MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Retric | 2025-11-05 23:59:29+00:00
I’m specifically suggesting using reclaimed land if they relocated the airport because the cost seems to work out for Chicago, though obviously an in depth analysis is necessary. Still just looking at the depths combined with lakes not having the downsides of open oceans makes it promising. Unfortunately we’re talking about a huge airport so moving anywhere gets incredibly expensive.

The ultimate reason so many cities use land reclamation for airports is open water does not lose property value by being near the airport. Thus a given greater metropolitan area regains not just the physical land of the airport but the increased property value from all that land that’s no longer next to an airport.
by defrost | 2025-11-05 23:59:49+00:00
Sure, you like to see evidence of global concerted action to address a global slow boiling frog problem that's unlikely to deeply affect many of the people alive today in G20 non equatorial countries but will very probably fuck up the continuity of life for grand children and great granchildren.

FWiW I read the seminal papers on this from the 1960s in the 1970s and have watched slow changes take place over decades. It's a long haul ongoing issue.

You may get some thoughts or find others to converse with in:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45827352

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nordhaus

as you determine who Ted Nordhaus is and where he and his group fit on the sprectrum.

I'd suggest you care less about "winning arguments" and focus more on consistently conveying a message that you can back up with exposition, listen to the positions of others, and develop your stance as your knowledge grows.
by bsder | 2025-11-06 00:00:51+00:00
> Narrow AI, AI with guardrails, AI with multiple safety redundancies - these don't elicit the same reaction. They seem to be valid, acceptable forms of automation.

Maybe because AI is only good at things that have been artificially made crappy?

Search engine? AI is a godsend at wiping out all the advertising and SEO glop since circa 2000. 80%+ of my AI stuff is something a search engine could do 25 years ago.

Produce a shell script example that a junior needs? AI is very good at coughing up the code for a bunch of things that have disastrously bad documentation from 1985 or disastrously stupid implementations from 1990 such that a junior engineer can finally get on with what they're supposed to be doing.

Generating the same webby Javascript slop that as everybody else in the universe? Solid--but the question is "If the Javascript slop is so boilerplate to generate that an AI can generate it, why does it exist, at all?" People have been lamenting the death of Hypercard, VB6, and Flash for a yonks age now and yet we still don't have replacements with the same ease of use.

Doing mind-numbing refactors of my codebase or generating boilerplate unit tests? Okay-ish. But why doesn't my editor have easy access to the AST so that I can type a couple of keystrokes and do it myself (thankfully this finally seems to be coming online).

Every single thing that AI produces okay-ish results for me on is something that has either been artificially enshittified or could have been automated decades ago.
by gwking | 2025-11-06 00:00:57+00:00
My first programming "job" was a sort of summer internship when I was 14 for a family owned company called Signature Systems (signature.net). They are still in business. Their product is an operating system called Comet, that if I'm not mistaken was originally a compatibility play bringing software from the previous era of 16 bit microcomputers onto DOS PCs, and then later into Windows. I may be misremembering some of the details but I think at one point a Comet system ran ticket sales at Madison Square Gardens. My summer project was to build a demo using their new support for Windows GUI elements. The last time I spoke with the owners, they told me that they still had customers, including in the textiles industry where loom patterns had been coded in Basic. I often think about it as an example of a legacy system, and smile at the idea of someone thinking they need to rewrite their plaid weave in TypeScript or Rust.

Separately, I have spent the last three years building a web app that replaced a heap of automation scripts for a ~50 person business. These were much more modern than what the OP describes but it had some of the same qualities. The scripts mostly generated google sheets and emails. The replacement is a python web app using SQLite. Moving the company data into a proper database has been a very significant step for them. In some ways, the project feels a lot like custom business software that got built in the 90s.
by geon | 2025-11-06 00:01:18+00:00
> Dial-up modems reached their full 56kbps potential in 1997

That's simply not true. Modems were basically the same tech in the dsl era, and using light instead of electricity is a very gradual refinement.

