MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ncruces | 2025-07-27 15:28:41+00:00
But that's also, IMO, why talking about it helps.

I didn't start this thread to chastise anyone about it, but to express the idea that, in a country poorer than the US (on average), within 30 years, getting kids to swim early probably contributed significantly to close the gap in drowning mortality (and surpass the US).

Also none of my kids knew how to swim by the time they were 4 (as in the article) but all of them had had “swimming” lessons, which basically amounted to us spending around an hour in a pool with them.

All I can say from subsequent “close calls” is that, in my experience, even just a little familiarity helps a lot.
by swinglock | 2025-07-27 15:29:32+00:00
As you said in the article, the reason is performance and that stands even if a realloc implementation is not poor.

It can't preallocate, so when adding many items it will make many expensive realloc calls that could have been avoided. Though you could have an interface that allows pushing or popping many items at once to make up for it, but this is less convenient.

You can currently forgo shrinking on pop but you can't if mixing popping and pushing. You need to know the capacity for that, otherwise it may actually shrink on a consequent push. This could incur many expensive reallocs if used similarly to a stack.

Even the cheap realloc calls will cost more than checking an int in code that's likely small, inlined, and with its data in one cache line (number of items and capacity next to each other in one struct, which are also next to the first item). The realloc function is probably dynamically linked, more complex, and has to access additional data.

If you don't want to add more memory overhead to the vector, consider just using two ints and it won't be any larger, that's enough unless a vector should be many gigabytes. Otherwise if you think that's not enough and feel like leaning into the complexity instead, use bit fields or bit twiddling to split up one 64 bit int into say, 56+8 bit ints. Let the smaller int track additional capacity rather than total capacity and also use that to solve your hysteresis problem. Well, or just use two 64 bit ints, but what's the fun in that?
by underbluewaters | 2025-07-27 15:30:04+00:00
It's not about the feature set. The Music app is the only software I use which randomly locks up my whole mac, just trying to do basic stuff like play a song or navigate albums. Doesn't seem to be related to whether I'm browsing Apple Music or my own library. This is on both my M1 MacBook Pro, and on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio in the office. It's baffling that something that worked so well in 2008 is such a dog in 2025. It's like using winamp in 1998.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-27 15:31:19+00:00
Oh. My. God.

> The only positive method of identifying a VOR is by its Morse Code identification or by the recorded automatic voice identification which is always indicated by use of the word “VOR” following the range's name.

There's such a long way from "Move fast and break things" to "Eh, it was good enough for my grandfather" and it feels as though aeronautics is very close to the latter. This would be OK if the demands on the system were declining or even steady, but they're increasing.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-07-27 15:31:22+00:00
It depends. Is your theory of change to push a welfare state, gradually increase the welfare, raise taxes to redistribute wealth, achieve UBI, fully fund public healthcare, housing, food, water?

Or is it that any day now workers are going to reach unanimous consensus and go on a national strike, siezing power from the owners of capital? Or maybe a violent revolution in which the bourgeoisie and class traitors get guillotineed alongside the capitalist oppressors?
by OutOfHere | 2025-07-27 15:31:42+00:00
I prefer base56, specifically https://github.com/foss-fund/base56 , for enhanced visual safety. It removes 1 and o. As noted on the linked page, the corresponding charset is 23456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnpqrstuvwxyz.

Note that there is no good standardization of base58 and therefore of base56. As such, there may exist variations depending on where you look, but the linked one is what I prefer.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-07-27 15:32:25+00:00
Yes this is the key point imo - power begets power in any system.

However diffuse power distributions aren’t a panacea either imo. As an example, I hold no particular power over the other tenants in my building, and they hold none over me, the building owner has significant power over all of us. It’s easy to imagine a future with no landlord, and the power over the plot of land being diffused among the current tenants. But then I would have some degree of power over my neighbours, and they over me, and all sorts of abuses and nastiness are possible there.

An uncomfortable possibility we should take seriously is that there might not be a perfect distribution of power in human societies. That whether power is concentrated or diffuse, it will be used for good and for ill.

