skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If each one is $100 upfront for them and in my pocket whenever I prove them bogus, all I can say is, Bring it on!!!
Related:

Slow Electricity: The Return of DC Power? (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28216968 - Aug 2021 (230 comments)
My 2023 in Review
For a problem that is theoretically binary (either in, or out?) filling polys can have really fiddly corner (literally!) cases.

Thanks for the WIP screenshots; they made me feel much better about my own slicers/rasterisers.

(there's probably a trick I'm missing*, but so far I've had the most robust results for 3D booleans by chasing fiddly overlaps/intersections on lower facets, all the way down to 0-D if necessary)

* like working directly with cubics, à la Jim Blinn?
I've had the pleasure of riding in a Baker Electric Car. Very cool - one of my favorite antiques I've ever ridden in.

It's worth pointing out that the early electric cars were almost exclusively sold to women. Early cars were messy and dangerous, and a safe easy-to-operate car was often bought by the wealthy to give to their wives. It ended up being the advent of the electric starter that killed the early electric cars more than anything. (Breaking your thumb hand cranking a car was a very common occurrence previously).
>If not, and you concede that there's no way for you to change your mind, why are you trying to change my mind?

I'm trying to change your mind because I honestly believe you are mistaken in your position on nuclear. Also because you are arguing well and seemingly in good faith, which I appreciate. We all have biases and you might show me my blind spots, it's important to challenge oneself.

If the truth turns out to be that nuclear is entirely safe and the cheapest option available, I wouldn't be opposed to it. I have seen absolutely nothing anywhere to indicate that this is the case.

Now, if the truth turns out to be that it is both much more expensive than we have been told, more so than many alternatives, as well as famously risky, would you stop supporting nuclear? If not, why?

I have found many many sources that indicate that the second scenario is true, but none that indicate that the first scenario is true. I sincerely hope that's the only reason why I have my opinion.
For solar cells, it was (according to Wikipedia) 1954 before the first practical PV cell was built. So that's already a late start. From there it seems that a lot of technologies had to develop in parallel, from larger silicon wafers to advances in understanding how to work with thin-film materials.

Meanwhile, in the 1950s and 1960s nuclear power was going to be the Next Big Thing, and it was understandable that low-efficiency PV tech was of interest only for things like satellites. IMHO, the top-down energy policy managers that couldn't fulfill the "too cheap to meter" promises of nuclear power wouldn't have been up to the task of accelerating PV technology either.

Solar cells are not like gas lasers, which could have been built in a neon-sign shop in the 1930s if the science needed to steer the technology had been in place. They are more like practical neural nets. Sure, they could have been built in the 1960s... if only GPUs weren't so darned hard to come by.

(And as someone else suggested, any nation that began the 20th century by pouring the resources into PV cells and EVs that we put into fossil fuels wouldn't have lived to see the 21st.)

Similar story for lithium batteries. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7215417/ seems to be a decent survey of their evolutionary timeline. They consist of multiple discrete technologies. R&D that goes into a good cathode has to be done separately from work on anodes. Same for electrolytes and separators. Looking at the bibliography in that article, batteries don't seem like the sort of field where progress could have been accelerated just by throwing money at it, and I think that's true for PV tech as well.
By the same token, life sentences for rape are going to take up a lot more prison capacity than you’re accounting for. If you change a rape sentence from ten years to life (and a ten year sentence might mean you get out in six), you could end up 5xing or 10xing the number of prisoner-years the system needs to handle from the same population of offenders.

Also by the same token, you’ve essentially made my case that “mass incarceration” is more a consequence of harsher sentences for serious violent crimes than it is a consequence of drug prohibition. If you favor even harsher sentences for serious violent crimes (I do too) then you need to accept that this will require significantly more prison capacity. Either that or we need to start talking about expanding the death penalty, and expediting the appeals process in capital cases so it can be applied at scale.
The first sign of China destroying its own economy came for me when Jack Ma was disappeared.

Chinas economy is now ruined.

The vast majority of foreign companies have left or are leaving. Same with foreign capital.

Massive unemployment and getting worse. People homeless and in poverty.

The real estate ponzi has collapsed. Banks are in trouble.

The construction boom has turned out to be extremely low quality and tofu dreg constructions everywhere are resulting in things like apartment blocks that are falling over and must be abandoned and destroyed.

The tech companies have been hacked down to size, entire industry sectors simply stopped.

In only a few years the China success story has collapsed entirely.