> we're probably still far from the full potential of LLMs

Then how come the returns are so extremely diminishing?

> I don't see any obstacles to developing and switching to something better.

The obstacle is that it needs to be invented. There was nothing stopping newton from discovering relativity either. We simply have no idea what the road forward even looks like.
by zeristor | 2025-11-06 00:01:59+00:00
One key point, could one lure rats away by playing on a flute?

I mean if you could it would be handy to automate it in large cities even today, no toxic poisons.

I’m not sure what evidence there is for that part of the story. It could be a tale as others have posted as to why the town lost so many children.
by borroka | 2025-11-06 00:02:45+00:00
Two things. First, not all smart people are overthinkers and not all overthinkers are smart.

Second, I find that a great way to change one's self-damaging behavior is, rather than the therapy that is often recommended, to try to be as much as possible, relatively speaking, in the company of people who behave the way we would like to.

For the person who wants to exercise, but for some psychological hang-ups, can't, the company of people who exercise tends to be much more effective than finding out the root causes of the behavior. The same for thinking too much, eating too much, not being able to talk to other people.
by codebje | 2025-11-06 00:03:03+00:00
I do apologise if my response came across as deliberately nitpicking on the specific item; my intent was to highlight that there are many cases where things we might broadly find unpalatable actually do happen all the time, with no harm except to our belief structures; from that perspective, sawdust or any other non-toxic contaminant in food is a pretty good analogy for AI in content, because in very small dilutions the only possible harm it can carry is to a belief structure.

On the flip side, it does seem to me like you have deliberately chosen the worst possible interpretation of what I wrote, so ... pot, kettle?
by 2ap | 2025-11-06 00:03:03+00:00
A systematic review like this can be helpful, in that it identifies where there are gaps in the literature, and prevents hype - if some studies show evidence of effect, and others do not, even if there are only a few published studies then we know somthing new about the totality of the literature on the subject.

That said, this particular systematic review has a couple of issues (e.g. I can't find the precise inclusion / exclusion criteria, nor can I find that it has been pre-registered on Prospero or another database).

I have written a few systematic reviews where there is very little data already availabe, and we use them to explain to funders why we need to do further research on a given topic.
by hansvm | 2025-11-06 00:03:24+00:00
Just a few PB, and sharding it across servers is fine.

It looks like all the disk-optimized examples on that site (still much more expensive than paying for raw disk, barely 5x cheaper than S3, when a disk-optimized colo solution only has ~3% overhead over the disks themselves) are through some no-name provider "HostKey". I suppose beggars can't be choosers, but in the contexst of storage (where systemic failures should be accounted for in the model) are you aware of more than one provider with reasonably priced storage?
by tharkun__ | 2025-11-06 00:03:32+00:00
Not at MDW but there are plenty such places and yes, some people do "get used to it". But there are studies that show that you increase health risks from such levels of noise even if you get used enough to it so that you can sleep through them. Search for increases in problems of cardiovascular health from car and plane noise.

And some people just won't really get used to it. I've lived near airplane noise and I never got used to it. I also don't sleep better with white noise. I sleep worse.
by rPlayer6554 | 2025-11-06 00:04:22+00:00
Why do people in SF just put up with this? If it were anywhere else in the country I’d think mayor would be ousted by someone who’d clean up the city.

And I’m not talking about homelessness in general. New York has plenty but at least it’s somewhat under control. No companies are leaving or putting these sorts of barriers in place because of it.
by wfleming | 2025-11-06 00:04:27+00:00
We’re in very nitpicky terminology weeds here (and I’m not the person you’re replying to), but my understanding is “commutative” is specifically about reordering operands of one binary op (4+3 == 3+4), while “associative” is about reordering a longer chain of the same operation (1+2+3 == 1+3+2).

