skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> TBMs are still custom-built for the job

This is semi-true. They are built for the job, but the design is standard. What is custom is the exact size of the tunnel, and thus all the supports.

TBMs generally last a lot longer than the job, so a city could save a lot of money if they planed to keep using their TBM, constantly digging tunnels. Start with a north-south line, then use the same TBM to build an east-west line (or southeast/northwest), and so on. However most cities are unable to find the continuous budget to do that and so when they are ready for the next one the old TBM is no longer worth using, and in any case they no longer have trained crew to run it.

> highly geology-dependent,

Soft water logged earth needs different machines from hard rock. There are combination machines, but if you can determine which you need you save a lot of money ordering the geology specific machine. Get this wrong and you end up with a TBM and partial tunnel under the city.

> require a ton of babysitting.

12 people per shift is the number I've heard (NYC uses double which is one of the smaller reasons things cost so much there). The work is mostly routine though. However the TBMs do break once in a while and they everything stops while you repair them.
Michael,

You are an inspiration. I have been following your journey since your post about quitting Google hit the HN front page. And what a wild ride it has been.

You tried many projects (https://mtlynch.io/projects/), and it took a while for you to find your winning idea. And I have read each of your retrospectives on TinyPilot (https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/) and know that it wasn't easy.

Your journey shows how hard it is to build a business (especially hardware-based), but with discipline and perseverance, it's definitely possible to create one as a solo founder.

I also have a business idea that I would like to work on, but I am not ready to quit my full-time job yet. I have a few questions for you:

1. Have you always been so disciplined in life? If not, how did you improve it?
2. As you shared here (https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/), doubts are natural when you haven't succeeded yet; how did you keep going? Did you ever come close to giving up and going back to corporate America?
3. I believe you have a partner; how did this affect your relationship with your partner?
4. Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

If you are ever in NYC, please hit me up; I would love to buy you a drink and chat more in person.
In fairness and in honesty, I can’t help but think of the American citizens assassinated by drone during the Obama administration.

I guess a politician is worth more than an Arab-American teenager?
No, New French Law Does Not Criminalise Opposition to mRNA Vaccines
For all of China's faults, the country seems less reliant on hard power for survival. Russia is a country with three tricks only: fossil fuels, nuclear weapons and destabilizing democracies.

China is a manufacturing and technology powerhouse.
> I suspect it is deliberate nonsense.

But is that your intuition talking?
> I'm trying to compare Alexei with some other known political figures. For Americans, I think Alexei is roughly comparable to MLK.

If you are comparing him to MLK, you've not seen Navalny's videos on Central Asians I guess (in case you need a summary: compares them to insects that need to be exterminated then kills one with a handgun).
The fastest and most expensive Wi-Fi router I've ever tested: Netgear Orbi 970
Of course, that's precisely what would make it entertaining!

But also interesting to see whether the number is increasing or decreasing at any given moment.

Of course, upon further reflection I realize that the rate of change is almost entirely determined by the position of the solar system in its elliptical orbit around the galaxy, and speed of the earth's elliptical orbit around the sun, and (at certain occasional points) your position in the rotational movement of the earth.

Anything using the accelerometer would be silly to include...
Not 6 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39395329

Yes, Germany has not the same level of health care. Most of the time it’s better than the US. According to studies and data. All sources are not from Germany:

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/best-h...

„Germany would have tied Switzerland had we averaged our rankings of the nations instead of using head-to-head matchups in a bracket system (Switzerland eliminated Germany in the first round). It’s an example of how close the voting was.“

Wow!

Sorry to break the news to you.
Is it same as embedding? Is embedding an RAG method?
I was once at an event, and a guy had some beautiful mixed signal something at a booth. Somehow I asked "so this is actually done in like KiCad..." and he kind of cut me with "well I have Altium subscription actually" and that, sufficed. Quality and feature set difference between these products is that obvious at mid-high ranges.
Asking because I literally do not know: Can you step through AI like you can step through C++ code in a debugger? Like, if you type in a prompt "Draw me a picture of a cat wearing a blue hat" could you (if you wanted to) step through every piece of the AI's process of generating that picture like you are stepping through code? If I wanted to understand how a Diffie–Hellman key exchange function worked, I could step through everything line by line to understand it, it would be deterministic, and I could do the exact same thing again and see the exact same steps.
An overview about a minimal (I hope yet useful) contribution that I have submitted to the Helm project. Looking forward to hear some of your thoughts.
Brand voice-cloned Huberman and changed his words in an ad
Americans being in favor of making a deal with Russia would be proof that psyops works
This is considerably more narrow than the Spotify ToS.
Not these ones...

These ones do what they "learned" from a lot of input data using a process that is us mimicking how we think brains could maybe function (kinda/sort off with a few unbiological "improvements").
A subway station needs to be able to handle, during rush hour, bursts of 100 people arriving every 2-3 minutes. A building generally does not.

