skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I once worked at a place where we essentially were unable to fix bugs because it was a no-code tool so people would do all kinds of wacky things with the system.

The mandate was, as far as I can tell, to enshrine these former bugs into actual documented features. I wish I had seen this as a warning for how the place was ran but I also needed the money.

That was on top of people doing completely stupid things and abusing the systems we gave them in exchange for way too little money. It got to the point where the company was offering dedicated servers as an upsell because there were clients that were paying far too little money, in my opinion, for the amount of resources they were taking up.

The breaking point came when I got woken up at 3am two nights in a row by a client who was very obviously an Indian scam call center who was paying us something like $100 / mo to have a button that calls an engineer at any time. The problem was they had something like 7 layers of recursion through their app and each update was causing cascading updates and unsurprisingly was taxing the entire server causing updates to be slow and/or unreliable.

Maybe I just sucked at it but I told leadership we need to jack up prices on that button and kick these pretty obvious scammers off the platform. I left a few months later.
Show HN: PostalAgent – Send Postcards online by circling areas on a Google Map
Hey HN, I just launched https://PostalAgent.com, a site that lets you easily send highly targeted postcards to specific neighborhoods.

I originally built this site 5 years ago but shut it down when my full time engineering job became too demanding, but recently I did a full rewrite with many new features.

To start you can select an area using a City, State, or even by circling specific areas on a Google Map. Then, you can refine your results and filter on specific demographics, like household income, home value, rental status, etc

You can also search for Businesses rather than consumers, and even filter by franchise type, presence of email, IRS tax code, Franchise Type, etc.

I was able to get a few clients signed up very quickly, mostly home services type businesses and real estate agents, but I think it could be used by many types of businesses. I have a few customers that are only using the mailing list feature without sending postcards, likely for cold email or other marketing outreach.

I'm looking for a bit of feedback from the community.
A less efficient way to implement this under your own power would be to set a reminder to check it again in, say, a year. I use Google keep for such things all the time
For me 'from __future__ import no_cyclic_imports' would be good enough, if it's even possible
You are right; there are still many good people and companies in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately the Philip Morrises of Silicon Valley have outsized influence since they control major social media platforms, Web infrastructure and standards, advertising networks, cloud computing platforms, and other essential tech infrastructure. Locally, they are also large employers in the Bay Area, and due to the housing crunch it is very difficult for non-“Philip Morris” workers, even in tech, to compete for housing (not every software engineer makes $200k+ in salary and gets RSU grants), which is pushing some of them out the Valley, helping make the Valley even more of a “Philip Morris” shop.
fitbits and similar are fine for measuring awake vs asleep but really terrible at breaking up the stages
it's a decent distro with a much smaller community, I'll stick with yocto and buildroot
Consumer support for right to repair is broad, so long as it comes at no cost to them. People don’t want to pay to fix things, and they don’t want to accept any reduction in performance either.
It's the terrible standard library of JS that keeps me with Ruby. Rails makes it even better. Being able to write little things like 3.days.from_now to get a timestamp is great.
After this month, Python 3.8 will be end-of-life, so maybe you can push internally to upgrade python.
I think basically it is like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model

except Microsoft had that up and running in 2006 but politics has kept Linux from doing the same. Specifically, WDDM and Wayland simplify the graphics interface to an API that lets you blast out a rectangle of pixels so unlike the old HAL model you weren't specifying an API where it can draw primitives like lines and circles, the API allows user-space applications to run software on the GPU to make pixel rectangles that either get blasted to the screen or composited.

Microsoft is really good at maintaining backwards compatible with the UI (I can still run Office '97 on my PC) and they figured out how to make it so old applications don't know what happened.

Incompetence at GUI work is a hallmark of the politics of Linux, just as power management "just not working" is a hallmark of the politics of the Intel-Microsoft-Dell alliance.
This is great, thanks! The "new replies in the last 24 hours" feature is great (not an email, just a dynamic query): https://hackernewsalerts.com/view-comments-replies/
I'm not sure why you're getting voted down. The HN guidelines clearly state downvotes are not to be used to express disagreement. Your point was politely and concisely made, and stuck to the topic.

Do better, voters.
Sure, so let's make them pay for it, job done.

If I go to the loo and my water company decides it's cheaper to dump human faeces in the middle of the M1 motorway than to dispose of it properly, the solution isn't for me to stop going to the loo, it's to force my water company to stop doing that.
Why don’t you teach the student what they need in the first place?
There should be zero overlap on a Venn diagram of people scrounging together money for basic transportation and those considering a $100k pseudo-truck. Anyone who needs to borrow money for a basic car but buys a cyber truck instead is in for a world of financial hurt.
Quantum Approaches to Consciousness
I've got 3 different non-fiction books for me:

Thinking Fast and Slow. This book discusses how we think and at what level and where some of the shortcuts we use when thinking occur and what impact they have on us. It really was one of the best books I've ever read; and like many books on that subject, you don't have to read the whole thing to get a lot out of it.

