MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-08-30 04:04:49+00:00
> I love that you are using colon for the assignment operator. This is absolutely correct.

Historically, distinguishing an equality operator from an assignment one has existed for many decades. Whether using colon for the latter is "absolutely correct" is the subject of valid debate.

An equally compelling case could be made for any of the following assignment operators as well:

foo <- 42 foo -> 42 foo <= 42 foo => 42 foo <-> 42 if expressing substitutability is important foo := 42 Pascal lives! (foo 42) so does LISP! foo is 42 for those who prefer English operators f(foo) = 42 for mathematically inclined languages

Etcetera
by zekrioca | 2025-08-30 04:04:59+00:00
> Electrification doesn't displace demand. It adds more demand.

Take cars, for instance. When someone buys an EV rather than ICE, do you think the EV uses the same amount of energy than the ICE car?

> what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it

Sure, what do you think that needs to be done when there is a limited resource such as electricity? Yes, more production, but until then, what should the grid do if the demand is growing?

> Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements

It is two different models, one is centralized (nuclear) and the other is distributed (solar). The planning is essentially different.
by Daub | 2025-08-30 04:05:05+00:00
Well... the accident that led to my eye being removed was in my workshop. Specifically, it was caused by my bench saw and its poor maintenance. The initial damage seemed slight but over time, my eye 'felt wrong'- tight and a bit achy, so I went to a local private hospital. There a young optician who did not seem bothered, prescribed eye drops. These had no impact at all, so I went to two other opticians, one of who said I had a detached retina. Finally I went to a state hospital and saw an ophthalmologist. She said the eye was infected and I needed to act fast if I wanted to save my sight. I tried to get it operated upon in that hospital, but they were keen to keep me 'under observation' far a few days. As I could still see out of that eye, they were reluctant to remove it. By this time, I was in quite a bit of pain and knew the only option was complete enucleation. So I discharged myself and went back to the private hospital. Even they were reluctant to operate until I had three second opinions, one of which I had to get from a specialist in Thailand. All of them seemed very worried that I had not yet had surgery to remove the dam thing.

My first mistake was in seeing a optometrists rather than ophthalmologists. However, all of them failed to recognize my case as one where I needed to be referred. To an optometrist, even a broken leg would be treated with eye drops.

The other thing that went wrong is that the surgeons I saw were nervous about proceeding with enucleation even when my condition became very advanced. I think that this nervousness came from the fact that I could still see out of that eye, and as a matter of insurance they wanted me to be blind before they would operate. But by then the infection might have spread to outside my eyeball.

Following surgery was a bit of a trip. For a few days I hallucinated in my missing eye... strange worm-like things, very Giger. Even now, in response to sudden movement or loud noises, I 'see' bright lights in that eye.
by franciscop | 2025-08-30 04:10:20+00:00
As johnecheck points out, in a certain level of abstraction, the main way of defining a country is whether other countries consider you a country or not. Even when other countries do consider you a country, what the borders are exactly might not be clearly recognized.

Since countries are political divisions, I'd also argue that this is the main and most important definition.

BTW, even "continents" suffer from this where in the US, Europe and Asia they are defined differently.
by rich_sasha | 2025-08-30 04:10:36+00:00
I sometimes wonder if you could make a much safer nuclear plants with TEGs. There would be next to no active processes and moving parts, no pumps and coolant and circulation. Use nuclear magic to make the hot side, cool with ambient temperature.

No doubt this would be less energy efficient, but perhaps you reap so much savings by not having to worry about water circulation that it's worth it.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-30 04:11:43+00:00
Looking over the threads running here, it is interesting how differently the article's title/point is being taken, filtered through different commenter situations and experiences.

I don't see it as a blind prescription.

It doesn't imply that choosing what is simple, will be simple. Or that simplest, will be simple. Or that this is a process uniquely immune from problems or tradeoffs.

Just a reminder to never forget to aim for simplest.

A tautological cookie fortune, of something important we often functionally forget or slide on.

There is a lot of wisdom in recognizing and repeating the most important "mantras of the obvious". And listening to them reformulated, in other ways, by other people.

The greatest craftbeings never stop revisiting the basics.
by majormajor | 2025-08-30 04:13:37+00:00
You need to test contracts with external code without having to include full external systems. Unit tests on internal implementation details are fragile as behavior changes. Unit tests on your module's contracts give you confidence in refactoring.

Passing params in instead of making external calls inside your business logic functions can help. DI can help if that's too impractical or unwieldy for whatever reason in the domain.

