MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pseudosaid | 2025-05-13 21:38:39+00:00
A stereo mix is in fact trivial and roughly assumes a left right speaker arrangement. Software summing is math and is the same across digital audio workstations because math is math. Are there 3 or more microphones? doesnt matter, each mic is a mono input. trying to capture a facsimile of a perceived stereo field? use ORTF mic spacing and hard pan those mono inputs appropriately.

Stereo is just dual mono. its that simple. Summing is just math, its that trivial.

Creating a mix of multiple inputs for a stereo lr output? also completely trivial from a technical standpoint. Hardly trivial from a creative pov, but that isnt what this is about.
by Townley | 2025-05-13 21:38:57+00:00
It sounds like their vision for space-based data centers presupposes nearly-free energy costs, delivered via a colossal solar farm made possible by falling launch costs.

Temporarily putting aside (extremely fair) feasibility questions around those two pre-requisites, data centers are a not-bad choice for things to do with unlimited space energy.

Aluminum smelting or growing food are the two I’d think of otherwise, and neither of those can have inputs/outputs beamed to a global network of high-bandwidth satellites.
by daeken | 2025-05-13 21:39:34+00:00
Massive radiators. The ISS has radiators that have a dissipation capacity of about 3m^2/kW. If we use that number, we'd need a 3000m^2 radiator per megawatt, which is the scale they're talking about. This could theoretically be brought down, but not even by an order of magnitude.

I wonder how much cooling the solar panels alone would need, when operating at that scale.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-05-13 21:39:55+00:00
Unless they've figured out some impressive cooling tech, which I would expect would be worth more than the rest of their company combined, then this is pretty much DoA. "More efficient cooling architecture taking advantage of higher ΔT in space" would indeed be useful if you had a nice medium to radiate into. It turns out that thermal radiation is incredibly poor into the vacuum of space lol.
by akdor1154 | 2025-05-13 21:40:02+00:00
Damn that's some scope creep if I ever saw it: 'try sending Arrow frames end to end' => 'rewrite the otel pipeline in rust'. Seems like the goals of the contributors don't exactly align with the goals of the project.

Kind of a bummer - one thing i was hoping to come out of this was better Arrow ecosystem support for golang.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-13 21:40:23+00:00
> That's not a terribly useful criteria, though. A Markov chain can produce novel sentences, hell a bingo machine can if you write words on the balls. "Knowledge" is kind of meaningless but also seemingly profound.

I don’t know why you came up with this pedantic example. Perhaps you’re autistic? If so then I apologize for assuming you aren’t.

Everyone knows that we are talking about more than just knowledge consisting of a random sting of letters. We are talking about actual useful knowledge.
by Lanzaa | 2025-05-13 21:40:42+00:00
Passive cooling refers to "passive radiative cooling"[0]. This is a well established technique, but I have doubts on how well it will scale with the heat generated by computation.

Radiative cooling works by exploiting the fact that hot objects emit electromagnetic radiation (glow), and hot means everything above absolute zero. The glow carries away energy which cools down the object. One complication is that each glowy object is also going to be absorbing glow from other objects. While the sun, earth, and moon all emit large amounts of glow (again, heat radiation), empty space is around 2.7 Kelvin, which is very cold and has little glow. So the radiative coolers typically need to have line of sight to empty space, which allows them to emit more energy than they absorb.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_cooling
by tart-lemonade | 2025-05-13 21:40:54+00:00
And the worst part is a federal ID would not enable tracking any more than your employers withholding wages for tax purposes and paying into Social Security does, but every time a federal ID has been proposed (which would be really useful as a way to keep SSNs from becoming something you have to disclose to everyone and their dog) it's been shut down by the "it's all a road to tyranny" crowd.

I could get a Real ID that reads "1060 W Addison St" today. All I have to do is pirate Acrobat, change the addresses on PDFs downloaded from the websites of my bank and power company, and walk into an Illinois Secretary of State office, as that's enough for the residency portion of a Real ID. They do not double-check any of this information, and I know this works because I had to edit a power bill PDF so my SO would have a second document for proof of residency. All it would take is one phone call to find out I'm the only one listed on the account, but it was never verified.

