MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geocar | 2025-05-19 07:11:31+00:00
> My understanding is that APL permits mutable state and side effects ... If you're modifying the contents of an array in-place, I don't think it's reasonable to consider that functional.

a←'hello' a[1]←'c'

This does _not_ modify the array in-place. It's actually the same as:

a←'hello' a←'c'@1⊢a

which is more obviously functional. It is easy to convince yourself of this:

a←'hello' b←a b[1]←'j' a,b

returns 'hellojello' and not 'jellojello'.
by zahlman | 2025-05-19 07:12:12+00:00
>I just gave you a tangible suggestion for how you might maintain your standards

No, you did nothing of the sort. You asked why people don't do something, and I explained to you that they sometimes do, but aren't required to because, among other things, it attracts abuse from new users. There are more reasons I didn't elaborate upon, that are covered in the meta discussion I linked you.

Meta discussion from 2017 that we have rehashed repeatedly ever since.

Countless people before you have suggested all the exact same things. None of them ever bring any new argument (because there is a small set of coherent arguments that could possibly be made) and none ever show any evidence of having considered, or being aware of, the previous discussion.

Again: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436
by xitang | 2025-05-19 07:12:13+00:00
+1 to this! I have tons of fun while building this job board and having to refactor my code multiple times to generalize a pattern that can pull jobs from various sites. It is so fun to dig into some readings on the trimodal nature of tech compensation and pay transparency laws in the US. Plus it is a helpful site for folks like you said.

What type of job board are you building btw? Does it focus on a niche?
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-19 07:12:20+00:00
They would not be valid UUIDs, it is an opaque 128-bit value.

To be honest many companies are not using strictly standard conforming UUIDs everywhere, and UUID has become a synonym for opaque 128-bit identifier. Consumers of the value just need them to be unique. All standard UUID versions are sometimes prohibited in environments, except maybe UUIDv8, so this semantic ambiguity is helpful.

Technically, you could make it present as a standard UUIDv4 or UUIDv8 by setting a few bits, as long as you remember to add them back if you ever need to decrypt it. The entropy might be a bit off for a UUIDv4 if someone actually checks but you can guarantee the uniqueness.

Using AES to produce a UUID-like key is an old but useful trick. Both ARM and x86 do that encryption in hardware — it is cheaper to generate than the standardized UUID versions in most cases.
by aziaziazi | 2025-05-19 07:14:16+00:00
Seems correct. I might not use you average-user-device (iPhone SE 2016) but liked your idea and clicked the link. The page freeze for ~15s for the first load but then refresh only takes ~4s. The animation is smooth if I’m not scrolling the list. Scrolling seems hard to handle as the new items takes 2s to appear. Do you use a virtual table [edit: just read you sibling comment saying you don’t, yet] or heavy JS for styling the list? I usually have no problem scrolling long text lists. Another guess would be the logos size but I’m not in my computer to check it out. For context: I know my device is old but it handles fine most sites that don’t have too many ads, js shenanigans or super heavy assets.

Kudos to you, I’m sure my 2012 mbp will handle it fine though :-)
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-19 07:15:09+00:00
My mom visited a professor in an African country a few years back, as part of a project.

She told me the professor had a guy employed to open and close the gates for when he drove to work and came home in the evening. That's all the guy did. Full time job.

Sounded so preposterous at first, but after thinking a wee bit I came to a similar conclusion that the alternatives might be a lot worse. It was steady income, albeit not a lot.
by matwood | 2025-05-19 07:16:14+00:00
You can't talk about top rates without also talking about where they kick in. Italy's top rate of 43% kicks in for everything over 50k euros. The 50k feels a bit low to me, and maybe 100k euros would be better. 90% of everything over 5M may work, but then you run into another problem where people that rich are not bringing home a salary. So you lower where it kicks in and then just impact the working professionals, which also isn't who you really want to target. And if you do want to target those working $500k+/year, removing the cap (176,100 this year) on SS payments is probably a better path.

