MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by onecommentman | 2025-05-24 02:18:09+00:00
This is my thesis about the size of where you live. There are three types of people:

1. People who like the mega cities/metastacities. They genuinely enjoy the idea that they could never “fit into their head” the city in which they live. It’s just too big. You can never possibly exhaust all the possibilities, much less keep up with all of the changes. They can be intensely loyal to their abstract city, abstract because they can never physically/socially experience the entire city, so it mostly exists only in their head. But the endless horizon of that abstract city is where they really live, and why they like it so much. Never boring…of course neither is a war zone.

2. Smaller right-sized cities, defined as cities/regions that you can just about fit into your head. Big enough that they are rarely boring, especially if you take advantage of the third dimension of time/local history. But small enough that you can experience the coziness and stability of fully living in that one space…in other words, a home.

3. Smaller towns of which you can exhaust the possibilities in just a few years. If you grok the place, it is supremely cozy, and you can deepen the sense of that by raising a family and becoming (an old phrase) a pillar of the community. You go deep socially instead of craning your neck across an endlessly broad horizon. You also have the third dimension of time/local history. And you have the additional option of defining your location not just as the small town, but rather a whole surrounding region as your actual home. For Americans this is easily an area of 60-100 miles/100-160 km radius, given our love affair with the automobile. That regional view then gets you into the second level of a small city, enough stimulation so it’s rarely boring.

And there’s always cyberspace. The small town life isn’t so extremely different when that part that is online is so similar for everyone, big city or small town.

For extremely different, try 19th Century Western life, or 20th Century non-Western life.
by thayne | 2025-05-24 02:18:13+00:00
Your example uses s-expressions, not canonical s-expressions. Canonical s expressions[1] is basically a binary format. Each atom/string is prefixed by a decimal length of the string and a colon. It's advantage over regular s expressions is that there is no need to escape or quote strings with whitespace, and there is only a single possible representation for a given data structure. The disadvantage is it is much harder to write and read by humans.

As for s-expressions vs json, there are pros and cons to each. S-expressions don't have any way to encode type information in the data itself, you need a schema to know if a certain value should be treated as a number or a string. And it's subjective which is more readable.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_S-expressions
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-24 02:19:23+00:00
Delayed adulthood is a real thing. Even 25 years ago many/most high school kids have after school and/or summer jobs. Now it is almost unheard of.

Their entire young lives are structured, parentally planned and resume padding. Then theres stuff like college admission consultants which have become very normalized, with allegedly 26% of parents hiring them per some study.

I worked from 14, had a crappy retail job throughout high school and my college prep was the $20 Kaplan CD lol. Whatever sports I played were the $50/season local league your parents drop you off at a couple nights a week. And my parents weren't poor, they were totally normal upper middle class low 6 figure earnings.

Nowadays the above is akin to smoking on an airplane with a baby in your lap.
by shawnz | 2025-05-24 02:19:28+00:00
I totally agree and I beg you to consider this feedback if you are reading @pamelafox.

The biggest problem with the usability of Microsoft products today is short-sighted thinking. New features, platforms, frameworks etc are launched and then forgotten about just a few years later with no effort to tie into the groundwork of what came before.

You might think this is only a problem for old customers who are already accustomed to the old technologies, but that's not true: it burdens new customers too. There's a few reasons for this that I can think of.

1) It's hard for new customers to know what technologies they should be reaching for in what situations when there's so many different choices.

2) It's hard to find the right documentation for the technology you've picked because you have to browse through a ton of out-of-date documentation that wrongly refers to the deprecated technologies and it's not clear what the current recommendations are.

3) The new stuff is often built without consideration for the ways of thinking that the underlying platform was built with. Thus, you end up with weird idiosyncrasies as you move from one technology to another, which make it hard to learn and hard to use.

4) When you replace the old technologies you lose the benefit of community knowledge on platforms like Stack Overflow, you lose the ability to look at existing open-source projects for guidance, etc. You are basically going into uncharted territory where there are no clearly established patterns in the wild.

So, even new users coming on to your platform suffer from these deficits. That's not to say I don't appreciate all the work on these new powerful technologies like VS Code and .NET Platform and so on, but I think a more long-sighted vision for these products would go a long way. And it's not just a matter of looking forward, since you never know what's going to happen in the future with a product as organizational priorities change. It's also a matter of looking backwards at what came before, at what groundwork was laid by previous efforts, and how it can be best taken advantage of and re-used for future efforts. That is the biggest missing piece at Microsoft today in my opinion.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-24 02:20:18+00:00
That a browser either maintain your own entire browser engine or you can't support additional types of extensions is a false dichotomy. Vivaldi chooses nto to support it just as much as the choose to integrate VPN, an email client, RSS, Atom, a completely custom UI, and probably other things I'm forgetting that Chromium doesn't ship for them.