The Dictator's Handbook. This is the book that spawned the video essay series by CGP Gray: Rules of Rulers ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs ). It has been a strong recommend for me on how and why the political world is the way it is.

Brain Lock: This is a book about OCD and it discusses a method of helping manage the symptoms and manifestations of OCD that creates a measurable and material change on the brain itself. Like self-help books, it does repeat itself quite a bit over the second half of the book. If you struggle with OCD, I do recommend it.
There's a couple of strategies to employ:

1. Never buy a new vehicle. Vehicles depreciate most quickly up-front. Buying a vehicle coming off of a lease is often a good bet. Most of the quick depreciation is done and now you're in the period of a slowly depreciating. You also have a relatively new vehicle.

2. Always put down at least 20% of the vehicle's purchase price, i.e. don't finance more than 80%. This does two things. One, it ensures your loan is unlikely to be upside down. Two, it limits how much you can borrow which keeps you from financing fantasies. For example, you had $4K cash for the last car you purchased. Given that, I would say that you should have kept your budget at $20K or under. $20K, even today, can get you a nice used car.
Not the person you are responding to, but my Python 3 migration plan was to move to Go for all new projects.
This is a pretty fundamentally flawed view. What about life or health insurance? Life insurance high, then what, stop living? Health insurance high, so stop getting sick?

Obviously the finances work such that net-net the insurance companies make more money in the end, but insurance is about individual level risk. Most likely (even hopefully) my insurance payments will be a net-loser, but IF I need it then they can prevent catastrophic financial loss.
I use lower parameter LLM's on M1's with very little RAM as well.

but 70B+ would be useful for me too
No, they jumped the gun.
NEWWWWWWW Achievement!
> lifetime access

Can users also download all of their data for their own safe-keeping?

Lifetime access is great, but whose lifetime are we talking about? Users'? Your company's? Yours? What happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, and your hosting provider doesn't receive November's payment?
Saying it is your favorite book is one thing. Saying it "changed your life" is another and yes, I'd think anyone who's life was changed by that particular book is indeed an idiot. I just don't see myself wanting to continue to engage with that person after a comment like that. Maybe I'm just impatient shrug
For what it is worth, I still listen to and love human-read audiobooks! However, it is particularly useful to have an AI option for books that are too niche for there to be an incentive for an individual to narrate them. Lots of academic and personal texts fall into those categories.
Apple is the closest you get today. You can even pay a premium for it!
seems to me a stretch for what it's best for and designed for
Global semiconductor sales up 20.6% to record $53.1B as trade wars rage on
Always interesting to see how different countries look at plates. Different colors front and back, different models for taxis (e.g. The Netherlands), EVs (many US states, and as per the article, the UK), and how they monetize them.

Not to mention whether you need one in the front or not...

I'm from Belgium they require front and back (same color), and which until ~10 years ago didn't allow customized plates. And then they allowed limited customization (9-abc-###), followed by full customization. Prices when they came out was 1,000 Euros (all things that make a car fun are taxes), went up to 2,000 Euros, and then they dropped it as demand stopped. They also make the owner of the car responsible for any tickets issued by the cops.

Compare that to living in Arizona. One plate, on the back. A gazillion options. Vanity plate? Free. Cops can only give you a ticket when they pull you over. (Except Scottsdale).
"Database: SQLite with SQLx for type-safe queries"

I might be ignorance. But is it not safe? How do you back up your data?
Nukes cannot be used to end industrial civilization, either.

Nuclear planners have always planned to use many ground bursts: on hardened targets like command bunkers, but also to destroy communications networks. Specifically, a "landing station" where transoceanic cables make landfall or wherever there used to be a 5ESS switch (the locations of which are publicly known) is a great place to hit with a ground burst to destroy much of the nation's non-wireless communications infrastructure. Estimates during the end of the Cold War are that about half of CONUS's area would be covered with lethal levels of fallout from these expected ground bursts. I guess if the Russians and Chinese were deliberately trying to cover as much area as possible with lethal levels of fallout (which they wouldn't because it is not an effective plan) they could cover 70 or 80% -- if they had as many nukes and means to "deliver" them intercontinentally as the Soviets did, which the Russians don't unless they've been hiding them from US inspectors, but I consider it very unlikely that they could've managed that.

And bomb fallout is very different from radioactive contamination from accidents at nuclear power plants: basically no area continues to have lethal levels of bomb fallout 4 weeks after the last bomb explodes. The method for decontaminating your house is to get up on a ladder and wash down your roof with a garden hose, then wash down all driveways and sidewalks.

