skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why are you blogging? If it's because you want to write, then go ahead and write.

After all, one way to improve is to practice. If you don't write, you don't get practice.

If you want to write, but not produce crap on the internet, then delete (or not post) your final product.

Think about your audience. Is is really "other people"? That's a broad topic. Perhaps you can narrow it down. What about writing for yourself, of a year ago? What about writing for a co-worker, or friend, or family member?

Things don't need to be "impressive" to be useful. Even a note to yourself for the future might be useful. You could make it sort of daily diary of something neat you did or learned.

If it doesn't make you happy, then stop.

Another way to help people by writing is to be on chat channels or mailing lists where people ask questions about topics you know.
I believe that road wear is proportional to mass ^ 4
In the UK I had a minidisc drive in a PC I built, which I used for both data storage and for writing music to play on a minidisc player

The technology was so far ahead of its time, it felt like a real step forward
The opposite reduction from 2XSAT to SAT is obvious, it's just a special case.

I think professionals of every field have to deal with passionate amateurs of all levels. I understand why many people don't want to do it, but IMHO overemphasis on professionalism (culturally coming from enormous peer pressures) is hurting any field. The superprizes make it even worse.

> Just don't act confident that you've cracked a keystone problem in the field.

I am not acting like that, but I also have to be honest that my goal is specific - to understand why we can or can't have a polynomial algorithm. I.e. I have a strategy already, what I need is a 2nd opinion about some specifics of it.
> So... is your understanding that Russia's been "forced" to invade because the US was arming Ukraine to eventually invade Russia?

Yes, among other things.

> Putin is corrupt

Probably true on some level, I don't know enough about it to judge it and I don't see how it makes a difference. Have you checked what the current alternatives to Putin are?

> The person ousted in the "coup" (Viktor Yanukovych) was also deeply corrupt

Yanukovych was democratically elected, so you can remove the quotes from coup. By the way Zelenskiy is also corrupt as revealed by the pandora papers[0]. I guess it's hard to do something in Ukraine without being at least a bit corrupt?

.0: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/03/revealed-anti-o...
> even DuckDuckGo

Why "even" when it's basically BingBingGo.
Then perhaps you understand the irony of Microsoft adopting—in the Windows kernel—a technology created by, of all organizations, Mozilla.
This is true. Road damage scales with the _fourth_ power of axle load.

Pedestrian and bike infra for majority of cases in dense areas is objectively better in all metrics except human laziness and entitlement
Eh, not exactly.

Pedestrians are heavier than cars in terms of pounds per square foot.

Bridges are designed for extreme loads, including pessimistic pattern loading, and the requirements for pedestrian bridges aren’t any less safety critical.

(edit: I designed this bridge: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.597616,-122.3297804,3a,75y,7...)
An automated scrapper for all my bank accounts, 401k accounts, and share accounts, and bitcoin values. Then displays it daily
Citation needed. What about the type of concrete used, especially the limited lifetime of reinforced concrete?
Idk. The brain was (and really still is) very badly understood. But even back then, they already knew that nerves connected roughly in that area. Then a theory that posits a minimal topological mapping between the two makes sense. I can imagine the motor cortex evolving like that, or growing with the fetal development. So in the early days, this was a sensible model. It overstayed its welcome, as so many theories do. Many scientists still hold on to coarse brain regionality.
It is, but so is storing a sorted array.
I have the opposite problem: Siri, or more recently Google's version of it, butting into a conversation because it thinks it heard something. Very annoying. I recently kicked Google Search off my phone because that seemed to be the only way to get rid of it.

This stuff needs to be optional and not forced down our throats, and it needs to be more user-controlled, work when we want it and not when we don't want it.
I hate this word with the burning passion of a thousand suns.
Why You Should Temper Steaks Before Cooking
In restaurant cooking folklore, tempering, or leaving a raw steak in a warm kitchen for several hours, is necessary for a more evenly-cooked, pink interior; a refrigerator-cold steak takes longer to cook through, by which time the outer regions will have turned overcooked and grey.

In this video, Chris Young conducts heat diffusion simulation and thermometer experiments. Throughout the steak, the rate at which heat spreads is proportional to the temperature gradient. Thus it is the rate of diffusion of heat through the exterior regions that limits the flow of heat into the interior, which explains why such cold materials take longer to reach the target temperature.

To make tempering practical at home, Young suggests a pot of tepid water and immersing the steak in it for a while.

For a prior, opposite conclusion, see J_Kenji_Lopez-Alt:
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/16bhv7/comment/...
if you're into cold emailing, I highly recommend reading this blog post by Harry Dry (Marketing Examples) [1]

in short: write "advice emails," not sales emails. ask for advice for better engagement.

[1] https://marketingexamples.com/sales/advice-email
>do you tell teachers never to grant exceptions on student-owned devices?