What is changing is what Chromium will maintain, what Vivaldi decides to continue supporting is their own choice. My guess is it will be more random crap as well, but not because Chromium is/isn't supporting those things.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-24 02:20:58+00:00
at least according to these people [0], you can overdose on morphine, same as any opiate or opioid. not sure their credentials but it makes sense; it's an opioid/opiate and those can cause respiratory depression.

[0]https://www.addictiongroup.org/drugs/opioids/morphine/overdo...
by chongli | 2025-05-24 02:23:43+00:00
There is a big inefficiency in construction markets but it's not in materials, it's in labour. Immigration laws starve construction companies of workers. With unfettered immigration it would be much easier to build simply due to a large availability of unskilled labour. The other side of the coin is of course planning, zoning approval, codes, bylaws, and other regulations that slow down construction projects and discourage development.

We've made it very hard to build because we really don't want to build. Homeowners are mostly interested in protecting their investment which means keeping housing demand high.
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-24 02:24:40+00:00
The weird thing with quant finance is that it basically started as a bunch of misfits from other disciplines. Mostly sub departments at banks and some funds no one ever heard of.

Now its a well trodden career path with specialized degree programs targeting it, online forums full of 16 year old aspirational hardos discussing which college to apply to in order to get into job 1 which leads to job 2 which leads to.. So again, train tracks.

Old quants are an interesting bunch to talk to. Guys who worked in plasma physics or are serious musicians or classically trained philosophy backgrounds, etc.

Now every grad resume I see for job openings looks exactly the same. I no longer deal with grad/intern programs thankfully.
by ggm | 2025-05-24 02:25:02+00:00
I worked next door to one in UQ. It was cobbled together from structurally strong steel parts, said to include former gun barrels, and major mining equipment prop shafts. I still have a pressure plate diaphragm, explosively burst like a bubble when the air is forced through it to make the hypersonic shock wave. The chamber is big enough for a wee 1/72nd scale model thing: typically a ramjet engine.

I used to have a teletype 33 from the same lab. At the end, it was only being used to submit orders to university Central stores for cleaning products.
by rtpg | 2025-05-24 02:25:30+00:00
Plenty of PC98 games out there that are just pure smut and assault fantasies.

You could make an argument about the production environments of "actual real person" pornography but if you're talking about aesthetics and morality of the end product? I dunno... tough sell to me for a "random" one.

Plenty of "real art" PC98 stuff too ofc (there are also of course people on the record saying "we put stuff in here so we could sell our RPG" and the like... market demands).
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-24 02:25:51+00:00
Right. Essentially, before the Enlightenment systems of weights and measures didn't exist in the standardized way we know it today—measurements traceable to national/international standards, etc.

That's not to say local standards—let's call them weights and measures—weren't strictly adhered to and enforced. They were. There are many recorded instances from history to illustrate the point from, say, Archimedes' eureka moment to that of the obsessive and overzealous Issac Newton† when Warden of the Royal Mint was roaming around London checking for clipped coins and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

I'm fiercely pro-metric, and I've had much to say on the matter on HN over the years. So I'm used to the guns coming out from those in the US defending the Imperial system. I've good reason, at school I learned the Imperial system, CGS and MKS (it was before SI). In say physics learning to do things fluently in three different systems was a recipe for mistakes and confusion.

At the risk of repeating myself (link below), learning foot poundals, dynes and Newtons was bad enough but to have to convert between them in exams really was pretty rotten. The other reasons I've also menrioned, I've sat on standards committees and have writtern standards (nothing as illustrious as the ISO but it was for an intergovernmental organization nonetheless). Writing standards is often a tedious thankless task (I don't have to tell you people don't read them for the fun of it).

The link below is me getting worked up on HN over the metric system over a number of rolling posts, and it's not the first. I've referred to it here more for the sake of completeness than anything else. (I don't like rereading my old posts so I don't expect others to do so.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43880977

† Newton. Not exactly weights and measures but a well documented case: https://coinsandhistoryfoundation.org/2021/04/30/sir-isaac-n...
by babyent | 2025-05-24 02:26:06+00:00
I agree with this so much.

You really do need to treat your friends as a revolving/evolving Rolodex.

Get rid of “friends”/people who hold you back. Their problems are not your problems. You have your own goal in life. They can deal with their own problems, and maturity is realizing it’s up to the individual to change.

Get friends in your life who add value to your life. These will be hard to find, but once you have such friends they are friends for life. These are people who are riding the same wave as you, who yearn for better waves. They love the sport of life.

I don’t talk to anyone I went to college with because I realized they’re not on the same wavelength. I’m not interested in cruising through life. They didn’t really add value to my life, and I didn’t want to be bored or annoyed. I’m talking nihilistic people who are ok with just status quo. Yuck!

