MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CSMastermind | 2025-05-24 15:07:08+00:00
Do you have a plausible path to 10x+ing tens of millions in capital?

Ultimately the business of VC means that you're dealing with people how have a high risk tolerance but need the potential high payout to balance their risk.

If you have a sustainable, profitable, but small business that needs capital to expand, but likely won't grow significantly, you're better off talking to a family office or individual investors. I'd avoid banks if you can help it.

If you actually do think you have a plausible VC investment then it's a game of networking. Go through every person you know and look for someone who knows someone who can give you an introduction. If all else fails there's cold outreach but those can be difficult. You might need to bring on a partner who can handle that side of things if it's critical to your business.
by NicolaiS | 2025-05-24 15:07:46+00:00
Another approach that avoids symlinks and avoids a git repo in $HOME (i.e. everything is a subdir of that git repo) is to use the option "git-dir" to clone into a subdir, e.g. `$HOME/.dotfiles/` but checkout into $HOME:

git clone --bare git@github.com:.../dotfiles.git $HOME/.dotfiles git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME checkout alias dotfiles='git --git-dir=$HOME/.dotfiles/ --work-tree=$HOME' dotfiles config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Now the "dotfiles"-alias can be used like git, "dotfiles add, checkout, log", no symlinks are needed and you avoid "contaminating" subdirs of $HOME (git searches parent dirs for ".git", so a ".git" folder in $HOME kinda sucks)
by hovden | 2025-05-24 15:08:26+00:00
The “Atlas of Fourier Transforms” caters to enthusiasts of all proficiency levels. Here, the reader embarks into the world of Fourier transforms through carefully curated images of Fourier pairs. As the atlas unfurls, it includes concepts of symmetry, rotation, translation, addition, multiplication, and interference. For those well-versed in the art of Fourier analysis, ”The Atlas of Fourier Transforms” offers an unparalleled dictionary of structures and their corresponding Fourier counterparts.
by skybrian | 2025-05-24 15:08:39+00:00
Since effects are powerful enough to implement generators and cooperative multitasking, it seems like it’s more than just exceptions? Calling some functions could task-switch and do arbitrary computation before returning at some arbitrary time later. It might be nice to know which function calls could do that.

I’m not a fan of how ‘await’ works in JavaScript because accidentally leaving it out causes subtle bugs. But the basic idea that some function calls are simple and return immediately and others are not makes sense.
by EasyMark | 2025-05-24 15:10:17+00:00
Ubuntu community will not accept ads like in windows, we will leave and go back to debian or pop-os or even jump ship and go to open suse. Canonical knows this, they learned, unlike Microsoft. Canonical has given back a LOT to open source and I am a pragmatist. We're not unforgiving purists. Corporations make mistakes, they're run by humans. With windows the war has never stopped and they are only adding more and more ads in a "beatings will continue until morale improves" fashion
by swores | 2025-05-24 15:10:32+00:00
Raspberry Pi does indeed have users for whom it's in the same category as things like Arduino.

But it also has lots of users for whom it is simply a cheap computer to plug into a screen / mouse / keyboard, people for whom the only interesting things about the hardware are its price and size.

(I've no idea what the ratio is, but I would guess the majority of customers are the latter type; though possibly not the majority of Pi's sold, since the former group contains people much more likely to buy multiple devices, whether someone like me who's bought a few for tinkering with, or someone actually doing something interesting and needing either 100s for their own project, or 1000s to go into something they're selling.)

So what you said is true for some, but far from all, Pi consumers.
by wduquette | 2025-05-24 15:10:59+00:00
Seems to me that the OP’s discussion presumes that the obvious managerial and institutional root causes have already been dealt with. I think he’s right about latent faults and fault tolerance; but an organization that doesn’t do good unit testing and remove technical debt is going to have lots more overt faults than one that does. Seems to me that a both/and approach is needed.
by alexpotato | 2025-05-24 15:12:52+00:00
I was in Hong Kong several years ago and saw some of the scaffolding up close.

As a former Boy Scout with a lot of experience in knots/lashing etc, I was VERY curious to see what kind of ropes, knots and lashing they use.

