skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a somewhat similar experience. I was working at my long-time dream employer. They say never meet your heroes and all that.

I had been working on two related projects and was really struggling because the company wanted "something different" than the industry norm. I could please one stakeholder but not another, and it went on like that for awhile. To this day I can't fathom why the various managers involved couldn't meet with _one another_ to sort out their creative differences, but they didn't. I was stuck trying to implement for competing aims that seemed more and more incompatible.

I couldn't see the forest for the trees because all of that was additional to my core work.

So, I didn't see a PIP coming. Got called into an unscheduled meeting one Friday. My boss says "hey didn't we have a meeting this afternoon? Let's hop on Zoom." It was like 4:30 PM and we absolutely didn't have a meeting scheduled. I got told I was being put on a PIP because my project wasn't delivering.

Created a game plan and was told we'd do check-ins in writing (via email) and a Zoom each week until "things were back on track." I busted my ass afresh and I sent a start-of-week email with my agenda for the week, an end-of-week check-in to compare my agenda to work completed, and to schedule a call.

What I absolutely should have seen coming was that I was going to be terminated. I should have seen that coming because I got not a single reply to the check-in emails I sent. I thought the Zoom calls sufficed. Each week I was told "hey, yeah, I saw that, great work! No notes!" But any time I tried to record the call I was admonished; it was clear I could either record the call or we could have the status meeting.

And then they laid a bunch of my team off, and reposted what I'd been doing as a new role. I didn't see it coming at all. Maybe I should have. My boss even said "some people see this coming," and told me it wasn't about performance. I was left hurt and confused. I had just gotten acknowledged for delivering very well on my core KPIs at an all-hands meeting the month prior.

Never meet your heroes, they say.
"Learn to love the journey" but I've got a broken nose
Whenever I speak to folks building in the tech space, whether they are indie hackers or venture-backed startup founders, I find the ones who make it say the same thing: "If I knew how hard it would be, I would never have done it." I feel that. You're supposed to enjoy the journey more than the end goal, but what if the path is horrible? For me, I seem to have stumbled into a stubborn mindset. It has been five years, and this is my third startup. The last two were venture-backed; this one hasn't raised money yet. I don't enjoy the failure. It creates a numb, heavy feeling in my forehead (hopefully not a sign of something else) that doesn't go away until I get a small win. Then the next day, it's back. The failures heavily outweigh the wins in terms of quantity. But here I am, back in front of the laptop, in front of my code editor, in front of LinkedIn. Writing code, looking for customers, talking to customers. You constantly hear that if you want money, then just get a job, but that is only the case for the elite. For someone with an unconventional background, this is the only way to create a life-changing outcome. So here I am, trying to love the journey, but my nose is bleeding.
Any interest in getting this dataset on Snowflake too?

(I run a Snowflake funded data provider on Snowflake marketplace)
Françoise Hardy Has Died
Nice. I made https://xclippy.com which has same the features.
Are these two example well chosen? Seems to me there has been plenty of entrepreneurship in food. So many new companies started in the past perhaps 20 years, and many now surprisingly large.

And medecine overall (drugs, machines, care, insurance, tests, prevention) has been considered a field with good future prospects for a long time - worthy of investing.
This is awesome, and I feel that this is indeed Alfred's Clipboard Manager on steroids. You did mention trying out Alfred. Without installing ClipBook but reading up on the features, what is missing from Alfred?

Alfred's Clipboard Manager is pretty navigable with the Keyboard; the history is as much as there (I don't know about being infinite), and I can also see the preview, etc.

I used to have Clipboard managers, but with Alfred + Powerpack, I did away with another program running on the menubar/background.

Edit/Update: I just checked Alfred and I can keep plain text, images, files list, for 3 months.
> keep it isolated to this comment

Thoughtful, I suppose. Entirely futile, however, as you can see.
> I plugged in my phone to the USB-C dock cable on the meeting room table

This was allowed? I don't think I have ever worked somewhere where plugging company devices to anything other than other company hardware was allowed, for security purposes.
/about

"Techinal details"

fyi
One of the first "hacker" breakthroughs in my first startup was due to following citations on a paper kind of related to my problem until I got to a paper from '61 implementing the exact algorithm I was needing at the time. Numerical approximations to a gnarly probabilistic problem that would make any engineer proud. Worked like a charm and, in a hardware thousands of times faster than it was designed to run, it was crazy efficient.
This comments belongs in a time capsule.

Microsoft was a breakup risk back when all that existed were computers and they had 95+% market share.
Not likely.

Have you seen AI code review tools? They are just as bad as any other AI products - it has a similar chance of fixing a defect or introducing a new one.
It feels like I am always peddling Lyn Alden on macro questions. One of Lyn's recent public articles analyses long term returns and argues that most investments suck, and a few superachievers pull up the averages.