It's hard to do right the first time - sometimes its fuzzy what's an internal detail vs what's an external contract - but you need to get there ASAP.
by rendaw | 2025-08-30 04:13:38+00:00
This sounds a lot like the apocryphal Einstein quote

> Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

And I found a similar quote from Aquinas

> If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffices

(Aquinas, [BW], p. 129).
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-30 04:14:43+00:00
That’s basically what happened with MathML a decade ago. Chromium had briefly had an implementation (M24 alone!), Firefox had an excellent implementation, and Safari had a decent implementation; there was very little usage. Chromium proposed removing it. There was much kerfuffle. When the dust settled, MathML won. MathML Core was defined, Igalia contributed a robust MathML implementation to Chromium, Safari tightened their implementation up, and people started actually using it a lot more.

Around the same time, Google tried to deprecate SMIL (SVG animation tech), which would probably have led to its removal after some time. This also failed, and it’s used more than it was then (though CSS animations are probably quite a bit more popular, and have over time become more capable), probably because now all engines support it robustly (MSHTML and EdgeHTML never did).

I hope that we’ll get a more formal commitment to XML and XSLT, and XSLT 3 in browsers, out of this.
by plorkyeran | 2025-08-30 04:15:13+00:00
At the time that would have required that they write a custom proxy that sat in front of IIS and everyone would have been very confused about why you even wanted to do that. IIS (and every other web server in 1996) just took the URL, converted it to a path, and ran that, with no transformations applied. This was three years into the web and many things that are simple and obvious now were not back then.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-30 04:15:37+00:00
Gene Roddenberry‘s Star Trek universe was a humanist post-scarcity society. There were a number of thinkers that informed that vision.

I think you are thinking in a meaningful way deserving of exploration. Our society as organized today isn’t ordained or divine. There are many cracks in the armor, and it’s likely that things will evolve in one way or another.

It’s hard to talk about because people cling strongly to what they want to believe and have trouble thinking about what could be.
by AnonC | 2025-08-30 04:16:38+00:00
> Of course, only the beeping Internet Archive totally ignored it and scraped my site. And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it.

Try using robots.txt to get it removed or excluded from The Internet Archive. The organization went back and forth on respecting robots.txt a couple of times, but it started respecting it (again) some years ago.

Several years ago I was also frustrated by its refusal to remove some content taken from a site I owned, but later the change to follow robots.txt was implemented (and my site was removed).

The FAQ has more information on how this works (there may be caveats). [1]

https://support.archive-it.org/hc/en-us/articles/208001096-R...
by orochimaaru | 2025-08-30 04:17:34+00:00
Yes. But with pyspark there is a Python gateway, the sql I think is translated natively in spark.

But when you create a dataframe in spark, that schema needs to be defined - or if it’s sql takes the form of the columns returned.

Use of Python can create hotspots with data transfers between spark and the Python gateway. Python UDFs are a common culprit.

Either way, my point is there are architectural and design points to your data solution that can cause many more problems than choice of language.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-30 04:17:48+00:00
> Noem said the hack threatened "the entire Department and the nation as a whole" but at the same time said that "no American citizens were directly impacted." She added: "No sensitive data was extracted from any DHS networks."

What does that even mean. It is either a problem or it isn’t.

Also interesting to read is the FEMA Katrina Declaration, linked to from this article:

https://www.standupforscience.net/fema-katrina-declaration

I have no doubt that there is some waste in all these agencies but the magnitude of change is so big for such a short time. Even if the leaders were excellent, they would need more time to understand the situation and make good choices. Zooming in on this breach, without more details, I find it hard to believe that these 23 people were the cause (versus some larger issue with the organization).
by majormajor | 2025-08-30 04:19:30+00:00
As software grows the problems go such that the effort to completely describe the necessary changes in plain language is often not all that much shorter than the code. Especially if you have a really really good autocomplete for the boilerplate parts of the code. So LLMs being really good at the tedious autocomplete makes LLMs have less marginal utility for the "write the whole thing" for certain types of work.

But the sneakier part of the problem is that as business rules get more complex it's usually harder to completely describe the problem in plain language than in a more formally specified language. For instance, plain-language "apply the user's promo code" doesn't capture the nasty if/else tree you might hit when you're deep in the codebase and see that there's already a bunch of restrictions on other types of promo codes and the product manager didn't think about which of those restrictions should apply to this new promo code. And at this point you're gonna need to use plain language to describe and refine the problem with the product manager - but if you instead were relying on an LLM to turn your short sentence into the right code, it might pick the wrong thing when it comes to modifying that existing code.
by necubi | 2025-08-30 04:23:26+00:00
On macOS it’s easy—opt+shift+-.

The em-dash used to be a slightly snooty way for Mac users to announce themselves. Sad that the polarity of perception has reversed.