Turns out it's just some flat nylon ribbon and mostly a couple quick wraps and overhand knots.

Really is amazing that it all stays together. I imagine the friction between the ribbon and the wood surface of the bamboo must be high enough to be "sticky".
by bandoti | 2025-05-24 15:13:22+00:00
I agree I mean what about all the teachers and the long term impact they have on society? A “little hundred mil” could go a long way.

But, that aside, since I’m just getting into the Lean Startup:

In chapter 12—startups typically need Scarce but Secure Resources:

“too much budget is as harmful as too little—as countless dot-com failures can attest—…”

I suppose this falls under case-and-point. They had too much money and blurring the lines between real customers and early adopters. This whole thing could have probably been figured out for a couple mil I’d imagine (though I’m no expert).
by queuebert | 2025-05-24 15:13:44+00:00
> ... decreased by increased mass.

I don't think this is in general true for planets or stars. You're confounding multiple effects. For a fixed number of particles, increasing metallicity, which follows average particle mass, should reduce radius, but for a fixed metallicity and temperature, increasing particles will increase radius. Temp has the effects stated. You can roughly validate this by the fact that massive planets and stars are bigger than less massive ones. Obviously many other things start happening as stars reach end of life...
by fullstop | 2025-05-24 15:14:28+00:00
With the direction things seem to be going, I'm not as confident about your 2040 hopes.

On a return trip from Florida we booked a room in Florence, SC for the night. Everybody was staring at me, but I was exhausted and figured that it was just in my head. We ate breakfast there the next morning and that's when I realized that we were the only white people there. About 50% of the population of Florence is black.

It was an interesting experience, and it gave me the opportunity to understand a fraction of how it would feel if the roles were reversed. And this was with friendly people with no malicious intent or fear!
by antirez | 2025-05-24 15:15:10+00:00
Very small: can run on the edge to allow something like a Raspberry Pi to make basic decisions for your appliance even if disconnected from the internet. Example: those are some time series parameters and instructions, decide if watering the plants or not; vision models that can watch a camera and transcribe what it is seeing in a basic way, ...

Small: runs in an average laptop not optimized for inference of LLMs, like Gemma 3 4B.

Medium: runs in a very high spec computer that people can buy for less than 5k. 30B, 70B dense models or larger MoEs.

Large: Models that big LLM providers sell as "mini", "flash", ...

Extra Large / SOTA: Gemini 2.5 PRO, Claude 4 Opus, ChatGPT O3, ...
by bigyabai | 2025-05-24 15:15:48+00:00
This is HN, PG posts will be instinctively and reactively upvoted.

That being said, this is pretty intellectually absent by the standards of a PG essay. "Writing good is hard" says man who has made his living off issuing advice that other people unconditionally obey. It feels less like a piece of solid writing advice and more like a selfish way to cover his ass now that the auspices of tech startups are shifting towards fascism. Like if the man behind the curtain started apologizing for the Emerald City and green-tinted glasses.
by hovden | 2025-05-24 15:16:05+00:00
Some context for HN: This is a self-published book, which is nonstandard in my field. Usually you work with large academic publishing groups. The choice of self-publishing is an unknown process to most academics in science and engineering. It afforded me an opportunity to learn more about publishing, bookmaking, marketing, and distribution. Self-publishing allows the author to retain creative control on how the book is made, presented, and shared.

I know HN is interested in academic publishing policies, copyright, DRM, etc. This project presents an alternative for researchers to share knowledge.
Ask HN: Senior SaaS developer wanting to pivot
by heyheyhey | 2025-05-24 15:16:28+00:00
Been at my current company over a decade doing ServiceNow development. Know all there is to know about the platform and want to switch to something non-ServiceNow, maybe full-stack or back-end work.

When I'm looking at job roles, it's daunting when I don't have the expertise required for those roles. I feel like I'd have to take a major pay cut or be constrained to the SN space.