So now we're back to the ultra-rich where you need to first think about taxing dividends as income without hurting retirees, and second think about some wealth tax. It could be small like .2% on everything over 5M or something, but it would actually put some tax burden on the people you're trying to put it on.
by uejfiweun | 2025-05-19 07:16:29+00:00
I'm sorry but I blame the old powers like the NYT a lot more for the current predicament than I blame the current president. For all their hemming and hawing about China leading "global production in multiple industries" they sure were silent during the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when the business elite of the country were busy offshoring and selling to the highest bidder to make this situation a reality. I think the corporate media in this country is an absolute disgrace.

It's like, what are they even trying to say here? Do they mean to imply that if Trump hadn't cut funding to public research or whatever, this situation would be fundamentally different? Completely ridiculous. If they're mad about the rise of China, then they should be blaming the people who allowed China to catch up in exchange for a quick buck.
by mschild | 2025-05-19 07:16:56+00:00
MS Office is far from a good piece of software itself though. Frankly, the amount sub-menus and other bullshit I constantly have to fix for my parents does not make for a great experience either.

Mind, I barely actually use any Excel/Word/PowerPoint software, but I often have the feeling that a lot of user complaints for these types of things simply come down to: "It's not what I'm used to, therefore it's terrible.".
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-19 07:17:28+00:00
I think most religions teach something along the lines of "life is sacred" (definitions of "life" may vary). Without this limitation or common sense, priorities may get inverted and someone decides that people being alive is the "cause" of problem X (suffering, climate change, whatever). While it worked for Stalin and the Unabomber, it doesn't sound like a moral, healthy, or sustainable approach.
by tinco | 2025-05-19 07:18:03+00:00
One thing I didn't quite realize is that they accidentally spend significant amounts of money. At a party I talked to someone who was like a financial coach for super wealthy people and he helps them clean up their shit. The way we might accidentally have a running $50/mo subscription for something we don't use any longer, they might have a $500/mo club membership they never go to. Or prebooked vacation rentals they don't visit, or maintenance on cars they don't use, etc.
by msla | 2025-05-19 07:18:33+00:00
The example works if and only if there's one National ID per person.

That's not true for SSNs. It's not true in that it is false. My statement that it is false is, in point of fact, true, and therefore not up for debate.

The government even acknowledges this:

https://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/handbook/handbook.14/handbook-14...

> 1401.7 Can a person have more than one SSN?

> Most persons have only one SSN. In certain limited situations, SSA can assign you a new number. If you receive a new SSN, you should use the new number. However, your old and new number will remain linked in our records to ensure that your earnings are credited properly. This could affect your benefits.

Maybe there are countries where it is the case that nobody ever gets multiple National IDs. Maybe there are countries without fraud and where everyone can and will update their records when the government does. Maybe there is a veritable Utopia on Earth, a Cockaigne of validated data and reasonable deadlines.
by _1tem | 2025-05-19 07:19:18+00:00
While I have you, I wanted to share with you an idea that I've had for years to improve SRS systems, that is SRS -> Email Inbox Zero as a brain hack. I tried to build a plugin for Anki but could not make it work. Not sure if it can be done with RemNote or I can build a plugin to do this.

The basic idea: SRS is great, but it can be hard to get motivated to start studying your cards every day. On the other hand, most people have a habit/addiction to check their email or social media multiple times a day. The idea is to intersperse random card studying into my email or Telegram inbox, reducing the time to study a single card to a few seconds interspersed across a busy day. So I want to get a few random emails (or texts) with a due flashcard question, and have the ability to answer the flashcard directly in one click from the message. The hard part is that last part: getting the software to work so that I can answer the flashcard in a single click from the email, so that I don't need to open the whole app just to start studying.

