skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We Know What Turned on the Lights at the Dawn of Time
LOC in Lisp multiplied by ARR
> [...] and their inter-comparisons using clocks onboard orbiters at relatively stable Lagrange points as time transfer links is crucial for establishing reliable communications infrastructure.
I don't think you understand that a lot of water usage in the southwest is not paid for at all.

In the village where I live in rural New Mexico, at least 30% of the population here have private wells and pay nothing for water at all (other than pump energy costs and well maintanance costs). Ranchers to the south of the village pump their own water and use it to irrigate alfalfa fields without paying anyone anything at all.

The reason water is cheap here is because of the historical and legal situation. If water was managed here as it is east of the Mississippi, where it is considered exclusively a public resource, then water supply systems would be able to charge prices more like those found in the east. But because "water rights" are bound up with "land rights", there is no way currently to do politically-controlled water pricing outside of city water systems.

And yes, agriculture in this part of the world uses 75% or more of all the water that falls or flows through the land, and if that wasn't here, water would not be much of an issue. I advocate locally for changes in how agriculture is done here, and write articles for hyperlocal media here to raise awareness of this issue.

But for now agriculture is here, using water wastefully and substantially, and that means that in effect the water supply is severely limited to the point that local jurisdictions will pay farmers to not use water that they have rights to.

I've lived in Israel (Rehovot). The Negev is a broadly similar climate (though much lower in elevation) as southern New Mexico and northern Israel is very similar to northern New Mexico. The Israelis are world leaders in the use of desalination, an option that makes no real sense for most of the US southwest (southern CA would be the obvious exception). This makes a significant difference to water availability both for agriculture and residential use in Israel.
I think this is too strong. If art has no inherent meaning, you can't say that it's not making a political statement, only that whether it's making a political statment or not is undefined.

Otherwise, saying that something is not making a political statement is actually a very strong political statement in itself (e.g. things which are "not political" can't be negotiated or changed).
Robert Hermann (Mathematician)
> A number of those issues are present even without subscriptions. For example, let's say you take it back to 2003, and buy Photoshop outright instead of subscribe. $700 piece of software, but when your computer dies and you need it on a new system, can't find the license key?

This is the same with losing anything of value. It's called a valuable lesson.
That “we” was the lawyer’s “we”. But their point stands: tools change and even if we understand and trust their specs and descriptions now, those change too inevitably in the future.

A bad law, an ambiguous law compels you to be defensive and take precautions. Cookie banners are one of many such defenses and everybody seems to be doing it, validating our strategy.

Thanks for your advice, but unless you are willing to defend me in court and put your money where your mouth is, with all due respect, I will consider its value to be exactly how much I paid for it.
That was my point: it used to be possible for those who wished to smoke in their rooms to do so, but that choice has been stripped everywhere I am aware of.

Free smokers!
Chum King Express
You get to an important issue: Type 1 vs Type 2 errors - precision vs recall. Any system is going to have errors, so what do you prioritize? The company has only limited control over this choice, as you also point out that the gov't will punish them for false negatives but not false positives. So the company prioritizes recall over precision.

But you also imply that the gov't should punish BOTH types of errors, but I'm not sure that's fair. By extension it implies that the company should have a perfect system, with no errors of either type. That's not realistic, and a company should be punished for meeting an impossible goal.

Better is for the government to just be explicit about it: we're requiring companies to employ broad sanctions, and even if some innocents get swept up, we think it's worth it to stop the bad guys. Or the verse, if that's the gov't decision.
Fresh unprocessed red meat is not directly known to cause cancer but it's implicated by the association to smoked/processed red meat that is a strong carcinogen. IARC says that maybe it can increase the risk of certain cancers but there is no direct evidence like with processed red meat.
Every single language with centralized dependency managers should, without a doubt require namespacing for package names.

user/package-name
group/package-name

etc...
I think we should just ban companies from implementing SMS 2FA.

https://lorendb.dev/posts/lets-ban-sms-2fa/
In Java, the original date/times were awful in the base library. Eventually, a very good replacement appeared called Joda-Time. Eventually, a "fix-all-the-design-flaws" 2.0 version was officially added to the base library as part of JSR-310. Excluding leap seconds (for which I have no practical need), I have never once found something that it cannot handle -- no matter how complex my conversion and calculation needs. A few other languages have basically ported Joda-Time or JSR-310 into their own. In 2024, date/time math feels like a hard, but solved problem with the correct libraries.

And last: I really like your example about Ruritania and the 48 cancellation policy. Sure, the country name is intended as a joke, but in the Real World all kinds of crazy things like this. Even Islamic calendars can be quite complex in 2024 -- knowing what days will be holidays in the future is a non-trivial task.
Good question.

Let's estimate the costs of compute.