Edit: Wikipedia actually says associativity is definitionally about changing parens[0]. Mostly amounts to the same thing for standard arithmetic operators, but it’s an interesting distinction.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_property
by Bratmon | 2025-11-06 00:06:41+00:00
He made a follow-up video in which he explains his testing methodology and what the dishwasher is doing in heavy detail:

https://youtu.be/WnBb3DLlVPwsi=1fW2qg8_Y1SmxkKo

Tl;dr He actually tested each cycle, timed what it did, and measured the energy with a Kill a Watt. He also found the repair manual, which included a diagram of each cycle that matched his tests.

His ultimate finding was that all of the cycles and modifiers did wildly different things, none of which correlated in any way to their name.
by eldaisfish | 2025-11-06 00:07:27+00:00
keep in mind the limitations of these forecasting calculations. On an AVERAGE day, assuming AVERAGE weather, assuming AVERAGE load, you should be fine.

The trouble with relying on the weather for your electricity is that it is entirely possible that you will go five days straight with cloud cover, limited to no solar generation and then be freezing. This is the problem that the electricity grid solves with varied sources of generation.
by helicone | 2025-11-06 00:07:45+00:00
A private citizen is most protected from their governments when decision makers in society have no expectation of privacy. Monitoring them 24/7 with everyone on the planet having access to the feeds at any time would afford the most protection.

Every conversation they have, every thing they write down, everything they do on a computer or phone, everything their staff does, says, writes down, or does on a computer or a phone, everything all of these people do: who they have sex with, whose comedy shows they go see, where they spend their vacations, all of this should be entered into the public record.

Not even national security is a compelling reason for secrecy. The only legitimate need is to wage war against other nations, but the majority use case is to conspire more effectively against the public for profit or to increase authority. In a world where every country on earth is forced into a similar regime, the default case is everyone watches the political situation and can react accordingly if things go wrong. If war sentiment precipitates quickly usually the cause can be traced to individual actors, and those people can be removed from office by the people of their respective countries if the sentiment isn't generally shared. If the people decide they want war anyway, they can direct their governments to resume secrecy for the duration of the war.

If you are not a decision-maker in society this is ideal for you, and it is probably worth suffering WW3 to enforce it globally.
by dathinab | 2025-11-06 00:09:00+00:00
except we are speaking about lying under oath, not espionage, you don't get a trail for espionage because you lie under oath

and leading management also technically doesn't need to know that is happens for it to be doable. Or in other words they have a lot of reason to "accidentally" not know about it/have it overlooked

this means even if it happens they are very unlikely to be charged for anything more then negligence

but the contracts I mentioned above basically state "it doesn't matter why it happens and if you knew or if it was your fault as long as there was the smallest bit of negligence on your side you are on the hook for it personally". So in a situation where they can effectively avoid espionage trials (because they didn't commit espionage, just negligence) they still are hold responsible

if high level management would reliable go to prison for things like that you wouldn't need additional contracts to make sure they actually have insensitive to actively try to find/prevent anything like this/act very non-negligent.
by chriswarbo | 2025-11-06 00:09:45+00:00
Hypothesis is a search algorithm for finding ways that we have misunderstood our code (whether that be in the codebase, or the claims we have made about it in the spec/tests). Conceptually, that's the inverse of "a unit test that sometimes fails": it's a search that sometimes succeeds at finding out that we're wrong. That's infinity% more effective than a search procedure which is hard-coded to check a single example; especially when that example is chosen by the same dev (with the same misconceptions!) that implemented the code-under-test!

Now, as for what would actually happen in that situation, when using Hypothesis:

- As others have indicated, Hypothesis keeps a database of the failures it's found. Committing that database to your project repo would act like a ratchet: once they've successfully found a problem, they will continue to do so (until it's fixed).

- If you don't want to commit your database (to avoid churn/conflicts), then the same would happen per working-copy. This is fine for dev machines, where repo directories can live for a long time; though not so useful for CI, if the working-copy gets nuked after each run.