The friends I’ve made since have improved my life. They’ve shown me how to really make the most out of life. Challenging myself to be better, and they’re smarter than me which is encouraging as well.

I have maybe a dozen close friends. I’m glad that I’m one of their close friends too.

Sorry if I sounded harsh ESL btw.
by rezmason | 2025-05-24 02:29:57+00:00
> ...[A]t the Ust’-Polui site near Salekhard, on the Ob River, archaeologists have found beads... believed to have originated in the Roman Empire or from Parthian production centres

Aw man, I would set a one-way time machine to a 2nd Century Parthian bead production center for the ASMR alone. If I ever got bored I could just hitchhike to Alaska.
by nebula8804 | 2025-05-24 02:30:45+00:00
Again like I said:

>Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.

Most of the people granted "free speech" on post-Musk twitter are still the same losers. Thats why they have so much time to complain about something that they think they have a say in. There is nothing more important going on in their lives/communities.

Conservatives are the defacto minorities in a modern western country.

They don't set the culture: ex: people visiting the US go to NYC & LA not Nebraska and Alabama, movies are dictates by the new ideas coming out of liberal circles, all conservative movies need to be subsidized.

They don't develop the innovations that keep the country ahead: ex: Texas, no matter how hard they try, is still second fiddle to SF and all these big companies they love to brag about (Tesla) started in CA.

They can hem and haw how much they hate that institutions like Harvard drag the country forward but in the end these whiners don't really have any long term lasting power because they are looking backwards, not forward.

Lets talk about a hypothetical: They actually manage to destroy Harvard. They are destroying the thing that gives them any say on the world stage. They may feel like they won but they will sink. The US is only 5% of the world population the rest of the world as much as they even care anymore about the US only look to their progressive institutions...not their backwater losers. Why would they?
by pseudo0 | 2025-05-24 02:31:23+00:00
They had the NSFW detection dialed up to the point where it would flag a bit of cleavage as inappropriate for real person depictions. They were very on top of this issue and really wanted to avoid any bad press over "deepfakes".

Characters are a bit tricky. For example, Lara Croft could refer to the fictional video game character, or the character in the movie played by Angelina Jolie. They allowed the former, but not the latter. Or a model trained on the concept of "Hermione Granger" from fan art would be allowed, but not a LoRA trained on Emma Watson from the movies. That seemed like a pretty reasonable position to take.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-24 02:32:18+00:00
> As far as I'm concerned, you are basically mentally stunted if you didn't work for pay in your teenage years.

I worked a teenage job, too. Physical labor.

It was a learning experience, but I don’t see it as this life changing pivot point that separated me from others. 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.

I also know plenty of people who didn’t have any jobs until they graduated college and they turned out fine.

I think some of the lofty claims about teenage jobs being life changing or how teens who don’t get jobs are “mentally stunted” are getting absurd.

It reads like people who have developed a chip on their shoulder about their own upbringings being superior to others because they were more difficult.
by fatbird | 2025-05-24 02:33:03+00:00
> Nations and identities can form on their own, brand new, and don't require an appeal to some prior legal entity.

Fair, in theory. In practice, it's a bit silly when the roots of western separatism are an economic policy from 50 years prior, and the fact the BC won't play ball on all the pipelines AB wants to build to the coast.

I think the analogy to parental emancipation is actually pretty good just because it does happen. It's a thing. And when Quebec came within 1% of separating in the 1995 referendum, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that a unilateral declaration of independence would be illegal, but that the federal gov't would be required to negotiate a separation in good faith.

> Alabama and Mississippi were created within the US by Congress

Yes, but in doing so they were granted the same sovereign status as existing states. Alberta's relation to the federal gov't is the same as any American city's to the state in which it's located. If Pittsburgh wanted to separate from PA, what would that be like?
by starkparker | 2025-05-24 02:33:13+00:00
That's the other unspoken side of the boomer-emulation argument, too. People's access to the world when boomers were buying houses and raising families was much less. Their families and friends were already close because few, if any, of them left where they were from (except to get drafted into wars). In some of those who left, they did so to enable the rest to follow.

These things just don't happen anymore. To find better work (especially outside of tech), people move, some constantly. Siblings wind up across the country or further from each other and where they grew up. Elders are either left behind or move into retirement homes.

There are exceptions, and those who keep some of that support network find the real boomer superpowers of sharing costs (financial, time, and labor alike) and inheriting wealth. But the ease with which people could leave home for good is one of many factors that make emulating boomers difficult, if not impossible: that rural cheap house isn't 10 minutes from the rest of your family, your childhood friends, and your co-workers anymore.
by arkadiyt | 2025-05-24 02:33:19+00:00
> does a 4096 not give you more security against passive capture and future decrypting?