For indexing, they need 2800 vCPUs[1], and they are using c6g instances; on-demand hourly price is $0.034/h per vCPU.
So indexing will cost them around $70k/month.

For search, they need 1200 vCPUs, it will cost them around $30k/month.

For storage, it will cost them $23/TB * 20000 = $460k/month.

Storage costs are an issue. Of course, they pay less than $23/TB but it's still expensive. They are optimizing this either by using different storage classes or by moving data to cheaper cloud providers for long term storage (less requests mean you need less performant storage and usually you can get a very good price on those object storages).

On quickwit side, we will also improve the compression ratio to reduce the storage footprint.

[1]: I fixed the num vCPUs number of indexing, it was written 4000 when I published the post, but it corresponded to the total number of vCPUs for search and indexing.
If it doesn't have retention, then it's not. Otherwise, Gameboy's display also qualifies as e-paper.
whereas here, if I paid more, I would get faster service, which means there is a financial incentive to provide slow service, pushing people to a higher-priced but not necessarily better-quality service.
I understand your sentiment. In theory there is no difference between a plumber or construction worker vs a CEO when it comes to DEI.

However, in the real world, a female CEO or President is much more likely to inspire girls to work towards those roles, compared to a model female plumber.

They call it "glass ceiling" not "glass floor" for a reason.

Those feminist organizations are definitely hypocritical, no question about that. That does not necessarily mean they are doing anything "wrong", according to how the world runs. I wouldn't blame them for not doing anything.

All that said, I think you bring up a valid point that people almost never talk about. But that's as much as it's worth.
The collab features are actually what got me to try it, and why it’s still installed on my machine.

I have no reason to use Zed over Kakoune or VS Code for working on my own (open-source VS Code, so no Liveshare).

I wanted to work on code with someone a few weeks ago, and we both downloaded Zed and started collaborating very quickly. It was a very smooth experience.
What if I don't have such latency requirements? I'm willing to trade that for flexibility or anything else
I’ve actually made the switch over to Typst[0] for my app [1]. I’ve previously used a quick jinja .tex template that then just pasted things in, but LaTeX can really throw some strange errors and overall handling the files was a hassle.

Typst was much easier to setup and the function-based operation meant that sending variables in was a breeze with better error handling there too. Also, I just grok the syntax a lot better.

Just another option for folks looking to redo their resumes/not use Latex.

[0] https://typst.app

[1] https://resgen.app
I understand that imperialist architecture has been co-opted throughout history to evoke a connection with Rome and project a legitimacy of power and order. Regardless of the origination of the architectural style and the author's nationality, it is choosing a specific "functional" architecture from a plethora of options because it projects a message which is strongly associated with the dominant imperial power. Maybe the author likes that style because it subconsciously makes them feel safe and protected by the power of the empire in an uncertain and rapidly changing world, that would track with conservative appeal for a lot of folks.
I get the sentiment but remember that OSS has always come with the caveat that someone you do not approve of benefits from your code. That part isn't really new with LLMs (which I'm definitely not a fan of). Really this goes for productive pursuit where you do not have total control of your clients. I think it's better to focus on how your work benefits those you want to benefit than to worry about how leeches also profit.
Idk, I think physical media always only appealed, and still only appeals to a few people.

I used to use Redbox when I visited my parents since they had no streaming services. But now they do. And I'm sure that having to pick a physical movie from whatever wasn't already consumed by someone else, and then having to remember to return it, isn't an experience that's making many people think "man physical media is truly valuable" compared to scrolling hundreds of shows at home.

It seems just like an HN pipedream. In reality there are more shows than I will ever care to watch.
> because there has not been any upstreamed Device Tree for this laptop, we were not able to get a Linux desktop installed

Looking forward to tests of Linux on Arm UEFI ("SystemReady") for laptops based on Qualcomm Oryon.
Starlink Mini is now available
Sunlight intensity varies greatly. Depending on where you live, season and cloudiness, you may only get a small fraction of the amount implied above. Again, there is no substitute for measuring your levels. Speaking from experience.
> Is there any financial system, regime, or product that depends upon leap seconds? I have never heard of any.

They’re certainly unusual.

> If so, it is safe to ignore them.

Really? Leap seconds have happened, and they could plausibly happen again. If so, during those leap seconds, events will occur. Do you need to record the time of those events?

> When storing date/time stamps, I prefer to persist into two separate fields: (a) date/time using UTC time zone and (b) original time zone offset, e.g., UTC+8.

That covers most bases for past events. It is inappropriate for many future events.

Hmm, maybe a good system library would have separate types for timestamps that were actually observed (or interpolated or otherwise computed after the fact, etc) and for times of events that may not have occurred at the time of computation.
> On a given high-throughput Kafka topic, this figure goes up to 11 MB/s per vCPU.

