MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-05-23 19:23:01+00:00
The article also references another article by the same author about cavitation and propellors, which is studied with water tunnels.[1]

The water tunnel was invented by Sir Charles Parsons. Parsons had invented the compound steam turbine, the long shaft of finned wheels seen inside all modern turbo devices, in 1884. The first turbine product was turbo-generators for power stations. It took a while for demand to build up, since this was only five years after Edison's light bulb demo.

So Parsons decided to try ship propulsion. A prototype boat was built with one turbine and one propeller. Too much power was available, and the propeller was cavitating, spinning in its own self-created vacuum and going nowhere. A demo for the British Admiralty was an embarrassing flop.

This was unexpected. Before Parsons' turbine, nobody had enough engine power to force a propeller into cavitation. Parsons had to start studying propeller design.

So Parsons built the first water tunnel, in Newcastle.[2] There was a closed loop of water, maybe two meters around, and a window to look in at the propeller. Parsons could see the cavitation bubbles.

Having built a debugging tool, Parsons was able to try out propeller designs, and came up with some workable high-speed propellers. So it was time to rebuild the test boat.

That was Turbinia, version 2. One boiler, three turbines, three long propeller shafts, and three propellers on each shaft, spaced over a meter apart. Way overpowered. First boat with serious vroom. Turbinia was far faster than anything else on the water.

Turbinia's public demo went down in history. The British Navy had prepared a huge parade of warships for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee fleet review. The might of the British Empire was shown off to the rest of the world. Everybody who was anybody, including the Queen, was there. Parsons brought Turbinia up behind the fleet and went to full power, turbines screaming. Turbinia zoomed through the columns of ships and disappeared into the distance. Some Navy patrol boats gave chase, but couldn't possibly catch Turbinia.

The British Admiralty wasn't pleased with this. But they couldn't do much. Sir Charles Parsons, son of an Irish lord, was a peer of the realm. He could only be tried by the House of Lords, which was more concerned about British naval superiority than the Admiralty being embarrassed. Also, there's a story that when the Admiralty sent some people over to Parsons' offices to chew him out, the Prussian naval attache was just leaving. Within a few years, Parsons turbines powered two new destroyers, and after that, the entire next generation of naval vessels.

[1] https://jordanwtaylor2.substack.com/p/killer-bubbles

[2] https://research.ncl.ac.uk/marinepropulsion/resources/fundam...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbinia
by AlexandrB | 2025-05-23 19:23:03+00:00
I grew up in Alberta and now live in Ontario and in my mind it's less "fuck Alberta" and more "I don't give a fuck about Alberta". Most Ontarians don't care about Alberta, its well being, or what its citizens want. Perhaps this is inevitable in a country as large as Canada.

A good parallel is America's "flyover country".
by paulorlando | 2025-05-23 19:23:07+00:00
Not sure I understand what you mean. At least, I thought that (most? all?) the churches were closed for the worst part of the French Revolution aftermath.

For example, the new state transformed Notre Dame and other Catholic churches into Temples of Reason, from which the new state religion, the Cult of Reason, would be celebrated. It didn't last long. Hard to create a new religion quickly. Maybe some echoes of recent history there.
by phillipcarter | 2025-05-23 19:23:28+00:00
The thing that a lot of people miss with MCP is that it's the right fit for enterprise software. LLMs, being universal translators, are the ideal glue between many disconnected systems that are extremely hard to connect without some fuzzy layer in between. And so that's why you see so much of the B2B SaaS world rolling out MCP servers, and internally at these companies, they're talking about how to re-jigger their APIs and restrictions for those APIs given different usage patterns.

Yes, the protocol is not necessarily "enterprise ready" by various definitions, but as the author points out, this is not terribly important, and the history of standards shows us that even messy and "bad" things get widespread adoption because they hit the right notes at the right time for the right people.
by elikoga | 2025-05-23 19:23:56+00:00
Potentially relevant:

Show HN: Torch Lens Maker – Differentiable Geometric Optics in PyTorch (63 days ago) 2025-03-21

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43435438

https://victorpoughon.github.io/torchlensmaker/
by empath75 | 2025-05-23 19:24:03+00:00
There's two reasons to use a measurement system -- one of those is for sort of every day work -- cooking, home carpentry and the like, and in that case, having something like the imperial system is nice, because you can divide things usefully.

The _other_ reason to use a measurement system is for doing _science_, and for that, having everything in base ten makes things _immensely_ easier, especially if you're working the math out by hand
by seabird | 2025-05-23 19:24:21+00:00
Is there no culture, or no "culture"?

When you talk to people from a major metropolitan area about culture outside of a major metropolitan area, they're very often not talking about culture. They're talking about entertainment, and a specific kind of it.

