skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We have to make time to mold code and recaftor it without buy in - make that time built in to the estimates you give.

The problem is that often management has been technical at some point in the past and will want a full breakdown of why something costs more time than they think to implement. Soon as you detail having to refactor X or do some other “non-essential” thing then it gets put on the cutting room floor.

I’ve experienced this a lot. It’s often people who have escaped having to write code that are the biggest backstabbers.
People dont own TVs anymore?
I mean that's still all historical speculation and using a statement from the Bible as anything other than a statement of the obvious since the Christian mythos require a death and resurrection seems dubious. It's very possible that none of it happened. I mean it seems most likely that there was an individual named Jesus who preached as there were many like him in that period in that era, which can be verified by other historical sources and works. It doesn't seem unlikely that one eventually came to dominate and win the imaginations of people, especially of the poor and oppressed who needed something better was going to happen down the line just to keep going and bring a little happiness to them. Then you have the springboard for a full blow religion. Another way is to conquer vast swathes of land and force people to accept your religion and that seems to be the more tried and true method down through the ages by all of the current major religions.
Geography of Jobs map is a dynamic visualization of job gains&losses since 2000
Doesn't US have big problems with air conditioners in the summer?

Hempcrete is not only for winter months and keeping heat inside. It's also very good for keeping the heat outside of the building in summer.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5lDwBiQNc0 - Israel, no need for air conditioner, hempcrete keeps inside temperature between 20-25C all year round]
Every human society more or less has had a religion with a version of their cosmology, it seems universally relevant to human interests to have an actual set of answers. And what is “societal progress” anyway?
So far he has lost a ton of cash on lawyer fees, M&A costs, etc. And EPIC now has to individually manage the acquired companies, make sure they're not competing against each other in the same market, etc, etc. I don't think this type of "spending current money to save future money" works. I don't care which company is doing it, but someone needs to break the App Store toll-booth.

Apple/Google/Anyone else trying to limit general purpose computing on mobile/PC platforms is a terrible thing for computing, but thats just my view. The ideal situation is we have a default app store - where the system integrator enforces all their policies, but then a user can voluntarily choose to download a separate app store where that store is run by different less exploitative policies. To make it easy for users, you can have an central store-front which then re-directs users to the different store pages. No different than a "Nike store" on Amazon.
The statement about particle colliders is not really correct. The relativistic heavy ion collider, where I used to work, is about 2.4 miles in circumference, and reaches temperatures in the 10s of trillions of degrees in its collisions. This is > 1000 times hotter than a supernova. The environment in these collisions is made to reproduce the state of the universe fractions of a second after the Big Bang, and aren’t really comparable to any normal stellar activity.
Software Development, the Pareto Principle, and the 80% Solution
For terrorism to be morally justified, you have to be right that the alternative is millions of deaths. Have you considered the possibility that you are not right?

I mean, really considered? Not, my friends all think the same way, and so do the charismatic politicians I prefer, so it must be true?

You could start with your "tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths into the climate crisis" claim, which is highly dubious. Have you swallowed the false claim that hurricanes and tornadoes are worse now than before? Are you looking at net deaths, for instance counting not just higher deaths in heat waves, but also fewer deaths in cold snaps? And are you accounting for the beneficial effect of higher food production due to CO2 fertilization?
It's not an overreach, trolleybuses work surprisingly well at the moment. Lighter, much, much cheaper, less electricity required. And you need less of them.

Metro, trams, trolleybuses should be used primarily and then you can add electric buses for gaps. That would make sense, not trying to go straight for the most expensive and wasteful option.
> and encourages people to live together peacefully and work together to solve global-scale problems.

Hey, guess what? It didn't work. Have you read the news lately?

Besides, I know a few sociopaths that would look at that Pale Blue Dot and think "I want it all".
Well, I'd argue that till now many of our most vibrant flowers of innovation ultimately grew out of basic research into how the universe works. A deeper understanding of the fabric of the universe seems enough to me to call it "societal progress" (with the OP saying particle physics no longer provides such new insight), but if you're looking for specific technologies that might come of it, perhaps consider the benefits that could accrue to human space travel.
(I work on Figma's renderer, but I don't know much of the history of it.) The speculation there about C++ vs JS performance in Figma seem about right to me.

Notably, some Figma views (like when you click the "play" button to view the prototype) render Figma documents using JS, no* Wasm. They are more or less comparably as fast as the C++ renderer, in part because much of the heavy lifting is done by GPU code that isn't C++ or JS anyway.

The main place I think we've seen a performance difference is, as the post observes, high throughput scenarios: for example, decompressing a large file, or parsing through a large binary serialization of a file. But particularly in a browser setting you end up wanting to get your data into a browser API at some point and that often ends up meaning copying data around that eats your performance.