So, again, nukes cannot be used to end industrial civilization. Note that this means that if the US ever nukes Russia with everything it has, Russia would bounce back and would again be a military threat (whether that takes 3 years or 15 years I don't know) so it makes little sense to nuke Russia unless the US is going to follow up with a long-term occupation of Russia's ports and maybe some key transportation hubs.

The USSR knew it had no chance to occupy US ports or occupy a substantial portion of US territory: their plan for followup was to grab the rest of the European plain, which includes most of Germany and all of northern France to the border with Spain.
I tried it and it works nicely for small sites where you look up some data / fill in some forms!

Then I really wanted data reactivity, so I started using `nanostores`, but I kept wanting more, and eventually added `alpinejs`

And then it got a bit too complicated for a one page microsite so I switched to Astro (for the interactive islands bit)
> Helping the worst regimes

They aren't saying SV is firing the missiles. Rather, the suggestion is SV is helping those that do.

So when you say

> I don't see Silicon Valley firing missiles in the Red Sea

You aren't countering the original claim. Instead, you'd have to argue that you don't see SV helping those firing missiles in the Red Sea. And, in that regard, I'm not so sure of that. Just look at crypto as a clear example of helping those regimes actually doing the firing.
> The best book I've ever read was Atlas Shrugged

I didn't read it until I was well into my 30s, but I very much enjoyed it.
Not the best I've ever read, but I have read it a few times now.

I don't agree with a lot of it, and I can't relate to some of the characters personally, I just think it is extremely well written. The characters and their motivations are very well laid out, and we get to go on a journey with them.
This is Elixir syntax, not Gleam:

Instead of

defmodule Robot do
def handle_call(:get_state, _from, state) do
something()
end
def get_state() do
GenServer.call(__MODULE__, :get_state)
end
end
robot = Robot.start_link()
robot.get_state()

just let me write (note the new flavor of def)

defstatefulmodule Robot do
def get_state() do
something()
end
end
robot = Robot.new()
robot.get_state()

Possibly add a defsync / defasync flavor of function definition to declare when the caller has to wait for the result of the function.

The idea is that I don't have to do the job of the compiler. It should add the boilerplate during the compilation to BEAM bytecode.

I know that there are a number of other possible cases that the handle_* functions can accommodate and this code does not, but this object-oriented-style state management is the purpose of almost all the occurrences of GenServers in the code bases I saw. Unfortunately it's littered by handle_* boilerplate that hides the purpose of the code and as all code, adds bugs by itself.

So: add handle_* to BEAM languages for maximum control but also add a dumbed down version that's all we need almost anytime.
Only thing new from Preview1 is the default parser switch from parse.y to Prism.

YJIT team seems to be rather quiet. I am wondering if there will be something coming in RubyConf?
Considering how anti-types dhh is, there is not going to be any official support for this anytime soon.

In his most recent interviews the philosophy can be summarised as "if you love types, good for you, but rails isn't for you"
Oh no! Established politicians! They know how the government works, and could possibly be effective. We can't let them get reelected!

I joke, but the current system is so much more vastly corrupt than this imagined scenario where small potatoes money gets handed out equally to all candidates in a race, that I just can't really imagine what your actual nightmare scenario might be.
Absolutely no evidence to suggest linking the power failure to the incident. Did I miss anything?
Ask HN: How to improve program design / abstraction ability? Resources?
With LLMs allowing me to write code so much faster, I'm much more quickly hitting tech debt walls (no doubt some to degree because I am using LLMs to write to code).

Rather, I'm much more quickly realizing the ways in which the abstractions I had in mind at the beginning of a project have flawed assumptions or aren't extensible in the way I now need them to be. I'm learning a lot from doing this, but I'd like to be able to deliberately practice this specific aspect of software engineering in isolation.

How can an engineer speed-run improving this type of design ability? Ideally, I am envisioning a Leetcode like platform that makes measurable, deliberate practice possible, but I doubt something like this exists or is possible in the near term.

Advice, essay, article, or book recommendations extremely welcome. Thanks!
Nobel Prize goes to microRNA researchers
It is great the author highlights that green tea already includes L-theanine where it is common to read about buying supplements.
Why Navy SEALs wear a trident and other facts about life as a frogman (2023)
It speaks more about the unfortunate state of practice in the team in question. C# itself is of similar terseness when compared to Ruby, with 10x to 20x better performance so even when written in a bulkier way, it becomes less relevant as you are not going to hold, say, C or C++ against similar criticism in such context. Oh, also no method not found thing too. C# has much greater likelihood of not having defects when you do deploy it.
How do they get accurate data if people use private browsing?

