MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csa | 2025-07-24 05:01:44+00:00
Hi Cate,

Welcome to HN!

A few things:

1. Thank you for writing the book and providing the excerpt.

2. Here is a link to the original blog post by Jason: https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

3. I imagine that Jason would be happy to talk to you if you contact him and tell him what you’re doing. He goes by jayro here on HN, but I am not sure how active he is on HN these days.

3. I think there were at least two main issues that LSA tried to address. One was capable tech people who were not finding work opportunities that were commensurate with their skill. Another was about the benefits of building in public. Which leads to…

4. Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN) built and sold two businesses publicly (Bingo Card Creator and Appointment Reminder). He was a big proponent of building publicly as a way to increase luck surface area, and I think that the strategy worked well for him. He also wrote a truckload on various sites including but not limited to HN. I imagine he would also be open to talking to you if you reach out

5. To provide some more constructive commentary about your excerpt, I get the sense that each of the headings are mostly byproducts of increasing LSA — namely, be passionate about something and talk to people about it. If you do that, then it’s easy to operate from a place of genuine curiosity, you will naturally (without trying) be auditioning for a bigger role, you will be giving before you take, and you will be airing your weirdness (although it’s probably not weird). Hosting events (overly specific) and a period of lostness (talking to the wrong audience?) just seem extremely peripheral to me in the discussion of LSA.

Anyway, thank you again for posting your excerpt. Best of luck!

More links you might find interesting:

https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

https://alchemist.camp/metacast/luck-surface-area

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25968751 (11 years later, but still…)

https://www.kalzumeus.com/ (Patio11 blog with all of the details)
by tbrownaw | 2025-07-24 05:02:52+00:00
> Effectiveness of regenerative braking depends on having an extremely large battery that can sink enough current to stop the car. An EV can do that, hybrids at best help the brakes out some. You just can't charge the battery fast enough doing anything but a very slow rolling stop.

This seems a bit exaggerated. Staying regenerative-only does require sticking to about half or so of how fast I could stop, but so far that seems to work fine unless a light turns right in front of me or traffic acts up. Usually it says it gets high 90's or 100%, and it didn't go below 50% even when a stoplight did turn at exactly the wrong time. (2022 Ford Escape non-plug-in hybrid, recently bought used.)
by spookie | 2025-07-24 05:02:58+00:00
Yeah, pretty incredible distro. Some rough edges here and there but man, even maintenance is a dream. It's just plain simpler to diagnose, and actually control what the system does. Instead of having to go down abstraction hell land.

Don't get me wrong, systemd is cool. But my god people really abuse of it. Especially distros. Some really make it hard to understand what service is in actual control. Why wrap daemons in daemons in daemons? With the worst possible names and descriptions to boot.
by Velorivox | 2025-07-24 05:03:16+00:00
First, this is just a pervasive myth. Not that Google doesn’t operate money losing services: Blogger is a good example of that.

Second, “if Google can’t make it work no one can” is also a myth. YouTube, even the idea of which came after Google video was already launched, is a good example of that.

And, of course, Google+…
by teleforce | 2025-07-24 05:04:32+00:00
>drastically removed brake dust

It will be very interesting to see the data for the same car that has many powertrain versions for example the Lexus UX with the UX 200 (ICE), UX 300h (hybrid) and UX 300e (EV) to test which one the best and the worst in term of brake dust residue.

My hypotheses is that for brake dust residue the best is hybrid, 2nd will be ICE and the 3rd will be EV. This is due to the fact that the EV version has at least several hundreds kg extra weight (about 400 kg extra), that makes the brake dust residue comparable to ICE if not worst based on the approximately 30% extra vehicle weight for the battery. The hybrid however only has approximately 5% more weight or extra 80 kg different compared to the ICE version.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-07-24 05:05:45+00:00
I know the "what you refer to as Linux is, in fact, GNU/Linux" thing has become a sort of tongue-in-cheek meme, but it actually applies here: crediting Linus Torvalds alone for the success of Linux ignores crucial contributions from RMS, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and probably dozens or hundreds of others.

