MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phs318u | 2025-05-14 01:20:38+00:00
Beaming power down to Earth from space-based solar collectors is a concept that's been around for a while.

"Dr. Glaser is best known as the inventor of the Solar Power Satellite concept, which he first presented in the journal Science for November 22, 1968 (“Power from the Sun: It’s Future”). In 1973 he was granted a U.S. patent on the Solar Power Satellite to supply power from space for use on the Earth."

One thing that always struck me was that you wouldn't want to be living near the "collectors". A very small angular error in beaming could result in being literally microwaved.

https://nss.org/in-memoriam-peter-e-glaser-1923-2014/
by neaden | 2025-05-14 01:20:38+00:00
Most organisms, including pathogens, have a relatively narrow temperature range they operate in. Hence why we get fevers in order to fight them off. Bats spend most of the time too cold, then get up to the equivalent of a high grade fever for an extended time. Here's a paper on the subject https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4012789/
by mplanchard | 2025-05-14 01:22:21+00:00
The biggest thing I’ve run into where I really want self-referential types is for work that I want to perform once and then cache, while still needing access to the original data.

An example: parsing a cookie header to get cookie names and values.

In that case, I settled on storing indexes indicating the ranges of each key and value instead of string slices, but it’s obviously a bit more error prone and hard to read. Benchmarking showed this to be almost twice as fast as cloning the values out into owned strings, so it was worth it, given it is in a hot path.

I do wish it were easier though. I know there are ways around this with Pin, but it’s very confusing IMO, and still you have to work with pointers rather than just having a &str.
by vel0city | 2025-05-14 01:22:23+00:00
And yet doing an ipconfig or netsh wlan show interfaces isn't always instantaneous depending on your hardware and the rest of your configuration. I can't tell you what all it's actually doing under the hood, but I've definitely seen variations of performance on different hardware.

Sometimes the devices and drivers just suck. Sometimes it's not the software's fault it's running at 43fps.

I'm hitting the little quick settings area on my exceptionally cheap and old personal laptop. I haven't experienced that slowness once. Once again I imagine the other stuff running interrupting all the OS calls and what not loading this information causes it to be slow.
by jamroom | 2025-05-14 01:22:32+00:00
My experience with people who "don't like the taste of coffee" usually has been that they don't like how bitter and strong the taste is, which is almost always tasting the "roast" instead of the bean. Single origin light roast is the way to go if you want a really good non-coffee tasting cup of coffee. My recommendation is central america single origin (Guatamala, Costa Rica, etc) - the beans from this region tend to lean towards caramel / chocolate / hazelnut tastes which goes a long way in getting non-coffee lovers to like a cup of coffee.
by moeenmiri | 2025-05-14 01:22:47+00:00
TLDR: It should be much easier to get quick insights. Like I mentioned in my other comment, just listing vote history isn’t enough—most people won’t take the time to dig into each bill and tally votes. Why not have an AI agent summarize a politician’s stance based on their voting record? Also, I’d love to see these tools include what politicians say in media and on social platforms, so they’re held accountable not just for what they do, but also what they say.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 01:24:19+00:00
> a truck is actually better than a train (except in the case of moving huge quantities of cargo). ChatGPT is far worse at "searching"

A truck and train are both transport. Google and ChatGPT are both fuzzy information retrieval functions. As a Kagi user, I’m not really seeing a massive difference in quality between first-page Google results and whatever nonsense LLMs serve up for the average searcher, who is not typically searching out of hardened utility as much as rough convenience.
by starik36 | 2025-05-14 01:24:37+00:00
I see you already have 27 replies...but I'll throw in my two cents.

I didn't believe it was this bad until I was made to believe it. My kid with 1 year full time experience at a FAANG adjacent company and a 6 month internship prior to that, is simple unable to get ANY interviews at all. And he is genuinely good at software development, much better than I was at his age.