This is why even deep subway stations usually go with multiple levels of escalators to keep the flow of people moving continuously.
People who say the universe is a simulation never consider the graphical overhead required. It'd be so annoying to make, I don't believe even an alien species would have the patience for it.
Yeah you can pipe nulls between processes just fine. You just can't print them in a shell.
This article fails to mention that watches were a lot smaller compared to the gigantic pieces of jewelry that dominate the 'military-themed' watches of today, and avoids many of the problems that people have mentioned.

Here's an example of an issued 'military watch' from from 1956:

https://thewatchspotblog.com/bulova-mil-w-3818a-bulova-cal-1...

It's only 32mm in diameter, compared to the advertised Smith and Bradley 'designed to be worn inside' which is 42mm, or the 'standard' size Garmin Fenix which 47mm. Many modern G-Shocks are larger still.
After reading thru all the comments, honestly I still don't get the point of this system. What is potential practical value or applications of this model?
> the fantasy...seems like a nonstarter

i see what you mean. but I wonder if this is because we have difficulty imagining a totally possible thing. i mean, surely at one point it must have seemed like less machine code engineers, and more script monkeys writing something extremely high level, was a nonstarter. or perhaps firing system software engineers and just letting FE devs write something extremely high level must have seemed like a nonstarter at one point.

but here we are.

> natural language just isn't precise enough for this

i often make the mistake of thinking business needs something more precise than what it is actually asking for (or what it truly needs). of course precise dollars and cents truly matter in some situations, but in other situations a crud app or report has a great deal of flexibility in its requirements. not willing to die on this hill, but i wonder if precise software and precise computer modelling is because the tools require it to be precise? and if so, a less precise interface tool may well lead to less precise inputs that still meet the underlying business requirements.
Amazon Joins SpaceX in Mission to Destroy NLRB
Government should be forced to compete in the free market like the plebs if they want money for their programs and salaries, rather than sending men with machine guns to prey on victims. Hope the fucks in office are good at flipping burgers and can cut out the avocado toast.
D3: Data-Driven Documents (2011)
>Pretty sure only smart western people will be hired for the roles.

Everywhere I've ever worked in tech, in my 20 year career, has had people from all backgrounds.
> I wonder if we'll see "100% human made content" in the future

I expect this is coming. Like seeing Certified Humane, Cage-Free, or Official League Merchandise stickers but on games, movies, art exhibitions, concerts. You can get 100% Made by Humans® verified products, which will add to the novelty of the experience.

But you'd have to verify the supply chain of all the assets which is almost impossible to do even with physical products. It's also somewhat sad that even prior to todays AI authenticity was lacking in almost everything, human interactions, knock-offs, experiences (travel), news sources, and it will (probably) get even worse.

Or maybe better if someone can pull this off well, anyone aware of anyone working on this currently?
When I was young, we had kind of a surrogate grandmother who was a retired nurse anesthetist. She told us stories of the old days counting the pulse of patients, holding an eye dropper full of chloroform to add to the gauze mask over the patient's face when the pulse got too fast.

If she had too many cases close to the end of her shift, she'd have to drive home buzzed on chloroform fumes.
clickbait misleading headline from a garbage-tier SEO-mill website.

flag this and ban the website
I thought about that too. The problem with trains is that they always need to run in the primary direction of traffic. So you can't really build them on cross-streets and avoid disrupting the main thoroughfares. Otherwise you'd often end up with a train to nowhere. The main exception being when traffic is curved, going around some obstruction that the train can cut across.

I recall when South Lake Union got its trolley, one of the things they pointed out was that property values next to a trolley drop, but property values 1 block away go up more. Everyone wants to be a couple blocks from transit, not living above it. So even if you avoided the main road going parallel to it, you're probably tearing up even more desirable real estate and commercial zoning.
I wear them on my ankle, so I know what time it is when I cross my legs.
Yes, these ones. Somebody told the computer to do all those things you just wrote.
Yeah I felt that one. But it actually makes sense. Due to the apparent wind (adding the vectors of wind and bike velocities together), and drag being proportional to the square of velocity, you will seldom feel a tailwind and headwinds will be amplified. And this spread widens the faster you ride, even turning lighter tailwinds into a headwind.
Animated Screenshot with Vibrantsnap
If Steam didn't accept AI in games since the beginning of Steam, there would be no Steam.
How does it work? I signed in and there’s just a board but no ai or coaching
You seem to think road lanes are cheap. They are not. My local library has thousands of books not touched on a typical day. The only roads not touched on the typical day are in new developments not ready for building construction to start, once the first building is occupied those roads will also be used every day.
> right now the business has a profit, and therefore a valuation, closer to zero

You’re thinking of this like an engineer rather than a business person.