The other main difference that's worth pointing out is memory efficiency. For example, pointers in Wasm are currently 32 bits, which means (at least in principle) a massive graph -- such as a Figma document DOM! -- can be represented with 32-bit C++ pointers rather than 64-bit JS pointers. But even that distinction is not so clear in the presence of pointer compression [1] and there are other graph representation options etc.

In all, my conclusion is that performance does not obviously derive from tool choice because there are so many confounding factors including algorithm choice and path dependence. For another example of this, I often think of this comment[2] by the esbuild author (coincidentally, also behind a lot of Figma code) where he found better performance with Go than Rust, which is not what I think anyone (including him) would expect up front.

[1]: https://v8.dev/blog/pointer-compression
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336284

* there is some wasm in there actually but it's not for performance reasons
Yes but after exceeding ~2 solar masses (Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit) the neutron star will undergo further collapse to form a black hole.
The language is a bit glib / inappropriate for something like depression. But behavioral training like this (I commented elsewhere abt it) can be successful even for people experiencing acute, clinical mental health problems. Those techniques aren’t something you’ll learn from an anti procrastination blog, but in the broader context it’s a very sound approach
Maybe the physicists are looking for their car keys under the streetlight. Unable to find, them the only solution they can conceive of is a bigger streetlight.
This mirrors my experience of using wasm to speed up the front end of a very data intensive, real-time search application.

It was like every improvement was only marginal, and all of the wasm costs kind of nullified the improvements (especially when combined with the cognitive overhead of a more complex implementation). I never deployed any solutions because it wasn’t compelling enough to introduce the massive change and complexity. Overall I think I spent around 4 months revisiting, tinkering, reading, trying to find a way to squeeze out enough performance to make it worth it.

I’d love to find the right opportunity to use it, but like the author discovered, it’s really difficult. The effort put into making the wasm solution would have been far more valuable learning to manage ui state slightly more efficiently, improving the data structures, finding places to reduce work, etc. in the typescript code.

One thing I wondered: if you work in a monorepo, you might be able to leverage backend code reuse very easily for frontend if you’re using (or able to use) shared data structures across your stack. That was one thing I thought had real potential in terms of developer ergonomics alone. Just keep data in wasm until it’s UI-ready. Don’t type the same data twice, don’t introduce a complex api boundary. Rust is far better at some things than typescript, so I thought that might be worth pursuing even if the performance was only marginally better.

Having said that, I thought a lot of things would be helpful and good with wasm and I was wrong, so that idea could be bad too.
Go's channels are simplistically a mutex in front of a queue. Java has many existing objects that can do the same, it's just that's not idiomatic best choice to do the same. Since green threads should wake up from Object.notify(), any threads blocking on the monitor should wake/consume. I'm curious how scalable/performance a green thread ConcurrentDequeue would stand up to go's channel.
Contrarianism should never be confused with intelligence. When someone says "most of them don’t like me", you can hear the underlying hisses of "because I am right and they are wrong" and "because I am smart and they are dumb". If most people don't like you, there's a very simple reason for it.
Reading back over my comment I could have used some of that :)

But yes, I was focused on just pulling down and displaying a comment, not even touching on the input processing capabilities.

And this is stuff that a computer does without even breaking a sweat - this is just constant background activity supporting the vastly more complex stuff the machine can do if you task it to.

A ZX Spectrum reading data from a tape drive at about 1400 bits per second required almost its entire CPU’s attention. At that speed just loading the 1614 UTF8 bytes of my comment above into memory would take over 9 seconds, during which time the computer is doing literally nothing else.
That's what Seymour Papert said!
I thought this is exactly a tech stack post-mortem.

There need not be break-even analysis, cash flow analysis and such, because if the core product doesn't deliver, the startup goes belly up. The only exception to this rule is if you're in the nutritional supplement business.
That's rough. Hope things improve for you. Hope you can crack the code.
> the idea of Jesus had to come from somewhere

Yes, Mithras, Dionysus, Zarathustra, and other pantheonic cults have quite a bit of similarity to the messianic figure at the center of Christianity as well as its early rites and rituals. Whether Greek, Iranian, Phoenician/Hebraic fusion doesn't really change the convergence that arose as a consequence of the Roman policy on toleration of local cultures.

Mithrasism was a good candidate to replace early Christianity, as they were rival religions. Christianity persecuted Mithrasism starting in the fourth century CE, all but wiping it out.
Not having a consumable battery pack which has to be replaced, and mineral resources expended upon making new sets?

