skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are some of your favorite HN posts?
I recently saw another poster ask if HN has provided anyone with anything of value [0]. That got me wondering what a collection of everyone’s favorite HN posts would look like.

I’ll start:

The last question by Isaac Asimov - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8376716

Temperature Conversion: Mental Calculation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20490666

Everything I know - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903596

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26366538
ANY Apple Silicon iMac is going to kill, just kill, the top of the line Intel Xeon iMac Pros. Blurry is not the word. It's gonna leapfrog the Xeons for almost any purpose rendering the whole thing ridiculous.

Source: I literally have an 18-core, 64 gig RAM Xeon iMac Pro and one of the new laptops (Macbook pro, 16 gig RAM). If they don't have to get 20 hours of battery life and they do literally anything to expand the processing from what they have, they're going to obliterate the discontinued ones so hard that it'd be insane or criminally misleading to continue selling the iMac Pros.

They've already quit selling the machine I have, and I kinda wish they had half a year ago… because I spent more than $8000 in the belief that I was going to put a stake in the ground and rely on that computer for a goodly number of years and that it was relevant to where Apple was headed.

Now (if Linus Tech Tips is to be believed) I can get a baseline Macbook Air, pop the back off, put a thermal conductive pad to vent heat away from the heatsink to the aluminum surface of the laptop, and get observably better performance on at least some realworld tasks for literally one EIGHTH the price.

I won't say I feel ripped off, but I feel extremely blindsided and that's only going to get worse as Apple continues to put out more products. Not sure people quite understand how inferior Apple's 'top line' products from the last generation, are to what they're currently producing.

Right now if you need heavy processing of VERY specific types involving many cores and many gigs of physical RAM but that doesn't fit into a category Apple's covering already with the M1s, such as 4k and 8k video editing that's better done on any M1 machine, that's the last known good use of the iMac Pros and Mac Pros. Only the heaviest of heavy lifting that's not covered by the strong suits of the M1…

I give it four months before Apple has something maybe at the $2000-3000 price point that absolutely destroys all the previous machines, no matter how 'Pro', at any price. And this is why they've got to kill off the previous lines. People will be really angry when this becomes apparent. Better to not even try and sell the machines, much less try to market them as 'more performance'. Expandability, yeah, there's that.
> What some people actually build with Electron doesn't really say much about what people _can_ build with Electron.

no, it does. anyone can build incredible apps on any tech, given infinite budget and time. What matters is how the average app behaves, and for electron it is much worse than the average Qt app for instance.
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People will pay anything right now to not hold cash.
I've seen this being mentioned in other comments, and besides WSL2, I've used PyCharm (a close relative to IDEA) connected to containers, Vagrant and plain VMs for years. I suppose the rest of the IntelliJ products have the same support, and WSL2 being rolled out, obviously?
There are a number of reasons you might prefer an architecture like this. The main two are resilience (don't place all your eggs in one basket -- if your computer is damaged or lost you don't lose your data) and availability (if your computer is shut down you can still access your data from your phone, tablet, or another device).

It would make great sense to have a non-hosted backend option, though, for power users who prefer to self-host their data.
Paywall. Some DOM Hackery got me the content.

Venezuela said it will introduce new large-denomination bolivar notes as hyperinflation renders most bills worthless, forcing citizens to turn to the U.S. dollar for everyday transactions.

The country’s central bank posted a statement on its website Friday saying it would begin circulating the new 200,000, 500,000 and 1,000,000 bills to “fulfill the current economy’s requirements” without providing further details. The 1,000,000 note -- the largest in the nation’s history -- is worth only $0.53 cents.

As Venezuela’s economy shrank for a seventh straight year in 2020, the government turned a blind eye to a growing number of dollar transactions, kick-started by rolling power outages that prevented credit and debit card purchases and fostered the use of cash. About 66% of transactions across the country are estimated to be made in foreign currency, according to Ecoanalitica.