Perfect conditions for a leader who needs distraction to seek it in war.
A couple years back my friends needed to drag me to the hospital after I flung far off the rails following about a week-long acid and coke bender preceded by a month or two of frequent mushroom trips. I was fully manic/psychotic and hadn't slept for days. I know that an opiate OD is a totally different animal but I can relate to your feelings of guilt/shame and the social fallout with people looking at you differently. Where you are now just sucks because not only do you feel at your lowest, but suddenly there's a distance in your relationships - your loved ones are concerned for you but may not necessarily know how to help - so just kicking back with your friends or family to take your mind off of it and cheer yourself up feels like its off the table. It can be very isolating.

I don't know if I have any great advice - it mostly took me time and space to heal - so patience and grit helped me most. Seeking a sense of connection to those who've experienced similar can help of course, too. There'll likely come times when you feel like you're bottoming out and its important to not use to try to pull yourself out of it. Gradually, people in my life looked at me like I was me again, and some of my closest friends never treated me any differently. Months later, someone might ask me how I was with an emphatic, concerned expression and it would annoy me since I just wanted to move on but I'd learn to let it go and recognize it as love and not pity.

Leading up to my spiraling out, substances (weed and booze in addition to the psychedelics) creeped their way into being the highlight in my life and I'd cycle them to avoid feeling like any given one of them was a problem. On the surface my life looked good - career, travel, hobbies, etc. - but I felt empty most of the time and nothing felt as compelling as getting blasted. I'm not sober but I dialed it way back and abstain from everything for long periods of time. I found Gabor Mate's talks/interviews on addiction on Youtube helpful as well as the book Running on Empty by Dr. Jonice Webb.
Filling polys is especially hard if you want to run on the GPU where access to denormals is inconsistent/nonexistent. Most of the algorithms in CS literature simply won't work. It's a fun challenge, at least!
As a counterpoint, after 15 years of being proficient in bash, the second I tried fish I never looked back.

There are a few minor differences in scripting that I had to figure out when I ran into them (while/if syntax, process substitution, some other minor things), but these were small enough that it didn’t matter.

I’ve had multiple coworkers with a similar experience.
Fflate: The fastest pure JavaScript compression library in existence
I recently replaced my usage of JSZip with fflate in a project and came away impressed by its speed.
On that topic, was actually searching the Space Shuttle history earlier, and found this infographic somebody over at SpaceX made when they were pitching the Dragon Module. Actually makes a pretty decent case that without Challenger, and subsequent recoil, the Shuttle program would have actually been pretty awesome.

At the time of crash, they were on course to be running 3-4 Shuttles at 4 flights each every year. [1] The cadence afterward was a pretty massive change.

[1] Shuttle Flights (circa 2010): https://i.imgur.com/f4sRT0T.jpg
Investec? Yeah thinking I need to phone them to disable mine
PyPy has moved to Git, GitHub
The pac-man ghost AIs are definitely worth a search, fun stuff from such a simple program.
What's the rational behind this?
> One of the foundations of law that you cannot make retroactive changes.

This is a common misconception, at least regarding laws in the US. While I may not agree with it, the US Supreme Court has for literally centuries (like since 1798) explicitly allowed all types of retroactive laws. Most importantly, the USSC has long held the prohibition against ex post facto laws only applies to criminal, not civil laws. (As an aside, this also shows what bullshit it is when justices say they are just "calling balls and strikes". Justices, of all political stripes, make up laws all the time. The Constitution, as written, very clearly and plainly says "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." At some point - Calder v. Bull in 1798 to be exact - the Supreme Court decided it only applies to criminal law.)

Good info: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-1/sec... and https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/219/140/
I think he's referring to your "defanging" which you implied was security related but doesn't actually achieve anything at all.
Hey, please don't cross into personal attack on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Edit: unfortunately your account has been breaking the site guidelines in a lot of other places too—here are some recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38825624

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38825543

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783196

We eventually have to ban accounts that post like this, so if you'd please stop doing that, we'd appreciate it. On HN the idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.
Not just Norway but also the EU (especially Germany).
You might be unfair to yourself in the sense that not all hours are created equal; some hours were never going to be productive hours, and so if you can immerse yourself in a subject with some easy-to-watch videos, that might be better than trying to force productivity where none is available.
Good idea, let’s enforce WHERE on UPDATE as well
In my 3 decades in tech, something happens around 10K employees and it's irreversible. Amazon was amazing in evading that for so long in exchange for a brutal cheapskate internal culture they slapped the label "FRUGALITY!" upon to make it seem legit. There's probably a doctoral thesis or two in analyzing how it was both broken and working at the same time.
This seems like way too much work when people have been doing things like this in different ways for years (just look at Replit, it runs a full IDE and runs on 4gb Chromebooks).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this project, but you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
> “It’s basically a colonial endeavor that they’re involved in,” Sarah Moser, a geography professor at McGill University who specializes in new cities, told The Daily Beast.