Why anyone thinks a federal ID would enable mass surveillance and tracking is beyond me. The NSA doesn't need a unified federal ID to track us, and law enforcement isn't exactly foiled by people who hold fake IDs or who have no IDs whatsoever (unless being undocumented or Amish is some magical "get out of jail free" card).
by int_19h | 2025-05-13 21:41:17+00:00
It really depends on company culture.

To give a personal counter-example, I'm an engineer. Based on my recommendation, my current employer hired a person who was fired (not laid off, but actually fired!) from my previous workplace. And my recommendation was itself based on a recommendation of my friend who is a former colleague at the aforementioned previous workplace, and whose opinion I trust and value highly. Of course the hiree still had to pass the interviews etc, and that isn't easy in and of itself; but my personal recommendation was what got their foot in the door.
by dang | 2025-05-13 21:41:25+00:00
Can you please not post comments like this? Thoughtful criticism is welcome, of course, but this sort of thing isn't. Besides breaking the site guidelines, it takes threads in less interesting directions and evokes even worse comments from others. We're trying to avoid that here.

"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by siddthesquid | 2025-05-13 21:41:30+00:00
I feel I can empathize with the ideology, and I want to argue that an idea like this is a big piece of some puzzle.

The puzzle: During the collapse, I think the biggest thing we would lose is our ability to communicate with each other in a reliable way. Like telecommunications and internet and all that. Who and what do we trust?

I imagine that before a collapse like this would happen, people would get a hint to gather as much as they can to help with their survival. Those things would include: this OS, the knowledge to load a sequence of bytes from whatever device is holding the OS to as many CPUs/controllers as possible, strategies to connect any number of arbitrary CPUs to radio devices, some knowledge of public keys and private keys. maybe all neatly organized into a handbook

The OS itself would be responsible for providing as easy an interface for any average joe to generate public/private keys, communicate with other people who have followed their same protocol, and use those public keys to build trust from communications. before the collapse happens, you may even collect a list of public keys you are likely to already trust.

The OS could maybe even have software for building communities of trust or even handling adhoc finances through (don't hate me for this) cryptocurrency.

anyways, this is all based on an assumption that the ability to communicate quickly (and build trust in a decentralized yet controllable way) is the best mitigation we have to a collapse

this answer is slightly influenced by the movie leave the world behind lol
by arp242 | 2025-05-13 21:41:55+00:00
> I don't remember the exact number of CPU cores amounted to a single SWE but IIRC it was in the thousands.

I think this probably holds true for outfits like Google because 1) on their scale "a core" is much cheaper than average, and 2) their salaries are much higher than average. But for your average business, even large businesses? A lot less so.

I think this is a classic "Facebook/Google/Netflix/etc. are in a class of their own and almost none of their practices will work for you"-type thing.
by derbOac | 2025-05-13 21:41:57+00:00
Ostensibly they're arguing the problem is government-mandated use of renewables and regulation to mandate that use in real time, rather than based on physical need or prudence. Not agreeing or disagreeing with them, just that's how I interpreted it.

Reason has been a little counterintuitive lately at times about energy policy. I think not too long ago they had an article basically arguing that the market is moving to renewables and that attempts by the Trump administration to push coal and so forth was bad policy as a result. That's not really at odds with libertarian principles, but I think depending on your assumptions about why certain things are the way they are, you can end up with different conclusions.
by ianhowson | 2025-05-13 21:42:10+00:00
I had a good laugh.

- You can't build 40MW of solar panels for $2M, even with theoretical maximum efficiency. You can't even build the cabling and regulators at that price.

- You need battery storage -- not as your backup -- but as primary source. It is going to cost more than $2M. Batteries are heavy. They are going to cost a lot to launch. This is not even solved on the ground yet.

- You need a heat transport medium to move heat into your massive radiator. Either you use water or you use air or you use heatpipes (metal). You have to pay for the cost and weight and launch expense. This is probably half the weight of the rack and I haven't bothered to do the math about how you transport heat into a 500 foot solar sail.