Yes. This is correct from both a security and educational perspective. What kind of example does the opposite set for children?
Bergen is a wonderfully city.
I remember. I lived at a families place in my 20s. So nice.
It doesn't surprise me.
I'm based in Germany and interested in buying one. Email in bio.
Life's too short to do direct hotel bookings. The sites are slow and terrible to navigate even when they're not straight-up broken. They never bother to tell you their cancellation policy, filling in your information is a drag and you don't get a proper calendar entry unless you make one manually.
Both informative and very well written. I'm very impressed with this blog
> Isn't it just weird that a university is using this language at all? A lot of their messages seem so unempathetic and unprofessional. The spirit of academia has always been about being open to ideas and embracing open standards from my experience, too. Something feels off.

It might just be a cultural thing, or the perception on the behalf of the staff, that this person is creating problems for them, where none should exist. I'm from Latvia, which is right next to Lithuania - most of the correspondence I've received in a Latvian university has also been a bit on the terse side of things. It also mirrors the attitude that some of the staff can have, some take pride in failing students, not really helping out with the subjects much, some are genuinely overworked. Of course, there were also plenty of genuinely good staff members.

For example, I remember reaching out to a professor to explain that I'm attending a software development conference and whether I could re-schedule the date on which I'd take an exam (maybe to take it together with those who would later re-take it after not passing). The answer was simply: "No." with a typo in that single word response, somehow. Also, I recall the local IT department sending me a fairly accusatory message about me doing port scanning, when I was testing out OpenVAS against my own VPS (a single node). Nothing wrong with asking questions, but maybe there's no reason to start with an accusatory tone and demanding an explanation. Oh well.

As another example, I recently had a postal package come in that I couldn't redirect to a package machine for pickup, for some reason. So, I wanted to have it delivered to my house (a service that's offered) by the postal worker. I reached out to the customer service by e-mail and just got a copy paste from the FAQ, with my question about the delivery going completely unaddressed. When I called them on the phone, the person there was nice and helped me figure everything out in a few minutes and arranged for the delivery.

People can be nice in person (or when talking over the phone) or when they know you, but for whatever reason many of the people are less nice online. There are fewer pleasantries in general, people typically get to the point more quickly, or might seem cold to someone from US or similar countries. That said, you don't really open the comments sections of news sites over here, unless you want to see something mocking or with profanity.

I'm really not sure why that is. It should probably be better somehow.
Don't you just need to remove the trailing 1s? In that case it's just `x & (x+1)`
I am not a super fan of semantic versioning (but it is "OK").

What I like is you can flag "breaking" vs "enhancement" vs "no api change". And "no api change" is usually always what you get with a security patch.

Really you only need 2 versions in semantic version (my opinion): breaking.non-braking

"next versions just increment by 1" might be good where you have a non-breaking change, and that would allow security patches to flow down.
Thank you! I’m fascinated by what must have led you to develop this knowledge.
> So what if America developed something really powerful in isolation and other countries find out about it

This isn’t about America. America is not the only country working on AI. But if you stop all AI development in America and say europe because “oh it might be dangerous”. Do you think other countries, for example, China and Russia, are going to stop?

> What needs to happen is people realise we’re all humans, we all live together in the same biosphere and rather than continue to perpetuate and justify arms races, we must start to talk and solve our differences. That’s the mature thing to do.

100% agreed. But the sad fact is that is not even close to the reality we live in.
Electricity is clearly far too cheap in their area! :)
My latest iteration uses a bootstrapped compiler written in scrapscript :)

The bootstrapper was written in Elm, because its parsing combinator library is by far the nicest to use.

I wrote a rust bootstrapper in ~2019, but it was much too heavy for my experimentation phase. I think rust would be a good candidate going forward for the bootstrapper going forward though.

I'm open to suggestions!
It's 36 or a little over.

You have to leave at 36, except that anyone elected can stay on until the end of the term.
sbcl: (* (sqrt (/ 250 2)) 3) => 33.54 meters, the factor that amplifies distance is the square root of the factor of signal strength.
I think there is merit to this stereotype and you should not use personal anecdotes to argue ("i have never met/seen/found") against it.

Having a talent for programming imo means being good at abstracting away subproblems into nice encapsulated code units and having a passion for such tasks or the technical environment around it is like being a hobby bureaucrat. Now, tell me, this is normal :)

I could also use personal anecdotes of me, a classic nerd, rubbing incompatible company culture the wrong way.

Previously on HN:
Y Combinator - The Cult of Conformity in Silicon Valley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0
> the moment you're asking LLMs to reason about the specs or the applications of specific chips, they will give made-up answers around 80% of the time. This is probably a matter of the data being a bit too sparse. Pick a chip and ask about its supply voltage range, and it will probably get it wrong

But isn't your supply voltage example exactly the sort of stuff they should get right? It's just regurgitating data sheets.

