MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmclnx | 2025-07-06 20:56:50+00:00
Many things makes sense to me, but as we can all guess, this will never become a thing :(

But the "magic number" thing to me is a waste of space. If this standard is accepted, if no magic number you have corrected UTF-8.

As for \r\n, not a big deal to me. I would like to see if forbidden if only to force Microsoft to use \n like UN*X and Apple. I still need to deal with \r\n in files showing up every so often.
by slow_typist | 2025-07-06 20:56:57+00:00
I don’t think that is a management problem but the mechanics will work against you and you would squander too much of the precious fuel if you stack’em in three dimensions.

But some geostationary satellites are close enough so that there can be failover without adjusting receiving antennas on the ground.

So you can of course keep them dense around the equator. Probably very close down to hundreds of meters (if not less) if you coordinate the station keeping. After all the forces that push or pull the satellites out of orbit (tidal forces and particle streams) should be very similar for close neighbours. Problem is that you have to share the bandwidth of the up- and downlink then because the dishes of the groundstations cannot focus so sharply.

Given that, and redundancy put aside, one bigger satellite with more payloads would usually be cheaper than two smaller ones without any disadvantages.
by j45 | 2025-07-06 20:57:02+00:00
5w to mw is huge, but at the same time the total cost of ownership over 3/5 years depending on the cost of the hardware may not pay off in a 5w spread, especially with SSD premiums.

When it comes to self hosted servers for example, using tiny computers as servers often gets you massive power savings that do make a difference compared to buying off-lease rack mount servers that can idle in the hundreds of watts.
by Crunchified | 2025-07-06 20:58:59+00:00
It's a little (or maybe a lot) different, given the added dimension of clashing (international) cultures and the resulting management perceptions. In some ways, it's the opposite side of the spectrum from those European countries that established their business operations in the USA in the '80s and '90s with far greater benefits and relaxed working schedules than the typical US corporate policies of the era. SAP comes to mind as an example.
by TMEHpodcast | 2025-07-06 20:59:39+00:00
I’ve often wondered what This American Life would have been if it were British.

“Each week, we bring you stories of life in Britain. Not extraordinary life. Not even particularly interesting life. Just… life. Grey, tea-soaked, mildly apologetic life. Today’s theme: Standing Quietly in Queues While Contemplating Death and Crisps.”
by IgorPartola | 2025-07-06 20:59:49+00:00
I work with Python quite a bit. Basically you either world where something like a web request takes 40ms to process instead of 20 and that just doesn't matter or you are in the situation where the request takes 2000ms instead of 500ms which is not as acceptable (but might be depending on the UI on top of this web request). At that point your first stop is something like numpy or another C or Rust module that will do the brunt of the CPU-intensive work. Past that, yeah you gotta look at different runtimes. But Python is so fast for prototyping that it might not even be worth it.

I haven't tried it yet but I do wonder about the feasibility of writing code in Python and then having an LLM transcode it to something like C, especially since I know C well enough to do what I want in that directly so I could check the resultant code by hand.
by christianqchung | 2025-07-06 20:59:51+00:00
> the biggest polluters and criminals in the climate story are still by far the fossil fuel industry (eg. Shell, Exxon)

What does this actually mean? It feels like when people say this it implies that gas companies just burn gas randomly for no reason. They sell their gas to everyday consumers, actual people. Why is this Shell/Exxon's fault and not consumers?
by jonchurch_ | 2025-07-06 21:00:40+00:00
Maybe I came into this article knowing too much about the solution, but I dont agree with commenters saying this is a poorly designed interview question. Its a blog post as well, not the format that would be presented to a candidate.

I think it has clear requirements and opportunities for nudges from the interviewer without invalidating the assessment (when someone inevitably gets tunnel vision on one particular requirement). It has plenty of ways for an interviewee to demonstrate their knowledge and solve the problem in different ways.

Ive run debounce interview questions that attempt to exercise similar competency from candidates, with layering on of requirements time allowing (leading/trailing edge, cancel, etc) and this queue form honestly feels closer to what Id expect devs to actually have built in their day to day.
by duskwuff | 2025-07-06 21:01:27+00:00
1) Adding offsets to multi-byte sequences breaks compatibility with existing UTF-8 text, while generating text which can be decoded (incorrectly) as UTF-8. That seems like a non-starter. The alleged benefit of "eliminating overlength encodings" seems marginal; overlength encodings are already invalid. It also significantly increases the complexity of encoders and decoders, especially in dealing with discontinuities like the UTF-16 surrogate "hole".

2) I really doubt that the current upper limit of U+10_FFFF is going to need to be raised. Past growth in the Unicode standard has primarily been driven by the addition of more CJK characters; that isn't going to continue indefinitely.

3) Disallowing C0 characters like U+0009 (horizontal tab) is absurd, especially at the level of a text encoding.

