skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Diverse Challenging Programming Projects
What are some go-to, fun, and (very) challenging programming projects you know of? Projects that really test your skills

1) Dynamic SQL generation via UI

2) Create an Emulator (console emulation)

3) Create a programming language

4) Create a mini frontend framework

5) Create a game or basic game engine

6) Create a REPL or text editor
I have an ancient memory of this show wherein Billy says "Word processing? That sounds like FOOD processing!" I have not yet been able to refind this moment, even going through the YouTube archives.

But going through those videos made me wistful. It was like Mr. Wizard (of whom I was also a fan back then): concise, friendly, encyclopedic explanations of both how to do things with the computers of the day, and of how the machines actually worked. For example, explaining the CPU as a little filing clerk inside the machine who receives instructions on what to do with the numbers stored in the vast array of numbered filing cabinets (i.e., the RAM). The videos interposing the bits with Luba and Billy also had a lovely early-80s "analog aesthetic", akin to Sesame Street.
how can your local environment be so hostile, it just doesn't sound pleasant. It also seems to be quite isolating from your neighbours and local neighbourhood. It sounds like everything after your yard is death and children need to be driven in some safety-cage to the next appointment. Next up is giving them bullet-proof vests and a gps tracker.
If most buildings lacked light because the vast majority just echolocated, then the those unable would be disabled.

It is okay for there to be a normal human experience, and define inability to participate as a disability.
500 Startups is quite global and well considered the second best. It's not a perfect comparison, though. 500 shines in marketing and hustling, while YC likes to focus more on product. Plenty of startups are better fits for one or the other and plenty do both.

"I applied to YC for S24 but didn't even get an interview. I feel like its just too competitive (about 30k applications)"

> If you didn't get a "you were in the top 10%" email, it might well be too competitive.
Perhaps in your narrative. I don’t believe that to be true for the vast majority of property claims.
> but fail2ban is kind of a hacky pos.

It's battle-tested for well over a decade, has accumulated 10.8k stars and 1.2k forks on github, so it seems to do something right no?

Not to mention that even if it were otherwise, that's not a reason to ignore UNIX philosopies that have served the FOSS world well for over half a century at this point.

Last but not least, there are any number of alternative solutions.
ublock blocks html element in a browser, dns blacklists stop resolution. they’re clearly not the same.
Why should any country allow Chinese industries when they haven't reciprocated the same for decades?

There is geniune hatred towards China and it's gonna increase no matter what
In that case the EU strategy is still awful, as they are essentially just sabotaging their own companies, which currently are competing in China. This just makes certain that EU companies will loose to Chinese competitors, just in a different market.

The right response isn't refusing the competition, the right response would be fighting China by creating an equal footing.

I think the situation has a huge asymmetry and the EU seems dedicated on eradicating the strengths of their own companies.
My understanding was that the parent recommends standardizing the native language throughout the world, rather than enforcing ESL.
> The OxHARP trial was a meticulously designed double-blind, placebo-controlled study involving 75 participants who had experienced a minor stroke and showed signs of mild to moderate small vessel disease.

I mean, I think if going for a walk were a magic bullet for stroke rehabilitation, someone would have noticed by now.
not mine, but love these two:
https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
> I’d never seen the word “delve” appear as much as it does now in anodyne, artificially generated content...

I have seen the word "Delve" a million times in the last decade. Granted, totally separate meaning and context.

For those of you who have played "Eve" you're probably gonna laugh right about now. For those of you who have not you might want to be a little worried.

Goonswarm is that you?
No, betting on the Scotland game to try and hedge expected profit loss doesn’t turn it into insurance. The payout isn’t tied to the thing you want to hedge, so it’s just hedging your bets (gambling payout vs beer sales).

