skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like this post. However, one of the reasons I love writing fiction so much is that it feels like such a _different_ way to express myself creatively than programming. Both use my brain, but in totally different ways, almost like exercising different muscles.

I think you can find similarities of the kind listed in this post within pretty much any two activities if you look for them. But overall the differences are what make writing and coding so well-suited and _fun_ to experience in one brain in my opinion.

In the end, both coding and writing are a way for me to vent my creativity and bring the worlds and ideas in my head into something tangible. That is their primary similarity. I do believe programming and writing fiction are two sides of the same coin. But they feel largely orthogonal to each other in my experience of them.

(After I wrote the last sentence I wasn't sure I was using the term "orthogonal" correctly, as I see that in the plain English sense of the term it seems to mean entirely independent... When what I am trying to express is rather that they _are_ related and _not_ entirely independent. As my experience or knowledge of coding changes, so does my experience of writing, in the sense that they retain the consistent right angle or relationship to each other despite otherwise feeling very different.)
I may be blind to the learning problems since I know git already. But isn't it pretty hard to mess up a git repo if all you do is add+commit? (maybe combined into a "save" button in some UI) Then, asking someone who knows better when you want to do anything more complicated.

To me, just being able to save versions and look at them later (like saves in a video game) is such a huge boon that any of the more complicated features don't even need to be touched for git to be worth it.
Especially since there's a PDF/A standard subset for archival, which makes those documents readable decades after any other format would rot.
I've had this problem with team vocabulary. Once one word gets used to describe 2 or more things it becomes impossible to roll back.

I tried banning a particular word once and coming up with 6 new words on the basis that you couldnt tell which of the 6 meanings somebody was using unless you used a different term for each one. That didnt work very well. People got too attached to the old, overloaded term.

Expecting an entire industry to stop using a term theyve become used to is not realistic.
Reasonable adults can disagree on the economics of building new reactors, but to destroy a fully functional already paid for reactor in a country that burns so much lignite is brain dead to the point that it defies comprehension.
> If the "engineering" part of ML had kept up with the "science" part, I have no doubt that performance for typical use cases would be 100x-1000x higher than we are seeing today.

Even more of a claim than previous one.
Yeah, mee too. I found it worthy to burn those few karma points to mention it.
So, casually arguing for genocide at unprecedented scale? All for the greater good of mankind?
> That is true, but I have never encountered a PDF that is not produced by me and cannot be faithfully represented in third party PDF readers.

That's because PDF is well designed and has a fallback for advanced page elements so more primitive readers can still render them.
> perhaps because NextStep, its roots, used PostScript natively?

And OS X and its successors use Display PDF natively, which is why it is trivial to save almost anything that can be displayed into a PDF file. The PDF stack that Preview.app leverages is a foundation of the OS itself.
Until the containment structure or reactor pressure vessel are irreversibly damaged, it should be quite possible to reactivate them.
Also, occupational physical activity often has exposure to harmful particulate matter and VOCs, such as in construction (or side: even the silicon fibrosis from rock shaping work recently discussed on HN).
Very few companies compete on code alone. Those that do I understand the model a bit more, but still usually have the velocity to run away from copycats.

Uber, Yahoo, Google, FB, you name it, all provide a ton of work open source. They don't compete on code alone.
What a bizarre comment - Preview.app isn't even the best PDF software on Apple platforms (it's more likely something like Readdle's PDF Expert).
> You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.

You may also be one step behind when it comes to infrastructure related bugs or support if you want to focus on providing the best product. Competitors who host your product have a much smaller scope to worry about which may lead them to have a better infrastructure and support structure that customers flock to. E.g. Elastic vs AWS

Except infrastructure and support may also be the only revenue stream for the original developers too.

Some may say that’s exactly how it should be in the free market and I agree (since you chose the OSS license model over something else like FSL), but it does highlight how the original developers may feel this is an unfair situation.
Assuming a balanced installation across the world, that number is more like 200 GW. But whatever.
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Every year since 2007 I tried Qt for mobile development (starting with Nokia N8) only to be disappointed again and again. Making a game with 3d graphics? Drawing charts? no problem. Using ui elements and sensors? You inevitably run into a bug, a missing feature or learn some new framework that works well until you do something that is not in one of the demos.

The team is obviously incredibly talented and their coding style know-how matured over time, and I really want it to work, but unfortunately it still isn't there yet.
Just imagine what would happen if lawmakers decided that it would be illegal for end consumers to use fossil fuels in the night if you have fossil fuels during the day... :D:D

After an initial "WTF I have to go to sleep now, because there's no electricity?!", people would get crazy innovative and find new solutions, and -to some extent- adapt.