I live in semi-rural Michigan and the idea that there's no culture here is just kind of absurd. The culture just doesn't consist of having a constant stream of touring musicians and restaurants for you to spend money on.
by 0xCMP | 2025-05-23 19:25:13+00:00
If you try to open anything with just HTTP on an iOS device (e.g. "Hey, look at this thing I made and have served on the public internet! <link>") it just won't load.

This was my experience sending a link to someone who primarily uses an iPad and is non-technical. They were not going to find/open their Macbook to see the link.
by RHSeeger | 2025-05-23 19:25:52+00:00
With the caveat that I've only really visited a dozen or so states, and only lived in 2, my experience is pretty different than yours.

NYC pizza (and even north of the city) is generally a step above most other places. You can find similar quality pizza most places if you look hard enough, but it's nice being able to stop almost anywhere in NY and get good pizza, better than the best you'll find without having to do real research in most places. The common open-front place in NY has great pizza. Where I am now (suburbs of another fairly large city), I have yet to find a good NYC-style pizza.

Bagels in NY fall into a similar bucket. If you search, you can find good ones elsewhere, but it's downright easy to find good ones in NYC (though that's less true outside NYC/Long Island than it is for pizza).

And man, the black-and-whites. To date, I've never found a good one outside NYC.

Times Square is an experience, not a place you go to shop. And not a place you go to wander around on an average Saturday night. Yeah, it's a tourist trap, but that's the experience it is. It's entertaining to walk around/through; on a rare basis.

I loved working in NYC (I lived about 90 minutes north of it at the time, but didn't need to go in every day, so the commute was less of an issue) and I very much miss living in NYS. Rarely, I'm there on a business trip (it's been years) and I plan my time out so I can have pizza for dinner.
by pvg | 2025-05-23 19:26:13+00:00
but they appear to have made the account just to make that comment

People making accounts so they can talk about their work is one of the best reasons for people to make an account and a big part of what makes HN threads interesting.

people claiming to be official advocates that could do real damage to your company if legal wanted to bone you.

That seems like the opposite of assuming good faith.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-05-23 19:27:02+00:00
I generally agree but strictly speaking I don't think this was yet another canned "chase-your-dream" speech. She went out of her way to elucidate who this was for, and it's ambitious people that are aimlessly coasting.

When you're young, particularly in tech, taking some swings (like with a startup) and not succeeding isn't a long-term detriment. It's a good experience that can help you land other jobs in the worst case.

Which is to say, not all dream-chasing is created equal. If you want to play music, then you need to do a cost-benefit analysis: you will probably not sustain yourself very long, will probably want a dayjob and/or an out at some point, and this is an opportunity cost vs early career traction. If one's ambition only begins and ends with that, then it won't matter so much if what you end up with is "just a job" with lower income potential. All depends on what you're ok with.

The common anecdote is trying to make the big leagues. But consider another: some elite athletes train for years ahead of the Olympics, and then it's all over and they never do it again (most often). Are they screwed? Well it arguably demonstrates discipline and grit and might look impressive on a resume. The lives of ex-Olympians go on. By the same token, someone who never makes the NBA or whatever can get a scholarship ride anyway (which compared to the cost of lifelong training, might be a small victory).

Sometimes optimizing for the early career/education ladder-jumping isn't the "correct" move. But I think it's important that young people understand what's probably at stake
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-23 19:27:04+00:00
> Taxes: $41

> Electric: ~$30

> Water: $0

> Heat: (no, it's really blank)

> Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there, assuming you go to town 3x per week at $2/trip. Multiple options to take the bus to town each day from this location.

> Food: ~$300/mo.

> Telephone: $8/mo

> Entertainment: Fishing and library, free

> Internet: Use library

This author cannot be coming at this from a serious point of view with this absolute embarrassment of a cost breakdown. There is no accounting here for heat (which is sort of important in the middle of "American Siberia"), property taxes, homeowner's insurance, healthcare, or saving for retirement.

> I’ve known men who grow rare Chinese medicinal herbs in greenhouses on a tenth of an acre to sell via the mail; or my uncle, who takes lumber from old barns and crafts it into shelves to sell online.

Damn, I be that would be a lot easier with an Internet connection at home and a smartphone.
by distantsounds | 2025-05-23 19:27:06+00:00
this dude _literally_ wrote about a neighboring town that's dying and the government isn't helping them out. https://shagbark.substack.com/p/obituaryland

Convincing people to move to a remote area while at the same time seeing literal ghost towns develop, is not something I would recommend. What happens when the public utilities fail? The roads need repairing? One of the _many_ blizzard-like seasons can knock out critical infrastructure.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-05-23 19:27:15+00:00
Alberta's lands are part of a treaties that First Nations have with Canada. The literal reserve lands themselves are less relevant than the vast traditional territories that Alberta First Nations are sharing with Canada under some treaty obligation.

