MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by supermatt | 2025-05-19 04:40:40+00:00
The benefit of Tailscale is that it gives you “lots” of wireguard tunnels that work through NAT with near zero configuration and a central admin interface.

I use a personal plan and have multiple nodes. Desktop, laptop, tablet, phones, docker containers just for me and a couple of raspberry Pis on my families home networks.

Only once have I been “locked out” of a node and that was due to an expired key.

Sure, for just connecting one node to another with a known IP and accessible port it’s overkill, but for anything more complex it an awful lot of awesome for very little effort.
by WalterGR | 2025-05-19 04:41:30+00:00
Well, my understanding is that localized prostate cancers tend to be slow-moving. Hence, depending on patient age, treatment is more likely to harm the patient than the cancer itself, and this has been the situation for some time.

Obviously once cancer has metastasized, it’s a whole other story.

(I’m not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Etc.)
by mrkeen | 2025-05-19 04:41:56+00:00
> Principle of Essential Denotation (PED): A relation should be identified by a natural key that reflects the entity’s essential, domain-defined identity — not by arbitrary or surrogate values.

create table citizen ( national_id national_id primary key, full_name text);

Is national_id really a natural key, or is it someone else's synthetic key? If so, should the owner of that database have opted for a natural key rather than a synthetic key?

More arguments for synthetic over natural keys: https://blog.ploeh.dk/2024/06/03/youll-regret-using-natural-...
by weinzierl | 2025-05-19 04:42:39+00:00
" Every base relation should be in its highest normal form (3, 5 or 6th normal form). "

If I remember my database lessons correctly there is no strictly highest normal form. It progresses from 1NF to BCNF, but above that it is more choosing different trade-offs.

Even below it is always a trade-off with performance and that is why we most of the time aim for 3NF, and sometimes BCNF.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-05-19 04:43:21+00:00
I would like to understand what others are feeling but I do feel less motivated - since the prompt took away the fun in doing things from scratch, research, trial and error and such.

AI, LLMs etc are here to stay. So, I will come around and will start getting motivated eventually - but currently in the trough, and hoping it trends up.
by weinzierl | 2025-05-19 04:45:09+00:00
" Every base relation should be in its highest normal form (3, 5 or 6th normal form). "

If I remember my database lessons correctly there is no strictly highest normal form. It progresses from 1NF to BCNF, but above that it is more choosing different trade-offs.

Even below it is always a trade-off with performance and that is why we most of the time aim for 3NF, and sometimes BCNF.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-05-19 04:45:11+00:00
I like Obsidian.[1] For organization, I like the PARA method.[2] I do also have my addition on top such as "0-Inbox" where un-sorted files lands. Otherwise, search and opening files directly via the keyboard shortcut in Obsidian works most of the times. But that would be just me, I'm known to be pretty organized (people told me many times). Wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me where something is and I'm likely to tell you exactly where to find it. I learned that trick from an uncle growing up.

Steph Ango, CEO of Obsidian, has a nice article on how he uses Obsidian.[3]

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/obsidian/

2. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/

3. https://stephango.com/vault
by shmerl | 2025-05-19 04:45:30+00:00
> Rendering, by comparison, is a huge can of worms. Every platform has their own unique support matrix.

GPU APIs landscape is stuck in the dumb NIH mentality of the '90s because stuck up lock-in proponents refuse to support Vulkan on their walled gardens.

The only recent somewhat positive development about that was MS deciding to use SPIR-V and eventually ditch DXIL. A small step in the right direction, but not really enough yet.
by jstanley | 2025-05-19 04:45:34+00:00
For your specific case: maybe 1 in 10000. Or 1 in 5000 because "11230" would fit just as well.

So about 13 bits of improbability.

But your hypothesis took a lot more than 13 bits to encode! It would be better compressed to say "Just think: 12350. What are the chances?"

That an elaborate explanation can be found to fit a number is not that surprising when you consider how many possible elaborate explanations there are.

See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-ga...
by rendaw | 2025-05-19 04:46:30+00:00
I do think this is something that's relevant to most programmers unlike other commenters -- but the article goes from "counting database IDs" (a good practical use case!) to "integer partitions" and I was immediately lost. No explanation of how those relate to calculating the database ID space, how those fit into the bigger scheme, etc.

I think the article needs to demonstrate to the reader how every section is relevant to them - either by building off a relevant issue discussed in a previous section or tying it to some real world use case.
by grep_name | 2025-05-19 04:48:52+00:00
People definitely sleep on emacs, which is a shame, but I do get it. I switched to emacs fulltime for coding for my work a few years ago, and really had it tailored to my preferences but drift (that took just slightly too long for me to keep up with while on the job) combined with AI features in other editors led me to land on Zed for code, which saddened me but is probably the best fit for coding.

