MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rockemsockem | 2025-06-15 00:24:54+00:00
Afaik Tesla is not a government contractor, so your compensation comment is moot.

Where we see waste in government is in big, entrenched, dinosaurs where competition is very difficult and/or limited. What we need is a little more free market capitalism in those areas. Greed is not the driver of waste imo, incompetence is a far bigger contributor.

If you'd like to make tangible arguments instead of vaguely ranting against capitalism then I'm all ears.

Edit: also the multi-billion dollar compensation package was in stock, so it didn't actually waste any money

Edit 2: by the way you're still dodging my original legitimate question about what the government has ever actually built without private contractors. There are real answers to that question and if you are such a big proponent of the government building things themselves maybe you should know something about them.
by fritzo | 2025-06-15 00:25:18+00:00
1. follow rich hickey's advice and orchestrate all llms to mutate a single shared state

2. let those llms operate asynchronously in parallel

3. when an llm wants to mutate the global state but the state has changed since it's checkout, try to safely merge changes using an expensive diff algorithm (which is still cheaper than the llm); on failure retry
by ryandrake | 2025-06-15 00:28:23+00:00
> Was it a waste of time, for just 2 euros? Sure. But if nobody starts complaining, nothing will ever be fixed.

This is how I feel. Money is money. If you don't complain, why not just start donating to these corporations? It's effectively the same thing. I've successfully argued over a difference of $0.90 on a restaurant order (they rung up a different appetizer than I actually ordered). If you don't push back, they'll never get better.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-06-15 00:28:34+00:00
I generally found with vibe coding I can only get so far in general before it mires in some local minimum and I need to take over and substantially drive development. I find it profoundly useful for the initial phase of work which in many ways is good. I find the initial decisions to often bog me down and it just runs through a lot of menial design decisions that ultimately don’t matter as much as I like to think at the beginning. Generally SoTA coding LLMs tend to be pretty well versed in minutia of libraries and tooling as well. It feels a lot like working with a 4 years experience engineer - they know a lot about the tools they know, and can get things to a point, but they hit a wall that only experience can surmount. Once things get complex enough they bounce around on the edges of the problem and need a more senior engineer to lead.
by jpablo | 2025-06-15 00:28:57+00:00
This doesn’t make any sense. Click and click is slower than click+drag, it’s just obviously two extra movements (a full extra press and an extra release).

You can also drag and hover while waiting for the opponent move and release if the expected move shows up or right click to cancel the drag if not the expected move.

Also dragging and hovering over your target square is super useful to visualize your move and catch any last millisecond mistakes.

I do t think any of the top bullet/hyperbullet players does click and click. I think I have seen Magnus doing click and click in very old chess24 blitz videos but I’m not sure he did that in lichess playing bullet orin chesscom scc for example.
by StableAlkyne | 2025-06-15 00:29:27+00:00
[Caveat: there aren't many Lyft drivers in my town, so I have only used Uber]

The problem is their system extorts you into tipping. If you don't tip, the driver will give you a 1/5 rating. If your rating averages low enough, nobody will pick you up. It's more of a bribe you pay for a good passenger rating than an actual tip.

As a result, you're forced to tip if you want to use it long term.

Personally, I'm hoping Waymo takes Uber's lunch money. I will gladly pay more for a service has not been infected with tipping.
by throwaway250612 | 2025-06-15 00:31:11+00:00
I am an insider, hence the throw away account.

The root cause of this incident was leadership driving velocity by cutting corners. It has been going on for years, eventually over the cliff.

This specific failure mode is known as query of death. A query triggers an existing bug that causes the server to crash. It is inevitable for C++ servers.

Service Control is in C++. It uses a comprehensive set of engineering guidelines to minimize and tolerate query of death and other failure modes. Before this incident, it had no major incident in the previous decade.

This incident is related to a new global quota policy. It was built quickly under leadership pressure, cutting corners. Such features should be built in a secondary service, or at least following the established engineering guidelines.

Regarding the action items mentioned in the report, the established engineering guidelines far exceed them. The team has been keeping up with their standard as much as they can.
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-15 00:31:35+00:00
I think you’re right but that’s basically my point. In practice glibc effectively ends up not freeing very much memory back to the OS. That’s the same as if it didn’t even bother releasing even though in theory it does have a code path to free.

The kernel does have techniques to try to free up that memory anyway (compressing them) but critically it’s not as effective as just letting the kernel know those pages are unused.
by steamrolled | 2025-06-15 00:33:28+00:00
I don't get why EE education emphasizes problems of this sort. The infinite grid is an extreme example, but solving weirdly complicated problems involving Kirchoff's laws and Thevenin's theorem was a common way to torture students back in my day...