> “They want to have a boys-only treehouse where they can go and do their bad-boy stuff and then come back to civilization,” she added. “They’re little boys who don’t want anyone to be the boss of them.”

What a childish put-down. What’s the point of interviewing a university professor if they’re just going to spout emotional ad hominem instead of engaging with the topic?
Dave Chappelle walked off stage. Blame audience members who don't follow rules
A* is cool but pixel base solutions are naive. Also Dijkstra with a heuristic is just the beginning to a A.I. rabbit hole.
*conscientiousness, distinct from consciousness :)
I really appreciate that you provided a bunch of screenshots of the in-progress development. Graphics programming is very challenging, and it can be frustrating to feel like you've spent multiple days just rendering glitch art. It's always good to show others how much we struggle even if we're experts :)

Having recently implemented a subset of opentype kerning, I can only imagine how stressful it was to implement the whole core truetype spec...
Windows 7 is 'Peak Windows'. On my rare forays into Windows, Windows 7 is what I choose to use.

As Microsoft declines, so does Windows. Microsoft can't afford to produce a better Windows.
> infrastructure that just didn't exist at the time until after the Rural Electrification Act in 1936

While not entirely critical I suppose, not getting stranded in an EV today also relies on much newer stuff as well, like the on board computer using cellular communications and GPS to help find a charging station within range of your destination. I imagine that in the absence of this assistance, the number of disabled EVs would be intolerably high, and delivering a can of gas is much simpler than delivering electricity or towing.
Java does not have perfect backwards compatibility, but it's pretty good.

Thread.stop was deprecated very long time ago. It was deprecated at least in Java 6 (2006 year) and I'm too lazy to check for earlier versions.

Security providers have very limited usefulness for ordinary applications. And AFAIK it's not even removed for Java 21 yet, so formally old apps should work for now.

I'm not aware of incompatible JDBC interface changes and I used to use very old Oracle driver without that much problem. Yes, there are some new methods in JDBC interfaces which are not implemented with old drivers, but you can just not call those methods. It's not breaking change.

Finalizers were never reliable. But you're not correct about them not running right now, I just checked and with Java 21 they're called.

So while there are breaking changes, they're always some application issues. If you call Thread.stop, you should not do that, that's bad application. If you're using security providers, you should not do that, they're not safe enough, you should use containers or VM or other means of code isolation. I'm not completely sure about JDBC issues, but I had experience running very old JDBC driver and it works just fine. If you rely on finalizer, you should not do that, that's wrong approach to resource management and it was always wrong.

Like I said, it's application to blame.
It’s a very common topic in lots of venues. Here is the economist talking about it: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/09/07/the-pand...

But as a for instance on one of the things you mentioned, our trade imbalance is less now than it was in the early 2000s. US industrial jobs have been on a negative trend for more than 50 years! That doesn’t correlate with the split between sentiment and other metrics either.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 included $7.5 billion to establish the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. This program aims to build substantial charging stations every 50 miles along every major travel corridor in the US. The first charging stations funded by it opened earlier this month. NEVI requires that all charging stations built with this funding not require any accounts or apps to initiate a charge, so they will likely all have credit card terminals.
At the end of 2023, I started doing #buildinpublic

In 2024, I will share all discoveries and insights from this process as a way to perform regular 'checkpoints' and organize my learning.

Here are my notes for Sprint 1:

1. Analytics
Google Analytics (or similar) has been a must-have tool since day one. It's crucial for understanding patterns and the impact of actions you take. After my Product Hunt launch and a HackerNews post, I noticed traffic spikes. An interesting insight from Google Analytics is that over 50% of my users are from India

2. Distribution Channels
"Building is the easy part," someone once told me, a sentiment I only understood recently. Post-launch, I was at a loss - my website was invisible to search engines, and traffic from Hacker News and Product Hunt had dried up. My target audience isn't the tech crowd frequenting these platforms. My product enhances study methods and note-taking, aimed at high school students and universities. How to reach them? SEO is one avenue, and maybe the best in the long run, but as a beginner, climbing Google's ranks will take time.

Social media seemed like another good bet. Despite growing my X profile and posting about my product, there was no significant traffic change. I believe I've found a potential solution, which I'm currently testing. I will talk about it in the next bullet point.