While the dollar has gained ground, Venezuelans continue to rely on bolivar bills for public transportation and to purchase subsidized fuel. The Caracas subway recently issued an electronic payment system after it routinely stopped charging passengers due to cash shortages.

President Nicolas Maduro has said he plans to move to a fully digital economy this year, following three years of hyperinflation that have prompted the nation’s mint to issue higher-denomination notes that are quickly rendered all but useless. Inflation soared 3,000% in the last 12 months, according to Bloomberg News’s Cafe con Leche Index.

In October, Venezuela imported banknote paper with plans to issue a 100,000 bill that quickly became outdated. It last issued new bills in 2019, after chopping five zeros of the previous bills in circulation in 2018.
DC's Lost Am Radio Station Still Transmitting Road Closures from 2013
Not sure if you're only looking for self-hosted things, but I've been trying out Apex Logs by TJ Holowaychuk: https://apex.sh/logs/

So far, I like it. You get a minimalist UI for doing interactive queries, and your data is ultimately persisted in your own Google BigQuery datasets so you can write arbitrary SQL against them.

I have yet to run significant volume through it, so perhaps my view will change if it performs worse at scale.
If you like building machines that function as animals, this is a basic technique. It is how my digital twin tracks my state.

I was thinking about my fitness band at the gym and like yeah it uses... A Kalman Filter? I load HN and there it is.
So these benchmarks are a bit out of date, as at least some of the Adobe apps have gone M1-native, but the iMac Pro does wallop the MacBook Pro in several cases.

https://barefeats.com/m1-versus-imac-pro.html

-

“…bespoke accelerator card…”

Are you thinking of the Mac Pro here? I don’t think the iMac Pro had anything exotic for GPU compute.
I don't understand hyperinflation. Doesn't it become obvious that you should stop printing money when the cost of printing the money is higher than the value printed on the notes?
> a metal-working course taught by Moholy-Nagy. Students would handmade prototypes based on assumptions of what would be easier to mass-manufacture (like using basic shapes such as cylinders of spheres). But in fact products with those shapes were actually hard to make industrially.

This was cause for a good laugh, though that likely wasn't your intention. But hear me out.

What doesn't seem to be mentioned is that Bauhuas was a leftist school. Moholy-Nagy is being your typical Marxist teaching a class on industrial products without having ever even stepping foot in a factory, much less knowing the state of industrial manufacturing.

Poser of tech? Well, in a way, Bauhaus was investigating the aesthetics of Modernity and industrial society. The disregard for actual manufacturing realities is entirely in line with disregarding human psychology when proscribing utopian authoritarian societies. It is a mindset and it should be added, symptomatic of their conceit.
We already have working AI, not prototypes. Look at big corporations for example.
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I don't think we've even remotely scratched the surface of what the Neural Engine can do. Also, the battery life is incredible and stays up to the hyperbole I've seen online. 10 hours of heavy work and takes it like a champ.

I can't speak to the all-out performance comparison with a 18 core Xeon, but yeah, this chip is pretty great.
I feel more and more than HN comments is not for every one and not for me. If you're not careful with your wording, you'll get flagged and your message will be dismissed and it seems futile to argue against it.

This creates an "elitist" atmosphere (totally subjective assertion) that I'm not comfortable with.

Your comment is the perfect example of that.
Until I open my Lyft to their Uber and Dorsey sells the same tweet on my NFT marketplace.
What about dictionary attacks?
Ian McEwan on Bach, Philip Roth and Living an Episodic Life (2019)
I’m not sure the right to repair initiatives that worked fairly well will work as well for tractors.

“What does the software cost?” matters tremendously in terms of whether you have no right to repair (today), practically no way to repair, or an effective right to repair.

For Ford’s diagnostic software, I might be able to buy it for several thousand dollars and expect to use it 100 times per year over the course of running my repair shop.

For a tractor owner who doesn’t want to risk being broken down in a field, what’s the equivalent?