Ruby on Rails? Are we talking about the Ruby part (Matz) or the Rails part (DHH)?

Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. The initial Gmail development team had multiple people plus the infrastructure and resources of Google. I'm not sure why people love the lone genius story so much, but it's definitely the exception and not the rule.
by jjk166 | 2025-07-24 05:06:17+00:00
Second strike capability deters full scale nuclear first strikes, but not necessarily limited strikes where the gamble is "they won't destroy the world just because we destroyed a city." It also does nothing against accidental launches, or strikes ordered because of miscommunication or irrationality. If we were confident we could deter all strikes, there would be no need for missile defense abroad either - our threat to retaliate would be sufficient. In any scenario where a carrier group is potentially getting nuked we're basically in a full scale nuclear war with a peer adversary. Those other ballistic missile defense systems do serve a purpose, but they are inadequate on their own. They currently exist because they were technically simpler, not because they are superior.

The purpose of ballistic missile defense is not to deter a state from attacking with ICBMs, it is to intercept ICBMs. For small strikes such as the scenarios given above, it can defeat or mitigate them. For sufficiently large strikes, nukes will get through, but fewer will get through, and importantly the adversary doesn't know which will get through, so for a given arsenal size they need to either double up on targets or accept a significant fraction of targets not being destroyed, either of which means more stuff is left standing than if there wasn't such a missile defense system in place. Again, defense systems are not meant to be undefeatable, they are just to force your adversary into incurring the cost to potentially defeat them. There is a deterrent effect to any weapon system - if it's harder, riskier, and more expensive to defeat the adversary, all the less reason to try - but that's just an added bonus.

The argument that this system encourages development of space based weapons falls on deaf ears. Space based weapons are already under active development by multiple nations, and will be implemented regardless because an adversary's satellite network is already a serious military asset to be attacked and defended. Given the choice between weaponized space and not being nuked versus probably still weaponization of space and being nuked, I know which option I'm choosing. I am even less compelled by the claim that a space based interceptor, whose sole purpose is to prevent nuclear armageddon and has no offensive capability whatsoever, somehow equates to space imperialism. The would be nuclear war mongers seem like the real enemy of free spacefaring nations.

There is a very real question of opportunity cost. Developing and deploying such a system is resource intensive, could those resources be better spent elsewhere? Is there a better way to defend against these threats? Are there realistic alternatives that prevent nuclear war by other means? I think a compelling case could be made for either. Whatever that alternative is though needs to be better than "sit around and pray no one launches nukes."
by pmontra | 2025-07-24 05:07:12+00:00
That's my laptop. I'll check what my customers do on their servers, but all of them have a login screen on the home page of their services. Only one of them have a registration screen. Those are the servers I have access to. Their corporate sites run on WordPress and I don't know how those servers are configured.

Anyway, I'd also enable swap on public facing servers.
by slt2021 | 2025-07-24 05:08:21+00:00
the level of regenerative braking directly impacts your accelerator pedal behavior.

by reducing regeneration, you will increase tire life by virtue of modifying your acceleration behavior. Its hard for me to explain, but I just suggest trying the medium regenerative setting and you will see it yourself.

You will feel it, because the most of the tire wear happens when car decelerates. On less regeneration your car will decelerate less and will wear out tires slower
by TheAlchemist | 2025-07-24 05:08:54+00:00
Hah, I appologized on the last one for posting so much about Tesla.

As for better things to talk about ? Yeah probably. But we're witnessing history in the making here and I find it fascinating. Think about how it was when Madoff was running his ponzi circle, and some guys knew about it for years, alerted the SEC and ... nothing happened.

I feel a bit the same about Tesla now.
by defrost | 2025-07-24 05:09:24+00:00
> if they've already been plugged once and theu get another puncture its off to the bin.

Again, that's your personal choice.

We've got off road and on road tyres we still use with four to five tyre plugs in them that have lasted a few years since their last puncture.