So Apples and Nvidias eventually rotate out of the return engines club and are replaced by next few champions; but not a broad group.
To this point I just want to have a way to block all Musk related news from my doom scrolling time. I just can't see any meaningful value in these news anymore.
Some early results for feed reader behavior monitoring
Orwell was a democratic socialist, not a Trotskyist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_influences_on_Tolkien

But even as d'Herbinville shimmered he fired his pistol, and the shot lashed forward and laced about the wizard's entrails, puncturing his peritoneum. He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the earth, and slid into the abyss. 'Conjugate, you fools!' he cried, and lost consciousness.

===

"So, you see," said the mathematician, "the individual mathematician is just the hyle, and it is our devotion to structure which gives us the morphe, by which we turn coffee into theorems."

"But then," queried the physicist, "doesn't conservation of truth imply that by time reversal there are also anti-mathematicians, who turn cotheorems into fee?"

"Yes," interjected the theoretical physicist, "and as mathematicians (like electrons) and anti-mathematicians are all isomorphic, we can even imagine that there is only a single mathematical genius, and when we appear to have many gifted mathematicians with space-like separation, it is because they are merely reflecting the multiple intersections that a single chain of mathematicians (taking the anti- into the scalar coefficient) may have with our current instant."
The guy radiates sleaze. Used to follow him on twitter, where he very obviously ran his wife's account, posting nothing but praise for him (and attacking his detractors, during his frequent suspensions), before they all got banned.
Can't say I agree. I also remember the late 80s and early 90s and PCs were simply not well equipped to run video games. Home computers that did run video games had special hardware dedicated for it, like the Commodore 64, the MSX, and the ZX Spectrum, but PCs weren't geared for games.

In fact, another one of Carmack's contributions to PC gaming was porting Super Mario 3 to the PC and demoing it to Nintendo as a proof of concept for smooth pixel sized scrolling, which was something that PCs were very poor at. His approach was to basically do a graphical diff frame by frame and only render the parts of the screen that changed, whereas all the other home computers I mentioned and even gaming consoles like the NES and Sega Master System had dedicated hardware for scrolling sprites.

Nintendo did not go forward with Carmack's proposal, wanting to keep their games exclusive to their own platform, but Carmack and id Software did manage to use that technology to develop Commander Keen. Prior to Commander Keen there were maybe 3-4 PC games that had any kind of pixel scrolling whatsoever and it was fairly limited.
> Give me six billion dollars and I'll also "build" a space company

You're off by an order of magnitude on the start-up capital SpaceX drew, and that almost exclusively from Musk.
Related:

The genius of binary space partitioning in Doom (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33692947 - Nov 2022 (159 comments)

Using Binary Space Partitioning in Doom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21906051 - Dec 2019 (8 comments)

How Much of a Genius-Level Move Was Using Binary Space Partitioning in Doom? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21467817 - Nov 2019 (6 comments)
> Now, is it 10k examples? No, but I think it was on the order of hundreds, if not thousands.

I have kids so I'm presuming I'm allowed to have an opinion here.

This is ignoring the fact that babies are not just learning labels, they're learning the whole of language, motion planning, sensory processing, etc.

Once they have the basics down concept acquisition time shrinks rapidly and kids can easily learn their new favorite animal in as little as a single example.

Compare this to LLMs which can one-shot certain tasks, but only if they have essentially already memorized enough information to know about that task. It gives the illusion that these models are learning like children do, when in reality they are not even entirely capable of learning novel concepts.

Beyond just learning a new animal, humans are able to learn entirely new systems of reasoning in surprisingly few examples (though it does take quite a bit of time to process them). How many homework questions did your entire calc 1 class have? I'm guessing less than 100 and (hopefully) you successfully learned differential calculus.
It doesn't matter. There are several issues:

1) Insurance is structured to be affordable to everyone by banning discrimination. Young, healthy people subsidize old, sick people. That's okay.

2) No one is banning free speech. People are banning specific types of decision-making based on free speech.

3) Speech here isn't free. See HIPAA. It's okay -- and even important -- to protect privacy. See also FERPA, RFPA, etc.

I don't feel bad having my interest rates a little bit higher right now, in return for not having them go up if I have a horrific medical expense later. I don't think that should be factored.

This is not a debt people choose.
Those computers were designed by International Business Machines corporation.

The fact that they could run games was great for a lot of us. But they weren't designed to do it.
For Crash Bandicoot (1996), Naughty Dog sidestepped the entire VSD performance problem. Since the camera is on rails and only moves forward and back, they pre-calculated the visibility for every position and stored it in the game's data. That meant no visibility calculation needed in real time at all, and they could do it per-pixel. As a result of that and some other brilliant tricks, they were able achieve probably the best graphics on Playstation.
The less people communicate, the more misunderstandings and animosities there will be which will ultimately lead to Many Bad Things(tm).