I'm not terribly familiar with the minute details of the numbered treaties that cover the area of Alberta, but I am aware from recent reporting that the local First Nations do not see Alberta as having any right to separate and take FN lands with them.
by YZF | 2025-05-23 19:28:27+00:00
What's in this for the oil industry? Not sure that oil companies actively working for separatism makes sense. What would be the consequences if it becomes public that they're doing this?

What sort of pull do the oil companies have over NY Times and other media that's reverberating this?

Money pours in when oil prices are high. That's not exactly under Alberta's control. What happens when there's an energy bear market? What is the push towards alternative energy going to do in the long run? Also Alberta is landlocked which would make exporting oil more difficult if Alberta becomes a country. One of PP's talking point (not wrong IMO) was that not having invested in being able to export to non-US customers was forcing Canada to sell oil for lower prices to the US.

EDIT: another random thought is that a lot of labor in Alberta came from out of the province. How is separating going to impact that?
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-23 19:28:33+00:00
To add to the sibling comment, collecting this wood takes time. I've collected wood the forest service takes down for use in a stove I use but processing all that wood takes time. You bring it home, cut it into small bits, keep it in a dry area to make sure the green wood dries out, and then you meticulously rotate older and newer stock to make sure you use the driest stuff for heating.

If you're living on $432 / month and working 30-40 hours at this cashier job then using your off days to grab and process wood is honestly pretty miserable. There are slums in developing countries with higher standards of living because they can heat their "house" (read: tent or hut) with oil.
by ModernMech | 2025-05-23 19:29:34+00:00
You asked: "how will this affect research", and the answer I gave was that the people doing the research will be forced to leave. From there, you assumed this:

"And they're irreplaceable, I take it."

And then went on to conclude this:

"Sounds pretty fucking racist, really."

So ask yourself... am I sounding racist, or are you just projecting racist sounding things onto me? It's very difficult to discuss anything when when that's your chosen rhetoric.
by MaxBarraclough | 2025-05-23 19:29:40+00:00
> Whatever else Microsoft was, it wasn't a gigantic advertising company that wants to spam us with borderline-scam sales efforts.

True at the time, but spam is now baked into Windows.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/windows-11-has-made-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37208219 )
by stego-tech | 2025-05-23 19:30:14+00:00
Those who promote separatism often have the most to gain from instability. A divided populace is far easier to exploit than a unified one, and the same goes for a fractured government. The UK, the US, Canada, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see more of these overtures from western countries in the decade ahead.

People whose sole skill is exploitation of others always seem to believe they can run the world better than others; it’s why they bankroll these movements.
by boruto | 2025-05-23 19:30:24+00:00
We have a system where each pod spins up around 30 scheduled job instances of one job each processing a "partition", then transaction outbox is queried with hash of identifier equating it to partition.

We increased partition counts on sale days and it works well for us.

Couple of gotchas we had were.

1) Using hashtext from postgres is sketchy.

2) Increasing partiton count is an orchestra which requires stopping the partition.
by MicrosoftShill | 2025-05-23 19:30:29+00:00
It sounds like you need some friends in the maker space or something similar where tinkering in something temporary is normal. I'd say you're among friends in the HN space where tinkerers are more common!

Keep working on your trauma. Don't however think that your healing is a requirement to have friends, love, etc. We are all broken and hurt. We are broken together.
by badc0ffee | 2025-05-23 19:30:41+00:00
> Alberta oilsands oil has the most expensive production costs of any major oil production area, which means they're the marginal producer, the first to shut down

This has not been true for years. Oil sands costs are lower than US shale costs: https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/varcoe-canadian...

The oil sands projects are longer-lived (no need to continually dig new wells), and labour costs have been optimized after the price shock of 2014.
by lucasfcosta | 2025-05-23 19:30:56+00:00
Thanks for writing this, Jessica.

This is a great paragraph:

> If you want to, you can just decide to shift gears at this point, and no one's going to tell you you can't. You can just decide to be more curious, or more responsible, or more energetic, and no one's going to go look up your college grades and say, "Hey, wait a minute, this person's supposed to be a slacker."

I've often seen people get too attached to an unproductive "identity" instead of looking at things as they are. It's way too common for people to fail once and think they're a failure, rather than thinking that they just failed at that particular time.

By the way, I remember meeting you during the S23 batch and how genuinely excited you were to meet us, young founders who were just getting started. It does seem like you found your people!
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-23 19:31:27+00:00
If you feel that I have wasted your time or insulted your person or character, that was not my intention or desire, but I understand that my words may have been interpreted that way. I may be wrong on points of fact through any or no reason, but not intentionally.