Any advice?
by kixiQu | 2025-05-24 15:17:45+00:00
I think we should all just calibrate what kind of project we believe the author to be engaged in from the following quote from a linked post:

> After all, constant sunshine is the weather of the dullard. The lover of hot, lazy days and breezy, cloudless skies fancies himself a lordling — he insists that the earth be his womb-like chamber of easy, saccharine delights. He is the same man who enjoys sugary-sweet sodas, on-the-nose political commentary, prefers his novels to be cheap and gutless, and his women botoxed and spray-tanned.

No very close reading is required, I believe.
by drob518 | 2025-05-24 15:17:58+00:00
It’s always a theory, but what choice do you have? You can’t rerun the experiment again under controlled conditions. Your only choice is to theorize or not. Sure, there is more possible error in such theories compared to other theories where you can rerun the experiment multiple times to test it, but that doesn’t mean that a theory that can’t be tested is wrong.
by amluto | 2025-05-24 15:18:17+00:00
To be fair, at $0.04/kWh, even at very low outdoor temperature, a heat pump at COP only a little bit above 1 or even an electric resistance heater is not very expensive to operate. If you have anything resembling decent insulation and you heat only a small space, heat can be very inexpensive. Even in an old, uninsulated, drafty house, you can fudge it cheaply with window insulating film and by hanging fabric on the walls. (Those cheap cut-to-size cellular window shades sold at many home improvement stores also have excellent thermal performance.)

It gets tricky if you want a civilized humidity level, though. You need to control leakage to achieve decent humidity and you need to control condensation to avoid damaging the window trim or other parts of the structure and to avoid growing mold.
by roenxi | 2025-05-24 15:18:18+00:00
> I'm thinking of anonymous/semi-anonymous authors that wrote world-famous novels while being unknown. I don't think that is going to be a viable route anymore, because it depended on the middle-men.

It is entirely viable, there are a couple of pipelines that go something like [forum -> patreon -> widespread appeal] to pick up aspiring writers who can rise above the herd. It reminds me a bit of Charles Dickens - a man who was clearly being paid by the word - but much more accessible. Then there are the sites that just aggregate masses of amateur stories. Mostly badly written stories, but talent has a chance to be seen.

There isn't going to be any difficulty for the next great novel making it out into the world. The issue is more the living conditions of the legions of also-ran writers.
by tacitusarc | 2025-05-24 15:18:47+00:00
I don’t think I agree with your interpretation of the definition.

If I spell the word “pale” as “pal”, that is not an acceptable spelling for the word “pale”, even if it is coincidentally the acceptable spelling for an entirely different word.

If I asked a human editor to spellcheck the sentence: “His mouth dropped and he turned pal.”, the editor would correctly indicate I had misspelled the word.

Spellcheck hasn’t done this in the past because it can be quite difficult. But that’s a limitation of computer capability, not functionality bounded by the definition of the term “spellcheck”.
by parentheses | 2025-05-24 15:19:25+00:00
OOC, what is the benefit of having a "library" that requires such manual labor to maintain and upgrade?

You'd miss out on CVEs because you don't use the common dependency paradigm.

You'd also miss out on bug fixes if you are not detecting the bug itself.

Help me understand because I'm with you on less dependencies but this does feel a bit extreme.
by knome | 2025-05-24 15:19:28+00:00
I was playing around, and inspected the boid count control to see if I might manually update it and see what unreasonably large and small populations look like. I saw the connected callback triggered updateProperty. Running updateProperty("boidCount", 10) in the console yielded a field with 10 boids, as expected, but apparently it doesn't update something else the natural code would, as as soon as two of the boids collided, a humongous explosion of boids occurred, like a firework.
by smegger001 | 2025-05-24 15:20:55+00:00
"In a new bid to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, two Native American communities are suing the Trump administration, saying it failed to adhere to historical treaty boundaries and circumvented environmental impact analysis. As a result, they are asking a federal judge in Montana to rescind the 2017 permit and block any further construction or use of the controversial pipeline.

The Fort Belknap Indian Community of Montana and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota contend there was no effort to study how the 1,200-mile pipeline project through their respective territories would affect their water systems and sacred lands."