I am not claiming that I know the answer, or that today is just the best that we can do, but I am pretty sceptical that we can wave away these fundamentals, or that we can design or plan societies like this.
by veqq | 2025-07-27 15:33:00+00:00
Janet has ~10 web frameworks (half SSG, half dynamic) and many web servers. Joy [0] is the most fully featured stack approach, which Janetdocs [1] runs on. But everything you mention is in the std lib. Here's a certbot in 10 lines only using the extended std lib (called spork): https://codeberg.org/veqq/janetdocs/src/branch/master/ssl-fe... `json/decode` automatically maps json to native data structures. There's a package manager included, which builds all code I've found so far, reproducibly.

As for DS, only arrays, there are maps, arrays and strings, all mutable or immutable. I don't think there's any intention to ever implement functional data structures, but they could "easily" be a library.

- [0] https://github.com/joy-framework/joy - [1] http://janetdocs.org/
by BurningFrog | 2025-07-27 15:33:13+00:00
The interesting version of this is to exterminate the malaria carrying mosquito species. Only 40 of 3500 species can carry malaria. If we wipe them out, non malaria carrying species will likely take their place in the ecosystems.

250 million people have malaria, and 600k, mostly children die from it yearly.

And yet, I see a lot more people defending the mosquitos than the humans.
by hyperpape | 2025-07-27 15:33:46+00:00
> While there have been improvements, Java performance work seems to have stopped after 2011 or so.

No idea how you got that impression. Here is an incomplete set of important changes:

- major developments on Graal and native code compilation for applications that prioritize startup time and memory use (I think Graal was started before 2011, but has changed a huge amount since then).

- the concurrent G1 garbage collector became the default, making most applications have much lower pause times (I believe it was released in Java 7 in 2011, but was not mature, only became a default in Java 9, and has regular improvements since then).

- the Shenendoah and ZGC concurrent garbage collectors were not started until well after 2011

- project lilliput, which reduces the header size of Java objects from 16 to 8 bytes is landing in Java 25, which comes out this fall

- specializing strings to use 1 byte/character for ascii strings, and 2 bytes for non-ascii strings

- virtual threads shipped in Java 22

- work on a vectorization API

- plenty of work on reducing the startup time of the JDK and modularizing it

One where I'm not sure about the timeline:

- https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/vm/cl... class data sharing to lower overhead of running multiple JVMs on a single node

P.S. I'm not writing this to comment on the the parent's claim that Java is faster in some contexts.
by coolThingsFirst | 2025-07-27 15:34:37+00:00
> Then you're doing something very wrong.

I apply to job just like before.

>Maybe your "nitty gritty" doesn't actually solve the customers problem or,

Yes, exactly, which is why I mentioned written a dog pic sharing app in Next.js is superior to reading Knuth. The implied meritocracy doesn't exist in tech. It's filled with biased monochromatic idiots who basically have ideas like 'bad experience is worse than no experience' which is euphemism for we don't hire people older than 26.

>Norvig's point about acquired wisdom over time is great and your quips sound like a you problem.

Only in tech does experience confer a disadvantage. Even in professional sports at 40 Lebron James is still playing. In tech, at 40 you are a dinasour and your career is done and dusted for.

I have yet to see a career path more pretentious, more focused on never ending peacocking and mimicry, ageism, language-ism, unstable and filled with unoriginality of a perverse kind. Go on X to see thousands of tech people having exactly the same personality with anime pfps who magically think the same and are in never ending Nirvana because of LLMs.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-07-27 15:34:45+00:00
I think if bay area companies had behaved differently in early treatment of Facebook I don't think we would have ended up with such a paranoid/aggressive Facebook and things would have been much better, even if Facebook still became super successful. I think some of those early purchase attempts/behaviors are WHAT made Facebook the bad thing it became. Wonder if the juicy stories ever come out.
by xp84 | 2025-07-27 15:35:40+00:00
One reason at least in my country (USA) is the dire state of broadband. A few people have awesome symmetric fiber, but it’s about a single digit percentage. Most of the rest uses DOCSIS with wildly asymmetrical ratios (e.g. mine is 1000 down/100 up), dynamic IP, and some have unreliable connectivity.