I support the broad right to repair (even if it means the initial sale costs more because the manufacturer no longer has a monopoly downstream on service), but I worry that with uncapped price on software you can have theoretically the right to repair without economically having it.
> ("I measured up", spin is actually up)

IMHO this is the fundamental mistake people make: conflating "I measured spin up" with "spin is actually up". Think about it: what is the evidence that there is actually a correspondence between a measurement and some external reality? There is only one possible answer to that: you can correlate this measurement with the outcomes of other measurements. For example, if you measure the same particle in the same basis twice in a row you will get the same result.

But there is a problem with that: if you actually look at the details you will find that it is actually not possible to measure the same particle in the same basis twice in a row because actually making a measurement requires entangling the particle with a macroscopic system, and you can only do that once. The best you can do is run a particle through a series of filters and look at where it ended up. You can then retrodict that the particle went one way or went another way, but you cannot actually measure its trajectory. In fact, you cannot even know that there even is a particle in your apparatus until the end when you actually measure it.

So the only thing you are left with at the end is a single actual measurement, and a macroscopic arrangement of some experimental setup about which you can tell a consistent story retroactively, but where you do not and cannot possibly have any direct evidence that your story is actually true, i.e. that the particle "actually" was spin up. And this is exactly what QM predicts: the consistent outcomes of measurements is not the result of the particle "actually" being spin up or spin down, but because the macroscopic systems (like humans) which compare the outcomes of their measurements are mutually entangled with each other and so decohere into classically consistent states. So if I ask you what you see as the outcome of the experiment, QM predicts that my perception of your answer will match my perception of the outcome. But it emphatically does NOT say that this outcome is actually real.
But then the government has to default, hasn't it?
Between (a) building the thing right and (b) building the right thing, I've personally seen a) go wrong sometimes and b) go wrong most of the time.

My personal feelings are that developers have far less influence on b).
That’s how every JetBrains IDE subscription works, though. If you pay for a year, you get the version at the start of that year for perpetuity.
I have the same feeling about the UI. The last time I tried watching a course was easier to find the videos on youtube(the author had uploaded them there as well).
Hmm the X Chip difference makes sense, because they are the same chip with the regular one built to be mobile. But in case of M2, the same distinction doesn't make sense because they are built for larger devices by default. Though I guess, they could have two completely separate chips and just use the X as convention.
You are assuming a basic level of competence which doesn't exist in the Venezuelan government.
Go back to Year 2000, Jobs may laugh and agree with disagree. Now Year 2021, HN: “Noodle JS is centenary and memories are around it”
I know. It really is quite scary, if you have been in a for-real security audit actually. We wouldn't be creating admin workstations if the security story with AD would be so great, hint - it isn't. Exchange must communicate with AD with much higher permissions than most users. It really is scary how many barriers will be crossed just so anything you would expect, like contacts, works.
I guess to increase profit, they're going to push pro users into the "tower"
Essentially Texans stay fat by lobbying to starve Venezuelans.
Being a 'low-tech' (compared to most other web destinations these days) and text-only sites with some social interactions is one of the reasons I come to hn multiple times a day. I sorta learn to ignore most things posted.

So benefit: low bandwidth, (relative) low noise news source compared to other places
AND it goes against economic incentives for the typical dev (i.e. make migration harder to engender lock-in)! But, for devs who have portability and openness as priorities (volunteers and altruists, in other words) it seems very helpful to have a precompiled model of how to build apps that respect these priorities.
I've only read "The Buried Giant", but can strongly recommend it. Beautiful, and sad, dreamy, poetic and fable-like.
The Hyperactive Hive Mind
False on all counts.

The GitHub estimate is only using known resources and reserves, a number which goes up every year as we discover more. It is not an estimate of total accessible lithium. Lithium resources, the type where we get most of our lithium, increased from 40M tons to 80M tons from 2016 to 2020 estimates, and will continue to increase:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Reserves

> This is not even remotely true. We don't even have 1 GWh of battery storage [1].