- Let's not even talk about how you need to colocate multiple other racks for compute and storage. There aren't any 1TBps orbital link technologies.

- Rad shielding? It doesn't work, but I'll let this slide; it seems like the least problematic part of the proposal.

- 15 year lifetime? GPUs are obsolete after 12 months.

I don't want to be the guy who shoots stuff down just for fun, but this doesn't even pass the sniff test. Maybe you can get 10x cheaper power and cooling in space. Still doesn't work.
by Someone | 2025-05-13 21:42:21+00:00
With linear growth in #customers/revenue/profit, percentage growth in #customers/revenue/profit drops every year.

In the limit it becomes zero.

Because of that, I think few CEOs would be happy with it in the long term.

Yes, you may be profitable and the best in your branch of work and be the largest in your branch of work and be a good employer, but if you’re close to that point and see a smaller company in your branch of work grow and thus take market share, you should be concerned that they will out-compete you in the long term.
by jjaksic | 2025-05-13 21:42:26+00:00
Yes, I was in this place too when I had a consulting company. We bid on projects with quotes for high quality work and guaranteed delivery within the agreed timeframe. More often than not we got rejected in favor of some students who submitted a quote for 4x less. I sometimes asked those clients how the project went, and they'd say, well, those guys missed the deadline and asked for more money several times
by bigyabai | 2025-05-13 21:42:30+00:00
For development work, I honestly prefer Windows. At least WSL knows what you want to do and gets out of the way. Comparatively, making a "correct" shell on MacOS often entails QEMU and local NAS, alt-tabbing between that and your native terminal for version control. Or you build your server software to be MacOS-native for debugging and port it to Linux later like a neanderthal.

Just... no. MacOS looks pretty but the workflow is uglier than Satan's taint. I don't get paid to work around Apple's dysfunction.
by GMoromisato | 2025-05-13 21:43:47+00:00
I've narrowed my algorithm to three (not so simple) rules:

1. Know yourself.

2. Work hard.

3. Serve others.

I think 90% of unhappiness comes from violating at least one of these rules.

Conversely, of course, following these rules doesn't guarantee happiness, but (I think) it increases your chances.
by otp209 | 2025-05-13 21:43:51+00:00
I don't mix relationships with work. Being kind to people for the purposes of recommendations is not the same as a relationship.

Relationships are a thing I support outside work. Inside work, I might build rapport and expand my professional network; that is NOT THE SAME as meeting people for the sake of pursuing relationships, and as much as possible one should be kept away from the other.
by gdubs | 2025-05-13 21:43:52+00:00
Many of you are more valuable than you realize and it pains me to read so many comments about how you need to frame things "just so" in an interview, or "be careful not to lose your patience ever".

It's dehumanizing, and it undervalues your inherent worth and skill set.

Obviously don't be a jerk. Beyond that you will really damage your mental well-being if you're constantly trying to put on a certain face or worry how things will "play" with recruiters.

The best advice is to try to stay generally optimistic and collaborative, and to take pride in your craft and lead by example. But also not to discount the fact that you might in fact be more capable of following your passions and starting your own thing than you realize.
by caseyy | 2025-05-13 21:44:06+00:00
By the way, inferior goods are not necessarily poor-quality products, though there is a meaningful correlation, and I based my original comment on it. Still, a OnePlus Android phone is considered an inferior good; an iPhone (or a Samsung Galaxy Android phone) is considered superior. Both are of excellent quality and better than one another in key areas. It's more about how wealth, brand perception, and overall market sentiment affect their demand. OnePlus phones will be in more demand during recessions, and demand for iPhones and Samsung Galaxys will decrease.

No objection to your use/non-use of the Market for Lemons label. Just wanted to clarify a possible misconception.

P.S. Apologies for editing this comment late. I thought the original version wasn't very concise.
by benzopaladine | 2025-05-13 21:44:13+00:00
Self-control is a factor too. Some people might get a big rush but have strong frontal lobes, other people might get a smaller rush but have low self-control and still end up consuming a lot / having their behavior reinforced.