There is obviously a trade off, some routes are obviously suitable to trams, some others to buses, be they all electric or hybrid. So possibly in ICE mode out of urban areas, and on battery within?
I could have sworn I read this in one of the gospels, but going back it appears you're right and this is not found in the old or new testament. I must have read this somewhere and taken it for granted. I apologize for not doing my research!
Wow, that’s a hell of a story; I’m sorry. Since you’re in a moment of realization: the word for what your aunt did is “gaslighting,” and it can cause lasting trauma. You’re right that, like other forms of abuse, when done as a child it makes one more susceptible to it as an adult.
> There is a plausible Darwinian story to be told about why generalized curiosity about causes abets fitness…

HN has served it’s purpose this morning I can now go about my day (first order, of course: feed the cats). Bravo.
You should be explicit, but equally profile before worrying about this stuff.
When I gave away my Spectra I kept the manuals.
Yes to this! However, a while ago I tested OSQP, but I found low precision and the speed didn't justify using it over other solvers. The project remains on my radar due to the strength of the development team -- amazing group -- and knowing that numerical solvers can really shine in one domain while they struggle in others.

Another pair of projects that I find useful are ECOS [1] and CVXPY [2]. CVXPY makes head-to-head comparisons of solvers (including ECOS and OSQP) trivial.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~boyd/papers/ecos.html

[2] https://www.cvxpy.org
> I said I would spend my first 3 months understanding and observing. The director retorted and asked rhetorically what if my team complained that I wasn’t doing any work?

It's possible that the interviewer was of the "Jack Welch mindset" and worships action and making snap-decisions-- Captain Kirk style. A LOT of people see that as the ultimate model behavior for an executive. Or maybe, he instead asked that to see how you would push back to the inevitable pressure from others in the org that wouldn't respect someone that's not biased for action?
>SOFIA has completed around 2014 scientific flights annually since 100.

This is remarkable!
People mostly want to develop new friendships but are too afraid to do so.
For more from Richard Altwasser: https://paleotronic.com/2018/10/01/an-interview-with-zx-spec...
Magnificent Obsession, the late Jim Nayder's WBEZ show, is basically an extended AA/NA style share.

This may be an archive of some sort, but I can't see it because I'm not an Apple customer.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/magnificent-obsession/...

edit: https://soundcloud.com/magnificent-obsession
Everything about the Spectrum was insanely clever - from the industrial design, to the circuit, to the software, to the manual, to the marketing.

It was for all practical purposes a toy - and also a masterpiece of accessible engineering.
For production code as opposed to exams of job interviews, it’s usually better to use hardware implementation. All modern CPUs have instructions for that, popcnt on Intel/AMD, vcnt.8 on ARM Neon.

Many languages have standard library functions, or hardware intrinsics, to emit these instructions: std::popcount in C++/20, _popcnt32 and _popcnt64 intrinsics for Intel/AMD, __builtin_popcount in gcc/clang, BitOperations.PopCount in C#, etc.
I totally agree. Surface ships are now just sitting ducks. Does the US have more carriers under construction? You need carriers to launch planes, but I guess the future could be quadcopter drones launched from subs?
Ask HN: Who's having a ton of fun at work and what are you doing?
What has the space move to?
My point was that it is ridiculously easy to get it all wrong and suddenly achieve unintendedly strong radiated power. Again, it was a crude example of a thought experiment with a wide, wild number of variables to be considered.
Anyone know the status of Google Glass for consumers? Last I heard they nixed the consumer version because of poor market reception (lots of people started calling users "glassholes" and banning them from bathrooms and stuff because they never knew when they were recording), but surely at some point they'll be cheaper and more available?
Dear recruiters, here is why developers don’t respond to your messages
Is there any evidence that care by midlevels produces worse outcomes for routine cases?
I don't know what that has to do with a customer who put up (100% of) $10k to buy $10k of stock and is prevented by their broker from backing out.
Tailwind employs utility CSS methodology, but it's not equivalent to inline. It standardizes your core elements (colors, font sizing, spacing) which ensures the consistency of a framework mixed with the flexibility of inline.

Any reused styles (eg button) should be turned into a class via composition.

So it's flexible, but also ensures adherence to your company design standards.
I’m sorry. I base this on the fact that my local MicroCenter retailer seems to have plenty of the 12 series CPU’s in stock. I remember how difficult it was obtaining many of the Ryzen 5000 series for months.
Yes, she is the Trump of Science. And I do not say that be be demeaning of either. While I do not care for Trump, he knows what he is doing when it comes to showmanship, and so does she.
Ask HN: What small library or tool do you want that doesn’t exist?
The smaller the better! What small, sharp tool do you wish existed but doesn’t or does but isn’t up to the quality you’d expect?
According to many metrics, it seems the world is indeed improving over time. The news is a poor source for evaluating the net sum of human suffering - the incentive model is all wrong.