Getting people to self host without corporate dependencies unfortunately means dynamic DNS, revealing your home IP address, and means that when your home internet is down or degraded, it affects you even if you go elsewhere.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-27 15:35:41+00:00
It's the first result on Google for "NC privatize DMV".

https://www.carolinajournal.com/nc-house-moves-toward-privat...

> The North Carolina House has officially taken a first step toward privatizing the infamously mismanaged Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV), as issues and customer complaints have persisted for years.

> The proposed budget released on Monday includes a provision that would begin the process of privatizing DMV services by creating a new pilot program to allow third-party vendors to handle driver’s license renewals, a function traditionally managed solely by the state.

> The reforms come amid increasing legislative pressure to modernize DMV operations. State leaders have repeatedly criticized the DMV’s operations, arguing that the division “would be out of business if it were in the private sector.” With no notable improvement in sight, Rep. Jake Johnson, R-Polk, has been behind the push for legislative action. Earlier this year, he proposed overhauling the DMV’s structure by taking it out of the Department of Transportation.
by dudeinjapan | 2025-07-27 15:36:07+00:00
Founder here of a 300 person startup. It's appalling and infuriating to read stories like these.

I started my biz because I wanted to make products that people love, that create value and timesave for others (specifically restaurants). I've always thought that if I do that and have a good time doing it the money will take care of itself.

I would be horrified if some PE firm rug-pulled our users and screwed our employees. Any such takeover would have to happen over my dead body.
by tonyarkles | 2025-07-27 15:36:42+00:00
Up-thread I was raving about the Rotax 912...

> there are more complex system interactions than meets the eye which can cause some problems

I will grant this for sure. Kind of like modern cars though, it's a double-edged sword. On the UAS programme I'm working on it has been absolutely invaluable to be able to just plug into the 912 ECU's CAN bus and gather a ton of engine telemetry (and send it down to the ground for monitoring at the GCS).

Thank you for posting the links and starting the discussion about 912 reliability. I'm going to have to dig into it a little and see if there's any takeaways I need to bring back to my team.

With zero evidence to support this other than my own experience with N=4 of these, I have a suspicion that part of the problem could be that they're not getting sufficient maintenance and inspection because of how simple they are from an O&M perspective and how robust they are in nominal and off-nominal conditions. When I was first working with it and flipping through the operators manual I was kind of shocked to discover that the only real pre-flight actions are: check coolant level, rotate the prop and make sure the oil reservoir burps. There's a startup and warm-up procedure that we follow to the letter but short-term you almost certainly won't notice if you skip it. Before we had our robust telemetry system and checklists in place, we accidentally flew it with only one ECU lane turned on once and didn't notice until we were on the ground. Engine was already off after landing when someone came on the radio and asked "hey guys... in-flight we're supposed to have both lanes A and B on right?" "Yeah..." "The Lane B switch was off when I approached the aircraft...".

To summarize what I'm getting at: this engine, in my experience so far, has a ton of really robust redundancy features and those redundancy features work so well that you may not notice that you've got issues until you've run out of redundancy. I can only think of two situations where we've had issues bad enough that it caused it to "run rough" and trigger a deeper investigation:

- Because our aircraft is unmanned we have electromechanical relays in series with the Lane A/B switches that we can control from the ground both for engine-start safety (the engine can't be started unless both the crew chief and remote pilot have turned on Lanes A and B) and to be able to kill the engine remotely after landing or in an emergency. We had an electrical issue that was causing the relays to chatter, resulting in Lanes A and B getting sporadic power.