Insurance might be a kind of “hedging” but in a limited way that makes it not gambling.
STL stands for Standard Template Library, which is an important piece of Generic Programming - it provides algorithms which are generic over the container types, so there's one library implementation of say sorting, and you can (but shouldn't) sort a linked list if you want to. When you see people asking why language X doesn't have "generics" this is the feature they're asking about - it's so fundamental now but in the 1990s it wasn't even obvious that you might want to write software this way. Generic Programming had been tried before, but the STL is an important idea and WG21 (the C++ Standards Committee) were persuaded to include it in the requirements for the new ISO standard.

However, in C++ because the STL is a big part of their Standard Library, and because Microsoft insists on naming their entire implementation of the Standard Library STL, it's usual to say STL to mean the entire stdlib, even though many parts of it aren't about generic programming at all.

So the STL is a crucial idea and inventing that was a tremendous accomplishment - but the C++ stdlib, which may be called "STL" and is in this article, is not a very good realisation of that idea. Indeed I'd argue the C++ programming language isn't a good realisation of that idea either - it was possible to write the STL for C++ and so that's what was done, but knowing this is a good idea you'd design the language differently. And people have.
My comment above about living in a fantasy was a reply to the root comment's notion that reading through RSS feed in the morning is a romantized, unachievable fantasy similar to a dad starting a day reading the newspaper (which is also not much of a fantasy as my dad has done that for decades).

So the morning routine I shared in the blog is the reality for me so I'm living that fantasy.
Actually you can't because there is a limit to resources in both time and money.
>Why should any country allow Chinese industries when they haven't reciprocated the same for decades?

What are you on about. EU car makers are currently competing heavily in China. China is VWs biggest market.

The situation is the exact reversal of what you portray.
Great list! Let’s add Euros and universal health care too!
My apologies I wasn't aware of the subtleties of the various e/ cults.
Google Chromium Review
Don’t Americans do:

MM-DD-YYYY?

So it would stand to reason that an American commenter may be meaning

YYYY-DD-MM

And guessing based on todays date, tell that to commenters who check this post in 6 months
Each gene therapy is a unique "medicine". There is little economy of scale, at least for the hardest part.
Nice work. But why isn't Docker supported as a runtime? Or is it?
This is the case in most of Europe. Another reason is that cars are required to have red reflectors at the back, but no reflectors at the front.
> Or do you expect the people in the article to just write the drivers for their own implants themselves?

No, but a community of volunteers might. ThreadX [0] is proof enough that an OSS community can keep a piece of software certified under strict security standards. I don't see why the same couldn't be achieved with software for medical devices.

[0] https://threadx.io/faq/#what-happens-with-the-existing-safet...
> I can trace all the way through multiple services easily on a simple detailed flame graph in our systems

I'm not sure what point is being made here. It's good that you can do that - but are you implying that that's not possible in an API-driven system?
Great writeup. Author writes they had problems with a FTDI chip. While this time it might be unrelated to purposely defective drivers, it's worth recalling what happened years ago when FTDI decided to fight against clones by hitting their users.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ftdi-admits-to-bricking-innoce...
Yes, you are hedging against financial loss. Most of the other stuff you describe, e.g. sentimental value of one painting vs another, are irrelevant to insurance. You pay a (relatively) small amount to eliminate the risk or mitigate the effect of getting a massive (specifically financial) loss.
Sex changes/gender transitions is an actual boring health problem. The inability to assume the correct gender for a trans person often leads to social rejection, violence, poverty, prostitution, murder, and suicide.
Actions typically consist of a series of small steps.

Given that LLMs are inaccurate around 5-10% of the time each step will compound the error rate until you are better off flipping a coin.
I think a more common use case than doing deploys by pushing to a different remote is to send git repo webhooks on PR merges to main to an API that has a deploy key and can fetch the repo itself.