I’ve been typing em-dashes since I got my first MacBook in 2006 and I’m not going to let the AI companies take my beautiful punctuation away from me.
by kbaker | 2025-08-30 04:23:30+00:00
OK, interesting, I think I see... So you are asking about if SQLite opens and finds a not-committed rollback journal that looks valid, then it rolls it back?

I was more curious so I looked at the code here:

https://sqlite.org/src/file?name=src/pager.c&ci=trunk

and found something similar to what you are asking in this comment before `sqlite3PagerCommitPhaseTwo`:

** When this function is called, the database file has been completely ** updated to reflect the changes made by the current transaction and ** synced to disk. The journal file still exists in the file-system ** though, and if a failure occurs at this point it will eventually ** be used as a hot-journal and the current transaction rolled back.

So, it does this:

** This function finalizes the journal file, either by deleting, ** truncating or partially zeroing it, so that it cannot be used ** for hot-journal rollback. Once this is done the transaction is ** irrevocably committed.

Assuming fsync works on both the main database and the hot journal, then I don't see a way that it is not durable? Because, it has to write and sync the full hot journal, then write to the main database, then zero out the hot journal, sync that, and only then does it atomically return from the commit? (assuming FULL and DELETE)
by bubblebeard | 2025-08-30 04:25:44+00:00
The author has a point. Obsolete tests serves no one, but deleting a test because it will randomly fail is an indication of an unstable process. Maybe there is a race condition, maybe your code has some dependency that is sporadically unavailable. Deleting such tests is just turning a blind eye to the problem. Unstable tests means you either didn’t write that test very well to begin with, or the process you are testing is itself unstable.
by touristtam | 2025-08-30 04:25:51+00:00
> People always talk about web browser monoculture and cheer on new entrants, yet no one seems to mind the os monoculture. We will all come out ahead if there are more viable OS out there to use.

3 main OSes vs 2 main browser engine for consumer to choose from?

Anyway the main issue with the Browser engine consolidation is that whoever owns the Browser engine, can make or break what goes in there. Just think about VSCode's current status with all the AI companies wanting to use it and make it their own product, while MSFT attempting to curtail it. At some point either MSFT decide it commit to FOSS on this one, or the multiple forks will have to reimplement some functionalities.
by kissgyorgy | 2025-08-30 04:26:25+00:00
What I did recently when developing a TUI was that I put the state in a dict, start the app in an infinite loop and whenever it quit, reload module, keep the state and instantiate the class with that state again. Something like this:

import tui state = {"current_step_index": 0, "variables": None} while True: app = tui.App(state) tui.run() state = app.get_state() importlib.reload(tui)
by nicklaf | 2025-08-30 04:26:43+00:00
FWIW, Colbert quipping that "reality has a well-known liberal bias" was clearly satirical of conservatives' tendency to trot out the canard of "liberal" bias.

You could just as well say he still agrees with your point about reality comporting more with a progressive understanding of ethics, while at the same time parodying Fox News for incoherently making spurious charges of "liberalism" at every turn.
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-30 04:28:29+00:00
The ability to use XSLT to convert JSON to HTML may be useful when making extensions for working with web sites that internally use JSON. Converting XML to JSON might also be useful for some things.

However, XSLT would be useful with command-line programs too, and not only in a web browser, anyways. (A standalone implementation might also be made to have the ability to load extensions written in C.)

There are problems with XML and with JSON, as well as with XSLT, but when dealing with XML and JSON formats anyways, XSLT can be helpful. (One problem is that XML does not deal very well with types other than Unicode text (JSON has a few additional types but still not very good). XSLT does add some types, though.)

They also mention RDF, but the standard XML format for RDF is not very good in my opinion (although I think someone did make up a better XML format for RDF, for the help of being used with XSLT better).
by AnonC | 2025-08-30 04:28:51+00:00
Under “The Intended Audience” (page 10 of the PDF sample on the site), it says that this is not an introduction to LISP and that it would be more enjoyable with some prerequisites.

Where does one — who has no knowledge of these prerequisites or about LISP (except that the latter has been heard in programming circles as something esoteric, extremely powerful, etc.) — start, before reading this book?
by marttt | 2025-08-30 04:34:04+00:00
+1, long time follower of nmh's work. His books are brief and concise, but carry a peculiar "something", a precision of expression etc that is hard to put into words - but can often be noticed in long-time practicioners of some mental teaching. :)

It is always interesting to spot a person on the interwebs who seems to actually have managed to turn buddhist or some other teachings into real world deeds. Living really modestly (IIRC, he/you also uses modest, underclocked laptops?), publishing for the benefit of many, and doing all this for years and years. Like, there seems to be no "overhead" in this way of living. Hugely inspirational.