1. When selling a business like this, the $236k would be called SDI or SDE (seller discretionary income/earnings).

2. The buyer determines what, if any, of that SDE will need to go to paying someone to do what the seller does. These duties could be assumed by the buyer, they could be assumed by existing people the buyer employees, the tasks could be reduced or eliminated, etc.

3. Based on 2, the buyer will typically adjust the earnings multiple that they are willing to buy at.

4. For complex businesses that need someone doing one or more specific roles, the listing agency for the business, if good, will encourage the seller to fill certain roles to improve the overall salability of the business and multiple of earnings that it will be sold at.

5. Without really looking into the business, I’m almost certain that it can be sold for much closer to $1m (or more!) than to your suggestion of (edit) closer to $0.
Yes. Unfortunately, he miscalculated and threw his life away by failing to appreciate the conditions. Similar to standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, this was and now proved to be a ineffective and futile act in a country whose populace refuses to stand up to Putin, oppression, or corruption. It's likely Putin will continue to be the de facto "elected" dictator of Russia until he dies and his oligarch pals replace him with someone equally terrible. The Russian people lack the will, organization, and moral courage to overthrow their klepto-plutocrat dictator.
NYC is paying $4B/mile for their latest tunneling projects.
That works out to $200M/block.

Lot of money to go around, I'd argue its more political will than cost.

Don't forget theres years of legal fees & court challenges even with deep tunneling!
Ask HN: Has AI/LLMs turned you off of tech?
I have been a passionate programmer from high school to my mid-thirties and for the first time in my career I find myself pessimistic about the future of our field to the point that I have lost my spark.

I have always loved correctness, cleanliness, and understanding how things work. Companies are racing to integrate tools that remove all of those attributes from my job. LLMs constantly spit out false information, poorly written and buggy code, and their inner workings are a black box of statistical knobs. They are a tool that encourages bloat and turns the job of the software engineer into a code checker watching over the shoulder of an intern.

I’ve realized the age of discrete, deterministic computing is coming to a close. Due to the tantalizing notion that programming can be commoditized and outsources to a machine, I know corporations will continue to pursue this avenue in full force. It’s put me into a real depression, and I wonder if I’m the only one.
> We expanded the M1 money supply from $4T to $18T and largely handed it out in a diffuse way.

This is often quoted and either comes out of ignorance or is intentionally misleading. Assuming it's the former, M1 in the US is not a good measure over the time span you are quoting, because there has been an accounting change that significantly expands of what kind of accounts are considered to be in M1.

See the description below the graph of https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL and the notification in https://www.federalreserve.gov/feeds/h6.html#2746 (the item from December 17, 2020 in case the anchor doesn't work properly).

If you want to make arguments about monetary supply in that time period, it's better to use M2.
They'll get elected in 49-state blowouts like he did, and for the same reason.

America's economy went from nowhere to #1 under a regime of almost no tax and regulation at all during the 1800's until 1914.

Even then, corpo's aren't actually paying 70%; there's a ton of loopholes and deductions. A high tax rate like that just favors the large incumbents and makes it hard for small businesses with no tax lawyers to get off the ground.

Also, oh my god, if you tax the wealth of all the billionaires at 100%:

a) it's confiscation

b) they won't magically keep churning out 12T in assets every time you confiscate it. Its wealth, not income.

c) the money isn't locked up in anything; how can you possibly believe this. It's invested in the economy. It's lent out to businesses and governments in the form of bonds. It's deployed capital in the form of stock.

Economic literacy is in an absolute shambles. We need to urgently improve the teaching of economics to kids. Between this, the common misconceptions about inflation, supply and demand, and people not knowing the difference between net worth and income, I'm getting more and more worried.
By rules of law you mean international law? By that logic we should also commit preemptive strikes against Israel to prevent it committing what is recognised by the internal community as genocide.
This is really unlikely, because the operations are pretty basic math and the GPUs do these about as efficiently as possible. Surely those GPUs will be improved further, but a custom ASIC probably won‘t help much with training. And NVIDIA has been producing GPUs that are specifically targeted at deep learning and they control both the software library and the hardware. I don‘t quite see how they couldn‘t optimize whatever they want to optimize.
> 1. Financing it. These programs are monumentally expensive. You need to get the money from somewhere.

