MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tokioyoyo | 2025-05-24 03:16:51+00:00
Don't get me wrong, I don't support it, but at this point, I've heard enough from the upper-stakeholders to get what they're imagining in their head. Basically, think of a system that takes a long list of requirements, then just magically makes a working code out of it. Then automagically takes bug reports, fixes them, and adds it to the list of the requirements. Rinse and repeat to make sure things just work. The higher up you go in the chain of command, the more you realize that, genuinely nobody cares about code quality, engineers and etc. in any of the companies that are not solely tech companies.

Again, the selling point to higher ups is that you won't need to deal with code anymore, because things will just "work". How? I don't know, but that's what they're imagining and trying to cash into.
by ngm7 | 2025-05-24 03:17:04+00:00
I'm slightly surprised excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com/) is not in the comments. I use it regularly to convey ideas to my devs and designers. Plus, it exports to json! Someone wrote a library to convert mermaid to excalidraw as well.

We're now experimenting with creating design questions to ask in interviews with excalidraw/mermaid
by ivm | 2025-05-24 03:17:27+00:00
Exactly, as someone who moved to a rural area (in Chile) a year ago, I can say that you basically pay a shipping tax on everything you need, starting with construction materials themselves.

It's basically that ancap meme of building your own infrastructure: water, electricity, access roads, clearing the vegetation that constantly tries to reclaim your property. I've never owned so many things in my life until I moved here, many of them just to be able to tend the wilderness around me.

But shoveling and cutting things has been an eye-opening experience in terms of how many processes the high-energy urban civilization hides from us. Even with steel/power tools, it’s brutal out there.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-24 03:17:41+00:00
it's just a four step synthesis. with the help of a phd chemist you could probably learn the steps in three months, and if you put your mind to it you could learn the ochem in a year. this project is the culmination of at least a year-maybe even up to three-of work.

whats surprising is that parents let their kids do ochem at 17!! thats some toxic shit :). safety is why chemistry is not a super popular field at high school level science fairs.
by pton_xd | 2025-05-24 03:18:25+00:00
> In fact, you meet plenty of people at a physical labor job like that who are clearly not on a path to being ahead of their peers, or who have been doing the same work for decades since they were a teenager.

At least for me, the experience of doing physical labor alongside people like that as a teenager was a real eye-opener. It showed me exactly what my life might look like if I didn't focus and work toward my goals. That was already my plan, but seeing the alternative first hand was pretty motivating nonetheless (and frightening).
by natmaka | 2025-05-24 03:18:47+00:00
> some level of radioactivity being discharged to the sea is deemed acceptable by experts

Doses now tolerated are way below those of ancient dumps. This is a classic ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison )

I wrote "we are far, far away from the massive (hundred of tons) dumps from the previous era" to subsume it.

Moreover the whole Linear No-Threshold and bioaccumulation of radioisotopes debate is far from settled, therefore some experts judge even low doses too dangerous.

> we should be able to vote on it?

IMHO yes. At the very least every citizen paying for it or exposed to some risk has a vote. Direct democracy and referendums let any of them take part, and experts have to convince a majority.

> need for subsidies and/or guaranteed prices

It mainly is an effect of (past and current) massive subsidies granted to other types of energy sources (nuclear, fossil fuels...), the difficult struggle of incoming quickly evolving tech (photovoltaic, wind turbines...) versus amortized plants, and the insufficient amount of energy-storage deployed equipment.

All those burdens are (slowly, this is heavy industry stuff) vanishing and it (more and more quickly) becomes perceptible: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
by tokioyoyo | 2025-05-24 03:19:51+00:00
Not to me, to anyone who is buying up the solution. We work in very general paradigm of "write code, see something wrong, fix it up, deploy, now it works without that problem". The one that's being desired is "here's list of things i want to work, make it automagically work". How it gets there, doesn't matter, because, only us, engineers, care about code. If it needs to be reimplemented to fix up a bug or introduce a new feature, let it be.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-05-24 03:20:00+00:00
>> The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends

Silicon Valley is not populated by people who are there for family and friends. Silicon Valley is populated by people who left their family and friends to go participate in a gold rush.

Silicon Valley is populated by people from other continents who came to participate in the gold rush, family and friends be damned.

I really don't understand the antipathy towards the fact that you can live on $432 a month in America. I just really don't. With some tradeoffs, you can live on $432 a month in America, and this fact makes some Hacker News commentators very very angry.
by brudgers | 2025-05-24 03:21:03+00:00
it would be much easier to build simply due to a large availability of unskilled labour

Money makes construction easier. For example it facilitates hiring skilled labor (or pays for stainless steel rebar).

The US housing market is shaped by two facts.