There's got to be 2x to 10x improvement to be made there, no? No way CPU is the limitation these days and even bad hard drives will support 50+mB/s write speeds.
At least where I live, I have to specifically request enabling of overdraft (of course they would love me to do so), but I ain't doing that. So with a debit card, I'm safe.

Banks lure you with credit cards and overdraft on debit cards (which in turn turns it into credit). If you can resist that you're in a much more robust position than otherwise.
For a European like me, most commercial transactions in USA feel more or less like fraud. It's really hard to figure out price of almost anything beforehand. E.g. in restaurant your meal will cost someting like 50% more than the sticker price. Even vending machines ask for tips, with dark patterns of course.
> an attacker who paid for Google Ads for a search term like "BANKNAME login"

I tried out buy Google ads once out of curiosity cause they gave me a free credit. It was crazy how many ridiculous stipulations and guidelines I had to work around before they'd accept my ad.

How are they that strict for me, but seemingly they'll sell to a phishing page that's impersonating a bank and targeting it to people searching for that bank?
Steer your Model T with this vape and fidget spinner
> It seems overall they’d be hiring...

I'd say it's an "enrichment" process - a higher % of such people apply, a higher % get hired, a higher % stick around...and move up. Some others either adopt that worldview, or learn to conform. And within closed/secret/hierarchical societies, it doesn't take a huge % of problematic priorities & worldviews to systematize a whole lot of undesirable stuff.

I've seen credible online accounts of pre-9/11 CIA decisions on how they should design a new mass-surveillance/analysis system. My read of those accounts & the CIA's alternatives is that they specifically chose "maximum-data-quantity creepy gratification" over "maximum real-world national security effectiveness". They had diversity, but not the right priorities.

(I've not paid attention to the 10/7 intel failures, but assume that the Mossad has "the usual" secret agency failings. OTOH, my impression is that war has been extremely convenient, politically, for Israel's current & problematic Prime Minister. So he might have been reading "Potential Jackpot" in spots where his Mossad intel briefings said "Potential Danger", and making decisions on that basis.)
Laid off last fall but luckily had severance take me to the beginning of 2024. Just started a job this week.

My experience with the job hunt this time around was horrible. I was overqualified for a large majority of positions I applied for and a perfect match for others yet I would be extremely lucky to even hear back a 'no thanks'.

The last time I was applying for jobs was during covid and I was at multiple stages of the interview process for multiple companies all at once and was actually able to make a choice regarding my future employment instead of just taking the first bone thrown my way like this time.
Switch statements are O(n), but reading dialog config is O(1). It matters when trying to get the game loop to run at 60fps

Edit: Evidently you can get O(1) from a Switch if the compiler converts it to jump statements. Just adding this for posterity, and to correct myself.
you're looking at where the puck is not where the puck is going
Interesting, I missed that. I wonder if there is a version of that service that isn't managed by Microsoft.
That sounds like tortious interference. Or maybe they'd get away with it since technically they're only providing the means for the customer to violate their contract at the click of a button. But anyways, cancelling your payment without cancelling your subscription doesn't actually save you any money unless the service provider chooses to immediately cancel your account in response.
Reposting my comment on "I just bought a 2024 Chevy Tahoe for $1" [1]:

This comment and many of the replies seem to outright dismiss chatbots as universally useless, but there's selection bias at work. Of course the average HN commenter would (claim to) have a nuanced situation that can only be handled by a human representative, but the majority of customer service interactions can be handled much more routinely.

Bits About Money [2] has a thoughtful take on customer support tiers from the perspective of banking:

> Think of the person from your grade school classes who had the most difficulty at everything. The U.S. expects banks to service people much, much less intelligent than them. Some customers do not understand why a $45 charge and a $32 charge would overdraw an account with $70 in it. The bank will not be more effective at educating them on this than the public school system was given a budget of $100,000 and 12 years to try. This customer calls the bank much more frequently than you do. You can understand why, right? From their perspective, they were just going about their life, doing nothing wrong, and then for some bullshit reason the bank charged them $35.

It's frustrating to be put through a gauntlet of chatbots and phone menus when you absolutely know you need a human to help, but that's the economics of chatbots and tier 1/2 support versus specialists:

> The reason you have to “jump through hoops” to “simply talk to someone” (a professional, with meaningful decisionmaking authority) is because the system is set up to a) try to dissuade that guy from speaking to someone whose time is expensive and b) believes, on the basis of voluminous evidence, that you are likely that guy until proven otherwise.

Yes, I agree that when I absolutely need to speak to a human, it's infuriating to no end. But everyone's collective "absolutely need to speak to a human" bar is higher than it may need to be.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38681450

[2] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
Meat isn't on par with alcohol and tobacco.
This should become the normal case. With the automated chatbots handling all the common or known problems and solutions, fewer humans are needed and can then be better trained to handle the more complex cases (with an AI assistant at their disposal). This improvement in support could possibly be achieved at lower cost (to the company).