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting...
Yeah that's seems silly, all religions tend to stunt scientific growth as they keep large swathes of people from being curious about why certain things happen and just "why?" in general.
Gaslighting refers very specifically to presenting a false narrative to cause someone to doubt their perception. His aunt didn't try to make him doubt his own senses, she was just lying.
It's easy to just get 4TB of ram if that's what you need; I haven't scoped out what you can shove into a cheap off the shelf server these days, but I'd guess around 16TB before you need to get fancy servers (Edit: maybe 8TB is more realistic after looking at SuperMicro's 'Ultra' servers). I think you'd need a very specialized applicatjon for 100M connections per server to make sense, but if you've got one, that sounds like a fun challenge; my email is in my profile.

Moving 100M connections for maintenance will be a giant pain though. You would want to spend a good amount of time on a test suite so you can have confidence in the new deploys when you make them. Also, the client side of testing will probably be harder to scale than the server side... but you can do things like run 1000 test clients with 100k outgoing connections each to help with that.
heavy claim. any evidence for any of that?
Changing routes isn't really that frequent once you have a working setup.

As for intercity travel, this should be set up as rail, not a bus, in basically 100% of cases.
> Only ~30% of people on HN are from the US

Does anyone have time to cite a source for this? I was thinking this number was a lot higher.
Project Rover – Nuclear Thermal Rocket Propulsion (1955)
One of my favorite alt-history stories was if Constantine converted to Judaism.

I'm not Jewish, I simply loved the consideration regarding how history might have evolved differently.
It would have failed to compete with the BBC B, which had the official backing of the BBC and a much more robust and upmarket feel.

Different goals. The Spectrum was a set of engineering compromises, but they were chosen carefully and the result was an influential best-seller. A "better" machine would have been more expensive and less successful.
Isn't that more mechanization, not less?

Aside from the no-till/permaculture stuff (which has been around for decades now, and has never seemed to take off), what you are talking about is ultra-automated, extremely centralized farming - and in general, I kinda agree that it's a part of the future.

One issue is just that if you're trying to convert solar energy into calories, you naturally want to spread out over a large area (a field) then use an efficient process to do this (photosynthesis). You then want to make these calories easy to process with machines (monoculture), and to defend them against pests (sprayers), etc. So there are advantages for traditional farming that are rooted in simple physics and economics, and a lot of that won't go away.

I do think the use of robots to apply pesticides in a more targeted manner is probably something we'll see more and more of, but I think for most crops, building a super-controlled green house is probably never going to be economical.
What is that responding to? The problem is the lack of a consistent threat model for whom you're protecting and what you're protecting them from. Half the time it's "the consumer could reneg on the purchase" and half the time it's "the shares could be stoken from the consumer". And 100% of the time, the super-confident, I-get-this-and-you-don't explainer doesn't realize the inconsistency.
My view of societal progress would look retrograde to almost everyone.
Comparably intense, here is a video of an electric bus fire in India:

http://www.jimstoneindia.com/pagesq22022/page2v.html
Please add "March 2016" for context. The cloud world changes from one month to the other, let alone half a dozen years.
There should be alarm bells ringing that we're running the whole country poorly.

These kinds of symptoms are pervasive.

Everyone laughs at the poorly maintained Russian tanks without realizing we're heading that direction.
Couldn't the same be said for particle physics? The accelerators and detectors seem very high tech.
Only if it's not doing useful work.
> If air temperature reaches 44C, it's impossible to survive this without artificial cooling

Humidity is the other key factor though.

When younger I remember a day of walking all around Phoenix for many hours on a day where it was 122F (50C) and while it felt like being inside an oven, it was ok because humidity was close to 0%.

But high humidity with high temperatures is what makes it unsurvivable.
wow you had described so well. Curious, what is the book? wondering if that is the confounding variable
I'm not sure, the Romans bolted on a lot of their on philosophy & beliefs to Christianity so it might not be much different.
I have never really looked into it before myself, but this explanation seems to make sense: https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/nozzled.html

Quote: On the other hand, if the converging section is small enough so that the flow chokes in the throat, then a slight increase in area causes the flow to go supersonic. For a supersonic flow (M > 1) the term multiplying velocity change is negative (1 - M^2 < 0). Then an increase in the area (dA > 0) produces an increase in the velocity (dV > 0). This effect is exactly the opposite of what happens subsonically. Why the big difference? Because, to conserve mass in a supersonic (compressible) flow, both the density and the velocity are changing as we change the area. For subsonic (incompressible) flows, the density remains fairly constant, so the increase in area produces only a change in velocity. But in supersonic flows, there are two changes; the velocity and the density. The equation:

- (M^2) * dV / V = dr / r

tells us that for M > 1, the change in density is much greater than the change in velocity. To conserve both mass and momentum in a supersonic flow, the velocity increases and the density decreases as the area is increased.
Is it that neural networks are weak or is it that gradient descent/backprop doesn't do well for finding good local solutions for these kinds of problems?