1. Housing is just about the “lowest and worst” [1] way to realize returns on real-estate.

2. It is about as hard (and often harder) to build inexpensive housing as expensive housing.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use
by chthonicdaemon | 2025-05-24 03:21:19+00:00
Yes the notes are in a random sequence. The "chords" appear to be chosen as major or minor triads, with random inversions or random "common intervals" like octaves, fifths and fourths, I don't think I've ever come across a tritone or "wierd" intervals.

I have gone through various phases in how it feels to play these random notes. Right at the beginning there is obviously the mechanical skill of just being able to put your fingers in the right place. This is less pronounced on piano than guitar, since single notes on the piano are obviously pretty easy for anyone. But when I switched to chords, I definitely felt the feeling I remember from learning the guitar, where the campfire chord shapes seemed to be just impossible to achieve with my fingers.

Keep in mind that this is not the only thing I'm doing to learn - I am also learning pieces, playing arpeggios and scales and studying music theory. Lately I've been gaining speed on the random notes by identifying runs and reading ahead a bit like you're describing.

I am quite proficient at guitar, played in a band and did a lot of pop music playing where you're handed a lyric sheet with chords and you have to just play. I can do that pretty much without prep. I can also "sight read" tablature for reasonably simple finger picking for novel songs quite a bit faster than I am able to do it on piano at the moment. I could never quite get there for traditional notation although I tried. I struggled to improve because once I knew the piece, I could play it without reading the music. So I would laboriously figure out the fingerings, then just play the piece from memory once I had done that. This was all happening in the early 1990s so I also didn't have the glut of music we would have now. Tablature was much more available for the pieces I wante to learn than traditional notation. I guess there is a mode where you force yourself to only learn new pieces all the time, but I found that pretty frustrating coming from zero.

I'm finding with piano, now that I have the notes in my fingers, that first step is much less frustrating and I can focus on building the mechanical dexterity to execute the phrases and remember the music.
by timr | 2025-05-24 03:22:37+00:00
They aren't doing it on their own. Most of these kids are working with established researchers who give them the shape of the project, as well as the tools and the expertise to accomplish it.

More recently the US scientific funding bodies have had summer programs for kids who wouldn't otherwise get that kind of access, but it's still the exception. It takes more than a summer to do this kind of work.

Edit: quick search for the father's name brings up this professor of biochemistry at UT Tyler:

https://www.uttyler.edu/directory/chemistry/lee-jiyong.php

and mom's name brings up this professor of pharmaceutical science:

https://www.unthsc.edu/college-of-pharmacy/eul-hyun-suh

I don't mean to take anything away from the kid or suggest that they don't work hard, are smart, etc., but these kinds of science fairs are fundamentally about access.
by defrost | 2025-05-24 03:23:54+00:00
> didn’t discover their ambition until after undergrad

I mixed with a lot of very ambitious people at university, some had a clear plan of how to exercise their ambition, not all of those plans worked as intended, many had ambition with no specific plan at that time other than to learn a breadth of useful knowledge, make good connections, take on early work with great networking potential .. and then pivot when they had a better handle on the world as it was at that time a year or three after graduation.

Ambition to succeed doesn't have to come with a specific predetermined path on how to succeed .. there's still room to adapt and morph as one moves forward.
by klooney | 2025-05-24 03:24:00+00:00
All industry everywhere is government subsidized. Germany has always had auto tariffs, and all of German industry heavily benefited from the long term, very cheap piped natural gas deals with Russia.

America's remaining industries are subsidized or protected with significant non trade barriers- medicine, rockets, agriculture, light truck manufacturering, financial services.

Software services are the one industry that mostly seems to stand on its own two feet, but there was a ton of nurturing of that in the past, as well as onerous export controls on cryptography.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-05-24 03:24:44+00:00
It's a good thing you've already decided what answer you want, so you can safely dismiss the generalization of all possible evidence on the basis of "that specific scenario didn't convince me so nothing could possibly happen".

You don't have to predict which exact scenario will go horribly wrong in order to accurately make the general prediction that we all lose, permanently. See, among other things, https://x.com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1894436637054214509 , for a simple example of how myriad superficially unrelated problems can arise out of the underlying issue of misalignment; the problem is not "oh, that one specific thing shouldn't happen", the problem is misalignment with humans.
by aylmao | 2025-05-24 03:25:40+00:00
If Alberta were to separate, I can only imagine it would be to become part of the USA. If Alberta became part of the USA, there would be many factors pushing the North West Territories, the Yukon and British Columbia to follow.

The Northwest Territories and Yukon simply make sense for the USA to want. It connects Alaska, they're relatively unpopulated (which makes annexation easy), and as northern trade routes become more feasible, are strategic for the USA to try to claim.

British Columbia has sizable population, but can it exist as part of Canada, isolated from the rest of Canada?

I think the geography of Canada is fascinating. It has long been a "river country", like Pakistan or Egypt, built around the St. Laurence river [1]. It inherited sizable "extra" territory on the west from the British— territory the Brits kept from the USA back when they were in a position to defend it.