Here, I don't think it's even useful to look at this problem in electronic terms. It's a pure math puzzle centered around an "infinite grid of linear A=B/C equations". Not the puzzle I ever felt the need to know the answer to, but I certainly don't judge others for geeking out about it.
by rossdavidh | 2025-06-15 00:33:55+00:00
I'm not actually convinced that "AI" will even replace all the jobs of drivers. Rumor is that Waymo had trouble in Austin (where I live) when they were centered downtown, because they would gridlock. I'm not convinced that they will work well once they become common on the roads, because they will all drive cautiously, and that may lend itself to gridlock situations. Right now they're in the SE corner of town (also where I live), and they don't seem to gridlock, but the first thing they do is almost always to go to another part of town. They will likely have a useful place, but I'm not convinced that it will pay enough to keep the cars in good shape, long term. The cars are all new, right now, but what happens when they get old and start to malfunction? Will they be making enough money to pay for that? Right now they might (like Uber and Lyft before them) just be burning through VC money, without any prospect of profitability.
by bane | 2025-06-15 00:35:06+00:00
Every woman I know who's been properly diagnosed with endo had to self-diagnose first, and then advocate to be tested. Not a single one was properly diagnosed by their doctor first. I'm not sure what the reason is, even women who go to doctors who specialize in endo seem to miss it unless the patient self-identifies.

The path to figuring it can be long and sometimes improbably. For example, somebody I know was watching a youtube channel they like, and one of the creators put out a side-video about a short informational cartoon they made about their own journey discovering they had endometriosis -- which also echoed this same diagnostic pattern.

My friend saw something in the cartoon that seemed familiar, decided to go get a biopsy, and voila - a lifetime of pain was finally answered. She was in her late 40s, and decided to just go get surgery and now a few years and a hysterectomy later lives pain free.
by Kirr | 2025-06-15 00:35:49+00:00
This may be as good time as any to plug my calculator for finite resistor networks (including grids) [1]. It works by eliminating non-terminal nodes one by one with the Star-Mesh transform, while keeping the exact rational resistances at each point.

[1] https://kirill-kryukov.com/electronics/resistor-network-solv...
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-15 00:36:21+00:00
glibc is not written in a containerized environment and I personally think it’s telling that a core feature of the more recent tcmalloc Google open sourced is that it returns memory efficiently, so clearly even in containerized environments it’s important. The reason for this is how kernels deal with compressing pages and pages released to the kernel are explicitly zeroed (unlike the user space allocator) which aids in the efficiency of the compression even in a containerized workload because those pages can just be skipped since they’re unused and the kernel can share the reference zeroed page for lazy allocations.

Also the kernel itself has memory needs for lots of things and it not having memory or having to go on a hunt to find contiguous pages is not good. Additionally in a VM or container environment there’s other containers and VMs running on that machine so the memory will also eventually get percolated up to the hyper visor to rebalance. None of this happens if the user space allocator hangs on to memory needlessly in a greedy fashion and indeed such an application would be more subject to the OOM killer.
by omoikane | 2025-06-15 00:37:00+00:00
> "Because there's a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they'll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting"

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1683/

Whatever digital record format they use, they will probably need to rewrite it once every few years to ensure that it's still readable.
by harmmonica | 2025-06-15 00:37:25+00:00
Can you expand on that? Why is it that a vehicle being bigger vs smaller is the distinction? I’m one person but I care about some combo of money/time/distance/comfort. If I could get a cheaper ride from say Houston up to the park rather than having to drive it myself the value prop to me is the same—I don’t have to drive. Heck if the seat on the bike was comfortable enough like a laid-back sport seat in a car I might choose the bike at the same price point because it would be more fun (again this assumes I “know” it’s safe).
by sandworm101 | 2025-06-15 00:38:11+00:00
And the electrician knows he can get a 99% answer out of a 10x10 grid on a workbench. The engineer is free to then add more resisters to the periphery until either the grant money runs out or the physicist's publishing deadline approaches.

A really difficult question: At each distance, what percentage of soldering errors in the grid can be tolerated before the fluke meter across the center square detects the fault? (That might actually be a thing as I've heard people talk about using changes of local resistance to detect remote cracks in conductive structures ... like maybe in a carbon fiber submarine hull.)
by jazzypants | 2025-06-15 00:38:45+00:00
They're referring to the founder of that website, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is controversial due to his 2023 Time article that called for a complete halt on the development of AI.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...
by TruffleLabs | 2025-06-15 00:38:58+00:00
Reading about Anne Wojcicki in Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Wojcicki

"On March 24, 2025, it was reported that 23andMe had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Wojcicki had resigned as CEO effective immediately but would remain on the company’s board.[22] On June 13, 2025, Wojcicki regained control of 23andMe through a $305 million deal, buying back nearly all of the company's assets."