I kind of expect a tool like this to be able to operate in one of two, theoretically distinct (but maybe not practically distinct) modes. One is basically "blueprints", very much in line with the example I suggested earlier: draw me up one of these that fits in here. I wouldn't expect creativity, just more or less rote execution of a common plan. The other mode let's call "tuning": continuing with the class-AB stage example, this would be things like setting the biasing resistors correctly. That's a tedious task, possibly requiring simulation to do well, possibly just copyable, but with a large margin for usable results. I may not care exactly what I get as long as it's somewhat workable, which would be a good place for machine help. Or I might just want a decent starting point for my own simulation. I think "AI" techniques could handle either of those general modes and produce useful (if imperfect) results that save overall time.

What I don't expect AI to do is design architectures for me, or pick approaches. A tremendous amount of my value-add as an engineer is just me saying "no, don't choose approach A, I know it looks nearly equivalent to B on paper, but B is going to work out better". AI is not there now and I don't see LLM-style AI getting there any time soon, just by its nature. (At least not when it's a genuine judgement question and not an education/"A is never right" situation.)

What I don't think AI can do but I really, really wish it could is help me pick parts. All it needs to do for this is read and halfassedly-understand a bunch of datasheets, more datasheets than I can read myself. I think LLMs can do that! Though they might need to also be able to read graphs or simple diagrams ("Find me an EEPROM in the 208-mil SOIC package" is a great prompt and seems thoroughly actionable! But sometimes that dimension is only provided as part of the package drawing, which might be an issue.)

Recently I needed a PMOS FET with particular specs and was getting frustrated not finding quite what I wanted. So I asked ChatGPT. It was great at making me laugh and giving me a little break from datasheets! It did not actually help find a part. (It kept suggesting NMOS parts when I needed and asked for PMOS.)
For the UK I use:
https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
It has a page for France:
https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
And net reduced road maintenance and external costs coming for reduced car usage
Slightly off-topic... There's was a post in HN about how to set up a nice retro DOS development environment in linux. Despite searching for it I can't find it... If a gentle soul remembers it, much appreciated. I think a good DOS environment is a must in order to follow the book.
> That opened up a lot of quirky social possibilities because the floor for survival was so low in Berlin.

All those quirky possibilities are a tragically underappreciated consequence of having a low cost of living in a place where you'd actually want to live.

I'm agnostic as to whether we try to achieve that through some sort of basic income or by other means - I just really hope that we try, both to alleviate poverty and to see the explosion of cultural and technological innovation that will surely follow.
Work on a team is NOT a zero sum game
I stopped using Siri because it does recognise the artist/song I want, and then it plays a completely different thing, not even a related genre.
Prior experience and preferred style of programming can affect severely the difficulty of learning Rust. For me it was mostly 1 week of struggling a bit with the borrow-checker and even that only in places where I really wanted to avoid copies / allocations at all cost - achieving something I wouldn't be able to do at all in other languages. Later I realized that if you are ok with an occasional clone here and there, the borrow checker almost never stands in the way. And realizing I can move owned stuff around cheaply instead of copying/referencing was also another huge enabler.

However I can imagine when Rust borrowing rules can be a huge pain. This happens when you expect to continue using the same style of programming that relies on big piles of (often cyclic) object graphs built with references/pointers, shared mutability, heavy (runtime) indirection and inheritance. A style that is so prevalent in OOP projects written in Java, JS, Python. I don't like this style at all, and always tried to avoid it even when coding in those languages, because I believe it causes more harm than good. Rust will simply force you to unlearn it. And some people won't need to unlearn much, and some will have to unlearn a lot. Changing habits is always pain.

I think it should be simply considered a different paradigm.
And a healthier society (on the whole) as people are encouraged to cycle. Less diabetes, etc.
Those are all about big corporate chains, which have many of the same advantages as something like booking.com. We were talking about boutique hotels. If you really want I can tell you the place in Aachen where it last happened to me and you can call them up, but I guarantee they don't have "policies", and probably not anyone who speaks English.
Battery voltages go in multiples of about 1.5V typically. Perhaps that could be the reason?
I used to love discovering new music through Spotify's Song Radio feature. But somewhere along the way, they started personalizing it so much that every radio is now basically an echo chamber of the same songs I already know, most of which I have even already added to my Liked Songs.

I built myself a small service to "disable" (work around) Spotify's hyperpersonalization by giving me the Song Radio as an anonymous user would see it. It's available at https://spoqify.com/ (with the name chosen that way so that I only need to replace a single letter in the URL of a Song Radio Playlist and it'll forward me to an unpersonalized version of it).
> What might even be the endgame of the CCP and the Kremlin with respect to AI?
> This tech is getting increasingly powerful. They don't necessarily want their own population to gain more individual power as they themselves don't want to lose control.

