skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't buy a lot of this analysis.

>This week, for instance, Google — despite probably being the most progressive or Silicon Valley company, nevertheless fired dozens of employees involved in pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests that resemble those on university campuses.

I find it extremely hard to believe that Google is going to start not wanting to hire MIT grads because MIT has a protest encampment. This sort of thing might make sense to someone with a political axe to grind, but it strikes me as completely out of touch with reality.

I interview a lot of candidates for highly technical positions. I cannot imagine a frame of mind where I would worry that someone with a Harvard degree is "More likely to hold strong political opinions that will distract from their work". Even if you believe this is somehow unique to graduates of private universities, Google fired 28 people over protests. Out of nearly 200k. There's just no possibility that worrying about this is justified.
I'm greatful to live in one of the safest towns in the world for cycling.
Because the loss is very limited, and most people regain after stopping medication. As discussed in the other thread, within about a year or so there's already a two thirds rebound, and patients don't see as much health improvement as through exercice for instance.
The richest can pay 20x more for something only slightly better and genuinely think it's a great deal.

You can't.
The Pullman Strike: Aftermath
I just want to shout out WalkSF which is a small organization punching well above its weight fighting for increased safety for pedestrians (which by proxy will mean increased safety for everyone). Voters in San Francisco overwhelmingly chose to maintain the JFK promenade vehicle closure in spite of very noisy complaints from a small minority of car owners. There are many uphill battles, but calmer, safer streets are popular with a solid majority of residents and I think politicians will start realizing that this will be a winning issue for them. It won't happen overnight, but I do think there is cause for optimism.
Nothing in the linked article says anything about market cap representing the “size” of a company. It talks about typical market caps of various size companies, but it never claimed it was bidirectional relationship. It seems you just googled market can and size and decided to link it. Unbelievable.
Incredibly comprehensive write up, thanks for the post.
Hadn’t heard of earth bags before and they can produce some cool lines.
Don’t believe it was mentioned but guadua, or giant bamboo, is another cool building material commonly used
I'd say its the exception that you should not go Ivy/elite if you get in. Ivy Leagues have experiences/opportunities that simply are not replicated at state schools.

Yes for determined/driven individuals, it may not matter all that much. And if you are not going to take advantage of what those elites have to offer, maybe you should reconsider if the financial burden is too high.
NSNull says hi
Maybe I’m just feeling emotional today but I found the examples so distressing I couldn’t continue the article. How could a whole family just be killed off: mother, father, and their children, and the driver responsible faces NO consequences? Even if consequences don’t bring people back from the dead, they are still useful for signaling to society that we recognize the severity of what happened.

It’s depressing to think about their home where they spent their days together now just sitting silent and empty, one day they all left together and would never return again, everything exactly as they left it, soon to be emptied out and sold off to the next owners who will take over as if nothing happened. And apparently as far as society is concerned nothing did happen. Our lives really don’t mean shit to anyone but ourselves. Why are we like this?
I retired (after 18+ years at Google) last August, and as of that date A LOT of production code used languages different from C++ -- Go, Java, Kotlin, AND Python, plus a few more (Rust, Dart, and many others). In my successful, long career at Google I did use C++ (I had "readability" in C++), but rarely: only when "ridiculous scalability" was needed.

For example, collecting Stackoverflow posts about GCP products, and distributing the needed subsets of them among vendors and employees in tech support to potentially answer, comment, edit, vote on, re-tag, &c, used to be all Python (and the "scale" was a few hundred or thousands of posts and people at a time -- ridiculously small "by Google `production` standards", and perfectly adequate for the much-higher-programmer-productivity Python has always afforded... I know, because I did the vast majority of that coding, including maintenance, ongoing monitoring of performance, and VERY occasional optimizations if and when monitoring showed them to be desirable).

That was the core of my job for my last several years at Google -- I won't even list the many other NON-prototyping tasks I did in previous years (decades, almost), the vast majority of them in Python. And -- the majority of my performance reviews during those 18+ years were rated "exceeds expectations", so it seems that world-class Python skill (which clearly was crucial to me getting a hiring offer back in 2004, though, alas, visa issues delayed my start to early 2005) were extremely useful for at least some of us Google engineers.

Alex
What a tragic state of affairs.

It's a shame that running modern software requires carefully packaging a virtual environment and then injecting a bunch of ugly global env vars.

I still think Docker shouldn't exist. Programs should simply bundle their dependencies. Running a program should be as simple as download, unzip, run. No complex hierarchical container management needed.