If the server was using a key exchange that did not support forward secrecy then yes. But:

% echo | openssl s_client -connect rachelbythebay.com:443 2>/dev/null | grep Cipher New, TLSv1.2, Cipher is ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 Cipher : ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384

^ they're using ECDHE (elliptic curve diffie hellman), which is providing forward secrecy.
by dustbunny | 2025-05-24 02:33:24+00:00
BC is liberal yes.

BC, Quebec and the federal government have prevented further oil industry development while enjoying Alberta tax revenue from said oil industry. That's the basic gripe. And as far as I can tell, it's true.

The whole country is pro-oil now because we've realized we need to be stronger. This election cycle was drastically different compared to the last one which was completely about "climate change". Which was ridiculous imo.

Seperatism is bad, but being pro-Alberta is good. Being pro-Canadian oil and infrastructure development is good.
by msephton | 2025-05-24 02:33:27+00:00
Not in Japan, you can see how the dithering was done in the video I link below, which was taken from promo footage of one of the most famous period Japanese paint apps for PC-98: Multi Paint System (1992, by Woody_RINN). The artist would paint two colours and then use a dither blend tool along the contrasting edge. https://youtu.be/nIdFor2WOnw?t=430

I'm sure some people did it pixel-by-pixel, but not so much in Japan where the software was designed to make dithering like this very easy.

You can find my big list of Japanese pixel art apps at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41136905
by bookmtn | 2025-05-24 02:34:43+00:00
"The Challenge" ("Vyzov" in Russian), is a 2023 space drama film shot on the International Space Station. It's the first feature-length film with actors shot in space. According to its IMDB page, the movie follows a surgeon who flies to the ISS to save a cosmonaut who suffers a heart attack.

Article excerpt from: https://www.floridatoday.com/story/news/2025/05/21/tom-cruis...
by 0x445442 | 2025-05-24 02:36:42+00:00
A real issue until recently, with remote work as an option, was the lack of opportunity to pursue more intellectual forms of work in a small rural area. I grew up raising cattle and a number of my extended family members were loggers. However, I had an aptitude for science and math and was bitten by the programming bug when I was a teenager. I didn't leave my rural community for fame and fortune but for work that was more interesting to me.

That said, now that I'm near the end of my career I've taken full advantage of remote work by moving to a rural area while maintaining similar pay. Honestly I don't know why more people haven't taken advantage of this significant arbitrage opportunity. To each his own.
by djtango | 2025-05-24 02:37:32+00:00
The key synthetic step using Ir was published after I graduated (and left Chemistry...) way to make me feel old :)

I'm very impressed by the level of chemistry demonstrated by a 17 year old. During my time as a chemistry student this level of project and synthesis probably could have been included as a chunk of a master's thesis. Did she perform all the synthesis herself? That takes a decent amount of experimental skill and more importantly what lab did she do all of this in?

Any uni ought to be delighted to get a precocious talent like this!
by cryptonector | 2025-05-24 02:38:55+00:00
I'm tempted to build something similar (because I can't use GPL libraries at $WORK and I also can't use PostgREST for reasons), but somewhere between what you do in Aquameta and what PostgREST does, with as much logic as possible in SQL or PlPgSQL.

Basically I'd have a thin HTTP/REST layer that does a set_config() for every request header and q-param, and which compiles the resource path to a SELECT (for GETs) or a DML (for POST/PUT/DELETE/PATCH), with similar restrictions to PostgREST, though perhaps a bit more liberal.

For DMLs the local-part would have to be just a table/view, or a function call (what to do with the request body in the case of a function call? reject it).

For a GET... I've ideas. The simplest would be to have a very simple "language" to compile to SQL, not too unlike PostgREST. The craziest one would be to have a transliteration of literal-value-free (certainly no strings, no quotes, no arrays, no row values, maybe only just integer and boolean literals) SQL statements to local-part, and the code to convert it back to a SELECT would parse the query and make sure it uses no tables/views/functions outside the public schema (and if functions, only ones marked pure), with q-params as... query parameters -- no SQL injection attacks here.

As in PostgREST the SQL code in the database (but not the caller's SQL) could set_config() things like response headers and status-code. Authentication would be done via SECURITY DEFINER functions that consume whatever Negotiate or Bearer token in the Authorization: header and SET the session role (which would always get RESET before the next request).

Except for the need for a parser for validating any queries (for the "crazy" design, if I go there) this would make the Java/Go/Rust/Whatever code quite simple, and w/o requiring any dynamic SQL in the DB.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-24 02:41:19+00:00
Sounds really good. Your vision is excellent, and I admire it and your work.

BTW, it's very important to get the details of authentication and authorization right. PostgREST does: it validates JWTs and exposes the claims to the SQL application via set_config()s, just like every detail of every request, and it does a `SET` to set the role to whatever the authenticated user is, though this could be done by a SECURITY DEFINER function instead that looks at the claims.