This afaik is missing from most PaaS tools (CapRover excluded, but it has been illegally relicensed to non-open-source). Perhaps watchtower or something could replace the functionality?
Sure, but how would I teach my children English as a first language, when my English is only ESL. And even if I could, I would never do that, as a diversity in languages directly leads to a diversity in thought.
I like the theory the article presents as to why such peculiar language has turned out in AI output: If humans involved in the reinforcement learning part of AI training tend to favor certain expressions, these will become "baked in". Further, as to why these expressions are so peculiar, and so outside the statistical usage, it comes down to the trainers being "non-native": "Hern suggests that it’s a result of the AI monopolies outsourcing cheap RLHF tasks to the global South, hiring cut-price workers in Nigeria and Kenya to monitor and adjust the linguistic preferences."
China can afford short term to massively subsidize their auto industry if this means it will completely wreck the local industries in Europe and US. Because once an industry is wrecked, it's very expensive to unwreck it.
Do you target big projects with heterogeneoud team ?

Is that the problem it's trying to solve?
It's self limiting. Overpopulated communities simply stop having kids because the resources aren't there.

The problem is the delay. Europe is doing 4 day work weeks because the workforce does not match and some countries do 6 days because they have excess workforce. But workforce can be 20-30 years out of sync with the current state. It's why immigration/emigration is a good thing too.
That was my guess :-) But binary search doesn’t need explicit powers of two. I wonder if maybe the PDP10 is much faster at loops with explicit counters instead of comparing the search upper and lower bounds.
I tried to get into it many moons ago, and the guidelines were to start from something very simple and well documented, and build your skills from there. I still have the itch but lack the time :(
there have been discussions of potential national supported voting for Chinese and Russian pro posts, and downvoting of anti posts, but I don't remember if there were any substantive studies done.
First: ice is a great reflector. Second: you'd have to cover large areas, with unknown consequences.
> The only scenario [wargabl]

The situation is far more complex than that and is primarily rooted in issues with Chinese real estate and their abortive attempt at a services-based economy.
English is more likely than Mandarin, because lots of people (including the mainland Chinese working in sectors that interface with the outside world) can speak some English, but very few people outside China speak any Mandarin.

Nassim Taleb wrote about this in https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict....
Americans do mm/dd/yyyy, but never mm-dd-yyyy
In terms of application size, I think around 5MB is great since it provides more convenient GUI features.

Regarding CPU and memory usage, if you don't open the Tauri program window, its CPU and memory usage is negligible.

KeyEcho's usage scenario only involves opening the window for necessary settings. After closing the window (or starting in the background by default), all window resources will be released.
Jornali – Build a memory wall for your startup
Hello everyone,

I am working on Jornali, a platform that enables people to share memories on virtual memory walls
Users can either write or sketch a memory and the memories you share across walls are saved in your journal

Regards, Zain

www.jornali.com
Democracy can build high-speed rail across the whole nation but it can't build the souls required to take the train. At least the trains will be on time when their population strikes 0.
So the response of the EU is to make absolutely sure that EU car makers are wrecked?

Instead of fighting back and trying to make ground, the EU makes sure that their own companies loose China as a market.
I don't know but my first association was "pico-dokku"
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40572593 Arnold, his tongue in cheek (and channelling his inner GJC), suggests a tripartite division of maths according to the industrial form which supports the pure researches:

- Celestial Mechanics (support: the descendants of von Braun): dynamical systems, linear algebra, topology, variational calculus, symplectic geometry

- Cryptography (support: CIA, SVR, etc.): number theory, algebraic geometry over finite fields, algebra, combinatorics, and computers.

- Hydrodynamics (support: boomer builders): complex analysis, partial derivative eqn's, Lie groups/algebras, cohomology theory, HPC.

Might there be one small village of pure mathematicians still holding out against the industrial support? (resident druid: Dunforkix)

Lagniappe: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/apply
Floyd-Warshall CSV Generator
Yeah I’ve got about five ideas for refactors that will make my life noticeably better. I’ve been pondering some of them for more than a year, slowly improving the design, but I’m still waiting for the right time when the ROI is higher.
It'd be nice if it were 20-60$, but weren't USBee AX Pro more like $500 when they released them?
I am not sure I can follow.
Love the candor of the writeup, for example admitting that they are effectively double-dipping.