I'm in non urban Australia and have cars actively used with > 500,000 km on the clock. We were raised to maintain gear; be it cars, trucks, aircraft, excavators, bob cats, etc.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-07-24 05:10:27+00:00
My question here is: why would Google try to actively sabotage, possibly even devastate the very backbone cash cow that is all those spammy, SEO-laden search and ad results right below its own AI overview, that's displacing them for engine users who don't bother with the rest (I thing I personally avoid because fuck you hallucinating AI overview)

Anyone have any ideas?

EDIT: Also, the irony of Google, which for years harped on and on about working to fight incorrect, erroneous and also even "misinformation-laden" search results, now making a hallucinating AI that often makes up outright bullshit with authority as its primary, first-line result for information. Truly a company that bathes in an ever deeper pool of shit the bigger it grows.
by itkovian_ | 2025-07-24 05:11:59+00:00
Article doesn’t say jobs aren’t about to be evicerated, says this is already happening and it’s due to capitalism, a lack of consumer protections and we require more government regulation. This never made any sense to me because we don’t have to guess how this would go - the experiment is being run in Europe right now.

Also the core of the argument is wrong, ai is clearly displacing jobs this is happening today.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-24 05:12:27+00:00
Many semiconductor materials cannot be grown as ingots that are later cut into wafers, like it is done with silicon or germanium, but they are grown epitaxially as thin layers on wafers made of other semiconductor or insulator materials that have a compatible crystal structure.

Most gallium nitride devices, like those that are used now in miniature chargers for laptops/smartphones, are made like this.

Using this technique for indium selenide is a standard procedure, not something surprising.

The "wells" are made by doping with various kinds of atoms, which is normally done by ion implantation, i.e. a ion beam inserts the desired impurities into the crystal, at the desired depth.

In very thin devices, like in most modern CMOS technologies, the doped zones no longer look like "wells". For an N-channel MOSFET, you just have from source to drain 3 zones of alternating polarity, n-p-n. The middle zone is surrounded partially or even totally by the gate insulator.
by mc3301 | 2025-07-24 05:13:28+00:00
It isn't just slow or distracted drivers. It is congestion. It is too many cars, and the impossible task of making them all "go" at the same time.

What we need is fewer cars and better shared transportation.

Heck, we should replace ALL cars with busses, and then they could go super fast with all the other buses. Make 'em small, so it's maybe 20 people per bus. That's 20 cars off the road, right there.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-24 05:16:06+00:00
This is like what you hope will happen. It happened to Japan. Doesn’t mean it will happen to the US.

When you look at some European country like Russia and see how fucked up it is. Then you say well Russia is full of white ppl like the US so the future of the US will be like Russia, doesn’t that sound massively stupid to you?

So why do you think what happened to Japan applies to China? Like is it because the people in Japan look like the people in China? You know the countries hate each other right?
by cloverich | 2025-07-24 05:17:23+00:00
Surprisingly you can get nearly same effect in automatics. I put around 60k miles on my first automatic (after120k+ on my first two cars, manual transmissions) and when i got my brakes checked at 63k they noted my brakes were still "brand new". I do gamify reading traffic to try and brake as little as possible (to help pass time etc), but was still surprised how far this takes you given i do plenty of stop and go traffic driving. This was a v6 sedan so lighter than an suv / truck. I expected it to not work in automatics but it does to at least some extent. I swapped for an EV before taking it the usual distance and curious if anyones pushed further and how far.
by vitorgrs | 2025-07-24 05:18:22+00:00
In Brazil, they called it Dolphin Mini. It's been a huge success. BYD now it's ahead of Toyota in sales.

If you told someone like, 3 years ago that this would happen, people would call you crazy,

TOP 9 from May was:

1. FIAT

2. VW

3. GM

4. BYD

5. Toyota

6. Hyundai

7. Honda

8. Caoa-Chery

9. Jeep
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-24 05:19:07+00:00
No this administration is set on protecting industry. Tesla is still around largely because byd is kept out.

I mean the policies you see you like to think are bad are literally helping Americans out, it’s just hard to look at those policies.