AI chatbots aren't the future, AI everything is. I'm far more concerned about some parts of the everything else, starting with automated warfare.
> why not start with wave theory and material science

You jest, but if I had infinite time...
They have 181 trillion logs
I'm curious why you used SQLAlchemy and Alembic when (based on your description) Django's support for SQLite sounds a lot nicer? According to the docs, there are a handful of caveats with the Django ORM and SQLite, but nothing too bad it would seem.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/databases/#sqlite-...
I lay awake at night thinking about the baby naming problem.

I want my child to have a name in the sweet spot. Not too common, not too unique, and, crucially, not a name that is popular for only a brief period so that everyone will know about how old they are just by their given name[0].

But people thinking along these lines inevitably gravitate to the same small handful of names, causing the "too popular for a brief period of time" effect against their will. I've already failed once; my cat is named Olivia, the popular girl's name of the decade, apparently.

[0] My own name is one of those. It's annoying.
Zed looked pretty cool but the amount of extensions VSCode has makes it difficult to justify a switch. I do think that the SQL extensions for VSCode are pretty terrible, so maybe that's something where Zed can capitalize.

Interestingly the biggest issues we're having with VSCode have nothing to do with the IDE itself and are instead related to the TypeScript language server. There are so many bugs that require the TypeScript language server to be restarted, and there's little the VSCode team can do about that. Made a new file? Restart. Rename a file? Restart. Delete a directory? Restart. Refactor a couple of classes? Might need a restart.

We're also having some serious language server slowdowns because of some packages we're using. And there's not much Zed can do here for us either. It's really unfortunate because the convenience of having a full-stack TypeScript application is brought down by all of these inconveniences. Makes me miss Go's language server.
The issue would be approached much differently if, for example, a “video llm” was created that scraped movies and generated content from those sources. The well organized, well connected movie industry would be up in arms burying ai companies with lawsuits and newly passed legal protections.
Heheh no. I'm in my 30s. My opinion comes from experience. I like to travel a lot, and have been several times on trips that brought me to places where the norm is a subpar connection. Taking 30 seconds to load the simplest bloatware-infested blog that doesn't even display text without JavaScript enabled, teaches you a thing or two about being judicious with technology choices.
I definitely suffered from severe internet addiction in college, and still struggle today. I rarely use social media other than forums like HN, and I know it impacts my financial health (like depression about my lackluster career for example).

I think the siren song of “everything and anything” of constant internet is its own problem
You always have to name the sister first, otherwise it’s a Schroedinger’s Dexter that never turns out the way you expected.
I would question first if the system needs to search with subsecond latency and if the same system needs to be which can handle 10k writes/sec.

Even google cloud and others let you wait for longer search queries. If not business ciritical, you can definitly wait a bit.

And the write system might not need to write it in the endformat. Especially as it also has to handle transformation and filtering.

Nonetheless, as mentioned in my other comment, the interesting details of this is missing.
You wrote "a long time back", so maybe my point can be ignored.

Did you not consider to use decimal math? According to MDN, the largest int in Javascript is 2^53 – 1. If you steal four digits for your fraction, that still leaves a huge number. I will assume that no one was gambling more than one billion currency units, so you had plenty of space. Do all your calcs with ints, then divide by 10,000 for a final result.

Ref: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
In an idea world, something like a bank. The problem is that banks have services and structures designed to enrich the bankers, not be useful to their customers. This sort of stuff isn't worth their time, and the digital banking infrastructure is too much of a mess for apps built on top of it to really shine.
oversimplified explanations here - great to relieve some hostility perhaps but not complete.. lots of holes in this blanket explanation.

History of trade protectionism ? that is older than sailing ships. Yes, the achievements of old Europe include flaming the largest and deadliest wars in world history. The USA benefited from not being destroyed? sure OK.. maybe war is a bad idea for prosperity.

Modern trade values might be divided into "oil and gas" and then everything else.. "arms trade" and then everything else.. Big Pharma ? ok you got me, yes the US rules it financially, but then old Europe has some assets like that, but not on front stage.. thinking textile dye chemistry for an example.

The USA has no special awards for inventing trade protectionism, just a vigorous practice at the right time due to the idiocy of others.

You speak English pretty well.. maybe that language is part of the success here? many other angles easily come to mind...
Nope. I'm describing the changes within middle-class and upper-middle-class culture across a couple of generations.

All of these changes are extremely well-documented, whether it's the increasing rigor in university admissions, the rise of helicopter parenting and all the associated activities, in sports camps, math camp, robotics camp, etc.