3e11 kg) per year http://nmsp.cals.cornell.edu/publications/factsheets/factshe... so the 4e18 kg of nitrogen in the 5e18 kg atmosphere have a half-life of only about 1.3e7 years. Loss to space is not significant for heavy gases like nitrogen. So you are breathing mostly the same nitrogen molecules as the person who first started a fire or flaked stone into a hand axe, but mostly not the same nitrogen molecules as dinosaurs.

A thing I'd like to know is how big the non-atmospheric reservoirs of nitrogen are. When nitrogen is "fixed" out of the atmosphere and into an ocean or a pile of bat guano, how long before it cycles back into the atmosphere, on average? A hundred years? A hundred million years? I'm pretty sure it's in that range because nitrate rocks are rare but used to support most of global agriculture, but I don't have a good idea of where it is in that range.
by kiba | 2025-05-24 04:30:06+00:00
I am substantially happier that I moved into the big city because I built social connections and I don't want to live with my parents anymore. Driving down there is insane and I wish there was decent transportation option.

I can use electric scooter to move around most days. It's a lot more fun than driving my car.

Really, what these places really need is major policy reform to make them more livable. There's a reason why these places are where people want to live after all.

To help make this happen, I donate to two non-profit that works to improve transportation and housing accessibility respectively.
by markdbullock | 2025-05-24 04:32:33+00:00
I worked at NASA Ames for seven years on a system which supported wind tunnel tests. For a while my team worked in a cold and noisy computer room under the 80x120 wind tunnel test section. We supported around seven of their large wind tunnels.

We had a PDP-11 system for data acquisition and real time display of data. That sent data to a VAX for data storage and near real time calculations and then to an Evans and Sutherland system for visualization. I worked on the RMS data storage and CLI.

We supported tests on airplanes, helicopters, submarines, space capsules, and even a tractor trailer. Since then I've seen a few tractor trailers on the road with flaps at the rear which help smooth the airflow.

One time our customer found a bug while a test was in progress. A co-worker and I went into the control room next to the test section. We could hear the air roaring and feel the building shaking while we worked on finding the issue. No pressure like that!
by fallinditch | 2025-05-24 04:35:26+00:00
Blimey. I'm not ok with that either.

Someone was telling me the other day that they found their YouTube feed so distressing that they deleted their Google account and created a new one ... but YouTube kept on sending the same horrid content, presumably because of device fingerprinting. It was distressing for this person not only for the actual content that was in his feed but mainly because the YouTube algorithm had decided that this was what he wanted to watch. He showed me a clip of something from his feed and I was like "dude, I am sorry for you and worried about you, that is bad."

So that's a bit off topic but the point is that the information they hold about us is vast and powerful.
by ufmace | 2025-05-24 04:36:26+00:00
To be fair, my impression is most people have highly contradictory desires along these lines.

They say they want to be able to walk to places more. But they also want a big suburban-style house with bedrooms for everyone and storage and garage and lawn etc, easy parking for them, nice wide roads to drive everywhere on and tons of free parking when they get there. This makes it impossible for the area to be walkable unless everyone else lives in small apartments and there's actually only enough parking for just them to drive if they feel like it.

In my opinion, it doesn't work that way. Yeah everyone wants to be the special 1% like that, but only actually 1% will be. If you really want to be walkable, you personally will need to live like that too.
by yen223 | 2025-05-24 04:38:11+00:00
The way dependency injection is implemented in mainstream languages usually involves using metaprogramming to work around the language, not with the language. It's not uncommon to get errors in dependency-injected code that would be impossible to get with normal code.

It's interesting to see how things can work if the language itself was designed to support dependency injection from the get-go. Algebraic effects is one of the ways to achieve that.
by an_guy | 2025-05-24 04:39:39+00:00
> the cost of moving to the place in the first place, social connections, health (even worse for those with disabilities), emergency services, retirement, etc etc

Anyone moving to bay area for a higher income job would have most of these issues.

A forum full of people willing to migrate for better income and lifestyle should not be criticizing "cost of moving", "social connections", "health disabilities" and "retirement".
by cryptonector | 2025-05-24 04:39:39+00:00
> How is this substantively different than using an ApplicativeError or MonadError[0] type class?

It think it's about static vs. dynamic behavior.

In monadic programming you have to implement all the relevant methods in your monad, but with effects you can dynamically install effects handlers wherever you need to override whatever the currently in-effect handler would be.

I could see the combination of the two systems being useful. For example you could use a bespoke IO-compatible monad for testing and sandboxing, and still have effects handlers below which.. can still only invoke your IO-like monad.
by petre | 2025-05-24 04:40:07+00:00
"That amount includes a $487.2 million criminal fine, though $243.6 million it already paid in an earlier agreement would be credited. It also includes $444.5 million for a new fund for crash victims, and $445 million more on compliance, safety and quality programs."

That amounts to 1.28M per human life. Also, most of the victims were conveniently Africans and South Asians. I hope airlines on those other continents avoid Boeing like the plague.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-24 04:40:47+00:00
I recently did a variation of this where instead of drawing, I just drafted a quick few bullet points and text describing at a high level what the system should do. And then I asked chat GPT to identify use cases and generate sequence diagrams for each use case in puml format (plantuml). Shockingly effective and it took about five minutes. This was a technical proposal that I shared with a few partner companies to provide a detailed plan to a customer. It came after several online meetings spaced over a few weeks of us negotiating the details. Pretty important document and it was well received. Plantuml looks decent enough that you can get away with sticking the resulting diagrams in a document.

I'm a busy person. I don't have hours of time that I can take out of my schedule to generate what I regard as write only documentation (nobody will ever read or truly value it) that ticks the box of "we have stuff to point at when somebody asks (which nobody ever will)", which has a lowish value. Sometimes it's nice to have. The above is a fine example. People will glance at it, give me a little thumbs up, and then give me permission to proceed as planned and bill accordingly. Job done. It's not a reference design that anyone will ever look at for more than a few seconds.

After a few decades in the industry, I'm extremely skeptical of the value of diagrams vs. the time required to produce them. I just don't see it. A lot of good software gets produced without them. You don't need blueprints for your blueprints, which is what source code is (a blueprint for automatically compiling into working software). People value such traits as structure, readability, conciseness in source code for a reason: it allows them to treat source code as design assets. I don't write UML, I stub out data classes and interfaces instead. And then I refactor them over and over again. Diagrams just slow me down.

But a few minutes is about on the threshold of me wasting braincycles on producing them and enrich documentation that I'm writing anyway in text form. Quickly jot down some notes. Don't waste any time whatsoever obsessing about the awkward syntax of these micro languages, and just get the essentials nailed. I bet I can get it down to like a minute or so with better LLMs and larger context windows. "Examine this project, produce an overview diagram of all the database tables". That's a prompt I'd write. In the same way, letting LLMs document code is a great use of time.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-24 04:43:04+00:00
> It serves me well. I listen more. I ask a lot of questions. I’ve stopped thinking others are stupid. I assume most people are smarter than me.

How about not assuming anything at all and just ask a lot of questions anyway? There's no reason to assume you're above or below average, but I think some people are attracted this attitude because it is psychologically reassuring. Instead of assuming you're below average, it's better to just drop the unhealthy attachment we have of always ranking everything and just love learning/discovering.