However, Org-Mode is seriously a killer feature that is well worth it on its own. I use emacs to handle all my finances, notes with org-roam, blogging with ox-hugo, dotfiles in a massive org-tangle document, etc. I couldn't find anything remotely to compare it to, and have failed attempts at switching. There are tons of ways of interacting with Emacs that are just lightyears ahead of anything else. Literate programming and tangle are a godsend for tons of different use cases for me as well. I even keep running notes in the base of my codebase so I can hop to various files and capture locations in the relevant files as links in notes.

The only pain point for these tools for me is trying to use them as part of a commandline integration. I really wish org-mode and org-roam's functions were callable outside of emacs, e.g. for automated document generation from org-mode. One of the most painful things I've had to setup is an org-roam-server integration that updates and deploys org-roam-server when the git repo containing its files is updated. Only way to do that seemingly is to run emacs in a very strange way inside of a docker image. Intuitively it feels like org-roam-server should be able to build itself into a static website for deployment. Might seem like a nitpick, but it's really not -- that interface is a huge part of why I use it and not being able to host it without horribly hacky workarounds seems like a massive weakness.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-19 04:51:52+00:00
A lot of people are, in general, in denial of what reduced fertility will bring. Consequences lag effect by decades so it's not exactly a secret what the future will hold. For instance most don't realize that Japan is still in the 'good ole days', relative to what awaits them in the future, even as places like Tokyo start to shrink today.

I also think people don't realize how fast things start happening once they do start happening. For another example there you can approximate the change in population due to fertility (once a fertility rate is shared among a population) as being a scalar on population of fertility_rate/2 every 20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 means each and every woman has 1 child on average, yet nonetheless that means your population ends up declining by 50% every 20 years, exponentially, until you start having a healthy number of children again, or go extinct.

So for a bemusing one one, North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war. And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist. South Korea with their fertility rate of 0.75 will not only see catastrophic population decline, but their entire economy will collapse alongside it. Going from 0.75 to a healthy fertility rate is probably not going to happen, so the North needs to merely wait, and keep having children.
by raphlinus | 2025-05-19 04:52:23+00:00
We tried something like this with piet-gpu-hal. One problem is that spirv-cross is lossy, though gaps in target language support are getting better. For example, a device scoped barrier is just dropped on the floor before Metal 3.2. Atomics are also a source of friction.

But the main problem is not the shader language itself, but the binding model. It's a pretty big mess, and things change as you go in the direction of bindless (descriptor indexing). There are a few approaches to this, certainly reinventing WebGPU is one. Another intriguing approach is blade[1] by Dzmitry Malyshau.

I wish the authors well, but this is a hard road, especially if the goal is to enable more advanced features including compute.

[1]: https://github.com/kvark/blade
by tuatoru | 2025-05-19 04:53:00+00:00
The "natural key" for a (natural) person is compound: full name and mother's full name, plus date, time and place of birth. Your birth certificate is your primary identification document.

However that still runs into problems of nondurability of the key in cultures that delay naming for a few years. To name one problem.

So yeah, use a big enough integer as your key, and have appropriate checks on groups of attributes like this.

However, if you are only interested in citizens, then a "natural" key is the citizen id issued by the government department responsible for doing that. (Citizen is a role played by a natural person so probably doesn't have too many attributes.) I still wouldn't use that as a primary key on the citizen table, though.
by epistasis | 2025-05-19 04:53:54+00:00
This is really great, I'm looking forward to playing with it.

Currently I use a mix of quak (preferred) and itable (if starting fom a colab notebook). It will be interesting to compare for my use cases, which most consist of checking for the distribution of data in a new file, or verifying that a transform I did resulted in the right sort of stuff.
by vineyardmike | 2025-05-19 04:55:24+00:00
You can do that in many institutions, why would you pick an institution with little reputation in these depressed cities?

The entire point is that reputable and well funded institutions with large campuses and thriving social and civic networks are doing fine. It’s small institutions that popped up to satisfy a once growing are being drained as demand falls.

Education is great, expanding your mind is great, but there is little incentive to foreclose other opportunities along the way in pursuit.
by wodenokoto | 2025-05-19 04:55:26+00:00
I think it’s a successful creative endeavor for two reasons:

They took the weaknesses of last years style transfer models and used them as a style, working around and with it’s shortcomings and weaknesses. That is a far cry from “type a prompt and be do e with it”.

Secondly I think the story is fun and the whole thing is fun, not in a will smith eats spaghetti kind of why but fun as in an actually fun short film.

I think it shows that AI can be a tool that empowers creativity and creative work and more than a power point stock photo generator.
by xitang | 2025-05-19 04:55:37+00:00
Thanks for sharing your insights on what you like and don't like about these job boards. Sorry to hear about the frustrations you have to go through. I wish you best of luck and hope you will land your dream position soon.

