skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It probably doesn't help right now, but you should know you are not the only one in your situation. Perhaps it might help to write down your actual principles. Then compare that list with the real reasons you refuse some employment opportunities.

I think you have already listed one big reason that isn't a high-minded principle. You want to make money. There may be others.

It's always wonderful when you can make a lot of money doing things you love to do. It stinks when you have to choose between what you are exceptionally good at doing and what your principles allow.

If only somebody could figure out how the talents of all the people in your situation could be used to restore housing affordability. Would you take a 70% paycut and move to Nebraska if it allowed you to keep all your other principles?

As you say, kindness isn't hiring. I'd love to see an HN discussion of all the good causes that need founders. It would be wonderful to have some well known efforts where the underemployed could devote some energy while they licked their wounds. It might even be useful to have "Goodworks Volunteer" fill that gap in employment history on your resume.

How do we get a monthly "What good causes need volunteers?" post on HN?
Yes but it feels good
If by "just a couple years" you mean five years. There is no gas lighting here: I am directly blaming Node for hurting the uptake of ESM by not planning to switch to ESM-first (with CJS second) as part of the ESM support work, and I'm blaming Node even more for then also not starting that planning work when ESM in Node was considered mature enough to not live behind an experimental feature flag anymore.

Node was, from the get-go, strongly tied to V8's development roadmap. They (like everyone else in the JS language space at the time) were watching the ESM debate, and had every opportunity to plan for a "few years out" switchover, starting the moment TC39 accepted ESM into the official language spec, with V8 following suit.

They didn't, but thankfully it's never too late: Node should absolutely still go "we're finally deprecating CJS. You should use ESM, and for the next 2 years it's business as usual but after that we won't support CJS unless your project marks itself as such in package.json, and 2 years after that, we're removing CJS support entirely".
It was over $100/MB for RAM in 1987. The price was declining until about 1990, then froze at about $40/MB for many years do to cartel-like behavior, then plummeted when competition increased around 1995. I was there when the price of RAM dropped 90% in a single year.
that we probably do.

Neither of those planets are outliers though ? which is why they both sell in quantities in excess of million units ?
If you're EB, why replace a hydraulic bushing when you can wait, and replace it but also have to repair a bunch of damage and make yourself a nice big extra chunk of change off Uncle Sam?

If you're ship's captain...why not help secure a nice 'consulting' 'job' at EB after retiring from the navy by helping EB make millions, and count on your officers to not say a peep to fleet command that the mess was preventable?
Half of all bytes are illegal ASCII though.
As russian citizen I'm not that good expert on US, but I can be trusted talking about what Russia is.
I think better to Move with Step Authentication before even you trigger MFA. You give a try on sensfrx, castle and fingerprintJS and other.
I think most people find the Himalayas pretty special
Gotcha, thanks champ!
I don't understand why a touchscreen is necessary to make food to order?
Slightly off topic, but one of the coolest (to me) archaeological discoveries is from ~1700 BC, showing a calculation of sqrt(2) to the equivalent of six decimal places: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YBC_7289
For the ones doing the colonizing? Overwhelmingly yes. A good potion of the issues with colonizing is about how the colonizing nations end up extracting massive amounts of resources for their own benefit.
"finished" as in "totally free from bugs" is one thing, "finished" as in "feature complete and passes all known test cases, artificial and real world, known at the time" is another. As an industry we need to push the second notion as something someone can build and then set down. building a bridge instead of a steam engine locomotive. a bridge needs some maintenance and upkeep, yes, but after it's built, the team that built it moves on to another project. To contrast, a steam engine locomotor is an ongoing engineering project, which requires constant upkeep to keep the train moving. A SaaS company's backend is a steam engine. The Unix util "ls" is a bridge.
"it's just made me feel like the computer is actually working for and with me and even that alone can be enough to get me motivated and accomplish what I set out to do."

This is a great way to describe what I've been feeling / experiencing as well.
Even without an official confirmation whether it is indeed a genocide or not, there has been enough evidence of horrible crimes that should dissuade a company from operating in Israel. If you really want to work with talented (no doubt) Israeli researchers, just bring them over to the US or elsewhere.
OK but at the time it was literally an open research question: given two reals A, B is there always a rational Q such that QA=B? Number theory as such was still in its infancy but I think it's impressive that this was exactly the right question to ask and they understood how important it was.
Stem Degrees Not Worth Effort, Expense
Thanks Harrison. LangGraph (eg graph theory + Networkx) is the correct implementation of multi-agent frameworks, though it is looking further into, and anticipating a future, then where most GPT/agent deployments are at.

And while structured output and tool calling are good, from client feedback, I'm seeing more of a need for different types of composable agents other then the default ReAct, which has distinct limitations and performs poorly in many scenarios. Reflection/Reflextion are really good, REWOO or Plan/Execute as well.