I don't know where that number comes from on that page, but it's wrong. More than 2GWh were connected to the US grid in Q4 2020 alone:

https://pvbuzz.com/woodmac-new-battery-storage-systems-q4-20...

And even if your number were right, it doesn't address the core point that battery storage deployment is growing at an absolutely incredible pace. In cost-competitive grids, it's replacing natural gas:

https://rmi.org/clean-energy-is-canceling-gas-plants/

> Cost is a function of supply and demand

This is just bad economics. These all affect each other. As production costs fall for lithium ion batteries, demand is growing, as shown by that RMI document. The cost of batteries is not falling because the demand is falling, the cost of lithium ion battery is primarily determined by manufacturing costs at the moment. The input costs of lithium is not going up because there's not enough lithium. And if supply of lithium does get constrained in the future, then there are alternative chemistries that are not supply limited.
Coming to a US state near you too
But bitcoin is just a scam of course.
This is incredibly well put, and it reminds me to read on a more active basis.

I have two different "modes" when reading - 1) for novels and light matsrial, which is just casual reading, 2) for material that warrants study, typically using a pen to underline critical information and write thoughts in the margins.

You seem to suggest that casual reading, while I'm sure shares some spillover benefit, should not be mis-characterized as active study and is closer to entertainment. Do you make a conscious effort to read most things actively?
I didn't say anything about mask-wearing itself - just offering an example of naive but faulty reasoning. You're looking for a fight that I'm not interested in having.
Current PhD in cryptography here, and I’ve observed similar dynamics in my lab—some profs are entrepreneurial, some have a “system” for all their students to follow, and some are classic cloistered academic types interested only in their research.

I’m also at least 10 years older than any other student in the lab, and I can see how someone in their 20s who hasn’t had a lot of jobs/bosses might have certain expectations about an advisor and be highly disappointed or even feel wronged.
It shouldn't really be that difficult. If it's capable of structuring "How heavy is _ on the moon?" The answer would be start out the same way looking for weight of _.

It seems to me that these kinds of questions could be handled but require some adjustments or tuning more than we need fundamentally different approaches. We can't do everything at once so there's going to be simple things that don't work for quite a while.
By your description I'm assuming it was supposed to be a Rothko.
It seems like lunatic is an open source lib with two different licenses. Is it that you can pick either one? Or is it the...union of the two licenses?

It's probably early, but how are you planning on making money? If I build on top of this, I don't want the rug to be pulled out from under me.
Audio over Bluetooth: most detailed information about profiles and codecs (2019)
So basically, "might makes right". How savage that feels.
As in, "Why" aren't you calling it what it really is, a Cult.

We already have a community. It's called Earth. Stop trying to exploit us.
Might be worth noting that the top-of-the-line iMac was, at least in terms of semi-real world benchmarks, was beating the iMac Pro.

https://barefeats.com/2020-iMac-5K-8core-versus-2017-iMac-Pr...

And at quite the discount. You give up ECC RAM, and I think the fans on the non-Pro iMac ramp up like turboprop, but that iMac Pro was getting long in the tooth.

I am a bit out of the Xeon loop; was there even an appropriate Xeon to update the Pro?
I get exposed to a broader swath of what people smarter than me care about, I also get to dive deeper on topics I enjoy.
HN has been a wonderful addition to my life.
FWIW my daily driver has been a maxed out iMac Pro, albeit from 2018.

I just got my hands on an M1 Mini and it demolishes the iMac on my use case as well.
Thank you for this gem and the responses. I haven’t laughed out loud from something I’ve read on HN as much as I just did thanks to this comment and its children comments.