There is some concern that the person who was CEO through the bankruptcy is now ready to reacquire it. What will change?
by throwawaymaths | 2025-06-15 00:39:41+00:00
it's really low in the amyloid field, especially for a fairly well regarded lab.

and i have no compunction spreading what you call "anti-science propaganda". the scientists deserve what i dish, given their behaviour.

it is, if anything, anti-intellectual to attempt to discredit real criticism of the scientific system that has real rational basis with low content slogans like "anti-science" that go against the very nature of science the process. youre only circling the wagons because you know youve done fucked up.
by ghaff | 2025-06-15 00:41:00+00:00
For many of us "good public transit" would make zero difference in our daily lives in the US. We just don't live somewhere that there will realistically be a bus stop or train stop within easy walking distance. I'm not even a long drive from a train station but it's absolutely unworkable as transportation for most purposes aside from going into the big city 9-5.
by muzani | 2025-06-15 00:41:20+00:00
I've had more trouble with other ICs rather than leaders.

It was a staff engineer role, very well paid. I was given a take home task for one interview. I did my research and looked into why they were hiring. I downloaded their app, read all the bad reviews on responsiveness, UI, and such. I built something in one hour that would solve the things they had trouble with over 4 years, as a kind of demo of what I could do if they took me.

When we had the actual interview, holy shit did they attack me. "Open your code on this file. Explain what is wrong with your code. I will not even give a hint otherwise you fail. You must tell me what is wrong with your code."

I did get them to explain the "correct answer" despite the pressure, and they were very reluctant to do so. I checked the code afterwards and even cross-checked it with AI and discovered that they were probably wrong lol.

It wasn't age. It wasn't racism, sexism, etc. It was a technical leader being challenged by the idea of someone else being technically better than them. Juniors can do work as fast as seniors; it's more that seniors are trusted to change culture for the better. If someone has trouble finding someone senior enough, most of the time it's because they refuse to let an outsider change the culture.

I did eventually get another job. Similar situation. Take home interview, vastly modernized code architecture than what the interviewer was used to. But in this case, the interviewer actually wanted to make products, get sales, make the customers happy, make money. So the incentives were aligned and they were happy to bring me in to set up policies and stuff.
by NotAnOtter | 2025-06-15 00:42:23+00:00
The new age version of cabs are over fit, people take them for many things they don't need. Me included; I no longer ask my siblings/friends/spouse to take me to the airport, I just order a lyft/uber where as I wasn't doing that with cabs 10 years ago.

People are catching on to that reality but at least WayMo offers something novel.
by clipsy | 2025-06-15 00:43:18+00:00
If you look at their graph, essentially job-switching is better -- often substantially better -- for wage growth whenever the economy is strong, and can drop to being slightly worse when the economy is in dire straits.

It's also not clear how "job switcher" is defined; particularly whether it would include people who are laid off or fired, which could obviously skew the results.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-15 00:44:07+00:00
Funny aside, they have an odd ligature to for “fi” on that site. It shows up in iOS Safari at least.

> Kachkine acknowledges that, as with any restoration project, there are ethical issues to consider, in terms of whether a restored version is an appropriate representation of an artist’s original style and intent. Any application of his new method, he says, should be done in consultation with conservators with knowledge of a painting’s history and origins.

A sort of interesting thought, “what was the artist’s intent, should be recover the painting,” is a well known question nowadays. It would be sort of funny if current artists would just write down what sort of restoration plans they are ok with. I wonder how many would say “just do what you will do people can enjoy it.”

Although, one could argue maybe that the damage which occurs to artwork as it ages also tells a historical story. Perhaps that story doesn’t just belong to the artist, and so restoring the work could be questionable even with their permission. I’m sure this is well-trod ground.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-15 00:44:39+00:00
I don't know how anyone could know if their tool is overlooked, but these threads are always "happy 10,000 day" fodder <https://xkcd.com/1053/> so I'll roll the dice

- aws-vault https://github.com/99designs/aws-vault

- often paired with the "open in container" Firefox extension (even if you use Chrome for everything else it's still great for color coding your account's "severity rating" to cut down on misclicks) https://github.com/honsiorovskyi/open-url-in-container and https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/open-url-in-contain... ; the $(aws-vault login --region $AWS_REGION --stdout "$my_profile_name") will emit the URL to login to the AWS console via their Federated Login behavior, then if one URL-encodes that and feeds it to $(firefox "ext+container:name=${con_name}&url=$url_enc") poof, it spawns the console authenticated with that aws-vault profile

- teamocil https://github.com/remi/teamocil#readme

- gojq which has just vastly superior error messages and yaml input https://github.com/itchyny/gojq

- org-mode, worth it even if you're not already in Emacs https://org-mode.org

- the 1Password cli's $(op inject) option for putting creds into files or env vars without really putting them in env vars e.g. https://developer.1password.com/docs/cli/secrets-environment...
by pixl97 | 2025-06-15 00:44:53+00:00
Thats what I'm not sure about here...

