MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jltsiren | 2025-12-08 00:19:59+00:00
With the Romans, the situation was the opposite. Their success was mostly based on the idea that conscripted peasants will eventually beat elite warriors. You just had to equip and train the conscripts instead of wasting the resources on the elites.

Because every man was expected to fight, the Romans had an effectively endless supply of experienced and well equipped soldiers. A society depending on a warrior class might win once or twice. But the Romans would still inflict some casualties. They would learn and adapt, and come back with another army next year. Sooner or later, the warrior class would be depleted, and Rome would prevail.

Eventually the Roman Republic grew large enough and successful enough to switch to a professional army. Not because it was better, but because the population was too large. There were not enough enemies to fight to make conscription useful.

Steppe nomads were far from unstoppable. They had occasional success in conquest, but their societies were set up to fail. The legitimacy of their leaders was based on personal relationships between the elites. When the leader of a large empire died, it was always unlikely that all leaders of note would support the successor. Most of the time, the empire would fracture into effectively independent polities. Sometimes there would be a figurehead leader on the top, but he would rarely have any real power over other leaders.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 00:20:12+00:00
> everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process

Nobody agrees on that. TFA follows "a state government inspector" whose effectiveness is hampered solely by a "North Carolina law" which "caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection." That law [1] doesn't exist outside North Carolina.

This is the first time I'm reading about this. We have a dollar store in my town. I'm curious to replicate this experiment myself and send the results into the local newspaper if the discrepancy is real.

[1] https://www.ncleg.gov/enactedlegislation/statutes/html/bycha... § 81A-30.1
by layer8 | 2025-12-08 00:20:55+00:00
Macros can be very powerful. But! They are like DSLs, in that they create their own mini language that you have to learn. Arguably worse than DSLs, macros modify the context of the host language in which they are invoked. That is their power, but it's also what distinguishes them from regular library functions, whose interface semantics are generally simpler to reason about.

Macros are preferable to runtime reflection and monkey patching, but the compile-time reflection and monkey-patching represented by macros still incurs a complexity tax that needs to be weighed against the alternative of non-macro code.
by andrew_lettuce | 2025-12-08 00:20:57+00:00
PE puts very little of their own money into the deal though, while they own it they don't buy it. They use incredibly high leverage and often saddle the company with monstrous debt, then loot the assets to pay the interest and take management fees while doing all this. Red lobster is a great recent example. They sold off all the real estate, then had stores lease it back, turning profitable locations into losers. They often do the same thing with manufacturing, goodwill, brandnames and sales channels.

Think of this like an oil well. If you pump off all the gas, you depressurize the reservoir and can never get the oil. You need to slow your production to get the oil first, but private equity is happy to skim the cream and leave the milk to spoil.
by dnautics | 2025-12-08 00:21:17+00:00
there was a recent interview where andrew suggested if i understood correctly: the future path of zig is to make all compilations (successful or not) produce an executable. if theres something egregious like a syntax or type error, the produced artifact just prints the error and returns nonzero. for a "unused parameter", the compiler produces the artifact you expect, but returns nonzero (so it gets caught by CI for example.
by sien | 2025-12-08 00:21:27+00:00
From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Sales_and_marketing

"In 2020, Chromebooks outsold Apple Macs for the first time by taking market share from laptops running Microsoft Windows. This rise is attributed to the platform's success in the education market.[79][80][81]"

Hmm.

This is interesting. Searches give you different numbers.

But it looks like the number of Chromebooks sold each year is comparable, but probably lower than the number of Macs.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-08 00:22:12+00:00
> Heck, most policymakers in LDCs panned the program at the time as well not actually prioritizing the aid that was needed [2]

I don’t have any insight as to what sort of aid would have been more effective, but quite frankly some of the criticisms were ridiculous when you consider the majority of people in these countries had a cheap mobile phone in their pocket a decade later.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2018/10/09/majorities-in-...
by accoil | 2025-12-08 00:22:17+00:00
This is how I've observed it: Catfriend1 has long been the owner of syncthing-fork on android, which was fork of the official client syncthing-android. It had extra features around Android that were lacking in the official client (e.g sync windows to reduce battery usage).

When google locked down on file apis a year or so ago, the official syncthing-android pulled out of google play, but syncthing-fork stuck around in fdroid as the fork was for personal purposes, and they were using fdroid for distribution in the first place.

This change in ownership is new to me, but I'm also not surprised it happened as syncthing-fork was always a personal project.
by autoexec | 2025-12-08 00:22:49+00:00
The concept of "small convenience store near me" isn't the problem. The problem is that these stores are actively engaging in outright fraud. People who shop there are absolutely getting fleeced regardless of how much gas they burn getting to the store that's regularly ripping them off.