---https://www.npr.org/2018/09/10/646523140/native-american-tri...
by fidotron | 2025-05-24 15:20:58+00:00
There is a famous line about legal writing: “There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.” [1]

PG going for the "they're connected" angle, not too convincingly as shown mainly in the paragraph starting "This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas".

[1] https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3774-legal-prose-and...
by BlueTemplar | 2025-05-24 15:21:51+00:00
But it's a kind of gaming that is so different (by its interfaces) that it's almost offtopic : it's a bit like starting to talk about plane freight when the discussion is about cargo bikes...

Android is the main competitor here, and is struggling (low profit/sale). I guess handhelds like the Switch and Steam Deck might somewhat be relevant ?
by keiferski | 2025-05-24 15:22:01+00:00
It doesn’t, really, which is okay, because the subtext here is that Pg is writing about essayistic writing, or more specifically, communicating ideas in the form of written words. I don’t think he is commenting on “good writing” in the sense of a novel or line of poetry.

Moby Dick is my go-to example of a novel that is incredibly well-written, but I wouldn’t say it’s particularly clear or straightforward in its presentation of ideas.

An example, if you haven’t read it:

”The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”
by aqrit | 2025-05-24 15:23:53+00:00
> health services in the area

Massena Hospital is a 25-bed hospital. Might have to go to Canton or Ogdensburg for a family doctor (45 minutes by car). Most things serious get referred to Syracuse or Burlington (3 hours away by car).

AFAIK, Cost[1] is "theoretically" nothing if annual income is less than the federal poverty line ($15,650 for an individuality). And might as well be free for an income up to $39,125.

[1] https://info.nystateofhealth.ny.gov/EssentialPlan
by Zigurd | 2025-05-24 15:25:11+00:00
Tesla supposedly has US$37 billion in cash. Why is Tesla semi still not in series production, and why has the price gone up to prohibitive levels? Why are there still two platforms, of which one has aged out completely and the other one seems to have no replacement coming?

Tesla has a large number of things they could have been doing in the past few years to not end up where they are now with an aging product line. Something doesn't add up.
by castillar76 | 2025-05-24 15:25:30+00:00
You're not wrong: there's definitely evidence, for instance, of savvy attackers watching the CT logs for things like newly-instantiated WordPress servers and then attacking them before the admins have set the initial password on them. (Which is really a WP problem, but I digress.) So there's benefit in not having the internals of your infrastructure writ large in public CT logs.

My problem is with the selected solution: wildcard certificates are a huge compromise waiting to happen. They give an attacker the ability to impersonate _anything_ in my infrastructure for as long as the cert is valid (and even a week is _long_ time for that). Worse, if I'm then distributing the wildcard to everything on my internal network that needs to do anything over HTTPS, that's a lot of potential attack points. (If it's just one TLS-terminating bastion host that's very tightly secured, then...maybe. _Maybe_. But it almost never stays that way.)

To me, it's a much better security tradeoff to accept the hostname problem (or run my own CA internally for stuff that doesn't need a public cert) and avoid wildcards entirely.
by kixiQu | 2025-05-24 15:26:32+00:00
I think connecting this to what V expressed is the value I meant to add here, I think they expressed what they meant with the detail required to express it, and I'm not interested in engaging with the topic on a level that works from summaries alone. Suffice to say that you responded to a comment speaking of how "people are properly incentivized to produce content" by saying '"traffic" did not incentivize "publishers" (as they call themselves) to produce any valuable content' as though traffic didn't have to do with the people out there publishing valuable stuff on the internet today, or as though such people don't exist. V's thing considers the interaction among these people, their incentives, and LLMs.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-24 15:26:46+00:00
English. "Write me a Python function or program that does X, Y, and Z on U and V using W." That will be the inevitable outcome of current trends, where relatively-primitive AI tools are used to write slightly more sophisticated code than would otherwise be written, which in turn is used to create slightly less-primitive AI tools.

For example, I just cut-and-pasted the author's own cri de coeur into Claude: https://claude.ai/share/1d750315-bffa-434b-a7e8-fb4d739ac89a Presumably at least one of the vectorized versions it replied with will work, although none is identical to the author's version.