Though I think they are actually triple-dipping or even quadruple-dipping.

1-2. Net-metering and credits

3. Reduced contribution to infrastructure

There are times when their PV setup produces very little or no electricity at all. At those times, they are 100% reliant on the grid to supply them with all their electricity needs. A large part of the cost of electricity supply is the fixed cost of infrastructure, whether used or not, which is paid off by the variable supply of electricity. Since they are 100% reliant on the grid at least some time, they haven't reduced the need for the fixed-cost infrastructure, but have reduced their contribution to that infrastructure.

I guess this could be alleviated by capping the amount of electricity you are allowed to take from the grid?

4. Increased variability

The addition of variable suppliers like PV reduces grid stability and increases the requirements for and cost of measures to stabilize the grid. Battery backup could obviously alleviate this, but if not done carefully it could just stretch out the destabilizing events and then make those fewer events worse.

While I really, really like the idea of rooftop solar, (partial) energy independence, and a more distributed grid, I think we do have to figure these things out. I don't see how it makes sense at the moment.
Google Chromium Review Analysis
Optimizing the UI's CPU bound frame rate in Call of Duty [video]
Found the German.

On a serious note: compared to the other inconsistencies, this seems like a very minor one. If we wanted to standardize time, we should agree on ONE timezone across the world. But of course that seems almost impossible: Having to convince 8 billion people on a change that has little benefit in their everyday life.
Most of those problems in the US are caused by lifestyle, and can't really be changed without behavioral modification. And a lot of our health issues are a matter of poor access to healthcare.
There can't be fair competition with China as long China is a dictatorship with mass surveillance and poor workers' rights.
It's a good choice indeed. But it adds complexity. Maybe I will choose to do this in the future.
any idea when this will be useful? first heard about this years ago
I am fluent in one language and speak three others passably, and have order-a-beer/ask-for-a-toilet/get-directions ability in a few others. It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it? The one I am fluent in is not the language of any of my ancestors if I go back just a couple of generations. So what?

My children are natively fluent in two languages. Neither of their languages is a second language.

Which language should I tell them is their primary language?
Can you explain what you mean?

I fail to see the downside for EU manufacturers.
Open-source AI-powered transaction tracker
Hey everyone!

I’ve always struggled with tracking transactions, so I built an app to automate it. It converts currencies, assigns categories, and writes descriptions automatically. While building it, I found and added features to track recurring subscriptions and notify me two days before they occur.

The entire app was created using AI, as I had no frontend knowledge when I started. Now, it’s open-source for anyone to use or even build a startup with!

Code for frontend and backend here:
https://www.notion.so/dkorzhov/WalletWave-a2d42b3157604dce833539da26d2663f?pvs=4

By the way, if you want to somehow support this — I’ve launched this project on Product Hunt:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/walletwave
> There's no point in refactoring the whole thing

Deep architectural/design flaws in a codebase can't always be addressed using a series of small independent changes.
The euro was great for Germany. Others weren't that happy.
Here's a non-flat one:

https://imgur.com/a/7KANxOn

Very unlikely to occur in nature I guess :-)
I consider social media curation a problem in an of itself, I've no evidence, but consider it a driving force behind a lot of society's current problems. Too easy to filter bubble and manipulate the masses.
Sounds interesting! Is there any support for multi-node systems? Let's say I want to have an ingress Caddy proxy on one node, which reverse proxies to several backed APIs on other nodes - can this be done simply with Podman Quadlet?

Also, what is the localdev UX like? With Docker Swarm I can easily run very similar setups in dev, test and prod, and it works with multi-node setups, has support for secrets etc. But the lack of work going into Docker Swarm becomes more concerning as the years pass by.