- Even if we disable the failure database, property failures will always show the inputs which caused it (the "counterexample"), along with the random seed used to generate it. Either of those is enough to reproduce that exact run, giving us a ready-made regression test we can copy/paste to make the failure permanent (until it's fixed). As others have said, Hypothesis properties can be decorated with `@example(foo)` to ensure a particular input is always checked.

- Even if we disable the failure database, and don't copy the counterexample as a regression test, property checkers like Hypothesis will still "shrink" any counterexamples they find. Your example of apostrophes causing problems is trivial for Hypothesis to shrink, so if/when it happens to find some counterexample, it will always manage to shrink that down to the string "'"; essentially telling us that "employee names fail on apostrophe", which we could either fix right now, or stick in our bug tracker, or whatever.
by taeric | 2025-11-06 00:09:53+00:00
More generally, the key here is that the more magic you want in the execution of your code, the more declarative you want the code to be. And SQL is pretty much the poster child declarative language out there.

Term rewriting languages probably work better at this than I would expect? It is kind of sad how little experience with that sort of thing that I have built up. And I think I'm above a large percentage of developers out there.
by renewiltord | 2025-11-06 00:10:05+00:00
Yeah, something like that happened nearby. They set up this bike repair store near my place and started repairing bikes. No one asked me if I even wanted this store nearby. I've been living here for like a decade and they gave me nothing. They offered to repair my bike for a fee, but I can already do that at home for free. We should ban businesses if they won't pay everyone within the vicinity the fee they demand.

I think there was some kind of corruption as to how they get to just repair bikes without giving me anything. I've been a local for way longer than these people.

EDIT: And yes, they do get government money. SF has a city program to encourage local businesses or something so they get grants. Besides all businesses are eligible for SBA loans and no one asked me if they should be.
by dprice1 | 2025-11-06 00:10:16+00:00
I have been using Dirty Labs dishwasher powder for about a year, since we got a new dishwasher, and inspired by some of his older videos on this topic. The performance has been good, no complaints. I don't torture-test my dishwasher like Alec does :). With the powder, I can do the whole some-on-the-door, some-in-the-dispenser thing mentioned here, or just use less for light loads. It is without a doubt not a budget option.

One aspect I like about it is that they have a fragrance-free variant, and even the "fragrance" one is not too bad. A second aspect I like is that it's biodegradable, et cetera. So a bit lighter on the environment, I hope, and the SDS is prominently available on the website.

I think another thing which is under-appreciated is that you need to know how to do the basic cleaning chores for your dishwasher-- for example if it has a filter, learn to clean it! Otherwise its ability to clean will probably be compromised.
by kj4ips | 2025-11-06 00:10:46+00:00
At least in most jurisdictions, the egress to a gathering area can __never__ be blocked, there is some provisions for delay on emergency exits, but those require NRTL certification, and are actually usually mechanical.

You might be able to lock it down during periods of limited occupancy, and you can rig it to an annoying alarm, and maybe try to identify the person, and ban them from future. It is possible to get variances for this, but you usually need to either be a medical or penal facility.
by breve | 2025-11-06 00:11:03+00:00
I don't see the point in the mental gymnastics to make excuses for Musk.

He's plainly not as you wish him to be. It's much better to simply see him as he is.

This is how he is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smQNNo2a9xc

It's not great.
by dfabulich | 2025-11-06 00:11:24+00:00
XSL is a functional programming language, not a declarative language. When you xsl:apply-template, you're calling a function.

Functional programming languages can often feel declarative. When XSL is doing trivial, functional transformations, when you keep your hands off of xsl:for-each, XSL feels declarative, and doesn't feel that bad.

The problem is: no clean API is perfectly shaped for UI, so you always wind up having to do arbitrary, non-trivial transformations with tricky uses of for-each to make the output HTML satisfy user requirements.

XSL's "escape hatch" is to allow arbitrary Turing-complete transformations. This was always intended to exist, to make easy transformations easy and hard transformations possible.