Having a small nearby connivance store and not getting scammed is an option. If the ability to get beer and hot dogs buns without having to drive to a larger more distant store is really worth the higher prices customers are getting fraudulently charged at the register, then these stores can just stop lying to customers and post the accurate prices.

If the laws were meaningfully enforced this is exactly what would happen. These stores would either comply with the law and stop committing fraud or they would be shut down, their CEOs would be sent to prison, and competitors willing to follow the law would step in to fill the need the market has for a small shop that sells beer and buns to rake in that profit for themselves.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-08 00:23:58+00:00
Small laptop computers are ergonomically useful to children who literally have a smaller body frame. I don't think there were many of those around prior to OLPC and/or netbooks, beyond specialty products like the Toshiba Libretto and perhaps the original Psion Netbook. Nowadays we still have low-end smaller ultrabooks that are effectively quite comparable to the former netbooks.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-08 00:24:15+00:00
"No semantic effect" is one of those recurring C++ tropes like the "subset of a superset" or "trading performance for safety" that I think even its defenders ought to call bullshit on. The insistence on "No semantic effect" for attributes has poisoned them badly, and the choice to just ignore the semantic implications for Bjarne's C++ 20 Concepts makes this a poor substitute for the concepts feature as once imagined at the start of the century.

I doubt I can satisfy you as to whether I'm somehow a paid evangelist, I remember I got a free meal once for contributing to the OSM project, and I bet if I dig further I can find some other occasion that, if you spin it hard enough can be justified as "payment" for my opinion that Rust is a good language. There was a nice lady giving our free cookies at the anti-racist counter-protests the other week, maybe she once met a guy who worked for an outfit which was contracted to print a Rust book? I sense you may own a corkboard and a lot of red string.
by manlymuppet | 2025-12-08 00:25:07+00:00
I'm using source code like it's used when referring to source code vs executables. React doesn't simply spit out HTML, nor the JSX used to write said React code, it outputs a mixture of things that's the optimized HTML/CSS/JS version of the React you wrote. This is akin to source code and the optimized binaries we actually use.

Perhaps the wrong usage of "source code". I probably should've been more precise. Forgive my lack of vocabulary to describe the difference I was referring to.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-08 00:25:26+00:00
> this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process.

Yeah it does. This is specifically the sort of thing that the FTC is in charge of addressing.

That is ultimately controlled by who the president is. There is some funding problems with these enforcement agencies that forces them to pick and chose their battles. However, you'd be naive to think that there isn't a significant difference from how Lina Khan ran things and how Andrew Ferguson runs things.
by Fwirt | 2025-12-08 00:26:35+00:00
No, but watching a novelist at work is boring, and yet people like books that are written by humans because they speak to the condition of the human who wrote it.

Let us not forget the old saw from SICP, “Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” I feel a number of people in the industry today fail to live by that maxim.
by martey | 2025-12-08 00:26:41+00:00
A lot of comments here seem to suggest that we should discount or ignore this paper because the OLPC program had other benefits (increasing uptake of lower cost laptops worldwide, giving children computer skills, etc.). This is a reasonable argument assuming that most people have only read the free abstract, but this isn't the conclusion that the authors come in the actual paper. Instead, they suggest that the program might have been more successful with increased teacher training and internet access in schools.

I was able to access the NBER version of the paper, but it looks like working copies are also available in a number of other locations:

- https://publications.iadb.org/en/laptops-long-run-evidence-one-laptop-child-program-rural-peru - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5391874 - https://www.ofermalamud.com/research
by rgmerk | 2025-12-08 00:27:22+00:00
The Port of Los Angeles is one of the largest ports in the USA, and has about 1,800 ship arrivals annually.

If they were all electric, all of this size, and required a full charge on arrival, you’re talking about (very roughly) 1 GW continuous power requirement for charging the ships. That’s a lot; no bones about it, but it’s not unprecedented - aluminium smelters and data centers are similarly hungry for power.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-08 00:28:56+00:00
Vid of the engine in action, from the team that made the paper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VSmBl8Rv_o

This one shows that it is not as unbelievable as it sounds :)

https://youtube.com/shorts/9KuTdPGqhVo
by yason | 2025-12-08 00:29:18+00:00
You could draw long/short straws to generate bits but since the challenge limited the tools to mortal bodies any other guessing game would do.

One could put his hands behind his back with one hand palm open and the other hand in a fist. The other one then guesses which hand is open and him being right or wrong generates either a 1 or 0. Repeat N times for an N-bit binary number. Both players can influence their choice equally and also equally make assumptions about the other player's intentions when making their own choice.
by jkaplowitz | 2025-12-08 00:29:46+00:00
> Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?