When this cycle ends, high-level programs and functions will be as incomprehensible to most mainstream developers as assembly is today. Today's specs are tomorrow's programs.

Not a bad thing, really. And overdue, as the article makes all too clear. But the transition will be a dizzying one, with plenty of collateral disruption along the way.
by dahart | 2025-05-24 15:27:00+00:00
The point here is not that it’s loops per se, the point is that the indexing is explicit. It seems like a big win to me. The article’s ~10 non-trivial examples all make the code easier to read, and more importantly, to understand exactly what the code is doing. It is true that some operations are difficult to reason about, that’s where explicit indexing really helps. The article resonates with me because I do want to learn numpy syntax, I’ve written hundreds of programs with nympy, spent countless hours doing battle with it, and I feel like I’m no better off now than someone who’s brand new to it. The indexing is constantly confounding, nothing ever just works. Anytime you see “None” and “axis=“ inside an operation, it’s a tell: bound to be difficult to comprehend. I’m always having to guess how to use some combination of reshape, dstack, hstack, transpose, and five other shape changers I’m forgetting, just to get something to work and it’s difficult to read and understand later. It feels like there is no debugging, only rewriting. I keep reading the manual for einsum over again and I’ve used it, but I can’t explain how, why, or when to use it, it seems like this thing you have to resort to because no other indexing seems to work. The ability to do straightforward explicit non-clever indexing as if you were writing loops seems like a pretty big step forward.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-24 15:27:07+00:00
> You’re exaggerating. WLCSP photosensitivity is an uncommon phenomenon that requires a very strong and specific light source

"In 1967, Dawon Kahng and Simon Min Sze at Bell Labs proposed that the floating gate of a MOSFET could be used for the cell of a reprogrammable ROM (read-only memory).[3] Building on this concept, Dov Frohman of Intel invented EPROM in 1971,[3] and was awarded U.S. patent 3,660,819 in 1972. Frohman designed the Intel 1702, a 2048-bit EPROM, which was announced by Intel in 1971.[3]"

"The programming process is not electrically reversible. To erase the data stored in the array of transistors, ultraviolet light is directed onto the die. Photons of the UV light cause ionization within the silicon oxide, which allows the stored charge on the floating gate to dissipate. Since the whole memory array is exposed, all the memory is erased at the same time. The process takes several minutes for UV lamps of convenient sizes; sunlight would erase a chip in weeks, and indoor fluorescent lighting over several years.[8] Generally, the EPROMs must be removed from equipment to be erased, since it is not usually practical to build in a UV lamp to erase parts in-circuit."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPROM
by itishappy | 2025-05-24 15:27:36+00:00
Looks slick!

I'm a bit confused at the distinction of "algebraic" vs "non-algebraic" effects. Think you can give a brief example of what you mean?

Also, I know you've taken a slightly different direction with Bluefin than other Haskell effects libraries (effects as values vs types). Is this related to the distinction above?
by antirez | 2025-05-24 15:29:00+00:00
I believe that it is not that style helps the content to be more right, not in the way PG believes (like in the example about writing shorter sentences), it is that a richer style (so, not shorter, but neither baroque: a style with more possibilities) can reflect a less obvious way of thinking, that carries more signal.

I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for the rest of your life (no kidding). In Italy there was a great writer called Giuseppe Pontiggia. He had to write an article for one of the main newspapers in Italy about the Nobel Prize in Literature, that with the surprise of many, was never assigned, year after year, to Borges. He wrote (sorry, translating from memory, I'm not an English speaker and I'm not going to use an LLM for this comment):

"Two are the prizes that each year the Swedish academy assigns: one is assigned to the winner of the prize, the other is not assigned to Borges".

This uncovers much more than just: even this year the prize was not assigned to Borges. And, honestly, I never saw this kind of style heights in PG writings (I appreciate the content most of the times, but having translated a few of his writings in Italian, I find the style of PG fragile: brings the point at home but never escapes simple constructs). You don't reach that kind of Pontiggia style with the process in the article here, but via a very different process that only the best writers are able to perform and access.