I would also point out the "Essays" section on nmh's webpage, especially the ones discussing sensitivity and high IQ: https://t3x.org/#essays

Having purchased several of your books, thanks for your work, nmh!
by al_borland | 2025-08-30 04:36:33+00:00
So if $900 is a good day, maybe we can assume $500 is average. That’s a 6 figure job.

I hear about this kind of this semi-regularly. It’s crazy to me that simply asking people for money can put someone in the top ~20% of earners. He probably made more than most people giving him money. It throws the incentives all out of whack for being a productive member of society.
by laserbeam | 2025-08-30 04:37:43+00:00
As a Romanian who has been very involved in Olympiads as a kid, I can tell that most of this is accurate. I’ve also lived in Denmark at university for several years and can contrast educational systems from first hand experience.

The sorting the author describes absolutely DOES happen in Romania. Exactly as he describes it, “getting into a good school” is incredibly important for students and parents here.

I’d also like to add the high school curriculum is very dense. The kind of math we did in 10th grade (there are 12 grades in Romania) was math people were only introduced to in their first year of university in Denmark.

There’re also a significant amount of optional after-school programs for contests, and I’ve only encountered students from good schools in them (as far as I can remember).

Yes, Romania is much better at filtering and at training people who are predisposed to intelectual work from a young age. Yes, Romania is bad at educating the masses.

However, I disagree with his conclusion and value judgement. I’d much rather see Romania adapt a system which educates everyone, rather than the world be better at filtering.
by eszed | 2025-08-30 04:38:42+00:00
Of course I have. I'm thinking of a couple of them right now, and I admire the hell out of them: it took courage to get up there and do what they did. I wasn't going to cast them in that show, right then, but within the limits of the time available I did my best to help them improve. I hoped they did, and I wished them nothing but the best.

I'm glad you brought that up, because it might be the exception that proves the rule. Those auditions did feel more personal, but it was entirely benign: I was rooting for them to succeed, and really felt for them when it became obvious (especially to them) that they had not.

Maybe it's not like that with other fields, or other companies, or other people - but if not, then that's not somewhere anyone should have to work. There's no incompatibility between high standards and human decency.
by teleforce | 2025-08-30 04:41:03+00:00
For the foundation on data engineering I'd recommend this book by Joe Reis and Matt Housley. They did a good job on providing the framework that includes data engineering lifecycle, software engineering, data management, data architecture, etc. You can check the proposed framework here [1],[2].

[1] Fundamentals of Data Engineering:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-data/97...

[2] Fundamentals of Data Engineering Review:

https://maninekkalapudi.medium.com/fundamentals-of-data-engi...
by the-anarchist | 2025-08-30 04:42:14+00:00
> ... showcased a similar use of the sandbox, sharing a screenshot of their friend successfully passing Reddit's face verification using a GMod model of what appears to be Zbigniew Stolarski from Arma III

I applaud this, it seems like the 90s rebellious internet behavior that brought us eMule and Bittorrent isn't dead. It is beautiful to see people literally gaming a stupid system to get back the internet they desire.
by bemmu | 2025-08-30 04:45:06+00:00
For Roblox I haven't seen the returns getting smaller. I've had a bunch of smallish games there for a few years, and it has been stable.

While there is a ridiculous amount of competition, so far it has been offset by platform expansion. When I started in 2020 the whole platform had about 30M daily active users. Now over 110M. Maybe my share of plays has shrunk, but it's now from a much bigger pie.

(I don't know if this holds true generally or if my games have somehow persisted better than the average game)
by blargey | 2025-08-30 04:46:31+00:00
That's a terrible example - how much room for improvement is left for the VOO-tier sensible, simple investment vehicles that matter to normal people with their monthly 401k buys? 1/10th of a BP? 1/100th? Is Jane Street hiring to chase diminishing returns to such broadly relevant, already-efficient markets, or to cook up new market-manipulation schemes of the sort that got them kicked out of India, that are antithetical to the market integrity such firms are supposed to provide?

The notion that efficient markets require firms like Jane Street to endlessly chase extra "edges" is a false dichotomy. The world would be a better place if intelligent people made more of the concrete products and services that get priced, than if they chased butterflies to expose that price one minute earlier to concentrate ever-more ephemeral, irrelevant arbitrage opportunities into their own little house like a Maxwell's Demon of the stock market.
by ehnto | 2025-08-30 04:46:55+00:00
> Even rewrites that have a decade old code base to be inspired from, often fail due to the sheer amount of things to consider.

The amount of knowledge required to first generate the codebase, that is now missing for the rewrite, is the elephant in the room for rewrites. That's a decade of decision making, business rules changing, knowledge leaving when people depart etc.

Much like your example, if you think all the information is in the codebase then you should go away and start talking to the business stakeholders until you understand the scope of what you don't currently know.