Recently, people are greatly incentivized to join a group and excommunicate those outside of it. This is a problem if it goes beyond superficial things like Windows vs. Linux, into things like culture and politics.

I'm surprised and saddened this needs to be explicitly stated here of all places.
Blame the people constantly giving phonies like this money. This wouldn't be a problem if so many so-called investors weren't vulnerable to whatever charm and bullshit he uses to obtain funding.

Why not grift? That's what is massively rewarded! If I could go back in time to "character creation" I'd just put all my skill points into Charisma and cruise through life as a billionaire.
Hah. My toddler gladly calls her former walking aid toy a "lawn mower". Random toys become pie and cakes she brings to us to eat.
The BigQuery dataset is entirely 3rd party, based on the public HN data (presumably via the HN Firebase API - https://github.com/HackerNews/API), so anyone is free to do this.
> Ah yes, you only need... an entire browser to access it, so much better!

electron is basically a browser wrapper in this case so yeah this is just skipping an unnecessary dependency.

not everybody uses obsidian. everybody has a browser.
I thought Quicksilver was older, but you're correct, LB goes back to NS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaunchBar#History

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(software)#History
I'd expect the change-up to be an equally-as-interesting subject for a physics analysis.
Please Stop Putting All Your CICD Logic in YAML
I strongly disagree. My expectation of what’s on my screen is that it’s ephemeral unless I take a screen shot.

Here’s an example. I always use a random password when creating accounts for (eg) databases, but not every UI supports this, so I have a little shell script that generates one. I then copy and paste it from the terminal. Once I close the terminal window and copy something else, that password is stored only once.

With recall, it’s now stored permanently. Someone who gets access to my screen history is a step closer to getting into my stuff.

Of course there are workarounds. But the expectation I have around how my screen work informs the actions I take on it.

Here’s another example. I recently clicked on a link from HN and ended up on a page containing explicit images. At work. As soon as I realised what I was looking at, I clicked away.

How long until my visual history is to be interrogated, characterised, and used to find me guilty of looking at inappropriate material in the workplace? Such a system is not going to care about my intentions. Even if I’m not disciplined, I’d certainly be embarrassed.
I support this for medical debt.

I don't think this is the cure for student loans, though.

The #1 reform student loans need is to be dischargeable through bankruptcy. There's a long list after that.

Credit records doesn't make the list for student loan reform to me. Credit records should be about choices, which student loans are, and which medical expenses are not.

The cliche about $200k debt for a liberal arts degree is perhaps an exaggeration, but the core of student loan reforms should be on realigning incentives to make sure the ROI is positive.
https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/never-enough-dismant...
An LLM-Based Recommender System Environment
A bunch of kids tragically died last month in baja doing this trip but with cell phones. Mexico is not the same as back in the 70s whatever some boneheaded people on this form may say about risks.

Safe to say i wouldn't send me kids to mexico on a surf trip without a cell phone.
Wow. Imagine peddling this AI generated shit not being the worst thing about someone.
Java 21 can't have things that Kotlin doesn't have, because you can call any Java method from Kotlin.

On the other hand, Kotlin can target native, JS, and WASM platforms as well as the JVM, which is something Java does not do (barring alternative VMs like Graal).
Lately, with all this talk of natural-language-as-programming-language, I've tried reflecting on my own code and seeing how I might convey the same intent, but in English.

It's made me realize that it's usually the rule that intent at least feels easier to convey through code rather than through natural language. This is especially true if I'm trying to perform some complex mathematical task that's geometric in nature. Put another way, it's probably easier to understand how poisson disc sampling works if you saw the code for it, vs if you read the actual paper, especially if the code had comments providing additional context for different blocks of code. Doesn't help that the paper uses complex mathematical terminology, whereas the code, at worst, might have very terse variable names

And yet, I think a better example might be found in markup languages like HTML. Trying to convey the layout of a webpage using ONLY natural language seems really hard compared to using a markup language.
Love that the app displays shortcuts on the lower left.
Why I use Maccy:
-Handles images
-Removes formatting
-Has shortcuts
-Offers search
-Is installed with Homebrew

I often copy huge (+70000) rows of excel sheets. Makes Maccy sluggish. Superlarge clipboard entries I’d like to purge somehow. After X mins if larger than Y?
Lest we forget, the Soviet Union did a great deal to allow WW2 to happen in the first place, and fought as an ally of the Nazis initially - and remained friendly and economically supportive all the way up to the German invasion. Orwell was absolutely correct to treat that regime nearly as bad as the Nazis.
> I think every one of us is better off for tesla, neuralink, spacex and even the boring company and paypal.