Unfortunately law makers are not keen on making people suffer a little now, in order to avoid a whole more of suffering later, once climate change effects hit irreversibly and tangibly.
veilid itself basically just provides a p2p backbone (where peers are identified by their public keys) on which you can build other applications. i.e. it's the replacement to the "random public IRC servers" part of this equation, and not the DNS-like system as a whole.
The point for lots of us is not to avoid the extinction of the human race but to reduce our suffering.

Lots of people are gonna suffer worse climate each year, lose their home and eventually their life all because we didn't put our shit together.
Try telling them it's fine because the human race will prevail at the end.

Science keep changing predictions and recomendations. That's part of the scientific method and the expected result. It can be disencouraging some times but the solution is not to give up on science and just wing it.
Having said that, the climate change models have been pretty accurate, more so taking into account the difficulty of modelling such a complex system.

The ozone hole was huge and we changed the products we used and it got fixed, it wasnt a miracle or a bad prediction just cause and effect.
This worked well because the economies were favorable but if the replacement were a lot more expensive the issue would have lasted a lot longer.

There are some more points I would like to tackle but I'm writing on my phone and this is already getting too long.
I just skimmed, but didn't see any mention of netsplits[1], and how to handle them?

Seems like a pretty grave omissions for something that should be somewhat reliable.

[1]: https://irc.wiki/Netsplit
Both the average income and the cost of living is significantly lower in China than in a typical Western country, which inevitably translates into lower production costs, regardless of whether/how much "slave labor" was involved.
You would think not losing jobs would be a required feature in any job queue software product.
If we're comparing "programming languages that can be used to make websites" then it's totally apples to apples. Ruby and Go (and Rust, Java, etc) are all valid options and so I think it's smart to compare them before starting a web project.
» Every time I saw this kind of discussions, my first question is, what happens when sun is not shining? Like in the night or when it's very cloudy?«

We're burning coal or gas. At least that's what happening in Germany which had to reactive 19 coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 7.3 GW after shutting down 8.4 GW of nuclear capacity.

See: https://www.smard.de/home/rueckkehr-von-kohlekraftwerken-an-...

Don't be like Germany, support nuclear!
You are completely wrong.
You don’t need only 2 or 3 nuclear power plants.

You would need to build again the total global nuclear capacity ever built only to balance the 413GW of solar deployed just this year.

Nuclear is dead, whoever says otherwise doesn’t know anything about the current energy market or is in denial.
I think consumers are trapped in a feedback loop precipitated by the rise of ad-driven software. From the perspective of an engineer, "consumers don't care about quality" — but what's really happening is that consumers have no reason to trust the quality of the software they use.

Grab a person off the street and ask them about how they feel about the quality of the software they use at work, at home, on their phones, and I bet they would be quite unhappy with it, but feel that this is just the way software is. What consumer would risk paying £100 for software when they expect it to suck anyway?

Without a demand for good software, suppliers are constrained to turn to alternate value streams like retention or data collection, creating worse experience for the users, and perpetuating the cycle.

So this is all you say that you can't look at the market at a surface level and immediately draw conclusions about what people fundamentally value, because the structure of the market is path-dependent. What may seem like end-users caring or not caring about something might be more of a reflection of choices made within systemic constraints.
We are _in_ the Metaverse. Algorithms generate personalised recommendations - your own universe - that the person right next to you may never see. You can live a full life online in your curated simulation, experiencing a completely difference perspective on what's hot and what's not. You have no shared cultural bond - just flashes where your algorithmic content briefly overlaps with another, before the borders shift again.
Uranium can be endlessly and economically extracted from seawater - and maintains an equilibrium from continuously dissolving rock. In light of that it's perfectly reasonable to dub nuclear fission power a renewable resource. Commercial nuclear is incredibly safe (pointing to Chernobyl simply indicates profound ignorance or dishonesty) and there's no actually good reason not to be using it on a much wider scale - carbonless, extremely high density power generation reliably available 24/7/365.
You have to have something around 600mm (or even something longer) to magnify the moon that much.

EXIF reports 500mm with an EOS R5, which is a full frame machine. So it's cropped generously.
None of these companies open source everything, or even the most valuable parts.
Things take time.

Currently there's more than 100 concentrated solar thermal plants, generating 7GWh of power, deployed around the world with a another 30 under construction right now in China and a third generation plant being designed here in Australia while the second gen is currently being built and tested after the success of first gen pilot.

https://theconversation.com/batteries-wont-cut-it-we-need-so...

