MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-10-19 19:00:54+00:00
The "such parens, much overwhelm, so confuse" attitude of non-Lispers always baffled me. Especially since when working in C-syntax languages, I'm cautious enough to enforce an explicit order of operations (to avoid confusion that can lead to errors) that I put nearly as many parens in my C or Java code as I do in my Lisp code. What's a few more pairs of round brackets among friends, eh?

Emacs was purpose-built for working in Lisp. Out-of-the-box it really helps with paren-matching by highlighting the matched bracket (of any type) when you cursor over a bracket (also works by highlighting the open when you type the close) and providing commands for traversing and selecting whole sexps. Those alone, combined with its smart indentation, will get you pretty far. Add something like Paredit or Parinfer if you want even more assistance with sexp manipulation.
by homeless_engi | 2025-10-19 19:00:57+00:00
Thanks for the kind words! I have not written it up but would like to. A word of warning: by trying to get into sequencing, I eventually burned through ~20k USD of student loans (still unpaid) with little to show. Nanopore sequencing also requires some specialized equipment (at least a micro centrifuge and micropipette and possibly more) which is not cheap.
by margalabargala | 2025-10-19 19:01:08+00:00
The context is when this person joins an existing team/project to help out and do some work. So there will be, for example, a meeting where 4 people are up to speed, with this person present.

It's not expected that they know everything up front, of course. Onboarding to a new project takes learning.

A big part of the irritation to me is the fact that they decline to phrase their question as a question. Always a statement. They won't ask "what is X?", it's "I don't know what X is." Leaving the onus on others to reinterpret as a question for them.
by mikewarot | 2025-10-19 19:01:36+00:00
Transistors are generally at their lowest static power dissipation if the are either fully on or off. The analog middle is great if you're trying to process continuous values, but then you're going to be forced to use a bias current to hold on in the middle, which is ok if that's the nature of the circuit.

A chip with billions of transistors can't reasonably work if most of them are in the analog mode, it'll just melt to slag, unless you have an amazing cooling system.

Also consider that there is only one threshold between values on a binary system. With a trinary system you would likely have to double the power supply voltage, and thus quadruple the power required just to maintain noise margins.
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-19 19:01:57+00:00
The question is what is different about equitably distributing the wealth of AI vs. equitably distributing wealth in general. It seems that the main difference is that, with AI wealth specifically, there is a lot of it being generated right now at a breakneck pace (although its long-term stability is in question). Given that, I don't think it's unreasonable to propose "stop AI immediately while we figure out how to distribute wealth".

The problem is that the longer you refrain from equitably distributing wealth, the harder it becomes to do it, because the people who have benefited from their inequitably distributed wealth will use it to oppose any more equitable distribution.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-19 19:02:04+00:00
Right. That could happen in the future, but your assertion was that it had already happened, and you used that assertion as support for why the GPL already resulted in lower use.

I can't see the future, but I can tell you without a doubt that, as things stand right now, the GPL has been a runaway success for users' rights.

Will that change in the future? Who knows? But that wasn't your claim nor my counterclaim.
by perlgeek | 2025-10-19 19:02:14+00:00
In theory, we know how to do wealth redistribution, AI or no AI: tax value creation and wealth transfer, such as inheritance. Then use the money to support the poor, or even everyone.

The problem really is political systems. In most developed countries, wealth inequality has been steadily increasing, even though if you ask people if they want larger or smaller inequality, most prefer smaller. So the political systems aren't achieving what the majority wants.

It also seems to me that most elections are won on current political topics (the latest war, the latest scandal, the current state of the economy), not on long-term values such as decreasing wealth inequality.
by ranger_danger | 2025-10-19 19:02:28+00:00
Except they have already done this for other sites. But if they actually agreed with you, then I think they should remove the relevant language from their ToS that claims they have moral control over what transits their network.

But SJWs have previously used this tactic (providers' own ToS) to get websites they don't like taken offline. It has been happening not only to reverse proxy providers, but also to Tier 1 ISPs (who blackholed kiwifarms just like CF), DNS providers, domain registrars and colocation/hosting providers.

It starts with the worst sites first, the ones many people will not be upset about having taken offline, and then slowly gets more and more obviously authoritarian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=First_They_Came&l...
by Slow_Hand | 2025-10-19 19:03:30+00:00
Yes. I work for a company that tunes dozens of speaker systems in high-end recording studios a year and our target frequency response balance can generally be described as this: A spectral "tilt" in which the bass frequencies are +6 dB louder than the highest frequencies. The slope downward should be gradual, from lows to highs. Again, with a 6 dB difference between the bottom and the top octaves.
by ekr____ | 2025-10-19 19:04:08+00:00
Almost none of them.