None of those make me better off in any way. Some (neuralink, the boring company) have never made anyone better off except maybe in some pilot program.
I use Flameshot on Linux, and I've found that Shottr works great on macOS.
I think this doesnt really add up. Cause as soon as the US would invaded Russia, not only would Russia nuke the invading armies. They would very probably also start nuking command infrastructure. Which might or might not trigger the MADs doctrine.
Related ongoing thread:

Francois Chollet: OpenAI has set back the progress towards AGI by 5-10 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40652818 - June 2024 (5 comments)
Piping a screenshot to tesseract seems easy, a quick search shows a plugin available to do so and no shortage of scripts.
Related ongoing thread:

ARC Prize – a $1M+ competition towards open AGI progress - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40648960 - June 2024 (75 comments)
> Human journalists have a horrible track record

Do they ? Would like to see some statistics on this.

Given that journalism produces a lot of content each day and majority is fine.
Send me an email - address in my profile - I'd be interested to discuss with you https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andrewstuart
The thing is you can learn a lot with a bootable FreeBSD usb, an old PC and a copy of the "Absolute FreeBSD" or the equivalent for Linux. I strongly believe that anyone who is not willing to put in the time to learn those stuff won't be able to do anything custom with computers. Shortcut has been there for years now and most people haven't touch it. Many only learn a few actions that apps provide and are content. Their phone are mostly for the things they replace (flashlight, camera, landline, magazines, tv,..). Computing is not one of these. Even taking the time to properly learn Word and Excel is no longer a thing.

Anything LLM can do locally, you can do it better with another, less demanding tool. And what they help with, it would be faster to just learn how to do it.
Interesting (snirnktstsk)
IIRC, both the Jedi engine (1995, Dark Forces) [1] and the Build engine (1995, Duke Nukem 3D) [2] which were of the same era used "sectors" rather than BSP trees for resolving visibility. Basically, it would traverse a graph as rays exited one sector and entered a neighboring sector. The approach is very much akin to walks through tet meshes in modern science apps.

In ray tracing, there are three commonly used spatial acceleration structures these days: grids, binary space partitions, and bounding volume hierarchies. Any one of those might have worked for Doom.

Though this post mentions marching through grids (as in Wolfenstein 3D) as not working for the arbitrarily positioned and angled walls, the usual way of using grids for ray tracing is to have each grid cell hold a list of the primitives that overlap it (many-to-many). Then you march the ray through the grid and test the ray against the list of primitives for each cell. You'd often use "mailboxing" (i.e., tiny LRU) to prevent retesting the same primitives over and over, since adjacent grid cells would often share primitives.

So basically extending the Wolfenstein 3D grid approach to Doom would have mean voxelizing the map to get lists of candidate walls for each cell, but testing the rays against the walls themselves (rather than say, the voxels themselves like in Minecraft).

I'm not sure what the tradeoffs for memory or performance on the 386s of the time would have been, however. But I think it's clear that while BSPs were a clever solution, they weren't the only possible choice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_(game_engine)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_(game_engine)
> The fact they are so convincing at it is a different, but definitely new and horrific problem on its own.

I tried one to help me get the syntax right for the config file for a program. It started by generating a config file for the latest version and not the old one I was using, but once I told it that, it fixed that convincingly and spit out a config file that looked like it was for my version.

However, the reason I asked for help was that the feature was very badly documented, and yet ChatGPT happily invented syntax for the thing I was having problems with. And every time I told it that it didn't look quite right, it confidently invented new syntax for the feature. Everything it made up looked pretty damn convincing, if I had designed the config file format I could have gone with either of those suggestions, but they were all wrong, as evidenced by the config file validator in the program.

At least Stack Overflow had comments and votes that helped you gauge the usefulness of the answer. These glorified toasters have neither.
This works on a Chromecast
That's not really true. The era of IBM designing computers was like the 8086 era. Clones were already dominant by the time the 286 came out, and Doom came out about half a year after the Pentium, or 586. That was very far into the era of "IBM compatible" machines being gaming machines.

There's more than a decade gap between "IBM compatible" clones taking over, and Doom coming out.
Medical debt already isn't really subject to usual incentives because people rather not die.
> Some of the ideas he partially helped popularize like the concept of language shaping how we think has been pseudo-scientific nonsense that is still actively harming society today. Except instead of being applied by authoritarian regimes it is political activists that waste their energy on useless battles trying to police language. The childish idea that we could change society by changing how we speak is just too tempting .

You're probably reversing cause and effect on this one. Orwell would have included Newspeak because he saw how other people were using it. H is reflecting reality, not leading it. Trying to control the linguistic parameters of the debate is just part of any argument. Political activists do like to take it into the realm of the silly it isn't just them doing it.