In the US, some companies (e.g. Pinterest, Dropbox) offer apprentice programs for folks looking to break into tech from non-tech background, not sure if there are equivalents in India. While I can't speak to the situation in India, in the US at least, for folks don't have much SWE job experience, they can also gain experiences via side projects or unpaid internship in smaller company and use it as a stepping stone to build their resume and increase their odds on landing a paid role.
by habi | 2025-05-19 04:55:40+00:00
> low energy, high resolution portable X-ray systems in all sorts of trades for NDT weld inspections

> low energy home medical X-ray systems

The low energy you desire might not be high enough to penetrate the object you want to image, either a weld to inspect, the blacksmiths bespoke object or the human. For imaging human tissue you want high energy for less radiation dose in the patient. That’s why x-rays are filtered by some mm of aluminum before imaging a patient. These filtered lower energy photons would be absorbed in the patient anyways.
by rawgabbit | 2025-05-19 04:55:45+00:00
I was going to comment on this. Natural keys sound like a good idea and they should enforced maybe by using a unique constraint.

Natural keys are important. But the real world and the databases that represent them are messy. People’s identities get stolen. Data entry mistakes and integration between systems fail and leave the data in a schizophrenic state.

In my experience I find arguments about natural keys unproductive. I usually try to steer the conversation to the scenarios I mentioned above. Those who listen to me will have a combination of synthetic and natural keys. The first is used to represent system state. The second is used to represent business processes.
by xlii | 2025-05-19 04:56:19+00:00
Lately I’ve been exploring zig and outside of painfully underdeveloped documentation I haven’t had so much fun with types (of comptime) for the long time.

I find it much more ergonomic than Rust and less energy draining than OCaml.

Then there’s pattern matching, but IMO Elixir is heading in the wrong direction. Erlang has accumulated dust over the decades. Clojure is very interesting choice because it can do both „comptime” (i.e. macros) and pattern matching.
by vintermann | 2025-05-19 05:01:30+00:00
Yeah, my immediate thought when reading this was that it's great they've replaced a formula with a better formula, but couldn't it be replaced by something smart? An LLM could in theory be content-aware, taking into account that this card reinforces these associations, which makes this other card easier to recall but this third card harder to recall. And it may even be able to say, this card is related to a more central concept, it should get priority because that will help in the longer run.

In the long run, the appeal of machine learning to me is that we can move up the stack of what we optimize for, so instead of targeting a proxy metric, say a certain recall ratio, we might actually be able to target directly the thing we care about, say ability to use these things in practice. Moving upwards in the teleological hierarchy.
by ascorbic | 2025-05-19 05:04:20+00:00
That's not what the reserve requirement means. In this example it means the bank needs to reserve 10% of the deposit, so it can lend $90 to Bob. Now Bob can then deposit that money with another bank, which can then lend it out and so forth, giving a compounded effect on the whole banking system a lot beyond that, but the bank can still only lend $90 backed by that deposit.
by jeffrallen | 2025-05-19 05:05:40+00:00
I often find myself smiling and joking with novices as I meet them coming back from a dead end, "yup, that's exactly the problem I suspected you'd have, now let's see how and why it happens, and how to move forward".

There might be some situations and some people for whom this would be immensely irritating, but for the moment as far as I can tell, it's going ok with my novices. But your essay opened up a reflection in me about how people perceive this and if I need to tone it down. Thanks!
by florbnit | 2025-05-19 05:06:22+00:00
It’s funny how emotional responses questions like this become on part of the people answering everything but the question. If some one asks in a sports forum what the best exercises are that pro tennis players do that novices don’t know about you wouldn’t expect the majority of answers being in the line of “Tennis players never experience true love! If all you have is tennis you’ll be depressed!”
by sapphicsnail | 2025-05-19 05:06:58+00:00
I remember when Reddit blew up I started meeting people that had really specific bits of information, stuff that I would normally only see from someone with some sort of domain expertise, but were oblivious to the context in which that knowledge was produced and couldn't really do anything other than regurgitate the info. Really curious to see the sort of brain rot LLMs will bring.
by dang | 2025-05-19 05:08:47+00:00
We've banned this account for repeatedly abusing the site guidelines and ignoring our many requests to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43009383 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43009374 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41121266 (July 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40979059 (July 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38623345 (Dec 2023)
by nyokodo | 2025-05-19 05:10:34+00:00
> And North Korea is going to win, simply by continuing to exist.

Except their fertility is below replacement also and as a poverty stricken repressive regime that relies on food aid from South Korea, China, and probably Russia lately the latter having their own terminal demographic crises… they might not out-survive the south for long.

1. https://www.newsweek.com/how-north-korea-news-births-compare...
by wormius | 2025-05-19 05:12:48+00:00
Using Cachy after testing some distros. I tried Nobara but it was too limited. Before this I've used Debian based distros (ubuntu, debian), Redhat/RPM (Redhat, Mandrake, OpenSuSe) and even Gentoo.