Would really help to keep up with my studying even on busy days and hack the brain's addiction to email/social media to do something useful.
by LittleFishyChan | 2025-05-19 07:19:22+00:00
You’re referring to incremental reading, which yes is indeed one of the killer features of SuperMemo. You're basically just reading, but you have at the core of it an SRS (SuperMemo) to store cool ideas in flashcard form and every article (“Topics” is how they are referred to in SuperMemo) will be shown to you at a later date. I like to think of them all on a “conveyor belt” that means everything you put into it will eventually find its way back to you. I love incremental reading but for many years I have struggled to find a way to mimic this OUTSIDE of SuperMemo. The overall peace of mind and level of control I have over the learning process is quite remarkable, and incremental reading is more than just the sum of its parts. I wish there were a standalone app for your phone or iPad for incremental reading, as I would love to use my iPad to do what I do when reading in SuperMemo on my windows laptop.
by Jarwain | 2025-05-19 07:20:33+00:00
So you've got a database ID, either serial or uuid? And you encrypt it when you send it to the user, maybe encrypted against their JWT or something to maintain stateless sessions?

And I guess if the user references specific resources by ID you'd have to translate back? Assuming the session has been maintained correctly,which I guess is a plus for stateful sessions. And it doesn't really matter if you get a collision on the encrypted output.

I spent enough time in the nibling comment talking about my doubts about that advice not to publicly share the identifying key. But I'll add one more point; it feels like a bunch of added complexity for marginal benefit.
by mherrmann | 2025-05-19 07:21:42+00:00
Hm, I'm sorry you feel that way. It's not meant to be mean. On the contrary; Instead of encouraging someone who I feel is going down a wrong path, to me it's kinder to express my view that they aren't. I have personally wasted years of my life on technical projects, and would have been better off if someone had told me that it was a bad idea.
by kortilla | 2025-05-19 07:21:46+00:00
> since they're most obviously stealing a whole lot from the rest of the world.

What definition of “stealing” are you using here?

It seems like it somehow includes owning a large equity stake in a profitable or rapidly growing company since that’s how most people that “make $400mm/year” are actually gaining wealth.

Claiming that is stealing is pretty dumb considering it’s how everyone that holds equity gains wealth. So when does it become stealing?
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-19 07:22:26+00:00
The point you may be missing is that the key itself contains information about records in the database that you don’t have access to. There are many famous examples in literature (e.g. the German Tank Problem [0]) of useful attacks on known unique serials to infer hidden information without access. In a database context, the keys for the records you are authorized to see can tell you much about the parts of the database to which you have no access.

Strong randomization of record serials mitigates these attacks.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
by anal_reactor | 2025-05-19 07:22:43+00:00
> but it lasts 5-10 times longer

I find it such a weird argument. Ok, your furniture from 1900 is still doing great, fantastic. The problems are:

1. Your great-grandfather had a different sense of esthetics, so shit just didn't fit your modern apartment.

2. You moved to a different country, and shipping fees of the furniture were ten times the cost of brand-new chipwood furniture (literally).

3. The furniture was designed with usage in mind that simply doesn't exist in modern world.

4. It was made specifically to fill a certain room. Your new place has a different layout. Deal with it.

These arguments are even more true in the context of technology. "Look, my grandma's black-and-white TV is still working!"... great? I'd rather have a modern 4k OLED, but I guess that's just personal preference. Not to mention how having expensive things makes you a prisoner of these things. If your cat ruins Ikea cabinet, you'll be angry for a day. If your cat ruins your family heirloom, you'll be pissed.
by Youden | 2025-05-19 07:22:53+00:00
A YouTuber reproduced the process: https://youtu.be/CglNRNrMFGM

(The original process is documented in the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476)

I suspect the issue with the other use-cases you mentioned is that it's very rigid. It isn't at all ductile or bendable the way steel is. It would either need to be pressed directly into the shape you need during manufacturing or pressed into a large piece of raw stock then subtractively processed to get the shape you need.

Pressing might be economic for standard profiles like beams but it won't be for pieces like the chassis of a car.