I was skeptical, I thought his approach was wrong, I thought this and that. He let me take over his job looking process for a week. I submitted over 100 applications for positions local and remote - positions that he is qualified to do. Not a single interview. Not even a phone screen.

Compare this with when I left college. Interviews were available at the drop of a hat.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-05-14 01:24:55+00:00
I will always love AirBnB for driving down prices by breaking the hotel cartels in major cities.

Over 10 years ago I rented a folding couch right off of Pearl ST. Boulder, CO.

I stayed in the living room of someones 1 bedroom apartment for $300 a night instead of 1k+ a night for the equivalent at what amounted to a travel lodge motel. The prices there were out of control, no inventory, just awful.

There are "plausible deniability" cartels everywhere, it's and it's always nice to see their grip on a region drop.
by hatthew | 2025-05-14 01:25:53+00:00
Oh right, that makes sense. So the argument is that comparing a 50C GPU+radiator in a 20C room vs a 50C GPU+radiator in 0K space, the one in space will dissipate more heat via radiation than the one on the ground? As you say, I'd expect that air cooling is much better than EM radiation, but I guess there is some basis for claiming the possibility that cooling in space is somehow better than on the ground, however unlikely.
by Clubber | 2025-05-14 01:27:13+00:00
>It is _also_ your job to make them less bad - this is good because your incentives are aligned.

This depends on the number of shits given. I can make anyone better who gives a shit, but there are a whole lot of people who don't and are irredeemable. If this seems to be the case, it's best to cut bait and find someone else quickly. In the 90s, it was "hire fast, fire fast," and somehow this was discarded. It was a tough but highly effective model for making really good teams.

To add to this, it seems people are either unwilling or unable to figure things out for themselves. There are some proprietary things that are really tough to figure out, but it seems a lot of devs these days spend about 5 minutes, then ask for help. "Back in the day," devs would spend a day or two banging their heads agains the before asking for help, and they were better for it.

This no shits given isn't limited to developers, but BAs, PMs, Biz and QA people. It seems a lot worse today than 10 years ago. I ended up spending a good chunk of my day doing people's jobs for them. The people that were hired to take stuff off my plate end up putting stuff on my plate.

Maybe I'm just old and salty. Get off my lawn!
by mplanchard | 2025-05-14 01:28:59+00:00
You’re passing in two references and returning a reference.

The compiler knows the returned reference must be tied to one of the incoming references (since you cannot return a reference to something created within the function, and all inputs are references, the output must therefore be referencing the input). But the compiler can’t know which reference the result comes from unless you tell it.

Theoretically it could tell by introspecting the function body, but the compiler only works on signatures, so the annotation must be added to the function signature to let it determine the expected lifetime of the returned reference.
by Quenby | 2025-05-14 01:29:18+00:00
This article instantly brought back memories of my childhood when my fingers would wrinkle after being in water too long. I used to think it was caused by the skin swelling from water, but it turns out it's actually due to blood vessels contracting—what a surprise! Even more amazing, this research not only answers a childhood question but can also be applied in forensic science, which I never expected! Do we still retain curiosity about the world around us? Have I overlooked the huge potential hidden in small details? Curiosity is truly important， it always leads us to discover unexpected worlds.
by tdb7893 | 2025-05-14 01:29:25+00:00
Huh, it never got tested in the Confederacy but it's interesting their Constitution might not have protected it. I'm very curious what the Confederate Supreme Court would have said if it ever had existed.

I wonder if that it's not clearly protected based on US jurisprudence is an oversight because apparently the Barron v Baltimore decision wasn't well known at the time according to the wiki article you linked on it and the VP was so adamant that it is.
by nja | 2025-05-14 01:30:31+00:00
Fascinating article!

> The dynamic is found almost nowhere else, except maybe Boston

Definitely true, as someone who lived in the middle of Boston for over a decade. I once had to take a day's Zoom meetings from my double-parked car after an unavoidable morning appointment had me returning right when street sweeping was happening.