So far I really like Cachy. It's been great for the bit of gaming I do. I had a bit of audio grief, but installing a different kernel seemed to have fixed the issue. Overall I'm pretty damn happy with it. It was much easier than default Arch. I tried Endeavour and though it was nice, there was something about it I didn't quite like (I don't recall what). I'm off Windows entirely - between shoving their AI stuff and Ads everywhere, after decades of off and on use, Linux is my forever home.

And yeah, KDE is pretty nice and solid now.
by wahern | 2025-05-19 05:12:53+00:00
But Social Security solvency isn't the only thing that needs to be addressed. Medicare, for example.

Considering that the population has decided it doesn't want any more significant immigration, ensuring the median age (along with median working age) will increase faster than lifespans, it seems foolhardy to think we can have our cake and eat it, too. Any kind of tax increase is a difficult sell.[1] If we can successfully raise the limit on payroll taxes, we better make it count. Note that social security disability benefits exist and presumably would remain an option for those unable to work.

That said, I appreciate you pointing that out. I hadn't realized how much revenue there was still to be had in lifting the payroll cap, at least according to https://crr.bc.edu/to-fix-social-security-increasing-the-wag...

[1] How quickly the left forgets that the president who pushed through devastating tax cuts in 2018 was just recently re-elected.
by xlii | 2025-05-19 05:13:02+00:00
I have a joke in context that I often like to tell:

Devil captured Physicist, Engineer and Mathematician. He gave each of them big can of spam and locked them in the empty room saying „you will be here for 2 weeks - open the can and survive or die to starvation”. After 2 weeks Devil opens Physicist cell. It’s covered floor to the ceiling in complex scribbles. One piece of wall is clean of etching but small dent is visible. Can of span is opened and eaten clean, Physicist sits in corner visibly annoyed. Next one is Engineer. Cell walls are covered in multiple dents and pieces of spam. Engineer is bruised almost as much as the can, but it is ultimately opened and engineer is alive.

Finally the Devil opens Mathematician cell and find him dead. Only „given the cylinder” is etched on the wall.

—-

Puent isn’t about engineering but it always helped me to set limits between software engineering and computer science.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-19 05:13:15+00:00
Interesting, thank you. I have heard of using dissolved ABS as a bed adhesive but I thought there were some other issues with that aside from the damage to PEI?

Yep, plastic composition is a big concern and it is pretty annoying how the major manufacturers don't tell you exactly what's in their plastics. I suspect part of the problem is that many of them buy cheap material in bulk and they often don't know the finer details themselves.

Thanks for mentioning the nozzle wear, I should track that for sure.
by Vecr | 2025-05-19 05:13:41+00:00
> the optimum is a bit thicker than our guidance suggests

That's probably confounded. Anything over a BMI of 23 better be an increasing proportion of muscle, and even then there's a point that the stress on the heart isn't worth it.

Almost every physical and mental heath condition does bad things to nutrition and internal energy stores, even if only at a diet level.

It's hard to see since so many people are overweight or obese to start with, but the overall correlation goes that way enough to cause confounding.
by dzink | 2025-05-19 05:14:30+00:00
It happened several years ago - when Conor was holding talks on Clubhouse. I had created an account with a few test notes and went back days later. The notes were not listed or linked anywhere. The person’s email or name was showing in the log but he was not even outed as an employee on linkedin at the time - so I originally thought someone has hacked my account or was accidentally given access to my notes. Then I asked the founder or the person and they said it was a new employee. I have screenshots somewhere but I don’t remember how i reached out to them - if it was a service chat, or email, or twitter, or clubhouse. I always check the network chatter on new sites I use - very enlightening about what they think of customers. A lot of times you see flags for things they want you or don’t want you to be, or what they want to upsell to you. Reactive sites put all kinds of logic in the front end where it doesn’t belong.
by godelski | 2025-05-19 05:14:37+00:00
> I've begun to think that there might be something fundamentally groady about basing assumptions of intelligence on appearance

I find this odd to hear. Not because I think we should base our opinions on someone's appearance but because I thought it was a common belief that we shouldn't. Or rather that you would be committing a faux pas by making such a statement publicly. That people at least wanted to paint the image of themselves as upholding this virtue, despite it being clear that society operated under such biases.

Growing up (American millennial) it was routine to see public service announcements to tell people to not judge others by their appearance. It was the lesson of not just children shows but a frequent trope in popular movies. Such as James Bond entering a fancy resort looking like a homeless man, being treated as such by some staff, only for that staff member to be chastised for not treating him with the upmost respect. "Don't judge a book by its cover". "The ugly duckling".

Have things changed? Is this no longer a social taboo? To at least feign this virtue?