4) BOMs are dumb. We learned that lesson in the early 2000s - even if they sound great as a way of identifying text encodings, they have a nasty way of sneaking into the middle of strings and causing havoc. Bringing them back is a terrible idea.
by convolvatron | 2025-07-06 21:02:14+00:00
If I'm working next to the hardware group, I generally write my own. this allows me to make progress on drivers/firmware before hardware is available. if its an asic we can even spend a little time making it run in the DV environment - they get vectors for free and overall we get more confidence that the firmware/driver is going to work on delivered silicon.

if something doesn't work on actual hardware, now we're in a really good place to have to a conversation. clearly the simulator differs from the actual design, and we can just focus on sussing that out. otherwise the conversation can be alot more difficult and can devolve into 'hardware's broken' vs 'software person doesn't have a clue'.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-06 21:02:23+00:00
Nothing is ever ideal, but centuries of labor laws gets us in the right direction. A 4 day workweek would do wonders while still having plenty of work to be done.

Your statement is also why I fear this supposed promise that "AI will do all the work, society won't need jobs!". I don't think we're getting this post-work utopia that tecunocrats love to promise.
by pvtmert | 2025-07-06 21:02:51+00:00
I am not sure if the _Swarm_ is still alive, but it can definitely do blue/green rolling deployments...

I fought really hard at one of the startups I previously worked. For the CV/Resume polishing, engineers pushed for K8s. It was outrageous for me since there were total of 3 applications running. 1 Python monolith and 2 other smaller Go apps.

Just before that, I was able to reduce AWS costs from 5k+/eur/month to sub 2k/eur/month. Having 3 parallel environments running at the time. (Dev/Staging/Prod).
by subjectsigma | 2025-07-06 21:03:05+00:00
I think you and other commenters are correct - it's just the theming. I can't get it to not have the tint on startup and it goes away when changing the theme as rgovostes described. The reason I was confused was because it starts out as black-and-white and then turns blue, and the blue is basically the same color as selecting text! Oh well, I feel silly now.
by vladms | 2025-07-06 21:04:06+00:00
I do not think there is "one" purpose for a PhD, and not everyone gets the same thing from it - it depends on what are a person's strong and weak points. I have seen very smart people not able to explain at all their work and during a PhD they were forced to improve. I have seen very good presenters that were forced to do some actual work. I have seen people that were convinced they can solve anything (as in some parts of the world the bachelor and master focus to much on solvable problems) understand that sometimes there just isn't a clear, nice solution to a problem.

On average someone that does have a PhD will have a wider set of skills, like understanding of the complexities of the field, resistance to frustration, capability to do research and ability to communicate.
by _pdp_ | 2025-07-06 21:05:20+00:00
> I've spent the weekend trying my hand at making an AI assistant SaaS (I can't believe this doesn't exist yet!), and the biggest lesson I learnt is that I need to pay attention to what Claude Code does.

It is part of the learning curve discovering that making a non-deterministic system act deterministically based on some vague instructions is actually pretty difficult.
by comrade1234 | 2025-07-06 21:05:53+00:00
I know this American life is good and when I listen to it I almost always think it was worthwhile. However... his voice. It's just so hard for me to listen to him for some reason.

Same thing with Hidden Brain. Impactful episodes that can change your life but the guy's voice puts you to sleep so it's like taking an upper and a downer at the same time.
by senko | 2025-07-06 21:07:59+00:00
The energy and/or water use comes up from time to time so I did a little digging:

The average ChatGPT query uses 0.34 Wh (0.12 kJ, 0.3kcal) and 0.32ml of water.

This means if you ask it one question every two minutes, you're using about as much energy as a 10W LED lightbulb.

If you use it 5000 times, you'll waste the energy of a medium-sized pizza, and water amount equivalent to how much you'd need to wash your hands after that pizza.

Sources:

Energy and water use: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

Typical water pipe flow (with perlator/aerator): 3.5 L/min: https://www.enu.hr/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/7.-Racionalno-... (US stats are 4x that: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/environment/edu...) Time required to properly wash hands: https://www.hzjz.hr/sluzba-zdravstvena-ekologija/pravilno-pr...
by phil21 | 2025-07-06 21:08:15+00:00
> But yeah… tipping has very little to do with “work harder => more pay.” You need to examine your logic more. Or just, like… have a few beers with a single person who’s ever worked in a restaurant as an adult.

I have had more than a few conversations with tipped service workers. Some are even friends of mine. While a lot of what you say is true (the manipulation of shifts and spotting/monopolizing desirable customers) it really fails to capture what most folks tell me about these jobs.

They like tips. The ones that hustle and build up a bank of "regulars" do quite well. It takes a lot of work, and if you hustle on your shifts you usually get more tables assigned to you or drinks poured per hour, etc. This means even more pay.