Because the policies represents American inferiority. America needs a leg up because their industry is inferior to China. These policies are not fair at all.
by bruce511 | 2025-07-24 05:19:36+00:00
I don't think this comment should be down-voted since it is indeed a real point of difference and it is worth discussing.

The key takeaway is that there are differences to driving an EV to driving an ICE vehicle. Equally those differences are in fact easy to adjust to given a bit of practice.

Of course cars have always had different control options. Automatic and Manual gearboxes spring to mind. When I first learned some cars had a gear selector as an arm on the steering column, and so on.

EVs like a somewhat gentler foot, because the torque is instant, so a heavy foot is likely to be a more uncomfortable ride.

So yes, different cars, different styles. But of course we adjust very quickly, and its not really difficult to drive anything- it just takes a bit of practice.
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-24 05:20:34+00:00
My only point is that you should have at least some few gig of swap space to smooth out temporary memory spikes, possibly avoiding random processes getting killed at random times, and making it very unlikely that the system will evict your code pages when it's running close to, but below the memory limit. The OOMKiller won't kick in if you're below the limit, but your system will freeze completely - virtually every time the scheduler runs, one core will stall on a disk read.

Conversely, with a few GB of old data paged out to disk, even to a slow HDD, there is going to be much, much less thrashing going on. Chances are, the system will work pretty normally, since it's most likely that memory that isn't being used at all is what will get swapped out, so it's unlikely to need to be swapped in any time soon. The spike that caused you to go over your normal memory usage will die down, memory will get freed naturally, and worse you'll see is that some process will have a temporary spike in latency soem time later when it actually needs those swapped out pages.

Now, if the spike is too large to fit even in RAM + swap, the OOMKiller will still run and the system will recover that way.

The only situation where you'll get in the state you are describing is if veitually all of your memory pages are constantly getting read and written to, so that the VMM can't evict any "stale" pages to swap. This should be a relatively rare occurrence, but I'm sure there are workloads where this happens, and I agree that in those cases, disabling swap is a good idea.

> If you aren't checking `malloc` failure you have UB, but hopefully you will just crash (killing processes is a good thing when the system fundamentally can't fulfill everything you're asking of it!), and there's a pretty good chance the process that gets killed is blameworthy.

This is a very optimistic assumption. Crashing is about as likely as some kind of data corruption for these cases. Not to mention, crashing (or getting OOMKilled, for that matter) are very likely to cause data loss - a potentially huge issue. If you can avoid the situation altogether, that's much better. Which means overprovisioning and enabling some amount of swap if your workload is of a nature that doesn't constantly churn the entire working memory.

> "Swap isn't even that slow for SSDs" is part of the problem. All developers should be required to use an HDD with full-disk encryption, so that they stop papering over their performance bugs.

You're supposed to design software for the systems you actually yarget, not some lowest common denominator. If you're targeting use cases where the software will be deployed on 5400 RPM HDDs with full disk encryption at rest running on an Intel Celeron CPU with 512 MB of RAM, then yes, design your system for those constraints. Disable swap, overcommit too, probably avoid any kind of VM technology, etc.

But don't go telling people who are designing for servers running on SSDs to disable swap because it'll make the system unusably slow - it just won't.
by slg | 2025-07-24 05:21:40+00:00
This is not an argument that has any relevancy to AI. If anything, someone who believes what you say should be against the introduction of AI into the system because your argument is fundamentally that these drugs shouldn't have a gatekeeper. Swapping out one gatekeeper for another, especially with the new gatekeeper being the unknown black box of some AI middleman, won't actually address your complaint.
by thejazzman | 2025-07-24 05:22:01+00:00
try it and found out; it's not about memory overhead (maybe it is to someone), it's that it works so much better than web backed things. it's just an absurdly fast/responsive/delightful thing to experience after years of everything going the other way [while hardware actually gets faster]