- Somehow in one revision of the ever-evolving full-system checklist the "check water separator" item got dropped and no one noticed. It flew probably 10+ flights on that checklist before we had a really rough start, in an environment that was highly conducive to water accumulation in the fuel (large daily OAT and RH swings). We were horrified at how much water came out when I realized that no one had been checking... and yet there had been zero negative effects until there was a big negative effect.
by Wilder7977 | 2025-07-27 15:37:32+00:00
That's a good point, but applies to email accounts or other "addresses" (e.g., chat IDs). Here I am referring almost exclusively to accounts for services and random websites. In fact, I still have ownership of the cringe email account I created in middle school, despite the fact that nothing besides spammers is using it. But as you say, a missed service that sends you an email there, and your data is in someone else's hands.

For other services (say, signal username) there are other controls that prevent this issue, thankfully.
by tlogan | 2025-07-27 15:37:57+00:00
Let me give you a concrete example.

In Sunset (San Francisco), most houses still have 100–150 amp electrical panels. To support full electrification these panels typically need to be upgraded to 200 or maybe 300 amps.

That upgrade alone costs around $10,000, including labor, permitting (which is surprisingly expensive), and inspections. If rewiring the house is also required (which is often the case) that can push the total to $30,000.

But it doesn’t stop there. PG&E’s infrastructure in many areas like Sunset is already maxed out. If your upgrade triggers a red flag, PG&E may require additional capacity upgrades. However, they won’t pay for them (they’ll just refuse the work until you do). These utility-related infrastructure upgrades can cost anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000, and yes, those costs fall on the homeowner.

So in total, you could be looking at $60,000 or more for this.
by waltbosz | 2025-07-27 15:38:14+00:00
Is the privatized NC DMV any better than the public one? I was just at the Delaware DMV getting my 2 vehicles inspected and registration renewed, and while not an entirely horrible experience, it did seem like there were a lot of inefficiencies and complacentcy.

I've also noticed the difference in the US post offices around me and the FedEx stores and wonder why the post offices aren't nicer customer experiences.
by kurthr | 2025-07-27 15:38:45+00:00
Mosquito introduction is an historical event (1820) in Hawaii (New Zealand, the Caribbean, etc). This devastated local bird populations driving many to extinction and halving the avian population in approximately a year due to virus propagation. The death of the birds led to less seed dispersal, loss of forest, and increased susceptibility to invasive plants.

Some are ancient, but have adapted to thrive in some human environments, but have spread well past their original areas by colonialism, slave trade, shipping, and war. The idea that modern mosquitoes are some "natural" ecosystem element is pretty funny. Perhaps they have destroyed the habitat that once existed and driven out competing species which once fit into the niche, but they are in most places relatively modern in ways other biting flies are not. The growing effects of malaria are not only on humans, but other animals including both chimps and reptiles as well.

Anopheles/Aedes/Culex mosquitos are the grey goo of insects, driving other flies, midges, and even mosquitos (which local fish and larval predators have evolved with) to exinction. Treat them like the infection they are.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-27 15:39:14+00:00
I take it you've never examined thev theoretical landscape of matrix multiplication algorithms?

The splitting you describe could be carried out just as easily with human transportation as with fruits and vegetables. I still object that it isn't logarithmic in either the space or trip requirement though. It's linear with one of those constant factors that you say are irrelevant. Just as you can never move a human using less than a human sized volume, you can never move a banana using less than a banana sized volume. Hence, linear.
by trinsic2 | 2025-07-27 15:40:06+00:00
Same here. I did spark some interest in my family when I sent them this UI Test [0]

We talked about it on hacker h news awhile back[1]

[0]: https://games.productartistry.com/games/dark-patterns

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42737778
by lormayna | 2025-07-27 15:40:40+00:00
As somebody that has written couple of services with Twisted in the late '00s, I feel asyncio a breath of fresh air. This not means that it's perfect, but it's a lot more usable than Twisted. I know that it's not possible, but I would like to have in Python something similar to goroutines, waitgroups and channels that Go has.
by bix6 | 2025-07-27 15:40:48+00:00
That wedding was expensive!!!

Article is paywalled so I’m speculating.

Lots of potential reasons. Could be diversification, preparing for leadership change, capital to fund his rocket ships, belief the stock will suffer due to tariffs, etc.