If you feel that I called you names because I used the word “concern troll,” that is just what the behavior is called in that context, and does not reflect my views on you as a person. I quite like you generally from what I have read of your output, even if I don’t agree with something. I don’t view disagreement about the guidelines with you as being a personal grievance, so I’m not sure why you feel attacked if I critique HN, but I’ll leave my words there. I respect you, though I don’t know you. I believe that reasonable people can disagree, and I aim to be reasonable here by admitting my mistake in understanding the difference between [flagged][dead] and [dead].

I won’t ask for an apology but I think from context it’s clear that we both feel we’re owed one. You got yours, and if you don’t need it or want it, that’s okay too. If you aren’t satisfied with it, I’m sure I’ll owe you a better one eventually, and I’ll give you that one for the same price as the last.

Are you able to identify anything you might have done differently in this thread? I know I am.

This might feel like snark, but I am really trying to approach this from a place of love for the community you have helped build, perhaps more than any other person. But when you treat me badly, it hurts, and I don’t know if you care or even perceive me at all.

Am I just a “wall of text” to you? I’m a real person, you know, trying to have a genuine interaction with people who care to hear it, not comply with HN guidelines or else.
by jeffbee | 2025-05-23 19:31:33+00:00
I admit the possibility that your idea of culture is a barren plain of consumerism. If that's the case, it's your problem and only you can fix it.

Agglomeration effects are real and there are centers of dance and music around the country that exist in self-reinforcing cycles of training and performance. These scenes come and go but they don't arise by themselves in isolated dying towns.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-05-23 19:31:43+00:00
This is false equivalency.

There is a right wing media machine that generates culture war rage bait 24x7x365.

The right spends a massive amount of time being enraged over things most of them weren't thinking about at all before they were told it was the most important issue in the world and something they needed to be very angry about.

Reality has a left wing bias because the right has abandoned facts.
by kergonath | 2025-05-23 19:31:59+00:00
> For all of the doomsday talk, hand-wringing, and sky-is-falling bluster

You have to be careful about these arguments. A lot of them were post-fact rationalisation by Brexiteers who needed to justify their actions, and they did it by erecting strawmen. Nobody said that the sky would be falling. Nobody sane, anyway. What was said was things like “immigration will happen anyway because the UK has a structural need for manpower”, which is true and immigration is still increasing; “this will create more red tape rather than less”, which it did; “exports will fall and it is our major market”, which they did and it still is; and so on.

If you read actual prospective papers from the time, the warnings were true, give or take the massive spanner in the works that was Covid. The EU did not roll over, and the UK did not get access to the single market without costs. The UK was sidelined and just spent 10 years cap in hand trying to get free trade deals. Fishermen are not better off, far from it. Environment regulations did get to shit. The cost in terms of GDP was massive. Poverty did rise (although it was bound to rise anyway with pre-Brexit policies).

If the whole thing is not a massive self-inflicted shot in the feet, I don’t know what is.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-23 19:32:14+00:00
> but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too.

This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in an urban area and I haven't eaten at a chain restaurant outside of road trips in years. I only eat at chains when I'm on a road trip and need a bite in the middle of nowhere. Once I drop into where I'm staying for vacation off the road trip, I'm eating local restaurants or cooking for myself if I'm out in nature. The fantastic food scene in my area is a huge factor in why I live here.

FWIW one can make the same comment about large US suburban home dwellers. Most of them just store stuff they rarely if ever use. Most of their less frequently used things are in varying states of disrepair and many of these folks would probably be better served by using communal amenities kept in good condition rather than storing sports equipment that they use once every 5 years in a dusty, mothball filled storage closet. Most folks in car-oriented US suburbs use their cars as mobile living rooms and do all sorts of illegal things (like makeup or doomscrolling their phone) in their car and only incidentally use them as transportation vehicles. But that doesn't stem the demand for folks who want to live in these homes.

The fact is, aside from job considerations, there are people who choose their density based on their actual preferences. One set of preferences may seem silly coming from a different set but that doesn't make them right or wrong; it just makes them preferences.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-05-23 19:32:42+00:00
It wouldn't be accurate at all to paint the BC Liberals as a reform party splinter group. While the party was half taken over by conservatives, rats fleeing their own sinking ship, the reality is that the party up until the last leader Falcon was always lead by individuals with strong Federal Liberal party ties. It's always been a right of centre Liberal party and was clearly even more right wing given its big tent coalition status with Fed Conservatives but labelling it as some sort of Reform Party western grievance party is absolutely a step too far.

The boring reality is that the BC NDP occupied all the space on the left and so the only viable space for the Liberals was more right of centre. Should be noted, not at all an unusual space for a Liberal to be. When the conservative Social Credit party imploded the BC Liberals took them on and it became a defacto two party system with the BC Liberals on the right.

The previous leader Clark kicked the can on a Fed Liberal leadership and we can see already from the actions of Carney that the right of centre Fed Liberals are alive and well.