To be clear, "pressing" here doesn't just mean a standard hydraulic press, the press also needs to be heated and the wood needs to be held under pressure for a while. You can't just stamp it the way you can with steel panels.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-19 07:23:47+00:00
>Next, the researchers examined how fitness was associated with the risk of dying in random accidents such as car accidents, drownings and homicides. They chose random accidents because they assumed that there ought to be no association between the men’s fitness in late adolescence and the risk of dying in random accidents.

This is clearly and obviously false though. Even the assumption is kind of ridiculous.

Of course a person with greater general fitness is going to, on average, suffer less severe consequences from a random accident. Including drowning is especially ridiculous, because that is a scenario where greater physical fitness directly contributes to your ability to survive such an accident.

The results can just as well be interpreted in a way that the original thesis is correct, but greater physical fitness also helps protect your body against the consequences of random accidents.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-05-19 07:24:09+00:00
The process sketch in the linked article is soak wood in some unspecified chemicals for a while then compress it (claimed by a factor of 4). Wood is ~400/500 kg/m3 so taken at face value I guess that gives ~1800kg/m3. Pretty much where carbon fibre falls. I'd expect it to be done at elevated temperature too.

I think I'd expect that to work. It's not going to be better than steel, as steel is amazing for a wide range of reasons, but for something in the domain of marine ply / other engineered timber, sure.
by ttctciyf | 2025-05-19 07:24:31+00:00
> So this is my presentation software. It's 25 lines of code. Microsoft Powerpoint is maybe 20 million lines of code; you don't need it.

The speaker then spontaneously decides to demonstrate programming under this paradigm:

> I'm going to tell this piece of paper what to do ... 'when you point up at an object ... that object should be highlighted in, say, green'

Moves paper around, highlighting is performed as requested.

https://youtu.be/PixPSNRDNMU?t=612

Haven't been keeping up with Bret Victor, but that bit was just as surprising and satisfying as his other demos, for me.
by Elaris | 2025-05-19 07:24:48+00:00
I thought this article would tell me about things that wealthy people buy that those of us who aren’t as rich would never even think about. But in the end, it mostly talked about things that are somewhat obvious like how wealth brings access, influence, and luxury. It was interesting, but not as surprising or revealing as I expected. I guess it’s something we can all imagine to some extent, even if we haven’t experienced it firsthand.
by N2yhWNXQN3k9 | 2025-05-19 07:24:57+00:00
These work well, but I wonder about hygiene. I keep mine in a glass dish on my desktop and attempt to cleanse them in hydrogen peroxide on occasion.

Ultimately, surgery is the best option in my experienced opinion, but it also has diminishing returns over time (~20 years in my case). This occurred recently for me, and I am looking to consult with an ENT again, when I feel like taking the recovery leap. With that said, I am still functioning extremely better than I ever did when I couldn't breathe 20 years ago.
by spookie | 2025-05-19 07:25:01+00:00
I don't think the hesitation comes from the boogeyman you speak of, but just relying on someone else other than yourself.

This has further implications than just security. Also, whoever gets into self hosting already wants to not rely on others for the most part. If you didn't go into this for the tinkering aspect, I guess Tailscale is completely ok for most, perhaps even ideal.

Nevertheless, none of this has anything to do with the achievements or not of Tailscale. People saying that your own VPN is ok have a point.
by whstl | 2025-05-19 07:28:16+00:00
Yep. With known software there's always this "learned helplessness" of dismissing problems with "ah yeah, this is how it is". Even when it's quirky, inconsistent or just broken.

With new stuff, the blame will always lay on the new software even in situations where it's lack of skill or attention from the user.

I remember a University I used to work at as a dev moving a few classes of a few loud professors from open source Moodle to a paid product, and professors basically replicating Moodle's discussion board functionality by creating public wikis and hoping students wouldn't mess up when editing.