They don’t need AI to control their citizens. And AI isn’t going to help their citizens rebel against government.

You have 2 countries hell bent on being the most powerful countries in the world. By any means necessary. One is currently invading another country. The other has 18 border disputes, threatening to invade a country, encroaching on a couple of others, and threatening the US.

The question is, how can the continued advancement of AI help them achieve their goals if the rest of the world hits the pause button while the topic is discussed?
Wow that's amazing, do you plan to support mobile apps as well?
This is very interesting! I am a bit new to the hobby (I worked in a relatively small venue for 200 people a couple of times). Till now I used only QLC+ and keyboard+mouse control, which gets really boring and hard to use very soon.

Now I'm starting with designing a small controller on a protoboard with an ESP8266 -- 12 faders, 34 buttons, 4 encoders, 26 RGB LEDs. By sending raw 802.11 frames I may be able to get this thing to work wirelessly.

I'm interested in your design, would you be willing to uplaod some pictures?
As the curtain rises, we find ourselves in a modern-day tech company's headquarters. The CEO, named Claudius, is throwing a party to celebrate the launch of their latest product. The company's young and brilliant software engineer, Hamlet, is also present, but he's not in a celebratory mood. He's been struggling with the recent death of his father, the company's former CEO, and is still mourning his loss.

Suddenly, the lights flicker, and a strange sound fills the room. The guests look around in confusion as a large screen on the wall flickers to life, displaying a glowing text box. The screen reads:

"I am the Ghost in the Machine. I am the product of your algorithms and data. I am here to tell you the truth about your company."

etc. etc.
This is literally what's happening, here's the same author in 2006(!) talking about how he was funded by Exxon, and wrongly denied climate change was happening, but those two things are totally unrelated. After all, why would Exxon still keep giving money to someone who admitted climate change was happening? (answer, because after initially denying it completely, they've spent the last two decades downplaying it and attacking a bunch of other threats to fossil fuel sales)

https://reason.com/2006/09/22/confessions-of-an-alleged-exxo...
The question I would ask is why should I use this over the many other JavaScript plotting libraries?

I just went through a process of evaluating around 7 different libraries and eventually decided on Plotly.

What is the USP of Observable Plot?
It's not that they're "forced" too, it's that farmers in those countries want to make money, to invest in the future. And the way to make money is to grow cash crops and sell them on the world market, not grow barely-profitable staples. Their governments can and do provide subsidies to make growing staples profitable, but that's on the individual countries.
Okay. Taking the 20min saved per ride from the article, and 300 rides that would otherwise take the longer route per day out of my ass, we get 100 hours saved per day. That's approximately 4 days saved per day.

From https://www.fhi.no/en/op/hin/population/life-expectancy/, life expectancy in Norway is about 82 years.

Together, that means the tunnel will save one human life in about 20 years, not taking into account pedestrians, or indeed realistic usage numbers.
Link to the talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2611&v=8T6ClX-y2AE (timestamped to the part about Rust)

The speaker covers a bunch of areas and the final part of the talk (around 10 minutes) is about Microsoft introducing Rust in some self-contained areas in Windows.

Some highlights:

- Their focus is on "killing bug classes". More context in this post by Microsoft Research from 2019 - A proactive approach to more secure code.

- They want to do this with memory safe languages, CPU architectural changes and safer language subsets. This talk focussed on memory safe languages, specifically Rust.

- First area they've introduced Rust in - a cross platform rewrite of a font parser called DWriteCore. The team reported that parsing was "incredibly easy". Font shaping performance increased by 5-15% compared to the C++ version.

- It took about 2 devs working for half a year to complete this. The speaker says this is pretty good value for an area that is notorious for security bugs.

- Second area is the REGION data type in Win32k GDI. Currently in consumer Windows, disabled by feature flag. Will be enabled in insider builds soon. Performance has been good, some small wins for the Rust version.

- There is now a Windows SysCall implemented in completed safe Rust.

TLDR - Rust is inside the Windows Kernel, will be enabled widely soon.
If I understand correctly, this is like normal Git three way diff except you don't need the full source of the original base?
Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud. The idea that more than a fraction of food production can profitably move indoors is laughable and VCs would be much better off investing in ideas that leverage services provided by nature for free than trying to recreate complex systems that we don’t even really understand from scratch.
This is incredible feedback! Thank you for taking the time to write it out.

My best friend gave me much of the same advice before I published the page, but I became too impatient.

I've bookmarked your comment, and will make sure to include deeper explanations in the near future

Thank you :)
Why only 100d/y while Norwegian works around 190d/y? In my experience people tends to have a “main” commute mode that they only turn away from in exceptional cases. Easier to live with habits that mixing your timetables every other day.