I think susceptibility to negative emotion is relevant too. Not all of the addictive content feels good. Lots of companies have figured out how to make negativity addictive.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-13 21:44:32+00:00
> Those were all local events.

> The only thing removing mankind's ability to make computers is a large (Chicxulub-ish-sized) meteor strike or andromeda-strain-like sci-fi story made real.

One of the possible causes of the Bronze Age Collapse (which btw was very non-local) is a prolonged drought that apparently lasted for decades. It's wasn't severe by itself but long enough for the fertile soil to keep shrinking year after year, decreasing the size of sustainable population.

I dwell on this sometimes and I think that probably we underestimate how fragile our food production system is. Feeding 8 billion people is not an easy endeavor. Multi-year global food reserves are not only non-existent but maybe even non-possible at this scale. A global event that would somehow disrupt our ability to produce food for several years in a row will make the hell break loose. I'm not confident that humanity couldn't plunge in a couple of dark age centuries as a result, all bets are off in a truly global famine.

Then the curious question is how likely is such an event? Chicxulub -- yes, but these are extremely rare, once in millions of years. The Volcanic Winters however occur every few centuries, the "Year Without a Summer" was 1816. Could we have "3 years without a summer" at some point? And not just in the northern hemisphere but globally? I don't know, maybe.

After all, the way I think of it is this: modern food production at scale is sun + water + fertilizers. Production of fertilizers seem distributed enough to be resilient at a global scale. Water at the Earth scale is sun again -- as long as it's shining it will rain somewhere, even if the distribution shifts (with dramatic effects for sure, but not a completely desperate situation). But then the sun does seem to be the single point of failure. If there's dust or ash or something else shielding the sun then it is in fact desperate.
by ponector | 2025-05-13 21:44:35+00:00
That part of the interview is a bunch of bullshit questions and socially acceptable answers from both sides. It is simply to check is candidate agrees to play the game by the rules.

Why are you looking for a new job? Because I have a dickhead manager and looking for a higher salary. But my answer will be I'm looking for new challenges, for opportunity to grow.

Both sides are telling lies during the interview.
by yfontana | 2025-05-13 21:45:19+00:00
I've been working on extracting text from some 20 million PDFs, with just about every type of layout you can imagine. We're using a similar approach (segmentation / OCR), but with PyMuPDF.

The full extract is projected to run for several days on a GPU cluster, at a cost of like 20-30k (can't remember the exact number but it's in that ballpark). When you can afford this kind of compute, text extraction from PDFs isn't quite a fully solved problem, but we're most of the way there.

What the article in the OP tries to do is, as far as I understand, somewhat different. It's trying to use much simpler heuristics to get acceptable results cheaper and faster, and this is definitely an open issue.
by thrance | 2025-05-13 21:45:29+00:00
More like, these guys will be focused on parting VCs from their money.

Datacenters in space makes no sense at all. Even ignoring the huge cost of sending hardware there in the first place, cooling is a massive issue in space. No medium to sink heat into means the only way to cool anything is by running water through giant infrared radiators. Not ideal when cooling is the largest bottleneck in scaling datacenters. Note that they would also have to dissipate the large amounts heat their datacenter satellite gets from being exposed to the Sun.

Also disregard the cost it takes to send a technician for maintenance, of updating hardware, etc.
by cellis | 2025-05-13 21:46:15+00:00
More importantly, why don't adults give up names that clearly put them at an economic disadvantage? The same reason people don't sell houses when they are almost always a bad investment; pride, sunk-costs, sentimentalism or other reasons for their subjectivity.

https://www.reddit.com/r/namenerds/comments/10hssp8/why_do_p...
by vd2287 | 2025-05-13 21:46:33+00:00
Felt like this needed a deeper look into what this even is:

Cyckle is an AI wrapper built in Cython, it runs local LLMs like Phi-3.5, and can analyze CSVs without sending anything to the cloud. All open-source.