There are a number of problems with trying to learn networking from the RFCs. First, they're specifications, not tutorials, so they just assume that you have a lot of background that you otherwise have to infer. Second, it's very common for a protocol to have been iteratively developed over the years and so split over a number of RFCs. In some cases, people will eventually try to consolidate things into a single document or document suite, but it's a big pain to do that, so it often doesn't happen.

Finally, a lot of the foundational RFCs were written long before we had a good understanding of how to design a robust networking protocol. For example, if you just implement TCP's original rate control algorithm [RFC 793] you get a system which is very vulnerable to congestion collapse (see https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf for more). Even with a more modern specification for RCP as in RFC 9293, you kind of have to work to piece together the shape of a working system. The QUIC RFCs are better because they were written all at once, but it's still not really designed to teach you.

IMO a better place to start is TCP/IP Illustrated by W. Richard Stevens. Volume 1 really explains the protocols. Volume 2 shows how to actually implement them.
by lexszero_ | 2025-10-19 19:04:56+00:00
Interestingly, ISO standard documents are sold for a non-insignificant price and DRMed, while people writing them are volunteers and/or paid by their employers to participate in standardization committees. A company willing to build equipment for an industry running on ISO/IEC communication protocols (like electric power distribution) may have to pay thousands for relevant standards, or rely on someone's interpretation of said standards to implement the protocol before they even begin, not considering certification costs.
by gigatexal | 2025-10-19 19:05:11+00:00
> Reporting on your Ordering System is an OLAP problem though. Generally an OLAP database stores data on disk in a way that it only needs to read the selected columns and the performance is better with wider columns, i.e. lots of duplicated data ( JOINs are slow ).

This sounds like the one big table approach. Which in my experience is very difficult to do right and only makes sense in the data mart sense.

Google’s Adsense data model I’m BigQuery is like this and works well but gets so wide it’s difficult. Then again when you imbed things like arrays and structs and can unnest as needed avoiding joins can be nice.

I’ve found star schemas to work out just fine in data marts. Just do them properly. Join as needed. And a good engine will handle the rest. We’ve has no issues with a similar model in Snowflake for example. Of course YMMV.
by Arkhaine_kupo | 2025-10-19 19:05:53+00:00
One of the issues AI coding has, is that its in some ways very inhuman. The bugs that are introduced are very hard to pick up because humans wouldnt write it that way, hence they wouldnt make those mistakes.

If you then introduce other devs you have 2 paths, they either build on top of vibe coding, which is going to leave you vulnerable to those bugs and honestly make their life a misery as they are working on top of work that missed basic decisions that will help it grow. (Imagine a non architect built your house, the walls might be straight but he didnt know to level the floor, or to add the right concrete to support the weight of a second floor)

Or the other path is they rebuild your entire app correctly. With the only advantage of the MVP and the users showing some viability for the idea. But the time it will take to rewrite it means in a fast moving space like start ups someone can quickly overtake you.

Its a risky proposition that means you are not going to create a very adequate base for the people you might hire.

I would still recommend against it, thinking that AI is more like WebMD, it can help someone who is already a doctor but it will confuse, and potentially hurt those without enough training to know what to look for.
by ddtaylor | 2025-10-19 19:05:59+00:00
In the earlier days of graphics on Linux this was a common right of passage. As far back as 2003 I can remember running an i915 graphics driver, which Intel has always had pretty good open drivers. When you would open a video in VLC and take a screenshot of the desktop, you would be left with a hole as it would grab the overlay compositing color (blue, green, etc.). However, if X11 was doing a video thing it would be filling these areas with whatever video is happening.
by Ghexor | 2025-10-19 19:06:35+00:00
I see female sexrobots as a symptom, a manifestation of the male gaze. I've heard personal histories of being courted and finding the guy was out for sexual gratification and didn't much care for her life-perspective. A justified anger there, I think, at a culture that perpetuates and celebrates this form of relating. Insecurity, I suspect, befalls more prominently the indoctrinated women that are catering to male expectations of beauty and ease. The successful feminists don't care if you're only screwing sexbots. If you are, it'll be great to have you off the market anyway. A filter for the men who won’t meaningfully connect.
by marcodiego | 2025-10-19 19:07:15+00:00
I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code every single day; they took small steps, but never stopped. Also there was the point of asking for help, not to get the answer, but to find a way out. There's also the "curse of the genius", but I don't think that is the case.