20% Fed long term cap gains plus Washington has like a 7% for big gains so maybe around 30% total but who knows his effective rate.
by mnahkies | 2025-07-27 15:42:00+00:00
Ha, I got that same book from the public library in my early teens.

I never completed it at the time either, though it created a foundation that enabled me to learn action script (Adobe flash) with relative ease and ultimately go on to complete a computer science degree despite pressure from my high school teachers to go into mechanical engineering or similar.

On balance I got to pursue something that genuinely interested me and happened to pay well and I'll always have a fond memory of the Sam's book, as well as the free Ubuntu CDs that got me onto Linux years before we got broadband

Edit: it wasn't teach yourself in 24 hours, it was the 21 days version (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sams-Teach-Yourself-21-Days/dp/0672...)
by anon-3988 | 2025-07-27 15:42:04+00:00
IIRC every variable have an anonymous name based on their scope. So

a = 10; { a = 20; } print(a)

This would print 10. Something like that. I just remembered that the first time I encountered this, I thought "this is going to be one of those things where I will unnecessarily trip over" and closed the page.
by sp4cemoneky | 2025-07-27 15:43:03+00:00
I don't know, I personally miss subscriptions to physical, there is the wait, there is also the whole reading in physical reality experience.

Also, whilst I am sure the quality of payed online magazines is better, once you start reading the cheap/free online crap, it is impossible to switch to a higher quality, and I always start my day with the cheap crap.
by binary132 | 2025-07-27 15:43:09+00:00
Part of the problem with libp2p is that the canonical implementations are in Go which isn’t really well-suited to use from C++, JS, or Rust. The diversity of implementations in other languages makes for varying levels of quality and features. They really should have just picked one implementation that would be well-suited to use via C FFI and provided ergonomic wrappers for it.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-07-27 15:43:26+00:00
> here is something there...

Indeed there is a diamond planet that old too.

A diamond planet, "55 Cancri E", is a super-Earth exoplanet known for its high density and potential diamond composition. It is located 41 light-years away and is about twice the size of Earth and nine times its mass. The planet's extreme heat and pressure are believed to have crystallized its carbon-rich composition into diamonds.
by bombela | 2025-07-27 15:43:58+00:00
I don't think anybody ever sold nixos that good to me before.

I might try it again. Last time I really did not like that any minute config change would take 15s to apply.

But the biggest issue for me, is that right now I have a good enough solution, that allows for config file update from applications. I have a small git repo, with one shell script, that symlinks config files, and even generates a few. And so backing up the latest config changes from KDE, freecad, etc, is a git add & commit away. I have another shell script to setup the base Ubuntu the way I want. And my data is replicated via syncthing.
by DaveZale | 2025-07-27 15:44:41+00:00
My last job was test scorer (high school essays and science) for a nationwide conpany.

Before I quit, they were comparing everyone's scoring rate using real time monitoring software. Amazingly, wfh employees will put up with this every day as the screws tighten (along with our backs, our necks, our fingers on the keyboard). At a certain point, you have to draw the line for reasons of your own. Mine was honesty.
by gajjanag | 2025-07-27 15:45:18+00:00
+1 - there are just so many Asian recipes that can not be done anywhere near as easily on induction stovetops (high heat from direct flame for flatbreads, etc).

Plus a whole bunch of cookware doesn't work with induction (clay pots, non ferromagnetic bases, etc). I do wonder if any of these "environmental" estimates factor in the environmental cost of replacing a bunch of cookware just to satisfy induction requirements.
by lupusreal | 2025-07-27 15:45:38+00:00
MSR has indeed been a mess. I think it's pretty obvious that NASA has been trying to instill a "sunk costs" mentality in Congress, and it's not working out the way they wanted.

MSR is a fine enough concept though, I think Rocket Lab's proposal to get it done is sound and the government should take them up on the offer. If nothing else, the money to Rocket Lab for MSR development would help to make Rocket Lab a more viable SpaceX competitor, which should pay off for the US government in the long run.