Currently works on Debian (I recommend 13 as that was what I am running right now, but 12 should work fine. If it doesn't, let me know in the repo!)
by badc0ffee | 2025-05-13 21:46:44+00:00
That was not my experience (at least with perlmonks) back when I used Perl, but maybe I'm mis-remembering things.

I think part of Perl's downfall was that TMTOWTDI became too many ways to do one thing, and it was too easy to create terse, unreadable code. Basically, the opposite direction of modern concepts like "idiomatic Go".

I'm sad that Perl is dying while people are still writing fucking bash scripts in production code. (Perl is still better than that!)
by ubedan | 2025-05-13 21:46:59+00:00
It’s fantastic to see Makepad reach its 1.0 release. Congratulations to Rik and the entire team for this spectacular achievement! The dedication and effort put into this project are truly commendable.

Makepad presents a compelling approach to cross-platform GUI and application development, and I believe it has the potential to become a leading open-source solution. Several key features stand out:

* *Rust-Native Design:* Built specifically for Rust, Makepad leverages the language’s strengths in performance, safety, and concurrent programming, resulting in robust and efficient applications.

* *Integrated Development System:* Makepad offers a unified environment encompassing a GUI framework, a development system, and an IDE, streamlining the development workflow.

* *Fast Compilation:* The system demonstrates impressively fast compilation times, accelerating iteration and development cycles.

* *Embedded Rust-like GPU Shader Language:* The inclusion of a dedicated, Rust-like shader language allows for powerful and flexible GPU programming within the framework. The design choice to facilitate variable referencing by name – both in the program and the shader code is a particularly nice touch.

* *Broad Platform Support:* Including Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, and the web via WebAssembly etc.

While Makepad 1.0 represents a major milestone, further development is crucial to fully realize its potential. Areas for future focus could include:

* *Accessibility Features:* Implementing robust accessibility support is essential for inclusivity and broad adoption. * *Agentic AI Integration:* Exploring integration with agentic AI frameworks would position Makepad at the forefront of emerging technologies. * *IDE Customization:* Expanding IDE customization options, particularly support for various keyboard mappings (e.g., Vim), would cater to a wider range of developer preferences. * *Real-World Applications & Community Growth:* Encouraging the development of more real-world applications and fostering a growing community will be key to long-term success.

I’m excited to see what the future holds for Makepad and look forward to contributing to its future success.
by shawnfrompdx | 2025-05-13 21:47:02+00:00
i have spent the last couple days responding to hundreds of comments on the substack piece. no new pieces of advice came up on this thread which were not already covered on the substack comments. advice which i have acknowledged. i was already about to do most of the pieces of advice anyways on my own as the next step, such as applying with a normie pseudonym. you don't know me. im not a victim and i don't have victim mindset. i am survivor.
by rolph | 2025-05-13 21:47:15+00:00
'new caution banner not only warns against potential piracy attempts'

ill read that as amz discourages piracy.

'but has also added that the streaming giant has the right to remove any film from its Prime Video platform and that there will be no prior notice about it. it also claims that some of the scenes in the movies and shows may be edited to "reflect current sensibilites."'

and then they go ahead and encourage it again.

of course this is unconfirmed and sus trolling.
by tharmas | 2025-05-13 21:47:32+00:00
Well, in Vancouver Canada, they built tons and tons of condos. But they were mostly bought up by local and overseas investors. In, fact some condo buildings weren't even advertised at all in Canada, only in Asia.

I grant the Austin Texas is its own unique situation.

Also, developers don't want to build build build housing as that, like you said would help to reduce the price.
by lxgr | 2025-05-13 21:47:43+00:00
> and a phone number that they can send the OTP to. I give them a phone number, it's not even the one on the account, they send the text to it.

This regularly blows my mind.

Presumably it’s some data broker or phone carrier integration, because for me, the answer is usually “sorry, we can’t verify that number, is this a postpaid contract in your name?”

No, it’s not. Oh, that’s a requirement for doing business with you? In that case, I won’t.