One day one professor approached me wanting a way to prevent students from messing up the "fake discussion board". He got a mouthful from the Dean who was nearby and was footing the bill of a few thousand per month on the expensive SaaS.
by madaxe_again | 2025-05-19 07:28:25+00:00
Time is indeed a very major thing, but it’s more accessible than most realise - I am only marginally wealthy, high 7/low 8 figures, and that’s ample for me to not need to work for a living and live very comfortably. Frankly, once you have even $1M in free liquid capital, you are in the endgame, as money makes money far more efficiently than labour. I spend perhaps 20 hours a year farting around with our finances, place some bets, and that’s it. I decided to go full on idle-rich when I was still practically a pauper, and have grown my worth significantly since.

Perhaps my sample pool is skewed, but the billionaires and centimillionaires I know live pretty modest lives in general - yes, they fly first class, stay in the best hotels, and all that jazz, but they’re unpretentious, and you wouldn’t know them from the upper middle class family sat at the next table. In fact, one I know regularly gets weird looks because he’ll be in some elite country club in his coffee-stained slacks and threadbare jumper - but there’s the rub - he doesn’t care. The guy who looks rich is probably up to his eyeballs in debt. The guy who looks like the janitor probably owns the place.

I think the single biggest thing wealth buys is not giving a shit what other people think. You don’t have to play status games when you know you’re the big dog in the room, even if nobody else knows it. I mean, I take perverse joy in showing up at places looking like I just crawled out of a gutter, because I know it doesn’t matter - my money is good.
by throw310822 | 2025-05-19 07:28:25+00:00
> neither tariffs nor other trade pressure will get China to abandon the state-driven economic playbook that has worked so well for it and suddenly adopt industrial and trade policies that Americans consider fair.

As if Americans would consider fair any trade policy that threatens the dominance of their country. Entirely understandable, but let's not pretend it's a matter of "fairness".
by norman784 | 2025-05-19 07:28:35+00:00
I remember Andreas saying something along those lines in some interview, but seeing their repo[0] doesn't looks like

C++ 64.6%

HTML 22.4%

JavaScript 11.0%

CMake 0.7%

Objective-C++ 0.5%

Swift 0.3%

Other 0.5%

[0] https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
by collyw | 2025-05-19 07:28:47+00:00
I grabbed a set of flashcard for Spanish verb conjugations. The guy had put in a lot of work to get them in the most frequent order, over 3000 lines of python. It been a massive help to me and I am not sure that writing the code to generate the list would really have helped my Spanish too much.

https://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjuga...
by bencyoung | 2025-05-19 07:29:03+00:00
You can do plenty of experiments to see if you are falling, e.g. hitting the surface of a planet you are falling towards. The event horizon is a surface like any other with a location in space and you can definitely see when you hit it (it's the bit where no light is coming out). And once you've crossed it, literally no EM radiation can move further from the singularity
by bobthepanda | 2025-05-19 07:29:41+00:00
https://www.cesolutionsinc.com/blog/2019/11/20-advantages-cl...

CLT is often faster because you can essentially just prefab it offsite and assemble it significantly faster and with less equipment and specialized workers than reinforced concrete. Steel needs steelworkers, plus concrete takes time to set and cannot be poured in all weather conditions.

While this isn't CLT I would imagine you still get most of the benefits (you can cut it to spec offsite and don't have to do anything special with it when it shows up)
by mellow_observer | 2025-05-19 07:30:29+00:00
I don't think that's likely possible. How would you determine the score? Where would you get your corpus of medieval words? How would you deal with the insane computational complexity?

Pecularities in Voynich also suggest that one to one word mappings are very unlikely to result in well described languages. For instance there's cases of repeated word sequences you don't really see in regular text. There's a lack of extremely common words that you would expect would be neccessary for a word based structured grammar, there's signs that there's at least two 'languages', character distributions within words don't match any known language, etc.

If there still is a real unencoded language in here, it's likely to be entirely different from any known language.
by josephg | 2025-05-19 07:30:44+00:00
Me too. But again, its nice to re-read old notes which are "lost to time". The author of this piece is clearly finding the past is actively influencing the present:

> At least for me — and most of the people I know — we got a garbage dump full of crufty links and pieces of text we hardly ever revisit. And we feel guilty and sad about it.

It'll never work if you can't leave things behind.