Different agents for different situations...
I think it's just meant to be a more easy-to-grok illustration of how big this thing is. Nobody's truly planning on cramming 54 people into one of these in orbit, barring an extreme Seven Eves-style emergency.
True, I just tried it for generating a book summary, and Sonnet 3.5 was very bad. GPT-4o is equally bad at that , gpt-4-turbo is great.
totally agree on not hiding prompts, and have tried to stop doing that as much as possible in LangChain and are not doing that at all in LangGraph

thanks for the thoughts, appreciate it
Fun fact: the Windows 3.1 minesweeper had a cheat code! Typing:

x y z z y S-Return

would cause the top left pixel of the screen to change color depending on whether the cursor was over a safe square or a bomb. Since you could plant flags before the timer started, it was possible to get rather unrealistic times.
Bet you could fit even more in if you blend them first
Maybe not turning the frogs gay, but possibly messing with our metabolism and contributing to the epidemic of obesity.
EU: "Don't threaten us with a good time."
The multi-dimensional nature of this problem makes it extremely fascinating to me, even twenty years into my career.

There's a certain dopamine hit you get for voluntarily trudging into the trough of despair, pushing the Sisphyean boulder of better design uphill in the optimistic belief that you can do better, and then actually arriving at something slightly better.

Way more fun than conceptualizing programming as duct-taping libraries, frameworks, and best practices together.
Fortunately it's a temporal state, otherwise there's risk of entering the Dunning-Kruger effect.

"You did awesome, but don't let it go to your head."
I would speculate that OpenAI is in a phase where speed of delivery is make-or-break, and any bloat would be a distraction. I bet they're extremely deliberate in their acquisitions.
LLMs run the risk of being captured by black box products that advertise themselves as being easy for non-tech people to use.

That doesn't make them a bad skill to have in ones toolbelt. Just keep in mind that companies love tech without techies and LLMs could be one of those tools where usage is bimodally distributed, with hardcore experts on one side building the tooling, and domain experts on the other side using the tooling; which may not leave much space in the middle-ground for someone knows a little bit of both sides.
> Their organizations hemorrhage the very people they need to help them compete against aggressive adversaries or competitors who have them in their sights.

Govt is a monopoly. So it can't be bothered.

(The org. in charge of preventing monopolies is a monopoly.)
When you're forced to piss in plastic bottles and wear diapers to work because the time it takes to walk to a bathroom and back can cost you your job, you're not going to go out of your way to find the right-sized box for every item.

Amazon employees are just scrambling to meet inhumane and unrealistic metrics set and enforced by assholes and algorithms that have zero concern for human rights, health, or dignity.
The main things I want to know (and what I ask when the "Do you have any questions for me?" question comes in an interview) is: what is the day-to-day process here? How do you do issue tracking, version control, code review, etc.? How are tasks assigned?

That sort of thing. Those are far from the only things that I want to know, but those are the things that I usually can't find out through independent research.

I do ask this in all interview rounds, but I only really pay close attention when I'm asking this of the working devs themselves.
Fastly is still out of budget for hobbyists who want to run their logic at the edge. For comparison, Cloudflare Workers starts at $5/month. It would be nice if Fastly could make the stuff that’s only free for 30 days available at a similar price point — jumping straight to $50/month is bit much.
Wait until you get a load of vanadium-boride/air batteries. 27,000Wh/kg. Stuff is like electrochemical TNT
Ongoing discussion (18 points, 19 minutes ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40751339
Other than the egregiousness of 2,510 McNugget meal orders, I often find that human order takers are not particularly accurate either.
I was working as a software engineer in finance (high-frequency trading, etc).

When COVID started, I wanted to do something about it, so I joined a PhD program in medicine. Now I work as a HPC software engineer in neuroscience.
The worst I experienced in this direction was also on a consumer device about 15 years ago. Performance was degraded and we couldn't explain it. A team of 5 of us was assembled to figure it out.

We spent over three months on it before finding a root cause. It was over two months before we could even understand how to measure it - we were seeing parts of the automated overnight test suite run taking longer, but every night it would be different tests that were slow. A key finding was that almost everything was slow on some boots of the device and fast on other boots of the device, and there was a reboot before each test was run. Doing some manual testing showed it being close to a 50% chance of a boot leading to slowness. Now what?

I eventually got frustrated and took the brute force / mindless approach... binary search over commits. Unfortunately, that wasn't easy because our build was 45-60 minutes, and then there was a heavily manual installation process that took 10-20 minutes, followed by several reboots to see if anything was slow. And there were several thousand commits since the last known good build (the previously shipped version of the device). The build/install/testing process was not easily automated, and we were not on git, otherwise using git-bisect would have been nice. Instead, I spent weeks doing the binary search manually.