In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something".

I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-19 19:07:36+00:00
The problems were more obvious to me when I was older and trying to mentor college students.

Some of them just got it, absorbed good advice like a sponge, rejected bad advice, and did their best. They were unsurprisingly successful in life (for their own definitions of success, which wasn't always monetary)

The most frustrating cases were the students who got baited by angry internet advice. Reddit was a frequent source of bad advice. Some got pulled into 4Chan or Something Awful (depending on the era). Others were in weird IRC channels or Discords. All of them got poisoned by cynical online junk. I'd hear the weirdest things about how they'd rationalize that studying was bad, degrees were useless, and nothing mattered. Some tried to lecture me on how the world was ending, the economy was collapsing, and therefore nothing mattered anyway.

The hardest type for me to mentor were the students who had a bottomless bucket of excuses to pull from for everything in their life. Nothing was ever their fault, even if their failure was unambiguously traceable back to their lack of studying. It was always the fault of their professor, their roommate, their parents, their students, their friends, or even their mentors (me) because they had trained themselves to find someone or something to blame in every situation. Not surprisingly they were always failing to progress in life until they hit some situation that forced self-reflection and learning. Some of them managed to turn it around, but I can still find many of them angrily ranting into LinkedIn or other social media to this day.

Mentoring was hard. It was rewarding to work with the students who wanted to learn and knew how to prefer good advice over bad. For some it felt like most of the battle was just keeping them away from bad influences and resisting the urge to run to Reddit to find something that helped them believe nothing was their fault.
by marssaxman | 2025-10-19 19:08:07+00:00
Well, that's ironic. I actually do spend all day, every work day, in a piece of software which unifies most of the tools I need - editor, file manager, make console, find/grep frontend, etc. It's as stable as can be, since I'm the only person who maintains or even uses it, and it's as simple as can be, since I don't bother to write features in unless I really want them.

I've always supposed that emacs was for people with inscrutably complex text-editing needs, far beyond the bounds of my "nano is plenty" imagination, but if my cozy little coding environment is the kind of thing people are doing with emacs, I can understand why they would like that.
by sieste | 2025-10-19 19:09:17+00:00
> The reason, they believe, is that as warm air rises over the sea, it draws moisture away from the land, yielding heavier downpours.

Without reading the original article, which probably goes into more detail, I find this very speculative and I'm not convinced there is more going on than correlation. If anything the causality is more plausible the other way round: When it doesn't rain over land, pollution spikes.
by mmooss | 2025-10-19 19:09:27+00:00
> Still, I do see a difference in men going after 16 year or 8 year old boys and how they approached them.

Agreed.

> If a 16 year old cannot say no to unwanted advances, I would say education failed him very much in the first place.

It's not a matter of education. Mature adults have trouble saying no (to all sorts of things) depending on the social situation, and the power relationship is a significant factor, which weighs against 16 year olds who not only have little power but are raised to trust and obey adults. Look at all the people who couldn't say 'no' to their institution supporting rapists. Consider adult female soldiers, for whom sexual assault is a relatively widespread problem (at least in the US military).
by ben_w | 2025-10-19 19:09:28+00:00
Last summer I used one of the models to help translate a few German wikipedia pages to English, hoping it would make things easier by keeping all the formatting etc. that I'd lose if I copy-pasted mere content via Google Translate.

I did check the translations were correct as part of this — while my German isn't great, it was sufficient for this — and it was fine up until reaching a long table about the timeline of events relevant to the subject, at which point it couldn't help but make stuff up.

Still useful, but when you find the limits of their competence, there's no point attempting to cajole them to go further. They'll save you whatever % of the task in effort, now you have to do all the rest; it's a waste of effort to think either carrot or stick will get them to succeed if they can't do it in the first few tries.
by otras | 2025-10-19 19:09:43+00:00
I remember learning about the complex pumping machines running some of the reservoir pumps in Boston (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Waterworks_Museum), where they made such distinct noises when working (and malfunctioning) that an engineer could diagnose the problem by ear.

I sometimes think about what a modern analogy would be for some of the operations work I do — translate a graph of status codes into a steady hum at 440hz for 200s, then cacophonous jolts as the 500s start to arrive? As you mentioned, no perfect analogy as you get farther and farther from moving parts.
by gyomu | 2025-10-19 19:10:03+00:00
> Trinary is philosophically appealing because its ground-floor vocabulary isn’t “yes” and “no”, but rather: “yes”, “no”, and “maybe”. It’s probably a bit much to imagine that this architectural difference could cascade up through the layers of abstraction and tend to produce software with subtler, richer values … yet I do imagine it.