A slow unskilled bartender is making far less money than a highly skilled efficient experienced bartender with a stable of regulars taking up half the bar stool seats every slow night. It is a night and day difference in total pay rates - all to do with skill. This can be two bartenders behind the same bar on the same nights. The unskilled bartender is not going to be known in these closely knit industry circles as good talent, and will likely never get the opportunity for a position at the top-tier establishments known for good tippers. Those positions are highly competitive.

While we can pontificate about how businesses "should" reward the top tier employees, it isn't happening. In this area of work these are often the only types of jobs available that offer significantly more hourly pay by working harder or being better at your job than your peers. Tilting at windmills only goes so far - sometimes you take the only options available to you to immediately improve your lot in life.

And yes, some of that is "manipulation" of your work environment - just like how we call it "managing upwards" in our white collar world. Same thing.
by famouswaffles | 2025-07-06 21:08:54+00:00
>It's the entire premise of the article.

Yeah, and it's wrong.

>Supported by data within the article.

Really Nothing in that article supports a statement as strong as "US public opinion on AI is negative".

>"People frequently visit this one site that's currently talked about a lot" is not evidence that people are in favor of AI.

ChatGPT wasn't released last week. It's nearly 2 years old and it's growth has been steady. People aren't visiting the site that much because of some 15 minutes of fame, they're visiting it because they find use of it that frequently. You don't get that many weekly active users otherwise.

And yeah, if that many people use it that frequently then you're going to need real evidence to say that they have a poor opinion on it, not tangentially related random surveys.

Oh the survey said most people wouldn't pay money for features they currently get for free ? Come on.

I agree that features you don't want shouldn't be shoved down your throat. I genuinely do. But that's about the only thing in the article I agree with.
by RandomThoughts3 | 2025-07-06 21:09:16+00:00
> its not just the text book definition of "borrow money at a low interest rate and invest at a higher interest rate"

That’s absolutely not the textbook definition of arbitrage.

Arbitrage is buy something somewhere at a price and resell it in a different market at a higher price. It’s just price arbitration hence the name.

There are no other kind of arbitrage implied when people talk about arbitrage. That’s what the word means.
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 21:09:33+00:00
> The next time someone says “science says…”, society may not listen.

We're already there. Turns out it has nothing to do with science at all, but rather propaganda and political messaging. If you just tell people science is wrong and bad then they internalize that, regardless of the state of science.

This confirms what many of us know to be true - what people believe has only a very loose tie to reality. Populist messaging is the future.
by scoodah | 2025-07-06 21:10:55+00:00
I use Linux everywhere but my laptop and I agree.

I used to run Arch on my work laptop but getting sleep and hibernate was such a pain I never did get it working quite right. My battery life was not great, partly due to the difficulties getting the system to prefer the iGPU over the nvidia GPU — however poor battery life is something I also experienced with windows laptops.

I’ve been running a MacBook since they switched to Apple Silicon and it would take a lot for me to switch back to a different laptop.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-06 21:11:18+00:00
It's an ok book. I thought Artemis was his most interesting book and also the most underrated. It's got some nice world building, I could imagine an expanse-like series based on it.

Also the main character is a tough girl which is nice.

I liked the Martian but it was a bit too cheerful for a pretty rough situation. And the characters a bit one dimensional. Artemis is a bit grittier.

Project Hail Mary didn't quite resonate with me somehow. It's ok but not a rereader.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-06 21:11:27+00:00
Claude Code is compared in the README. https://github.com/sst/opencode?tab=readme-ov-file#how-is-th...

One other thing that would be neat to make more visible: what kind of prompts and tools are at the heart of this agent?

I found a bunch of tools here. Haven't found an overarching prompt yet. https://github.com/sst/opencode/tree/dev/packages/opencode/s...
by kragen | 2025-07-06 21:11:48+00:00
Thanks for the link! This is a good example of the use of the medium of video (animation) to present information more clearly than alternative media could.

He's concerned not about allocating the suffering optimally (to the people least willing to pay to reduce it, for example because they are in excellent health or couldn't afford the flight otherwise) but about reducing the total amount of suffering, which is far more important.

In other contexts, the main benefit of market mechanisms is precisely that they vastly reduce suffering, for example by stimulating the production of socially valuable goods. Is there a way market mechanisms for boarding order could have such a benefit? For example, by rewarding people who board in an order that minimizes overall boarding delay? I'm skeptical.
by woopsn | 2025-07-06 21:11:54+00:00
Convolution with dirac delta will give you an exact sample of f(0), and in principle a whole signal could be constructed as a combination of delayed delta signals - but we can't realize an exact delta signal in most spaces, only approximations.

As a result we get finite resolution and truncation of the spectrum. So "Fourier analysis with pre-applied lowpass filter" would be analysis of sampled signals, the filter determined by the sampling kernel (delta approximator) and properties of the DFT.