Depends on the level it's set at, but as it's "Basic" it would just cover basic needs. It would replace unemployment benefit, the non-contributory portion of old age pensions, child benefit, and maybe a few other things. It would also simplify bureaucracy - no need to assess people's circumstances. There have been pilot programmes which showed other benefits, e.g. the Dauphin experiment resulted in improvements in people's health, and a recent experiment in Kenya resulted in people setting up businesses, boosting the local economy. Yes, rich people would get it too, but that would be paid for through increases in higher rates of income tax.
That's the reason why we have Russia we know today and I'm afraid that we'll see more countries taking this path in coming years. Almost million russians left country during last two years alone. But if everyone against regime leaves, who have to fight for better country? Or do you really think that it's more effective to shout in Twitter?
This is why you should couple UBI with an eye-wateringly (90-95%) high tax on Land rents, (i.e, the value of the unimproved raw resource. "Land" is more than just plots of terrain: Mineral, Water, and Wildlife/Fishing rights - along with radio spectrum, etc all fall into this category.) Improvements and value-adds from human activity remain profitable, gatekeeping access to resources is not.

Economically speaking, your ability to compete for the extra disposable income is the same as anyone else's, but that money originated in the taxed rent from the Land you control, and any elasticity in demand for your Land caused by the increase in cash running around is priced in - if more people need what you have, your taxes increase along with it.

What remains for you to profit from is what service or value you add above and beyond the market value of the underlying Land.
The flake is unfortunately stuck on an old version (v2.0.0), since they changed how it's built with v2.1.0 and I haven't gotten around to fixing the flake, I'll try to see if I can get an update for it soon.
Is is not any non-nato country. Have you heard of Budapest memorandum?
Was it their earnings call? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-15/the-ceo-o...
Vision Pro app to convert 2D photos to Spatial
Sorry for the sob story, but I have a lot of 2D photos of my dog who I recently had to put down and wanted to relive them as Spatial media. Put together and shipped a free app to do it. Let me know if you have any feedback/feature requests
Is this any different from any other country? I don’t think their birth rates are that different from South Korea or Italy or Canada
Wasnt Irongate build on licensed VIA chipset IP, and same deal with nForce being Acer/ALI/ULI?
yeah. I actually wrote the logic for the layout myself (wasn't really happy with the available libraries). may open source this if people are interested!
Yes, I am hesitant, and your experience only makes me more so. I may try it for a day here and there just to see what it's like. You can get a "day pass" for the coworking space near me. It's cheaper just to get a couple coffees and sit at Starbucks all day...
The cost of means testing isn't just what you see on a budget. It's also all of the people who are eligible, but incapable of demonstrating that fact because of some byzantine requirements imposed on them to show eligibility[0].

There will, of course, be people who consider this to be a feature, not a bug. That's an ideological difference outside the scope of this comment.

[0] Source: I know someone applying for long-term disability. Getting an answer to a question as straightforward as how to sign the paperwork (wet signature, digital, print/sign/scan, fax?!) has been a challenge for them. It's also unclear if the three different signatures needed of them are even to be done the same way. This is a generally competent, functional person I'm talking about, by the way.
How person that was working with closed source software can show it to you?
Newer ones make less noise. The old steel structures in Chicago make a lot of noise. The sky train in Vancouver isn't silent, but it is not loud: they knew noise could be an issue and so built to make it not a problem.
> We used to dig up roads to put trains underneath – cheaply. Ever-better tunnel boring machines have made the disruption this causes unnecessary.

What? Sure, tunneling machines make less disruption but unnecessary? You still have to build the stations, entrances, and venting systems. All of those breach the surface and the space needed to facilitate the construction still causes lots of disruption.

But yes, more public transportation please. Lots of it!
or use vis(1) on both sides of bash-land
Every business who is raising prices to support paying their workers minimum wage are at fault.

Minimum wage laws are a trailing benefit. Always behind the times. Every raise to the minimum wage is a (partial) catch up to where it really should be in terms of the concept of a living wage (for anyone - not the Republican talking point, entirely invented out of thin air, that it's meant to be for teenagers with part time jobs).

Those business owners, until each advance, are already making out at the benefit of their workers. So you can blame poor planning, poor foresight there.

And if that's still a painful pill to swallow, rather than "government hates small business", then as another reminder - you have no constitutional right to a profitable business.
Can I use VSCode to:

- Read and reply to my emails?

- Manage TODOs across domains (so e.g. I can make a TODO that has a link to a specific email)?

- Use it as a Mastodon client (read and write toots, boost them, favorite them, etc)

- Scrape a web site (several pages), getting only the relevant content[1]

- Bulk rename/copy lots of files with a custom naming algorithm

- Chat on IRC

- Use it as a spreadsheet

- Do numerical integration with it

- Have a literate document with code in several languages that talk to one another

- Annotate PDFs

This is a tiny list. In fact, you can browse past Emacsconf talks to see how people use it.

[1] https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/Mar/solving-a-scraping-pro...
I recall from a PBS special that in the late 1800s, NYC suffered a blizzard that shut down even elevated trains for days. Hence, the move towards building underground.
CGMatter – Sora – The 'VFX Button' [video]
> You are asking what if this guy has "web crawl data" that google does not have?

No, I'm asking if he has permission to redistribute these files.