This non-St. Laurence Canada has slowly been populating, but looking at North American maps— from population density [2], to roads [3][4], to railroads [5], it just seems so relatively disconnected at the longitude of Lake Superior. I don't really know if it's possible to build a big city in the Thunder Bay/Nipigon area, but it almost feels like there should be one there.

I get that Ottawa was made the capital in 1857 as a compromise between French and English speaking Canada, but if the USA keeps pushing this rhetoric (and we all know it's the USA behind Alberta separatism), would it be beneficial to move the Capital to Winnipeg? It's closer to the actual center of Canada, which would not only exert more influence on the west, but be a forcing function on east-west connectivity and with it, union.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada#/media/Fi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada#/media/Fi...

[3]: https://www.cec.org/north-american-environmental-atlas/major...

[4]: https://koordinates.com/layer/110462-north-american-roads-20...

[5]: https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/map-rail-canada/
by kragen | 2025-05-24 03:29:16+00:00
But a thing that has remained constant from Classical Athens until maybe 150 years ago is that everyone involved understood that physics was a branch of philosophy. Some of them favored one theory of physics, some favored another, but nobody argued that the other schools of thought on the matter weren't philosophical; they merely disagreed with their philosophical conclusions. Plato and his Academy didn't, as far as anybody knows, consider Aristotle to be a non-philosopher; he presumably considered him ti be mistaken. Even today, if you become formally recognized for your contributions to physics, the recognition comes in the form of naming you a "doctor of philosophy" and calling your work "academic".

There's a current fad for using an incoherent definition of "philosophy" that arbitrarily excludes fields of philosophy such as physics, but hopefully it will end in another century or two.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-24 03:31:31+00:00
Former Meta employee here. Let me explain how other Meta employees do volunteering at Habitat for Humanity "building homes". They show up late, work extra slow, don't know what they're doing, don't take the initiative, don't coordinate with the HfH site leader, leave messes, don't help clean up, and leave early without telling the site leader. Oh, but of course they get the free T-shirt and social media group photo.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-05-24 03:32:05+00:00
I have not seen a single Elixir project that doesn't have a spaghetti mess made out of macros.

You can rant all you want about the disadvantages of OOP and other paradigms. But after your rant, do not come up with an even more absurd type system that gives you even more work to do without any upside.

Building a project out of constructs such as macros does not scale with project size or team size. The only aspect that scales is the resulting size of the unmanageable spaghetti. Tolerating having that as a widely used feature in your language and then praise it as being fantastic truly makes one wonder what are you comparing the Elixir experience with? Elixir is fantastic compared to... fighting 100 gorillas blindfolded.

There are good choices built into the language, like railroad oriented programming. But those will never undo the infinitely awful and inadequate insanity of having to deal with macros to survive.

And to be frank, even if there are use-cases where the language shines and can be excellent tool for the job, most of the time those are not your use-case, and most of the time your team is not familiar with the language enough to leverage its advantages or build something production-worthy.

And if you ever go through the pain of mastering Elixir, 99.99% of the time your next job will not use it. If you are at a startup celebrating the virtues of Elixir before having enough revenue, your next non-Elixir job is closer than you think because your company will run out of money. And if your plan is having a LLM help you write Elixir faster before you burn through your budget? Good luck debugging a labyrinth made out of AI generated macros, your on-call rotation will go great. Your stakeholders will be eager to learn more about how great Elixir is when they ask for an explanation of why nothing works, an estimate of when it will be fixed, why is the project late or how can they add more team members to make it go faster.
by smhanov | 2025-05-24 03:33:18+00:00
I wish WebSequenceDiagrams was further up your list. I guess I have some work to do.

When I made it, nothing like mermaid, plantUML，lucid charts existed. The syntax of most tools was based on Java or graphviz and overly verbose. I was writing an email to a colleague at BlackBerry and wrote out the sequence diagrams as text. I spent the next week making a script to convert it to an image and put it online. Many other tools have since adopted the syntax and I'm happy it has become so widespread.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-24 03:33:33+00:00
You're correct that your DNS queries and answers can set the case bit, but the protocol design always said that while the answers must match the query, the case isn't actually significant. For a long time that's just an obscure Um Actually nerd trivia question, but traditional (before DPRIVE) DNS is very old and is mostly a UDP protocol, so people try to spoof it, let's follow that story:

At first: The only anti-spoof defence provided in DNS is an ID number, initially people are like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... and so the attacker watches you use these IDs then makes you ask a question, "6: A? mybank.example" and simultaneously they answer "6: A 10.20.30.40" before your real DNS server could likely respond - choosing their own IP address. Six is the expected ID, you just got spoofed and will visit their fake bank.