Living now in a more rural area, I need to use my car a lot more, but there's a lot _less_ stress from knowing I can just go at any time and return at any time and I'll be able to just move on with my life...
by codr7 | 2025-05-14 01:31:05+00:00
The way we've done code reuse up to this point rarely lives up to its promises.

I don't know what the solution is, but these days I'm a lot more likely to simply copy code over to a new project rather than try to build general purpose libraries.

I feel like that's part of the mess Rust/Swift are getting themselves tangled up in, everything depends on everything which turns evolution into more and more of an uphill struggle.
by jwr | 2025-05-14 01:31:42+00:00
> you could have paid more for a different car that has better software, like a Tesla, Lucid, Rivian ... but you didn't

At the time, I did not pay much attention to the software, because I never expected it could be so bad. Now I know better, and my next choice will consider software as one of the main factors (I don't be buying a swasticar anytime soon, though).
by temp0826 | 2025-05-14 01:31:56+00:00
While working at an ayahuasca retreat center I did several very long traditional master plant diets. This is a very restrictive diet (no salt, oils, sugar, spices, usually no fruits or green veggies. Very bland food- oatmeal, rice, quinoa, beans, lentils, plantains, fish). Some days you wake up starving only to find yourself unable to stomach a bite of oatmeal. Some people have a really hard time with it for a couple weeks or less. After a few months I surprised myself actually looking forward to eating a big bowl of unsalted, unspiced lentils. Yum!
by Rebelgecko | 2025-05-14 01:31:57+00:00
I don't understand why

* applicants are heavily penalized if they took 1 music class in college (whereas 0 or 2 classes is treated as a good thing)

* Applicants are penalized if science.wasn't their worst course in high school. However they're also penalized if science was their worst course in college.

* It seems wrong that the way you heard about the job is directly used to determine whether or not you'll get it
by ianbicking | 2025-05-14 01:31:59+00:00
I feel like I should understand the purpose of knowledge graphs, but I just... don't.

Like the example "CocoIndex supports Incremental Processing" becomes the subject/predicate/object triple (CocoIndex, supports, Incremental Processing)... so what? Are you going to look up "Incremental Processing" and get a list of related entities? That's not a term that is well enough defined to be meaningful across a variety of subjects. I can incrementally process my sandwich by taking small bites.

I guess you could actually expand "Incremental Processing" to some full definition. But then it's not really a knowledge graph because the only entity ever associated with that new definition will be CocoIndex, and you are back to a single sentence that contains the information, you've just pretended it's structured. ("Supports" hardly a well-defined term either!)

I can _kind of_ see how knowledge graphs can be used for limited relationships. If you want to map companies to board members, and board members to family members, etc. Very clearly and formally defined entities (like a person or company), with clearly defined relationships (board member, brother, etc). I still don't know how _useful_ the result is, but at least I can understand the validity of the model. But for everything else... am I missing something?
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-14 01:32:05+00:00
Shampoo makers add ingredients which alter what you perceive with fingers. so if you wash your hair with gloves on hand, you can feel that shampoo did nothing to your hair. or try one hand with glove, other without and you can touch your hair to feel that scam.

also most shampoos, shower gels are just soap making ingredients + fragrance + color...

not walking on direct sun most of the day did more to beauty of current population than any beauty product on planet. yes im ugly.
by diputsmonro | 2025-05-14 01:32:07+00:00
Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a race to the bottom.

Of course we learned this all before a century ago, it's why we have things like the FDA in the first place. But this new generation of techno-libertarians and DOGE folks who grew up in a "move fast and break things" era, who grew up in the cleanest and safest times the world has ever seen, have no understanding or care of the dangers here and are willing to throw it all away because of imagined inefficiencies. Regulations are written in blood, and those that remove them will have new blood on their hands.
by nunez | 2025-05-14 01:33:06+00:00
This is why I write stuff in reMarkable.