It does not - and that's exactly my point! Cops are allowed to arrest that criminal even though there's no immediate need to arrest them. So, immediate need is not a prerequisite to cops arresting someone.

> Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.

Yes, but cops are also free to arrest people who they are confident will show up to court, if there's probable cause that they've committed a crime. Again, the point of that example was that immediate need is not required before a cop can arrest someone.

> This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.

I agree that it would be best if there were a separate agency that could respond on the spot for this type of issue, other than the regular police department and other than a slow administrative complaint/inspection process which doesn't lead to enough of a fine for stores to change their processes.

But I was discussing the possibility of the sale completing according to the law and the store trying to stop the customer from leaving with their purchase because they didn't pay the illegal overcharge. That would indeed by a crime attempted or committed by the store, assuming the law considers the sale to have been completed, and that is indeed something within the scope of what cops can handle.

To use your health code analogy: sure, in general, administrative complaints are the way to handle health code violations. But what do you call it if a restaurant worker sees something which they know or reasonably should know is toxic to humans spill into a customer's order, and then they serve it to the customer anyway without a warning? Yes, that's a crime as well as a health code violation. There are plenty of cases where cops can legitimately be involved in things that can also be handled administratively. Whether or not cops are likely to respond in useful or timely ways is a completely separate question from what the law allows.

(Tangent: Cops also quite often handle administrative fines of even smaller magnitude than what we're discussing here, but usually when the aggrieved party is the government and the wrongdoer is a random individual, like issuing non-criminal $60-100 fines for not paying a public transit fare of a couple of dollars. It's rare for them to do it when the aggrieved party is a random individual and the wrongdoer is a business.)
by jandrewrogers | 2025-12-08 00:29:57+00:00
In many regards, the F-35 was the first aircraft explicitly engineered for the requirements of drone-centric warfare. Its limitations are that this capability was grafted onto an older (by US standards) 5th generation tech stack that wasn't designed for this role from first principles. I think this is what ultimately limited production of the F-22, which is not upgradeable even to the standard of the F-35 for drone-centric environments.

The new 6th generation platforms being rolled out (B-21, F-47, et al) are all pure first-principles drone-warfare native platforms.
by throw0101a | 2025-12-08 00:30:04+00:00
> One of them explicitly called it a childish set of glued together python scripts that fall apart very quickly when you get off the happy path.

A 'childish set scripts' that manages (as of 2020) a few hundreds of thousands of cores, 7,700 hypervisors, and 54,000 VMs at CERN:

* https://superuser.openinfra.org/articles/cern-openstack-upda...

The Proxmox folks themselves know (as of 2023) of Proxmox clusters as large as 51 nodes:

* https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/the-maximum-number-of-node...

So what scale do you need?
by ghaff | 2025-12-08 00:30:40+00:00
They've become the browser-centric portal for the education market which is the only thing a lot of people need/want. (I probably prefer that to defaulting to tablets/smartphones.)

At the same time, as far as I can tell, Chromebooks are pretty much all K-12 focused devices at this point. Which is fine. But I'd potentially buy something higher-end if it were available. But it isn't.
by addaon | 2025-12-08 00:31:06+00:00
> All that means is that 10 years ago you had to rely on humans to write the code that today can be done more safely with auto generation.

No. It means more than that. There's a cross-product here. On one axis, you have "resources needed", higher for code gen. On another axis, you have "available hardware safety features." If the higher resources needed for code gen pushes you to fewer hardware safety features available at that performance bucket, then you're stuck with a more complex safety concept, pushing the overall system complexity up. The choice isn't "code gen, with corresponding hopefully better tool safety, and more hardware cost" vs. "hand written code, with human-written bugs that need to be mitigated by test processes, and less hardware cost." It's "code gen, better tool safety, more system complexity, much much larger test matrix for fault injection" vs "human-written code, human-written bugs, but an overall much simpler system." And while it is possible to discuss systems that are so simple that safety processors can be used either way, or systems so complex that non-safety processors must be used either way... in my experience, there are real, interesting, and relevant systems over the past decade that are right on the edge.

It's also worth saying that for high-criticality avionics built to DAL B or DAL A via DO-178, the incidence of bugs found in the wild is very, very low. That's accomplished by spending outrageous time (money) on testing, but it's achievable -- defects in real-world avionics systems overwhelming are defects in the requirement specifications, not in the implementation, hand-written or not.
by saalweachter | 2025-12-08 00:31:14+00:00
It's not uncommon, in a well-written code base, to see documentation on different functions or algorithms with where they came from.

This isn't just giving credit; it's valuable documentation.