You basically never need to write Turing-complete code in a type system, but in any meaningful XSL project you will absolutely need to write Turing-complete XSL.

XSL's escape hatch is always needed, but it's absolutely terrible, especially compared to JS, especially compared to modern frameworks. This is why JS remained popular, but XSL dwindled.
by dylan604 | 2025-11-06 00:11:59+00:00
The death of Frys was one of those that took so much longer than it should. The last time I went into a Frys was a fluke as I had thought it was already out of business. Walking around inside was surreal as the inventory was sad with the vast majority of shelves empty. I remember taking pics at the time of just how much a shadow itself it really was. I just couldn't fathom why someone had allowed the stores to stay open that long.
by eldaisfish | 2025-11-06 00:13:24+00:00
you heard wrong. What most electricity grids forbid is exporting power from your home to the grid when the grid is down. The claimed danger is that energised power lines will kill people working on the lines.

The reality is that the vast majority of home inverters (in an EV, battery or solar PV) is nowhere near powerful enough to energise even a single distribution transformer.

This is yet another example of electricity codes being unrealistically restrictive.

Generally, there's nothing stopping you from disconnecting your home from the grid during a power outage and running your own devices off a battery. Going fully off-grid depends on your local laws.
by sevensor | 2025-11-06 00:14:18+00:00
I appreciate the attempt to explain in executive speak that engineers may not be fungible, that they can be costly to replace, that the organization will suffer if attrition gets out of hand, and that their decisions can influence these outcomes. I don’t think it quite hits the mark for organizations where this is a problem, because I think bad executives play a fundamentally different game. I’m not quite sure what it is, but the success of the company doesn’t seem to influence their decision making. Maybe it’s just that confidence in their ability to fail up makes success irrelevant?
by jakedata | 2025-11-06 00:15:21+00:00
The Microcenter in Cambridge (MA) finally updated their sign to modernize the rainbow Apple logo a few years ago. I hope it's stashed somewhere, to me it's more iconic than the Citgo sign a few miles away. They have added some components and kits but it doesn't fill the yawning void left by You-Do-It Electronics shutting down a year ago, or Radio Shack's slow motion demise.
by JustExAWS | 2025-11-06 00:15:29+00:00
You can’t both have versatility and simplicity and the entire leaky abstractions thing. Give me AWS with a bunch of primitives for anything that is moderately complicated over something like Vercel, AWS Amplify. Elastic Beanstalk etc.

This isn’t rah rah AWS, it’s just the one I know from an architectural level - I was pure developer before I got into AWS seven years ago and before then I hadn’t had to manage architecture since 2003. I would say the same that I prefer the raw primitives of GCP, Azure, or on prem Kubernetes more than the equivalent leaky “easy to use” alternative.
by nandomrumber | 2025-11-06 00:15:32+00:00
Any way that is more fair for the end user.

Why should a solar generator, who has virtually zero inputs, demand the same rate as a gas or coal generator who’s costs are dominated by inputs?

Where’s the promised savings to the end user? That’s right, there aren’t any.

And people bang on about solar being cheaper.

No it isn’t.

Solar electricity is the same price as gas peaker-plant electricity. Everywhere I’ve looked, same story.

And there’s no solar power without gas.
by arjie | 2025-11-06 00:15:57+00:00
Wow, this is something. I recall (decades ago, so who knows how accurate) running Dillo under Enlightenment DR17 on a low-spec Pentium (perhaps) in the old era. Glad to see it's still kicking. The computer was too slow for the rest of the software of the era but Dillo was still fast!

I was very proud that I could call our home phone line and it would boot the computer if it was off. Most pointless feature ever, but I thought I was hot shit when I was a kid getting that to work.
by emmelaich | 2025-11-06 00:16:21+00:00
There are even older languages with similar goals. At least three are called viper and are older than 6 years. Two linked below and much older one with ocaml-ish features that I could not find a link for.

https://github.com/pdarragh/Viper

https://github.com/appcypher/viper