At some point, I have to type it in so that I can share with others. This transfers short term memory into long term.

I know there are a billion notes systems that have heaps of features. Nothing beats writing for me.

I wish I had something like this earlier in my career. I've forgotten so much useful info that only comes back when the right external triggers are fired. It's annoying.
by keyle | 2025-05-14 01:33:24+00:00
I cannot for the life of me figure out why these companies don't just stick to their core.

Because those CEO are unhappy. They want more in their life, they want everything; so that maybe then, they'll be fulfilled.

The path to success is made by many failures; and when you get to success, you can't take the success, you can't be 'done', you need more success. It's a long form of chasing the next dopamine rush.

He probably hasn't felt more alive than the week he threw everything in the blender. It's a mix of issues that starts with childhood and leads to a life of addiction for more.

On the cover of a magazine, it's an inspiring story, but deep down it's a sad human trait.

All power to him though, it sure makes for interesting stories.
by agarren | 2025-05-14 01:34:07+00:00
That sounds a bit unfair. All that code that we neither wrote nor understood, I think in the case of Rust, it’s either the borrow checker or the compiler itself doing something it does best - i.e., “defining memory safety away”. If that’s the case, then labeling such tooling and language-enforced memory safety mechanisms as “a bunch of additional code…you didn’t write and…don’t understand” appears somewhat inaccurate, no?
by zeroq | 2025-05-14 01:35:43+00:00
(disclaimer - I know very little about this, it's just common sense and theorycrafting)

> Multi-year global food reserves are not only non-existent but maybe even non-possible at this scale.

I agree with the sentiment, but I will risk a hypothesis that in "western" world we have enough canned and highly processed food (the one that lies on the shelf of your grocery store and has best before set 2-3 years ahead) to survive "covid but for crops" event. There are couple of reasons I feel safe about this. We waste massive amout of food on a daily basis. We have a huge variety of food available, and not everything has to be affected. We already rely on global supply chains on a daily basis and for whatever reason while living in EU I'm eating garlic imported as far away as China. And then there's coffee, bananas, etc.

Sure, covid has shown that a massive shift will have a dramatic short term impact. Somehow Shkreli was sent to prison after raising price of a drug by 5000%, but when every pharmacy in my country did exactly the same with face masks everyone was quite ok with that, as long as they could get one. And after the initial shock we got back to seamingly normal life.

If anything, I'm scared about the water.

But all in all, when the shit really hits the fan, I envision scenario similar to McCarthy's `The Road` or for lack of better example `The Walking Dead`. People will be more busy trying to secure food and shelter rather than figuring out how to boot some obscure OS on a defunct computer.
by sneak | 2025-05-14 01:37:13+00:00
The moment private entities can avoid spending money on auth and anti-sybil, they will simply default to using the government IdP, because auth is hard and fixing exceptions is expensive (CSRs, etc).

Then, you will simply have to provide full government ID to every business for every transaction. Instant surveillance state (given that they can access all business records).

This is not a world in which you wish to live. It is very important that you be able to transact without ID.
by fragmede | 2025-05-14 01:37:26+00:00
> 99.999 may be an ass-pull of a figure,

Comparisons to old technology is just something I do for fun, don't read too much into it. :)

Fun fact: A usb-C to HDMI dongle for has more computing power than the computer that took us to the moon.

As far as the NSA being even less practical, they're among the few who have the staff that could eke every last cycle of performance out of what remained. Maybe the Utah datacenter wouldn't work, but Room 641A long predates that.
by CuriousRose | 2025-05-14 01:37:50+00:00
It amazes me that companies like AirBnB get huge valuations and user bases when the fundamental feature of searching for listings is phenomenally atrocious.

- Paginated results that reset and call an API for new results when the map is moved (even to a subset of the initial call such as in a zoom).

- Inability to change pagination size.