and i say this as a proud career long web developer. i just really like zed.
by postpawl | 2025-07-24 05:22:57+00:00
GM announced a $10 billion stock buyback in November 2023, literally weeks after claiming they couldn't afford worker raises during the UAW strike that cost them $1.1 billion. Since 2015, GM has authorized $37.7 billion in total buybacks while their new UAW contract costs $9.3 billion over four years. When you can find $10 billion for buybacks immediately after settling a strike, the problem isn't "expensive labor". It's management that chose financial engineering over building competitive manufacturing capabilities.
by cloverich | 2025-07-24 05:23:01+00:00
To be constructive, took me a little over a week to get used to. Also i test drove four, and absolutely hated 2 of them. One felt very similar to my ICE car (VW ID4). Eventually settled on ioniq and after a week, it quickly became my favorite driving car ever (which coming from sporty manual transmissions, is not at all what i expected or why i bought it).

All to say, check out a few to be sure, im still shocked how much i love driving this thing (and how criminally fast it is, totally absurd).
by genewitch | 2025-07-24 05:23:17+00:00
what happens when there's more people that need 20 minutes? it takes me less than five to pull up, fill up, and go. when the gas station is packed, i might have to wait 4-5 minutes for my turn.

Now quadruple this.

"super extra 1gigawatt charging" isn't coming to my area, potentially ever. Afaik there's two "super chargers" in my metro area, both at dealerships. i've actually never seen a Tesla charger in person.
by gloomyday | 2025-07-24 05:26:39+00:00
This is a pervasive phenomenon in programming. Many times suboptimal solutions remain for a long time because, well, it does solve the problem. Once you are taught X by authoritative figures, you tend to lean on it. It takes experience and an open mind to do anything else.

The use of GOTO is another example. Yes, you probably wouldn't want in your codebase, but the overzealousness against it removes expressions like break statements or multiple return statements from languages.
by bhaney | 2025-07-24 05:26:44+00:00
> "Cognizant was not duped by any elaborate ploy or sophisticated hacking techniques," says the lawsuit, using italics to indicate outrage emphasis. "The cybercriminal just called the Cognizant Service Desk, asked for credentials to access Clorox’s network, and Cognizant handed the credentials right over. Cognizant is on tape handing over the keys to Clorox’s corporate network to the cybercriminal—no authentication questions asked."

Damn
by jampa | 2025-07-24 05:27:02+00:00
He drives a Xiaomi SU7, which seems like the best car out there for the price.

Honestly, it amazes me that Xiaomi built the car that you would expect Apple to come up with after all these years they spent researching and coming up with nothing.

According to Wikipedia, the Xiaomi SU7 Max has 1,784 hp and is priced at 73,000 USD. In some YouTube videos, they raced against Ferraris and Bugattis, and it fared better than much more expensive cars. I have no idea how they did it.
by hyperadvanced | 2025-07-24 05:27:46+00:00
One problem is that depending on the book, the LLM can be somewhat cagey about if it really has read the book, or what sources it has used in constructing its “understanding” of it. Due to its sycophancy bias, the machine will laud your understanding of the text without a real referent to back it up, giving you what is essentially bullet point.

This may hack it for cursory knowledge, like how I know the rough outline of Ulysses, despite having never read it, but it cannot supplant a real textual reading of it. Despite all of this, LLMs can be great for comparing and contrasting writers and thinkers, and can help you organize your thoughts.
by achierius | 2025-07-24 05:30:24+00:00
You would be surprised. Plenty of (sufficiently religious) people will indeed hold funerals for and bury miscarriages, if they're at all identifiable. What you seem to expect is that they attempt to force other people to do so -- but unlike killing an organism, "failing to mourn" an organism is not really a crime under any moral framework, so the impetus just isn't there in the same way.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-07-24 05:30:30+00:00
Nazism and anti-Marxism are absolutely not unrelated! And that's not just rhetoric like mine, either: for example, the hero image on the Britannica article "Were the Nazis Socialists?" is a banner at Nazi parade that reads "Death to Marxism". [1]

That doesn't mean that anti-Marxists are all Nazis, or vice versa. But the claim that they're totally unrelated is not correct at all.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/story/were-the-nazis-socialists