It's happening, it just hasn't yet arrived at scale.

In parallel we're also seeing the rise of solar -> green hydrogen | ammonia | methanol for use in heavy primary industry (mining and transport) which is a decent chunk of fossil fuel use to be displaced.
»After an initial "WTF I have to go to sleep now, because there's no electricity?!", people would get crazy innovative and find new solutions, and -to some extent- adapt.«

You cannot enforce innovations. That's not how it works, really!
It’s always amazing to me how frequently backups silently fail. Every backup software or general common tool to back things up that I’ve seen has many points of silent failure where it just gives up copying at some point in the process or skips over files for some reason without indicating what or why.

If you don’t delete files as you go, now you have an unknown partial backup state that basically doubles your needed space.

If you delete as you go, sometimes something happens and the process stops or corrupts so your data is now split and you may have lost something.

Even trying to log all the failures during the process is amazingly difficult and solutions to work around that specific problem, themselves, somehow introduce more and new types silent failure in some type of irony.
nope. it's not a fallback server, if you read our docs you'd see it's using another actual peer, but also many of the other cases are not routable in other libraries such as libp2p (which does fall back to servers in most cases).
Researchers in ML and neuroscience disagree with you.

You have a superficial grasp of the topic. Your refusal to engage with the literature suggests an underlying insecurity regarding machine intelligence.

Good luck navigating this topic with such a mental block, it's a great way to remain befuddled.

> in 2020 neuroscientists introduced the Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine (TEM) [1], a mathematical model of the hippocampus that bears a striking resemblance to transformer architecture.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38758572
For each kWh delivered by the tech? Yes.

For 24x7 grid supply at .9999 reliability? I’m not nearly so sure; it might be, and if that were the case, it’s great news, because it makes that almost an inevitability.
I'm surprised people still try this tbh. I tried Qt on mobile when it first came out and it was clear that the entire approach was wrong.
Yeah, there's no electronics here.
»It's happening, it just hasn't yet arrived at scale.«

Making it at scale is a MAJOR challenge.

Germany alone consumes up to 1.6 billion kWh on a single day. That's the capacity of 16 million Tesla-S batteries with 100 kWh.

Solving the storage problem is simply infeasible and is never going to happen in the foreseeable future!
"The gun is the tool, the mind is the weapon" [0]

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_Don%27t_Kill_People,_Ra...
Addiction? I mean there's tons of things like this. Tobacco, Alcohol, Junk Food, the list goes on.
Yep, your edit is correct. HN prevented me from replying quickly - sorry.
I think what you're saying 1) was very true 5 years ago and 2) is likely accurate to your part of the world.

The story of the mid sized SV company moving back to hardware is becoming more and more common. Outside of that US tech bubble, millions of companies still use data centres regularly.

Now if you're providing advice to someone in the US tech industry around the SV area (West I think?) maybe that's valid, but thee are many countries and millions of companies where those skills are useful. The OP is in Sweden, where that may or may not reflect your experience.
Why remove it? You posted it in 2021, and resubmitting a story after a year is allowed by the HN Guidelines:

"If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I think these documents capture a piece of Silicon Valley history that's important to remember.
People brag about a lot of things and windows compat is better than e.g. macOS but recent windows actually can't even run a good number of other MS software of the 95 era.
Ah, that explains why they're so similar then!
Loved this article.

> Making explicit these differences, however, would reveal that these platforms are not all that different from the banks of Wall Street: they are not making value, they’re taking it. And as long as this remains the underlying form of profit, tech firms’ imaginary of a technological future will be limited to the fast and cheap profits of monopoly rents. This is at the center of tech’s innovation crisis. That tech work is becoming bullshit is not the problem. The problem is that the companies themselves are bullshit.

Also please read David Graeber s Bullshit Jobs.
Excellent writeup robn!
You'd be surprised how simple webservers are if you write one from scratch.

Makes most "frameworks" seem bloated.
> They both use the same mental processes

There is not some evidence or argument in the article to actually support this claim. If anything, assuming the more plausible hypothesis that programming and mathematical thought are akin to each other, and the fact that research supports that there brain networks related to mathematical reasoning unrelated to other language activities [1], I would think it is much more plausible that writing code is fundamentally different from writing prose (even if they do share some similarities as language goes).