- Inability to hide listings you aren't interested in.

- Map only displaying listings on the current page, which change dramatically per page.

- Page changes (the thing you do more of than comparing options), take way too long.

Maybe it's a real-estate website related issue as the two main property sites in Australia (Domain and RealEstate) as also garbage. I have a feeling it's also designed this way to prevent scraping.

Can someone at AirBnB please sort these basic QoL things out.
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-14 01:38:00+00:00
AI is hype. It does do some things, but about 75-80% of the AI business value is based only on FOMO and not any kind of metric or economic factor. So, unless there is some radical revolutionary improvement to AI just put that out of your mind.

Now, it seems your concerns are anchored on employment and not anything regarding technology. I have been laid off during my career and survived many layoffs. The first round of layoffs I experienced in the big brand web world was the same year I received a negative review. I kept my job while other highly rated people were pushed out the door.

Here is my learning about career sustainability:

* If you don't like what you do then all you are doing is funding a life style. If you both hate what you do AND do not have a shit ton of personal disposable income sitting in a bank account after 5 years its not worth it. Tell them to fuck off, take a hit to your income/lifestyle and do something else. You will thank me later. This one piece of advice will add years to your life.

* If you want to have a job that withstands all layoffs (aside from the business completely folding) do what is most needed. In my case I was a first year front end developer at Travelocity back in 2008 when the market crashed and before massive frameworks did your job for you. They couldn't hire front end developers to save their life. Its just like now in that most of the candidates were extremely childish or extremely incompetent, but now businesses looks the other way while colossal frameworks and tool sets do most of the work. I kept my job when others didn't because I was more valuable to the business, even with a shit annual review, than people who were cherished employees.

* If you want to be taken seriously on the job do only two things well: 1) guard your time and 2) take care of people. Be ruthless about these two things. If you spend 4 hours a week actually doing your job and the coworker next to you spends 40 hours a week doing their job you are 10x more valuable. This is counter-intuitive because they are working hard you aren't doing shit. Hard work is not valued. Delivery is valued. If you want hard work to be valued then get out of IT and becoming an independent contractor of a trade skill. If you are a narcissist your more competent peers will see through your bullshit. Seriously, learn to take care of people.

* If you want to get promoted do only three things well: 1) deliver what your boss asks of you, 2) measure things, and 3) demonstrate superior communication and organizational skills. I have seen this work in the corporate world and I have heard these exact things more than once from brigadier generals in the US Army.
by vacuity | 2025-05-14 01:38:02+00:00
> It's getting from point A to point B with whatever works best given the circumstances after considering all the pros and cons.

I agree with you on this, but on this forum that's full of people who write software, I'm skeptical that making better software isn't often (usually?) the better choice. But I understand that this is one of those "critical mass" things where a few people can't do nearly as much.
by sershe | 2025-05-14 01:38:08+00:00
That to me seems like amazing mental gymnastics. It would eliminate the right of distant citizen proxies to take away the actual rights from actual individual citizens. The proxies who, especially in single party states, can do whatever they or the loudest groups of nimbys and activists want, with impunity.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like either party. But in this case they are doing a good thing even if for questionable reasons. Although also, I do think that fear of having California regulate ai innovation known to the state of California to cause cancer, combined with the large market "veto power", causing harm vs e.g. China with regard to ai progress, is pretty credible.
by throwaway422432 | 2025-05-14 01:38:36+00:00
The land cattle is often raised on is unsuitable for anything else. Poor soil, unpredictable rainfall that can fluctuate between drought and flooding.

Some Australian outback cattle stations may cover millions of hectares, but you're not going to be able to grow anything else out there: too hot and little water and unlike cattle you can't move your pea farm to where the water is.

I would agree that land-clearing (cutting down forests) to raise cattle is unacceptable, as are the use of feed-lots, but I would disagree that we need to eat less meat, and I would personally never give up my grass-fed organic beef.