Alas I am not King.
> hard to believe that Google is going to start not wanting to hire MIT grads because MIT has a protest encampment

There was a time when Google wouldn't consider a candidate if they weren't from MIT. The loss of that monopoly is the point. You aren't disadvantaged going to MIT today relative to a few decades ago. You're just not as relatively advantaged as you once were.
I live right by 4th and king where the kid was killed.

There was a community event where we all gathered to express our discontent with the lack of safety at this intersection, and many others.

Someone had a sign that said "our neighbor died here" and one of the police officers there, the one who responded first the day the child died, walked up to the person with the sign and said "they weren't our neighbor". He said that because the family was visiting.

They were our neighbor, and we let them down.

I've been pretty dissapointed with many of my interactions with the folks that are supposed to be protecting us in this city. It's got to be a hard job, but we need to do better, somehow.
Web apps are much faster to install and update.

1) Your browser is always open, whereas you need to close your current app and open the app store app

2) Google Search is better at giving you what you want in the fewest number of keystrokes than any search from any other company including app store search boxes

3) installing a "web app" is one click after the google search results or if someone posts a link. As you might know from social media, even one click is a lot and most people won't click links in a comment. In the apple app store i have to tap on the app in the search result, tap install, double click the lock button, scan my face then wait many seconds. Some websites load in many seconds but that's not that common and it's considered a bad website

4) software is reinstalled on each use, meaning it's always updated. Native apps update randomly with a big delay and I have to check if there's an update manually sometimes

5) with native software there's a risk it will not support your device. Risk is commonly expressed as a cost, so the fact that in my life I've searched for an app and found out that it's not supported on iPad or not supported in my country can be counted as every single app store download since then took me .1 seconds longer because I now know there's a risk I will waste my time looking for the app. Web apps also don't work sometimes but it's more predictable since it's usually tied to real limitations like the screen size of your device. Another risk is malware, I feel nervous and powerless when installing native software because I don't know who I'm giving access and to and to what, whereas I understand what web apps can track. and also the fact that it's HTML and JavaScript instead of opaque assembly instructions makes ad blockers possible and cheap

Installation is an integral part of using software, and a big the reason the web won and continues to win.
But if you make friends with those rich kids may open opportunities you would not otherwise have.
This is a poor framing and Darrel knows better. While it is true retail shops fight to maintain parking spots, the real underlying issue is the local homeowners who fight the denser type of housing that is needed to promote foot traffic to keep businesses viable. Cities in general also don’t sufficiently support mass transit and biking which also helps increase non-auto customers.

What is needed is general reform of the layout of America cities. Specifically we need to allow five-over-one buildings (retail first floor, 5 stories of residential above) nearly everywhere. Every time I am in Cambridge MA I am shocked at the blocks of one story retail along Massachusetts Ave.
The only advice you can give the young is unsolicited. They'll never ask for it because they already believe they know everything.

I'm fully aware my reply is ridiculous, much like what I was responding to.
My point is that if Bob wanted to specifically murder Ralph with a car, it would be fairly difficult to do it in a way that doesn't scream intent.
Exercise helps people to lose weight. Just go to a local group bike ride. Then first observe average BMI there and then talk to people and you will find out a lot of them started fat. The problem is that people delude themselves about calories - both burnt and eaten. For example riding a bike at somewhat brisk but sustainable (for a healthy average man) pace may burn 500kcal per hour (that would be around 140W). Similarly running or walking for 7km as 70kg person burns around 500kcal. You do it 7 days a week and you still can't really eat more than your baseline if you want to lose weight. We can argue if 7 hours a week is a lot of exercise or not but most people would feel they exercise a lot and use that as justification to eat more.

The problem is that we are so sedentary that a very mild volume of exercise like 7 hours a week (let alone things like going to the gym 4 days a week) is seen as "very active lifestyle" and used as license to eat a lot.

Unfortunately you're still sedentary if you do that and sit at the desk, drive a car or lie on a sofa for the rest of the day.

It's not like adding more exercise is bad. It's the fact people are sedentary, drive everywhere that it's not feasible for them to get to activity level to really make a dent. Imagine you have to walk to your office for 30 minutes every day (and then back) then walk to a store to buy food. Then do some sports on top of that and suddenly the amount of food you can eat changes drastically.

Unfortunately it's very hard to do in today's world. We even started SUV'ing children to school instead of letting them walk. No wonder almost everyone is getting fat and complains that "no amount of exercise makes a difference".