That yielded the offending commit. The problem was that it was a massive commit (tens of thousands of lines of code) from a group in another part of the company. It was a snapshot of all of their development over the course of a couple of years. The commit message, and the authors, stated that the commit was a no-op with everything behind a disabled feature flag.

So now it was onto code level binary search. Keep deleting about half of the code in the commit, in this case by chunks that are intended to be inactive. After eventually deleting all the inactive code, there were still a few dozen lines of changes in a Linux subsystem that did window compositing. Those lines of code were all quite interdependent, so it was hard to delete much and keep things functional, so now on to walking through code. At least I could use my brain again!

Using the clue that the problem was happening about half the time and given that this code was in C, I started looking for uninitialized booleans. Sure enough, there was one called something like `enable_transparency`. Disabled code was setting it to `true`, but nothing was setting it to `false` when their system was disabled. Before their commit, there was no variable - `false` was being passed into the initializer call directly. Adding `= false` to the declaration was the fix.

So, well over a year of engineering hours spent to figure out the issue. The upside is that some people on the team didn't know how to proceed, so they spent their time speeding up random things that were slow. So the device ended up being noticeably faster when we were done. But it was pretty stressful as we were closing in on our launch date with little visibility into whether we'd figure it out or not.
Glad to hear that- sounds like I should give LangGraph a try after all
There are recent papers based on diffusion that perform quite well. Here's an example of a recent paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.01661. I am also working on ML-based CO. My approach has a close 1% gap on hard instances with 800-1200 nodes and less than 0.1% for 200-300 nodes on Maximum Cut, Minimum Independent Set, and Maximum Clique problems. I think these are very promising times for neural network-based discrete optimization.
This is one of a slew of articles containing the following claims:

* magnet material was created used a new "AI platform"

* development process is 200x faster

* (raw ?) material costs are down to 50%

* carbon material emissions down to 70%

What is not said:

* Any kind of detail about the magnet material or material performance

Overall they seem much more intent on selling their "innovative, new AI material design process" than the material process

END_OF_RANT
Given the name I was under the impression that this would be a rotating module to create artificial gravity, but it seems instead it is just a large capsule.
How long retired? Things have gone in what can only be described as an.. incomprehensible unfathomable direction in the last decade or so. Parent post is not surprising in the least.

Politics is seeping where it doesn't belong.

I am very worried.
A lot of times, the antivirus is part of the crapware that comes with a new windows computer. After a month of free tryal, it start shiwing scarry reminders. And as John reminds us, it may be difficult to uninstall https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg
> it is only possible to describe 0% of the rational numbers between 0 and 1 with text

It is possible to describe 100% of the rational numbers with text. You describe the numerator, make a space, then describe the denominator. The length of the text document depends on the number described and can be arbitrarily long.
There is a love/hate relationship with most of those old text adventures. They could make an entire world with just a handful of words and fill them with clever puzzles to delight the users.

But then the parser would be willfully obtuse and most of the gameplay would be figuring out the exact combination of commands to unlock the next snippit of the story. Sometimes requiring the player to telepathically connect with the developer to figure out precisely what phrasing he intended.

You see a special looking rock on the ground.

> PICK UP THE ROCK

Huh?

> PICK UP ROCK

Huh?

> PICK UP SPECIAL ROCK

Huh?

> PICK UP THE SPECIAL ROCK

You pick up the rock, it feels special in your hands, you are certain it will be important sometime later.

> PUT ROCK IN POCKET

Huh?

> PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN POCKET

Huh?

> PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET

I can't do that.

> OPEN POCKET

Huh?

> OPEN MY POCKET

You open your pocket.

> PUT SPECIAL ROCK IN MY POCKET

You safely store the rock.

It is no mystery why graphical adventure games basically wiped out the text adventure games.
Mostly agree, but this

> aging manager suffering from Peter Principle, partly it’s the fear of negative pushback from senior leadership

is not typically the reason, in my experience. I've seen a lack of full comprehension on the part of the team pushing the innovation as to the actual benefit and cost of the innovation to all the affected teams. And as a result, the lack of a plan to address those issues...

I've seen a lot of incomplete innovations, where the benefit is real and useful, but the plan leaves various concerns of different teams unaddressed -- no doubt due to the innovation team being unaware. Strangely, the innovation team often wants to push forward anyway, which is not good since the plan is basically unworkable with critical issues unresolved (I can tell they kind of think the issues aren't critical but only because they don't understand them -- leading with ignorance when the processes and products actually have to work at the end is always doomed to fail.)

The most common way plans are incomplete that I've seen is when they don't account for the schedule. The plan will take X time away from other work to implement, but the schedule for delivery of that other work isn't moved back X, nor are there other compensating measures. That's an unworkable plan, and any half-decent manager will push back on it.