You can just have a struct { case yes; case no; case maybe; } data structure and pepper it throughout your code wherever you think it’d lead to subtler, richer software… sure, it’s not “at the hardware level” (whatever that means given today’s hardware abstractions) but that should let you demonstrate whatever proof of utility you want to demonstrate.
by jamesblonde | 2025-10-19 19:10:04+00:00
RonDB uses a non-blocking 2PC algorithm - commits in memory, and then does a group commit of transactions to disk every 500ms. This means it can handle insane write throughput, as well as read throughput. However, if both your DB nodes fail, you could lose 500ms of data - which is not the end of the world for k8s. Normally, you would locate DB nodes in different AZes, reducing the probabilty of correlated failures.
by schrodinger | 2025-10-19 19:10:27+00:00
I'll start:

Nuclear fission delayed 25 years.

WWII fought without atomic weapons.

No decisive end to the war instantly cementing the US as the undisputed global superpower and ushering in Pax Americana.

No mutually assured destruction fundamentally altering the calculus of major warfare.

Yet the discovery was inevitable, and they start appearing in the 1960s under a different world order. What happens next?
by giardini | 2025-10-19 19:10:42+00:00
My experience is mostly in the southeast region of Texas where the land is flat and fertile. This would be considered good farmland by most people. It is in these regions, separated by mostly pine forests, that I have seen considerable housing development.

Pricier homes of the Pacific Northwest are usually well-clear of the larger trees that challenge foundations. And I'm sure they're usually built by people knowledgeable about tree intrusion. By well-clear I mean half a football field away. I don't know about more densely-populated areas.

Smaller decorative trees are not usually a problem but nonetheless are best kept away from structures. It's the "nice old 50-year old oak tree" or the "30-year old pine tree" that is within 20 feet that will ruin your lawn and house.

I have a neighbor who simultaneously removed an oak tree from his back yard and a rather large young pine from his front yard ~12 years ago. The back yard is just starting to settle down. The front still looks bad. He mows his lawn in shifts: part at a time until he tires. During the rainy season you can still easily trace the oak tree's rotting roots as they steer the rainwater through the back yard. He saws and hacks at the roots, trying to keep the general flow toward the front yard and the street (as drainage is supposed to be in these neighborhoods). I know that he would be happier with a simple flat backyard of grass for his grandchildren to play on.

Every old tree near our lovely family home eventually had to be removed. This, despite the classic pier-and-beam construction. The shifting had gone too far to adjust the piers. It was time to adjust the trees: and my father, being an engineer, had to run the operation himself.

What an eye-opener that was: who knew that when an inch-thick braided steel cable holding an oak tree in suspension as it is sawed down could break, whip backward, slash and tear a 3-inch deep by 3-foot wound across the side of an even-larger pecan tree in less than the blink of an eye? Thank God no one was standing in the open area when the cable broke!
by beloch | 2025-10-19 19:11:23+00:00
It will be interesting to see what they do next.

The SF approach would be to lock down every aspect of the new zippers with as much proprietary BS as possible for as long as possible, charging high fees the whole time and quite likely causing relatively poor market penetration. Relatively few people will pay $50 extra for a thinner zipper on a typical jacket. To combat this, one SF approach might be to pump out ads and branding to to make the new zipper a status symbol.

e.g. Will we start to see fashion designers paid to highlight the new zippers on their products rather than hiding them behind flaps or in folds? Are Brando biker jackets about to trend again?

On the other hand, YKK might simply do what they've been doing for the last century: Obliterate the competition by doing what they do better and cheaper. This is how they took the market from manufacturer's like Talon. They might maintain control of their new zipper tech with patents, etc., but they might also make the tooling affordable and try to maximize uptake by manufacturers.

I have a vintage reproduction of a 1920's cafe racer with a Talon zipper on it. That thing needs to be babied. Zip it up wrong and the slide will bend, teeth will stop engaging, etc.. If you want a jacket that you'll think twice about zipping up (e.g. "Am I really so cold it's worth it?"), get something with a vintage Talon zipper. The first thing that stood out to me as a falsehood in this article was the claim that this is the first upgrade to the zipper in a century. YKK has been quietly making them better and better that whole time.