When I look at photos of my parents in their 20s I struggle to see any fat people. Almost no one had a car back then (in my country) and that needed to walk a lot just to get to school/job, buy food, get anything done around the town (no online forms back then). People usually attribute it to food availability but when I try to estimate how much they needed to walk every day I see a completely different picture.
These kinds of think pieces make more sense when you understand them as advertisements that someone is an unscrupulous flack who will toe the establishment line for a paycheck. They’re not intended to be persuasive or really make so much sense, so much as to say “I’ll gladly take money to spout whatever nonsense is needed to make your views seem credible or popular.”
Show HN: I built mindECHO – Search and find answers across your saved webpages
So one can actually make use of all the efforts reading, bookmarking, and saving, when needed.
Yeah, the only actual hurdle from Apple is the measly 8 bucks a month for a developer account. I would happily pay ten times that amount just to avoid the node_modules dumpster fire
The point I gave up reading was when Nate started arguing that a degree from an Ivy League would look worse than a good state school to employers because those students are clearly political activist nincompoops. And it's like... first off, these trends have been going on for as long as I can remember (and I am no longer young), and second off, you got your fame doing good statistical analysis, surely you could back up your assertions with hard data showing the decline of hiring instead of political punditry. But I'm guessing the data shows the opposite of the political punditry here.
My US driving test didn’t even include a highway drive. It does feel like the ability to drive is treated as a right here. It’s only a privilege from the license cost point of view.
It works right now, but I'm actively adding a lot of additional things that might make your life easier. The roadmap on the readme shows what I'm working on adding. Feel free to shoot me an email at carson at poole.ai and I'd be happy to give some guidance, but a quickstart is definitely at the top of my priorities also. :)
Meredith Whittaker and Elon Musk share similar opinions as me on the subject. I assume you’re a captain of industry?
I think I agree with Nate’s advice (skip the Ivies, go to a good state school) but I don’t agree with the reasons why.

I don’t think elite private colleges are losing esteem at all (the recent noise about pro-Palestinian protests will be forgotten five minutes after they stop, just like all the other campus protest movements in decades past, this isn’t new!), I just think the economic argument is getting harder and harder to make.
I'm extremely skeptical that this shift has anything to do with protest encampments and coddling concerns.
And the resumé boost is for life.
(silly answer) use Visual C++. I've been coding across MacOS, Linux, and Windows 11, with roughly comparable machines in a lot of ways (all Intel). Visual C++ while awkward for compatibility - is very very fast for builds, and not bad for IDE interface for rapid fixes.

More serious - I moved to CMake presets and with that came a lot of cache optimization - including parallel builds. MacOS is now almost as fast as Windows for build, and Linux/gcc not far behind. Windows C++ seems to have the lowest modern feature compatibility, followed by MacOS/Clang, with Linux/recent GCC being the most complex. A lot of the newer features seem to add a lot to the build time..

... mind I've been working with C++ only for the last few months, and C for many years before, so consider it a beginner post in a lot of ways. Still, it was interesting to explore, and I'll be continuing to explore - I haven't yet enabled ccache for instance which I suspect will improve a lot.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization because the difficulty of the recaptcha is based upon the property its protecting. If it was just about behaving how google wants, then someone who behaved how Google wants shouldn't get tested harder on sketchier sites.
There are 2 things that (for me at least) make exercise a core component of weight control:

1) When I lose abdominal tone, I can eat way more food before my satiety signals start firing. I screwed myself early in life by hoovering up as much of every meal as I could until I was physically uncomfortable, and that was my signal to stop eating. When I have good core tone, it's physically harder to distend my gut to pack more food in (I'm 5'6", so the smaller intestinal cavity may have a greater impact for my tiny ass).

2) The more muscle mass I'm carrying, in combination with better cardio capabilities, the greater caloric burn I can effect in the same amount of time, and the greater duration of energy output I can sustain.

My current exercise regime is a mix of kettlebells and heavy mace for strength training, and skating in the mini ramp in my backyard. 20 minutes of continuous moving of a kettlebell or heavy mace dynamically is an excellent conditioning routine on its own, and combine that with another 45 minutes of rock-to-fakie, tail stall, fakie-rock, 50-50s, 180s, backside disasters, and of course kickflips in the mini ramp all add up to a ridiculous caloric load and demand that the whole body be firing coherently at the same time.

I strongly recommend transition skateboarding for cardio, but I don't think many people are physically capable of it (although I only picked it up in my early thirties, so it's not necessary to have been doing it your whole life to get good mileage out of the sport later in life).
Are there benchmarks? 2x speed up would not be enough for me to return to c++ hell, but 5x might be, in some circumstances.
It’s always been the network, and it always will be. I went to a public university, all my friends and roommates are doing well, but none of them have started a company worth more than a million or so. Some are director level at big tech companies, but none are exec level.
I don’t think you should even be allowed to vote past 40.
Nice, didn't know about fernflower, thanks for the recommendation! I use JavaDecompile (JD-GUI)¹ too much and is already in my workflow, but from insights like this i see some nicer/better tools.