IP tracking?
I wanted to send a UX feedback :
Multiline text shrinks the 'x' button (the more text, the more shrunk the button gets).
So many devices are general purpose computers that are treated like a specialized device.

eg: modern games consoles. A Nintendo 3DS is an ARM11 board. You can run Linux on it. Most people don’t because it doesn’t look like a “computer.” And because they wouldn’t know how as it takes a very specific skill set to make it work.

They do get reused a lot because gamers of that era tend to value them… but a device like that could have tons of useful applications to extend its life.

A fold-up computer with built in wifi that runs on battery? Nice. With enough around you could run a low-power mesh network in an emergency to keep communication open between folks that are separated.

But such repurposing is far outside of most people’s reach. Especially when we’re trained to think of these things as products.

Phones are another one. An iPhone 5 could easily be repurposed into a firewall or other application to extend its usefulness and lifetime. It’s a general purpose computer crippled into being a product though.
I love how all the replies are focusing on how this is supposedly their favorite book and not the bit about "it changed my life"
The waste of abseil's b-tree, for example, is small per value: https://abseil.io/about/design/btree

The efficiency compared to hash tables very much does carry over to the small b-trees used for in-memory data.
Assuming that what you say is the outcome of a proposal like mine (which, btw, it isn't): I would rather have the government (which is beholden to the constitution) than the wealthy (who aren't beholden to the constitution) be the gatekeeper.

In fact, this money would be available to anyone who met whatever threshold was legally enshrined, a far better alternative than having to kiss the ring of an oligarch, as you propose.
Technically both Perkin-Elmer and Kodak had heritage, as Perkin-Elmer had made mirrors for the KH-9, but Kodak was making the KH-11 mirrors.

NASA initially considered a 3m main mirror for the HST, but opted for a 2.4m mirror especially to take advantage of the existing industrial base for 2.4m mirrors for the KH-11. As it was a proven industrial process that derisked the project and reduced cost compared to a 3m mirror.
Which means offline htmx is possible, althought I wouldn't love to maintain that.
Odd, I distinctly remember gas prices on some machines behaving that way in 2012 or so.
Money is numbers in computers, joules and watts are real things.

Coal, gas and oil is full of externalities which are nowhere near being correctly included in the nominal prices of these commodities. Arguably neither are solar panels and wind turbines.
Love your story here! You're not doing it wrong at all.

> Has anyone else bootstrapped using Rust? What were your experiences?

We scaled several websites to 6M+ MAUs on Actix/SQLx and ran that on the lowest tier VMs.

Rust is God Mode for efficient and scalable HTTP services. Moreover, the type safety and robust type system give us incredible confidence that our software is defect free.
Most egregious is the one copying the title from Snopes' "Video Genuinely Shows White 'Baby Peacock'?" (with the question mark cut off). A page all about how the picture isn't a real baby peacock.

But also, if you search the more accurate term, "peachick", you seem to get 100% real images, although half the pages call them "baby peacocks".
The RoR hype started to wane long before React. You're really missing a huge part of our industry:

- While most 2nd or 3rd tier tech companies don't need Google scale infrastructure, SOA in Java/C# and then Go is incredibly prevalent. Many teams never had a reason to even look at RoR and its considerably worse language and runtime.

- Good ideas from RoR were copied by pretty much every ecosystem; again, most people never wanted Ruby in the first place.

- Plenty of small web shops simply stuck to PHP.
And what do you suggest during a recession, where finding a job is not so easy?
No, I am summarizing my experience with several different primaries and around 8 specialist practices, much of it gained from advocating for several older family members.

Yes, you can request your next appointment with the same doctor (modulo having to wait even longer). But that doesn't change the overall dynamic where they've been set up to give you mere slivers of time while outsourcing their working memory to janky computer systems. And while you can develop an ongoing relationship with one doctor, they can still leave suddenly because they've hit their individual breaking point from the practice's continual screw turning.

I know there are some good doctors out there. For example our pediatrician has been great (after a bit of a bumpy start due to overall industry-wide CYA dynamics). But a few shining examples, if you can even manage to invest the effort and find them, don't really change the quality of the overall system. Especially when many situations basically require relying on the whole system.
Sorry, US only
Man, what an ass way of choosing your friends... I doubt it's optimal.
Now read “Experience” by RWE and your answer will change.
I liked Atlas Shrugged.
I remember reading "One Day", quite a long way through the book. I was sat in economy on an Emirates flight back from Islamabad, it was 4th November 2010, and it hit my like a truck when I got to that bit.

Might not be a "good book", but it was certainly memorable.
If we're doing litmus tests, your handle is almost certainly going to get you ignored by a lot of people.
actual baby peacocks are almost indistinguishable from guinea hatchlings and there's a strong resemblance to baby chickens or turkeys.