So then: DNS clients get smarter using randomisation for the ID, 23493, 45390, 18301... this helps considerably, but bandwidth is cheap and those IDs are only 16-bit so a bad guy can actually send you 65536 answers and get a 100% success rate with spoofing, or more realistically maybe they send 1000 answers and still have more than 1% success.

Today as a further improvement, we use Paul Vixie's bit 0x20 hack which uses every letter of a DNS label to hide one bit of entropy in the case in addition to the random ID. Now the attacker has to try not only different IDs but different case spellings, A? mYbANk.eXAmpLE or maybe A? MyBANk.EXAMple or A? mybaNK.EXamPLE -- only responses with the right case match, the others are ignored.

So, because of all this security shenanigans, your DNS client knows that case in DNS queries doesn't matter and will do what we want for this purpose.

[Edited: fixed a few typos]
by chthonicdaemon | 2025-05-24 03:33:46+00:00
I'm curious in both of these cases what you are using for feedback. Specifically in the rhythm case, how do you know if you nailed it or just played some other rhythm than was shown by your cards? Did you also generate the sound?

In the case of playing a random piece of music, if you don't know it, again, how do you know how well you've done? I've been contemplating a similar thing with my repertoire playing, choosing a random bar for revision or learning via Anki.

Another thing - it sounded like you already played your instrument well, but wanted sight read, when you were doing this learning. So perhaps you already had a lot of the phrases in your fingers so to speak and this was just allowing you to connect the notation to what you already knew how to play. Do you think this would have worked well in my case where I could play a different instrument but didn't have any mechanical memory of chord shapes, arpeggios and so on in my fingers?
by chrisweekly | 2025-05-24 03:33:52+00:00
I mean the concept of "rainmaking" -- to bring in $, in business terms "make it rain" means generate revenue, earn money, trigger positive economic outcomes. Which seems a far cry from the pejorative use you seemed to be going for. I'm not criticizing, I'm expressing confusion.

Spy agencies don't "rainmake" the American public, that just doesn't make any sense.
by aylmao | 2025-05-24 03:35:17+00:00
They can't be an independent country, because their position is indefensible. Over 3/4ths of their borders would be with Canada— that's enough influence and threat to thwart any separatism. Who do you trade with? How do you keep Canadian troops away?

The only way this could happen is if the only other country Alberta borders, the United States, strongly supports the separation— strongly enough to break ties with Canada over it that is. And if it does, I suspect Alberta wouldn't be independent very long. All trade and most defense would be with and thanks to the United States. It'd be easy for the USA to annex Alberta.
by deadbabe | 2025-05-24 03:35:20+00:00
My fear is that it is the future: A future where innovation stagnates because no one knows how or even wants to do anything anymore that they can’t get from prompting an LLM. Everything humans do will be a prompt interface. Already at work people are lazy as hell, nobody wants to know things, just do things and move on.

Air traffic control? Just have pilots prompt an LLM, there’s already discussions about it due to the lack of people available to work this job.

Legal battles? Prompt LLMs for case studies. Many firms no longer have a need for junior members.

Movies and shows? Prompt LLMs to produce content, no need for elaborate CGI or set designs or costumes.

Someday perhaps there will be a new human art renaissance where people learn to shun LLMs and AI content and once again we will be graced with an abundance soulful human works. We will not live long enough to see those days.
by pod_krad | 2025-05-24 03:36:27+00:00
I disagree. It requires to know Python, YAML, Jinja2, own set of commands. It requires careful developing of playbooks. It is slow. It is complicated for non-standard cases where you don't have ready for using modules.

Is there a better approach? I think yes. This is Pyinfra - just pure Python, no additional DSLs. Also for configuration there is Terraform (but there are also some limitations).
by kragen | 2025-05-24 03:39:16+00:00
It occurs to me that 100 is 2% more than 7×7×2, so you could reasonably approximate 7× (if you didn't know it) as follows. Since 1dB is about 23%, 2% is about 0.09dB, so 98× is about 19.91dB, 49× is about 16.90dB, and so 7× has to be half that: 8.45dB. And so it is.
by mastazi | 2025-05-24 03:39:36+00:00
> About six months ago, I realized that it was probably time to get away from Gandi as a registrar and also SSL provider (reseller).

I've recently heard similar takes about Gandi but I am out of the loop, can someone explain the controversy? Currently using it for one of my domains and I'd like to know more.

EDIT: tried googling but results are about people whose name is either Gandi or Ghandi, could not find much about Gandi the company.
by lacker | 2025-05-24 03:39:41+00:00
This is great, and the ability to "remix" the art with Claude is really neat. I sat down with my son (kindergarten age) and we took turns giving it instructions to see how we could change it. He just wanted to keep going and going, until it was past his bedtime.

All you haters out there, just... play around with it. It's fun. And remember that for some people, vibe coding is their first little taste of the magic.