There is a close connection between mathematical thinking, including all between basic arithmetic up to calculus, algebra and advanced research mathematics, and specific spatial abilities and skills (specifically mental rotation/transformation, but not other spatial/navigation skills [2]). Programming is also imo a mode of mathematical thinking, and in this one needs to construct and manipulate logical relations between objects and processes. This makes it different than prose, where the relations are of different natures. I think this is what is missing from this: math and programming alike involve a certain understanding and manipulation of relations, which uses our preexisting toolbox of spatial reasoning (which may or may not take the form of explicit mental visualisation; people with aphantasia can also be good in mental rotation tasks).

[1] Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1603205113

[2] Reimagining Mathematics: The Role of Mental Imagery in Explaining Mathematical Calculation Skills in Childhood https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mbe.12281
You can scan a 35mm frame at 1200 billion megapixel it doesn't mean you get 1200 billion megapixel of usable data

Most scanners top out at 60% of their claimed resolution, which means scanning at 6400dpi gives you something closer to 3200dpi, for the v850 it's a bit worse actually

https://www.filmscanner.info/en/EpsonPerfectionV850Pro.html

> According to our resolution chart, this equals an effective resolution of about 2300 ppi

I have side by side of cms20 film zoomed in at 100% that show a much much much better level of details on my camera based setup than on the Epson v850 and plustek 8100.

> Can you clarify what sort of camera based rig at a similar price point would be superior?

Any modern FF camera (>2012) with any semi decent macro lens (nikkor 55 3.5) will produce better results, even if marginally, while being much faster. You can get a Sony a7rII and a macro lens for less than a v850, then you need a light source (led panel, laptop screen, ebook screen), two panes of glass to hold the film flat and some kind of tube to hold the camera on top of the negative. If you're on a budget you could probably make it work for half of the cost of a v850

It takes less space and you can use it as a camera, while the scanner is just a scanner
Genuinely curious questions, as I only know people who have made the decision to go vegan as adults: do you feel or know that this diet had any side effects on you growing up? How much attention did you pay to getting a diverse diet and all required nutrients? How long have you been vegan now?
> So the total global nuclear capacity ever built is now producing 413GW. Eerily the same as the solar capacity installed just last year.

Peak power isn’t the right measure of comparison here, I don’t think. Average power and guaranteed power on a 24- hour basis seems a more logical comparison.

“Can it run my heat pump at 5 in the morning on a cold winter day?” matters a lot to people.
Merry Christmas and thanks for an inspiring story. I have been through so much chaos, struggles in 2023, but comparing to you, it is just nothing.
I will forever take heart gratefully in whicheve life will hit me at.
Hope things will get better with your wife and you, I guess it could only be better from here.
Thanks, you made my day and best wishes to you from Vietnam
You actually can and we're doing that in Germany. The plants remain on stand-by.

However, you always need conventional power plants on the grid as otherwise you won't be able to do load-following.

Most 100%-renewable-energy plans suffer from a deficit of knowledge how large electricity grids actually work.

There is a reason why there is no 100%-renewable-energy grid anywhere in the world which does not heavily rely on hydro power or geothermal power.
That's just not true, at scale. I did some googling and all signs point to single percentage points of beef being handled that way. That's US beef, you think the last 20 years of Argentinian beef has coexisted with the Amazon?
Picking on Google here, their most valuable part by far is injecting ads into search. Most agree their search is nothing special, getting worse even. We've seen tens of companies write good enough search engines. You could write one 10x better tomorrow and still likely fail. Their code is not the secret sauce - their user lock in is.

A lot of the same could be said for FB.
"overturn the idea that livestock are dumb and unworthy of scientific attention."

Where's this idea? Most of the farmers I know don't believe this. They know their animals have some level of intelligence. There is a huge amount of scientific attention given to livestock - from genetics and breeding, to disease, management practices, etc.

Maybe this is just what people who have never been around livestock believe?
Again, I can see that. I want to know what they actually tried and what the result is that they're unsatisfied with to take as a starting point.
A Retrospective of My Personal Open Source Projects from 2023
> I have never once thought "man, that thing is slow".

You’re either lying or incapable to detect typing latency.

Try typing while CLion indexes stuff in background or open couple hundred thousand line file in VS Code with Vim plugin and let me know how it goes.
> the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.

We are getting there. The price of food has crashed pretty hard over the last couple of years, and we're already back to 2019 levels, with little sign of that trend stopping. Barring some major shift, food will be cheaper than ever by next year.

It may not actually be cheaper food that you need, but rather cheaper retail workers. While food has crashed, the price of food in the grocery store still seems to be climbing.
Water isn't really that scarce in California, we just give it all to almond farmers who export it to China.
> Flat Earthers absolutely do build rockets

I mean ones that would matter for the society.