Also, had no idea systemd-proxy was a thing - is there anything systemd doesn't have its tentacles into? :)
A List of LLM Products and Articles I went through
Page is invalid because it does not include the Mastodon logo.
For me, RSS is the solution to FOMO because I don't need to worry about missing new posts because some algorithm decided not to show them to me or because I didn't happen to see them during the short window they were visible in other feeds.
You’re changing the subject now. The TUE would be for the asthma medication, not the diuretic. She was below the limit for asthma medication, so didn’t need a TUE.

Edit: if you’re about to talk about how it affected the ruling for the asthma medication, then you’re just repeating the article and should just read that instead of arguing in the comments.
> nothing except facial flushing

What does this mean?
Adonis + Inertia or Laravel + Inertia
DYMO 1570: The Cadillac of Label Makers [video]
China will never let a foreign company win long term. Targeting the Chinese market is something for next quart not the next ten years.
Looks great, there doesn’t appear to be an associated browser extension. What are the thoughts on a browser extension alternative of this?
Yes, if version 1.3 of Command handler X was the active version when an event happened, then it needs to be replayed with that version, even if you’re now on v4.5.
You are missing the alternative cost, which is Europe is lacking quality manufacturing jobs and when there is no jobs, there is no reason why people should pursue education to do said jobs. In the long run it robs the countries of economic potential and future businesses won't even start due to lack of people capable of doing the needed jobs.

Chinese lax approach to human and employment rights is a form of subsidy that is countered by tariffs.
Solar is cheap. We are looking at an age of energy abundance.

EDIT: Since this year, batteries are also cheap.
Modern Dymos are plastic crap. Since all the design patents etc must have expired by now, I wonder if anyone is making copies of this original?
Yup! This house has little insulation. We got the downstairs windows double glazed after we moved in but upstairs is still single pane. One day we'll change that...
It's very bad for heating/cooling
"The children involved in the study were born with DFNB9, which accounts for between 2 and 8% of hereditary deafness. It is caused by mutations in the OTOF gene which prevent the production of functioning otoferlin protein, which can significantly reduce sound transmission from the inner ear hair cells to hearing nerves."

Just shows how much of our body functions we take for granted. Every function has a critical path that is so vulnerable. This is despite the human body having all kinds of redundancies. Our body is so resilient, yet at times, some of the mechanisms are so fragile.
China is VWs biggest market. BMW, Renault, Mercedes all have massive interests in China, which very quickly end the second China retaliates on the tariffs.

Currently EU manufacturers are competing in China. If a trade war happens that will end and both sides will retreat to their own respective regions, currently that is clearly worse for EU car makers. All German car makers oppose these tarrifs for exactly those reasons.
Having worked at a large world renowned genetics laboratory as an SWE I believe I can say that it is unlikely you will have the option of having any direct input into this kind of work, in that role.

That being said, there is a lot of things an SWE can do in a support role.

Some of the things I did were data processing pipelines (both automatic and human centric UI for phenotype gathering) and interconnected networks of scientific instruments, as well as some deployments of R and Python code.

Sure, your name wont show up along with hundreds of others in the Nature publications, but you will know that you contributed to the overall success. And it does feel good.
Did it happen yesterday?

Did it happen last month?

Did it happen last year?

I feel like that's the order I ask questions if wonder when something happened.
Underscore as a separator, YYYY_MM_DD:

1970_01_01
2024_06_09
2024_12_31
16383_12_31

Treated as base-10 number literal in some programming languages.

5 bits for DD [0, 31] + 4 bits for MM [0, 15] + 14 or more bits for year [0, 16_383] = 23 bits.
For podcasts: AntennaPod [0], for everything else: Feeder [1].

[0] https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod

[1] https://github.com/spacecowboy/Feeder
I use parental controls with time limits on myself and stash the code in an inconvenient location.

Works extremely well.
As a Swede it amazes me that some countries allow parking "in the wrong direction". I've never even thought about it, and I don't know if it's a written rule (I'm sure it is, just it;s been a long time since I got my license).