But so long as the sampling kernel is good (that is the actual terminology), we can form f exactly as the limit of these fuzzy interpolations.

The term "resolution of the identity" is associated with the fact that delta doesn't exist in most function spaces and instead has to be approximated. A good sampling kernel "resolves" the missing (convolutional) identity. I like thinking of the term also in the sense that these operators behave like the identity if it were only good up to some resolution.
by burnte | 2025-07-06 21:12:01+00:00
> I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused.

UI has been taken over by graphic designers and human interaction experts have been pushed out. It happened as we started calling it "user experience" rather than "user interface" because people started to worry about the emotional state of the user, rather than being a tool. It became about being form over function, and now we have to worry about holding it wrong when in reality machines are here to serve humans, not the other way around.
by TechnicalVault | 2025-07-06 21:12:13+00:00
It doesn't help what we've designed a rather silly academic system where principal investigators are forced to spend a good deal of their time thinking where they'll be applying for their next grant. We also optimise the system for short term thinking rather than long games. There are some exceptions in research institutes but I think young people are the ones who have the clearest minds because of it.
by andy99 | 2025-07-06 21:12:20+00:00
Modern PhDs are not designed for people that are smart like this. She's a math savant that obviously has a unique and demonstrably effective way of looking at things, why destroy that with "training how to do research".

I hope she's found a program that will support her while realizing she's smarter than whomever is setting the rules, rather than something stifling.
by alextousss | 2025-07-06 21:12:54+00:00
Light being coherent and light being dangerous are two completely orthogonal concepts. A laser is dangerous because of the very tight beam, but any household mirror keeps that beam focused. Plus, a mosquito needs 100millijoules to fry (from the intellectual ventures study) which is a lot more than what a retina can handle. The short duration actually makes it even worse, because the eye lids can’t close soon enough to avoid the retina burning (they take 100ms to close). That’s the reason why lasers are classed by power.

A retina being easier to burn than a mosquito is the fundamental reason why we haven’t seen that tech deployed. LiDAR detection with a 2D goniometer + high power laser has been available commercially for a while. There just never was someone to create something so deceptive as to sell a 40watts device as possibly safe.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-07-06 21:14:59+00:00
Tower got caught doing the same thing about 10 years ago. Apparently the strategy was literally called "the hammer" or something that was far too on-the-nose, but it was exploiting other strategies at the firm that bought a ton in the morning and hammered the close - "the hammer" made that leg profitable.

I assume Jane Street's version of this may have been unintentional: get your big position to do a bunch of intraday trading without worrying about being too short, then exit at the end of the day. This can work because markets tend to go up or stay flat intraday, meaning you get to use typical strategies in a jurisdiction that doesn't like when you go short via superposition. Then along the way, someone figured out this options trade and didn't realize their own behavior was influencing the price of the option (oops, I guess it wasn't superposition all along).
by teiferer | 2025-07-06 21:15:26+00:00
I'd love to see dang's take on this. How to prevent HN getting overrun with AI topics? How to avoid slop killing the mood? In terms of articles, in terms of comments?

Is there any estimate of how many comments are LLM-generated? What if I tell an agent "make an HN account and post comments with the goal of maximizing karma" and come back after a week to see how it went?
by gizmo686 | 2025-07-06 21:15:52+00:00
It is not required for vector spaces to have a basis. As it turns out, the claim that every vector space has a basis is equivalent to the axiom of choice, which seems well beyond the scope of the article.

However, the particular vector space in question (functions from R to R) does have a basis, which the author describes. That basis is not as useful as a basis typically is for finite dimensional (or even countably unfitine dimensional) vector spaces, but it still exists.
by bluelightning2k | 2025-07-06 21:17:55+00:00
Interestingly I think I would over-think this. The interviewer is assuming a single server, running in a VPS type environment. There's also no notion of state persistence/timeout/recovery etc. I think I'd immediately have started factoring those things in.

ALSO while JavaScript is a single threaded environment, the while solution would still basically work due to the scheduler (at least if you yield, await sleep, etc.)
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by psvisualdesign | 2025-07-06 21:18:19+00:00
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by lordnacho | 2025-07-06 21:18:37+00:00
I'm amazed they managed to move firms. Suppose you know how the strategy works, and it's like what SEBI says.

1) How do you approach mlp? They don't just give you an account, they have risk officers, compliance officers, and general strategy due diligence.

2) If you manage to get past it, what then? Say mlp just asks some superficial questions and sees the dollar signs. Are you going to do the same thing? You have to think the compliance people will complain, surely?

3) So maybe the strategy they actually approached with was a parasitical strategy? If you know which stocks will be bought and sold by JS, maybe you do jump in first? Especially as you'll know particulars like when it happens, which stocks are selected, and how to spot them.