3. Networking with Other Indie Hackers
I've been networking with numerous indie hackers. One, in particular, caught my attention with his success in selling a browser extension. How was he attracting users? I messaged him DM, and his response was enlightening:

- Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Reels

TikTok! Why hadn't I considered this before? It's likely the best platform to find my audience. I've spent the last couple of days learning about TikTok strategies and just published my first video. I plan to post 1-2 videos weekly to quickly establish my niche with the algorithm. Will it work? Don't know. But is the best alternative right now.

4. Marketplaces: A Distribution Channel I didn't know
An interesting development since my launch: I've received invitations to sell my CMAPS subscriptions on marketplaces. My first annual subscription sale happened on DealFuel. Next week, I'll start selling through AppSumo.
Ah, now I see I responded to the wrong message.
And, as the article says, all the media that would still exist if copying it wasn't prohibited.
Do you use multiple monitors with different dpi? If you do, then there is plenty of incentive for Wayland because getting proper scaling across monitors is IMPOSSIBLE under X11.
Don't forget Vsauce! He doesn't make as many videos anymore but he has a huge backlog of great videos.
Which I think -- in my personal opinion -- is strong evidence that copyright terms are too long.

We (the demos) are supposed to give people a time-limited monopoly in return for them ultimately enriching the public domain. If the works entering the public domain are spent then we need to adjust the deal until it heavily benefits the pubic domain -- the works should still be culturally relevant, so they should be works that are at most [let's say] 30 years old where a parent could share the cultural experiences of works from their own youth with a child.
Ehhh... maybe. One implicit trade-off here is how low detail the second set is, and that'll happen any time you force a structure - mandated structure takes more space on average, sometimes significantly more. Passive voice wastes a lot of space too (in English anyway).

Personally I think this is better solved by a changelog doc (which you can wordsmith for outsiders, which is an entirely different target than internal developers) and `git blame` (I never browse all of history to find changes to a method, just blame it for the latest or `git log -p -L` to check a series of changes to a file/func/etc).
Hedging using reinforcement learning: Contextual k-armed bandit vs. Q-learning
Why bother, when you can 'just' use Windows 7?
No worse than jetlag. You don't get over it in one day but you've got to keep sticking to the new schedule until you do.
OK, so someone somewhere had thought of this. Would _you_ be interested in it?
There's something I tell my students. You don't need math to make good models, but you do need to know math to know why your models are wrong.

So yes, math is needed. If you don't have math you're going to hoodwink yourself into thinking you can get to AGI by scale alone. You'll just use transformers everywhere because that's what everyone else does and you'll get confused between activation functions. You'll make models and models that work, but there's a big difference in working models and knowing where to expect your models to fail and understanding their limitations.

I feel a lot of people just look at test set results and expect that to mean that the model isn't overfitting. (not to mention tuning hps based on test set results)
So childless men should be expected to pay for free child care through taxes, but we’ll keep fathers in check by having the social expectation they take on a greater role in childcare? That system isn’t really engineered to optimize for men bonding with children, it will just inevitably result in polygamy really.

We had a system that optimized for male attachment to children and it was the societal expectation to marry and for marriage to really be til death do you part.
Retrotech:

Adrian's Digital Basement (retrotech repair)

RMC The Cave (retro curation and stories)

Cntl Alt Rees (retro eclectic)

Jan Beta (repair)

LGR (eclectic)

Mr. Carlson's lab (repair of generally older RF, but some newer)

CuriousMarc (repair, testing, stories. Did a complete repair of the Apollo Guidance Computer)
Netscape 2.x/3.x on System 7.5 is where I was introduced to the internet. Their splash screens and animated loading icon added a certain air of awe to what was already an impressive experience as a kid… kudos to whoever was in charge of the design of those graphics.
> fun fact: most books published in the US before 1964 are in the public domain

<https://www.crummy.com/2019/07/22/0>

Submitted to HN 2019 August 02. 62 comments. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20591071>
What a waste :(
Anything you want! As long as it can't confuse consumers into thinking it came from Disney. And it has to be based on the 1938 version.

It'll be interesting to see the first lawsuits over this, because there's a lot of grey area!
All very great choices! “Dog army? What do you think that means?” Is an inside joke with me and my best friend from “High Holidays”.

I also agree that the ranking is hard. A remarkable thing about the show is how it’s consistent throughout its run and doesn’t really fall off in quality despite going for over a decade.
Thank you for replying, your work shaped me into what I came to be. I was a backend developer at the end of the 90’s, sadly not for Netscape Server, it was mostly C++ CGI.

Have you been around during this time period (birth hour of Mozilla)? https://youtu.be/4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
The Test Paper of the Last Chinese Imperial Exam