1 - JD-GUI - https://java-decompiler.github.io/
To be fair (to be faairrrrr), Communism's embedded contradictions flamed it out significantly faster than capitalisms has.
I think it's pretty unpredictable how much value you will get out of a particular institution.

Firstly, students enter at a time when they're still figuring out what life is. You could do a lot of research on how to maximize the best professors or network in a field but most won't predict what specialty they'll end up with. Even if they do, they're so young they could not know how to judge the quality of an authority yet, so who is to say you will estimate that correctly?

The other reason people want top schools is for networking with other students. Some people will get a lot out of that and others won't. There's a bit of randomness involved. You could maximize your odds of being surrounded with good networks by going to the best school but honestly, I doubt you can truly predict the worth of that for an individual student.
Ollama provides a web server with API that just works out of the box, which is great when you want to integrate multiple applications (potentially distributed on smaller edge devices) with LLMs that run on a single beefy machine.

In my home I have a large gaming rig that sometimes runs Ollama+Open WebUI, then I also have a bunch of other services running on a smaller server and a Raspberry Pi which reach out to Ollama for their LLM inference needs.
>>> Would love to hear what you all thing of writing web apps in the browser in Python.

I like the idea. I'm not a commercial dev, but a so called "scientific" programmer, meaning that I use programming mainly as a problem solving tool. But once in a while I create little apps for my colleagues to use, many of whom don't program. But they can manage spreadsheets quite well.

I'm pretty committed to Python at this point, but deployment of an app is a headache, and I've explored a variety of solutions. I've written a couple of web apps using *flet*, and they run on pretty much every platform I've tested. This seems like a nice approach.

The thing I'd like to figure out is how to give a web app access to a user's files, though I appreciate why this should be difficult for security reasons.
I think they are losing esteem, but some silly protests aren't why. The selection process itself is deeply, deeply flawed and interacts poorly with incentives for education. Feedback on performance is muddled up with the effects of networking with monied up people.

Not much of this is positive. Their ability to hire and the amount of money they have still is, I suppose. Assuming those are focused on teaching, though, which I doubt.
Cool vulnerabilities you've discovered yourself throughout the years?
Not only that. There are people who go to great lengths to make sure that native apps don't work properly across desktop environments even on the same OS. They also call out anyone who dares to complain about it.
That wasn’t my experience at all. Most people who gave me advice unsolicited gave me bad advice, while those I sought out were hesitant to steer me, but what they did provide, was quite valuable.
I think that you've cottoned on to my sometimes oblique humor!
I thought it would be Australia.
Very cool that it emulates the phosphor "burn" fading away like the original vector graphics hardware. You can see and play the real thing at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.
The connections don't matter as much as you would think. If you're driven, you will succeed. Regardless of school choice.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in-ivy...

“As a hypothetical example, take the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State, which are two schools a lot of students choose between,” Krueger said. “One is Ivy, one is a state school. Penn is much more highly selective. If you compare the students who go to those two schools, the ones who go to Penn have higher incomes. But let’s look at those who got into both types of schools, some of whom chose Penn and some of whom chose Penn State. Within that set it doesn’t seem to matter whether you go to the more selective school. Now, you would think that the more ambitious student is the one who would choose to go to Penn, and the ones choosing to go to Penn State might be a little less confident in their abilities or have a little lower family income, and both of those factors would point to people doing worse later on. But they don’t.”

Krueger says that there is one exception to this. Students from the very lowest economic strata do seem to benefit from going to an Ivy."
> There have been XPRIZE competitions for vehicle efficiency, oil spill technology, more efficient rockets, health sensors, AI systems, genomics, etc.

All of which are based on existing technologies that have been delivering for decades if not an entire century (vehicle efficiency). Even something as nebulous as "AI systems" has been around for twenty years in the form of Google's original semantic search capabilities.

This "Quantum AI" prize, however, is a solution in search of a problem.
Creating Nginx Rewrite Rules
The MacBook Air 15 and XPS 15 both start at $1,299. But the base model MacBook Air only has 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage vs the XPS 15's 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Apple has been stingy with RAM for years now.
> VSCode is better than XCode or Android Studio

That’s just your opinion though isn’t it
Forget moonshots, investors want profit now