If we assume this is an infinite grid in its own universe then nothing can actually move. The gravitational pull should be the same from every direction. If we assume the grid is perfect then there is no nucleation sites to start a collapse. The grid would be in perfect balance.

The same is thought about our universe. If there hadn't been small quantum fluctuations during the inflationary stage it would have taken much longer for what we see in the modern universe to form.
by fuzztester | 2025-06-15 00:47:11+00:00
The tool is called "make", not "Make", both in the docs and in the file system.

And the file it processes can be called Makefile or makefile or even other names (see the -f option).

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/make.1.html

And that applies even to pre-GNU Linux make.

Source: been using Unix since some years before Linux was created.
by joshSzep | 2025-06-15 00:47:23+00:00
I’ve been thinking about how modern family structures seem increasingly misaligned with what our biology and history may have prepared us for. It seems likely that nature "intended" families to be multigenerational, larger clan-like units linked by shared responsibility, proximity, and care.

Modern norms have instead left many parents effectively on their own, juggling full-time work with full-time childcare. If multigenerational living were normalized, the retired could help raise the kids while the working adults focus on providing. That setup allows for more quality time rather than burnout.

This isn’t anecdotal. I didn’t grow up in a household like that. But the research supports it:

1. Older adults living with younger generations experience less loneliness, better mental health, and even longer lifespans. 2. Multigenerational households are more financially resilient, less likely to live in poverty, and able to share housing, food, and caregiving costs. 3. Children benefit cognitively and emotionally from regular grandparent involvement. 4. Multigenerational setups enable parents to stay in the workforce while providing more consistent and affordable childcare. 5. Families in these homes report stronger relationships and better intergenerational understanding.

Of course there are challenges. Privacy, space, and generational conflict are real. But with today's social isolation, rising living costs, and aging demographics, we might want to normalize this kind of household again.

Maybe the future isn't just smarter cities or more automation, but rethinking how we live together.

---

*Sources:*

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9876343/ 2. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/03/24/the-inc... 3. https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/75/6/12... 4. https://www.gu.org/app/uploads/2021/03/FamilyMatters2021.pdf 5. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db255.pdf
by dtagames | 2025-06-15 00:49:52+00:00
Kudos on making your app and, even more importantly, shipping it! Far too few devs are serious enough to ship something customers can actually use.

Both domain and programming expertise are still required with agents. You just picked up yours along the way. The larger and more complicated the architecture, the more human guidance is needed.

But the 2 "hidden skills" needed to master agents are really the one's you've demonstrated here. Those are communicating clearly and being willing to listen and learn. Perhaps your hospitality background is a benefit here because those are not common dev skills, especially communicating about programming in plain English as you did with the LLM.
by pyman | 2025-06-15 00:51:08+00:00
I live in Montevideo, here people use "usted" (the formal "you" in Spanish) to show respect to older people. But there's no strict rule about when to switch from "tu" (informal you) to "usted". So you kind of guess based on how old someone looks.

The problem is, if you say "usted" to someone who doesn't see themselves as old, they might take offence. So, trying to be polite in Uruguay can backfire if your mental age calculation is off!
by b112 | 2025-06-15 00:52:26+00:00
You must have missed this in the wikipedia page, but they're hinged.

So when they look down (which for a chicken means bending their neck), they can see the ground and their feed.

When looking ahead, their vision is obscured and blurry, opaque, so they won't attack or eat other chickens.

(the red is an additional option)
by ryandrake | 2025-06-15 00:52:39+00:00
IMO it's attitudes like this that allow companies to continue ripping us all off for small amounts here and small amounts there. They know it's a small amount and most people won't push back, so they keep getting away with it. I suppose the only thing that stops me from hitting the nuclear button every time this happens is that there are a limited number of companies offering many categories of services, and I'd eventually have to charge back each of them and lose access to an entire industry composed entirely of shitty companies.

It would be much better if companies were inclined to amicably settle small dollar disputes rather than the default which seems to be to stonewall, and then ban when the customer uses the only tool they have to push back.
by jfengel | 2025-06-15 00:52:42+00:00
It becomes a black hole, but it doesn't necessarily collapse, at least not at first. A supermassive black hole has very low density and a very gentle gravitational gradient.

All of the mass does end up in the singularity, in finite time (at least for any finite subset of the black hole), but it doesn't automatically become super dense just because it's a black hole. It can remain quite ordinary for a very long time.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-06-15 00:53:55+00:00
> You can ride a plane (national only) here in NZ with no ID check. There is a name on the ticket, but no one checks it matches the passenger.

I hypothesize that at least one of these is true:

No one has exploited this yet (it only takes one incident).

It is checked, you just don't know about it. Facial ID is pretty rad now.