Even though I got zero wives out of these comments, there was some real value generated here!
If you’re a dictator looking to hold on to power, and you have no ability to borrow money (can’t pay in bolivar because it quickly becomes worthless, can’t pay in foreign currency because your inflation rate effectively makes the loan’s interest rate high), why not print? It may not help your citizens, but you can keep your army fed enough to stay on your side.
I literally have the 18 core Xeon iMac Pro, with 64 gigs of RAM. I bought the Macbook Pro (not the Air) with 16 gigs of RAM and 1T SSD.

Not as concerned with video editing and renders. The iMac Pro can wreck the Macbook on specifically OBS software x264 encoding, while OBS is not Apple Silicon-native. Repeat, software encoding, not attempting to use the hardware chip (there can be issues streaming to YouTube using it). This is the one case I've found, of anything, where the iMac Pro wins.

I tried Minecraft, as there's an M1-native version out there. My old intel Mini: 70 fps. The iMac Pro: 240 fps. The M1 Macbook: 270 fps.

I'm gonna say it's rare that my M1 Macbook Pro does NOT beat my Xeon iMac Pro at four times the price, four times the RAM. Again, I literally own both. I've even found a purpose (software x264) where the M1 machine can't keep up. It's the only thing I've found so far, where the M1 isn't faster. Everything else about operating this machine is faster than the iMac Pro, which remains my primary desktop I use every day.
> Doesn't it become obvious that you should stop printing money when the cost of printing the money is higher than the value printed on the notes?

No, because who's doing the printing doesn't care. They're printing it (the government) to pay their own debts
Get-Process WINWORD

PM(K)
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51600
The purpose of memory_order_consume in C++11 (2014)
In NL they are.
Oh yeah, that's a fair point, I have encountered the input lock issue before. Hopefully it will be fixed in future.

VLC also works for me from the start, but seems to lag at higher resolutions, hence fiddling to get DirectShow working.
Rather than make unkind remarks about Grub (too easy), I'd sure like to see a version that doesn't support dual-booting Windows. Imagine how elegant that could be.
To be fair, I do like some abstract art. Those rectangle ones you're talking about can look good as generic decor. Multiple thousands of dollars type of good? Hell no. $20 poster? Yea. A good textured giclee print, 50-100 tops.

In truth, it's just like bitcoin. The black market got involved and drove up prices. The naive market observed without understanding and jumped in.
Well he is also the guy who kept saying that the snapdragon 810 was fine well after everyone knew that it had major thermal issues.
this paper is extremely annoying, they could have at least given some examples of the amount of energy that would be required to create their warp teardrop bubbles using their new equations
Usually these situations arise out of rock & hard place trade offs. The Weimar Republic printed money to pay foreign war debts that they otherwise couldn’t raise taxes for. If Germany failed to pay France its entirely reasonable France could go to war.

If The Venezuelan government can’t pay foreign or domestic obligations then they need to print money or default. They may not have the ability to default.
You can host your own solid server, right?
Might be a lame question, but can BlueTooth connections be intercepted and "heard" ?

If so, How?
Will this run MS Teams better, only half joking
I’m a old fogey who’s on HN since 2007, and HN is one of the rare forums that has helped me in my career. I lurked a lot during early years but the value I got from it was immense. I honed my craft of software engineering just by being here and randomly discovering Nuggets of wisdom. HN is a treasure trove if you know how to find it. The olden comments are especially golden.

Edit: the best feature of HN is the absence of notifications when someone comments on your comments and absence of an award system. This removes the Karmafication of the interaction
I'm way over exposed to the US dollar, so I probably should hedge more than I do, but I don't think we'll see this level of inflation in a long while.

The dollar is still king, as this article demonstrates. When the world flees to safety, the dollar is almost always the currency it flees into.

That said, I really don't know how this current US money-printing episode ends. It's hard to imagine it ends well.

I've been DCAing into PSLV, PHYS, and SPPP as a kind of hedge. I'm curious what others are doing?
Yeah I just had an awkward conversation with a relative who works for a company that has a on site email server running exchange. When I asked him had he patched or upgraded it he said no Microsoft does all that. Grim.