If you're later looking at this function and find a bug or want to modify it, the original source might not have the bug, might have already fixed it, or might have additional functionality that is useful when you copy it to a third location that wasn't necessary in the first copy.
by chongli | 2025-12-08 00:32:13+00:00
Weren't they losing money for years on all-you-can-eat seafood specials [1]?

It's not uncommon in the fast food business to be breaking even or losing money on all aspects of the business while the true value of the company, its real estate portfolio, steadily grows. The fact that investors decided they wanted to cash out should be a surprise to no one.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91129776/what-really-killed-red-...
by wpietri | 2025-12-08 00:33:08+00:00
On the contrary, constraints often mean you don't need formal estimates. (I'll come back to prioritization in a sec.)

Startups are a great example. When you raise your first chunk of money, the size of that isn't really driven by a carefully considered, detailed plan with engineering hours estimated per task. What you get is basically determined what's currently fashionable among angels and small-end VCs, plus who's doing your fundraising. (If you're Jeffery Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, you can raise $1bn. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi But the rest of us have to make do with what we can get.)

So at that point you have a strong constraint (whatever you raised) and some relatively clear goal. As I said, cost isn't nearly as relevant as ROI, and nobody can put real numbers on the R in a startup. At that point you have two choices.

One is just to build to whatever the CEO (or some set of HiPPOs wants). Then you launch and find out whether or not you're fucked. The other is to take something akin to the Lean Startup approach, where you iteratively chase your goal, testing product and marketing hypotheses by shipping early and often.

In that later context, are people making intuitive ROI judgments? Absolutely. Every thing you try has people doing what you could casually call estimating. But does that require an estimation practice, where engineers carefully examine the work and produce numbers? Not at all. Again, I've done it many times. Especially in a startup context, the effort required for estimation is much better put into maximizing learning per unit of spending.

And how do you do that? Relentless prioritization. I was once part of a team that was so good at it that they launched with no login system. Initial users just typed their names in text fields. They wanted proper auth, and eventually they built it, but for demonstrating traction and raising money there were higher priorities. It worked out for them; they built up to have millions of users and were eventually acquired for tens of millions. On very little investor money.

Being great at prioritization makes estimation way less necessary. The units of work get small enough that the law of large numbers is on your side. And the amount of learning gained from the things released change both the R and I numbers frequently enough that formal estimates don't have a long shelf life.

So I get what you're saying in theory, but I'm telling you in practice it's different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 00:33:17+00:00
> Because a PE fund is at most a seven year timeline

Berkshire Hathaway is a PE fund with permanent capital.

Broadly speaking, making generalisatios about PE is almost impossible because it's an asset class which is, essentially, all non-public business. Instead, it's more useful to think about which element private equity touches you're specifically complaining about: capitalism in general, financial transparency, leverage and liability.
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-08 00:34:09+00:00
This is a stupid assertion, plenty of people like being plumbers, or otherwise working with their hands. There no logic in your argument just classism.

I’m not friends with the guy, he’s just done good work for me at a fair price. I have a lot of respect for that, and clearly you don’t respect people who work hard.

You are morally repugnant.
by zozzle | 2025-12-08 00:34:10+00:00
Having testes leads to male-typical levels of testosterone which, barring androgen insensitivity, leads to male puberty. These are three integrated steps in the male developmental pathway, not three different definitions.

We can agree to disagree on whether Banda is in the same category as Semenya, Khelif, etc. But consider that when news articles report a purportedly female athlete embroiled in controversy over competition eligibility as having "naturally high levels of testosterone" or similar, what this actually means is the athlete is male with a DSD. There has been a considerable amount of obfuscation on this topic and those who lose out are actual female athletes.

Unfairly elevating males like Semenya to the heights of female competition excludes women who would otherwise have had the opportunity to showcase their athletic excellence. This is the real misogyny.
by degamad | 2025-12-08 00:34:28+00:00
What you are describing the best-case scenario. They happen.

What also happens is, they take operating businesses with reasonable returns, buy up all it's supply chain or it's competitors to reduce costs or enable monopoly pricing, then load the company up with debt, squeezing it into a terrible company. That is the bad scenario which people object to.

An example: https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 00:34:29+00:00
> If a company controlled by PE goes bankrupt, shareholders (PE) likely make a profit. But if a publicly listed company goes bankrupt, shareholders lose their money

This isn't remotely true. Plenty of private equity investments go bust before they can pay themselves back. And plenty of public company investors milked a company for interest payments or dividends into the ground.

> PEs almost never lose money

Private equity funds regularly lose money. Usually to lenders.

You're complaining about leverage in general. Probably not private equity per se.