(Schedule impact is usually a tough one... at least at larger places, in my experience, the high-level delivery schedule is negotiated at a high level, and it hard to change for political reasons. That means time for any innovation plans has to be included from the start. Yet slack in any schedule tends to get gobbled up at the team level or below, addressing their concerns -- who doesn't have tons of technical debt they are dying to resolve? There's a way to handle this, but it has to be planned for and done at a high level, and done correctly. The fruits of any innovation team that doesn't have this are gong to be minimal.)
> Maybe it's a bad analogy given the complexity of a rocket launch, but I always think about European exploration of the North Atlantic. Huge risk and loss of life, but the winners built empires on those achievements.

> So yes, I agree that at some point you need to launch the thing.

This comment sounds an awful lot like you think the genocide of indigenous peoples is justified by the fact that the winners built empires, but I'd like to assume you intended to say something better. If you did intend to say something better, please clarify.
There is an old saying: US innovates, China replicates and EU regulates.
Family whose roof was damaged by space debris files claims against NASA
> so, doctrine is best, because everyone is used to being told what to do?

I think they mean doctrine as in military doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_doctrine), which is a somewhat different idea than, say, religious doctrine. Religious doctrine can easily get rigid and legalistic, and compliance with it can become an end unto itself. Military doctrine is something a military would use in order to make the organization effective at a certain kind of task or endeavor.
I have seen this multiple times before. Management chastising good work because some externality of that work shows up on a graph that they have to talk about at some weekly meeting. It doesn't even have to make the graph look bad, just stick out.
Slashing $10k+ on our AWS Bill at Levels.fyi
I also have my criticisms of LangChain, but this feels mean-spirited towards devs that I think are honestly trying and didn't charge anything to use.
For polynomials, it's kind of trivial that taylor series work. It's sort of magical in the case of sine and cosine and the exponential function, but that's more a case, i think, of the "magical" properties of those functions than the taylor series. In the general case, taylor series only approximate a function around a point and it's not even guaranteed to do it very well or very far from that point.
That was such a great game but sadly it seemed to fizzle out.
There were lots of neat exploits which made it even better.
I also liked the communication style, with pre canned message you could give with certain key combos.
Good news is, if the imitator is smart enough, they can become experts...

(see "Ripley Underground" by Patricia Highsmith for more info...)

:)
So what makes sense to you is adding the additional layer of transforming the JSON data into HTML from an API - all of which are almost always in the end tailor made for the app anyway - using a significant chunk of code within a completely separate and bloated ecosystem and in a different language than what the server uses?

A bonus "feature" of this, and a very important one, is that this now also requires different specializations on your team and the personnel costs and communication overhead that comes with that. Great, now adding simple CRUD functionality to a website is a two week project syncing between backenders and frontenders, for something that someone wanting to scratch their own itch could hammer out independently in a single day back in the SSR days.
Their kiosk UI is unusually poorly designed. It takes more than a dozen clicks to buy what used to be "I'd like a number two with a Coke" at the counter.

Their old number 1/number 2/etc was incredibly efficient and swept through the entire fast food industry.

Has anyone seen a report or analysis or similar on why they abandoned that incredibly fast and effective system and replaced it with a purchase UX (both kiosk and at the counter signage) which looks pretty incompetent to the casual observer.
What important discoveries have you made using your supposedly "more rigorous" mathematics?
Tbh, idk. Idk even what skills are the most in-demand right now, because everything is getting constantly and rapidly disrupted. Most likely in the next 10 years, skills which will be most demanded are skills which won't be easily replicated by AI.
I guess, it’s hard to even imagine a super intelligence, would be coding. Who knows what would be going on. It really is sci-fi.
Air Taxi Network in the San Francisco Bay Area
50% of the time doing something that has a one percent chance of killing you 69 times will kill you
The regulations around AI in the European Union are not well formed. The EU has shown that they will regulate things years later and impose massive fines and business costs. The EU also happens to be Apple’s least profitable market, and one that isn’t going to be growing over the next two decades. There’s just no reason to get involved over there. It’s not worth the risk.
I'm Starting a New Company
How do people survive with Linux and Windows.
I spend many years till couple of months before the invasion in Ukraine. I have never met someone who doesnt speak russian. Only the elderly people have sometimes a mixed slang between russian and ukrainian. But other than that everyone speaks it. There are some hardcore nationalists connected to Bandera (pro nazi group) that refuse to speak russian, but remaining people dont care and speak both.
Troubleshooting vendor WCF SDK version mismatch was not fun, and the guy who had to reverse engineer it to attempt a .NET Core port probably lost a few years off his lifespan (this was before CoreWCF was a thing).

When people bash gRPC today, they don't know of the horrors of the past.