skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was glad in the past few years to discover that I am not alone in finding Kafka off-putting / way too convoluted
Thanks for the suggestion! Apparently a mod had down weighted it, but they reconsidered after I emailed then! So thanks!
No need to blame inflation. Inflation is not new or secret. T-Mobile knew about inflation when it made promises. It could have included an inflation adjustment in their "uncontract". The blame is squarely on T-Mobile here.
Funnily enough, for my own toy CPU project I elected to make the program counter a GPR, both readable and writable - because it allowed me to eliminate jump and branch instructions.

Reads from the PC return the address of the next instruction to be executed, so a simple exchange between two registers performs the branch, and supplies the return address. (I did end up special-casing the add instruction so that when adding to the PC the return address ends up in the source register.)
I think you're glossing over a few details here which - although understandable - deserve a little clarification.

The poster is referring to cost at the point of care - which under the UK's NHS model is £0. The "£3000" per year should really be viewed as the cost of an insurance policy (in fact, NHS funding comes from a progressive tax called National Insurance - at least in theory). This "£3,000" on average then compares to the average cost per person of a health insurance policy in the US of around $7,700 [0] - plus of course in the USA you generally have point-of-care costs too.

Additionally tax by its nature in the UK is progressive and the income distribution is fairly heavy-tailed, so it's not really a cost of "just under £3,000pp" - the average citizen pays far less than that, and even most high earners will pay less. For example someone on £100,000 (top 1-2% of salaries in UK) will pay just over £4,000 in NI [1] - but NI funds more than just the NHS and also funds social care and state benefits.

Of course in the UK some people choose to supplement NHS care with some form of private insurance - either paid for privately (uncommon) or provided as an in-kind benefit through an employer (still not ubiquitous but recently more common). Private care is typically used for things like skipping waiting lists for certain treatments or access to alternative care not offered by the NHS.

These private policies tend to have a lot less coverage than the NHS, so I would say aren't directly comparable to the NHS - nor are they generally totally adequate as standalone insurance policy so aren't comparable to an insurance policy in the US either.

The model is just very different in the UK and the US, and it's hard to compare them directly. However, what is inarguable is that the NHS provides very good value for money, especially when compared with other G7 nations [2] - on average less than half of the expenditure per capita of the US.

[0]: https://www.william-russell.com/blog/health-insurance-usa-co...

[1]: https://www.which.co.uk/money/tax/tax-calculators/national-i...

[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html
HN had fifty people in every thread swearing that nobody predicted the iPhone would be a success so we should all shut up and buy or else FOMO.

It was constant and everywhere. Tens of posters who have apparently zero connection to the company Apple other than "They released the iPhone" as if they've never had a high profile flop, as if they've never had only okay sales of a product, as if they've never tried to change the world and failed miserably, as if Apple never misses.

Because of a single damn product release. One time. At the crux of a phase change in the personal digital device world.

Just, utterly divorced from reality. I feel like these posters are half of my company's management team.
it is a question of who is going to subsidize global pharma R&D?

same drug costs $10k in US is sold for $5k in EU and $10 in India.

The biggest question is: Why should US consumer subsidize pharma R&D so that pharma can sell it globally and hoard profits in Switzerland?

note: all pharma companies are incorporated in a way to pay de-minimus tax in US/EU/Asia via transfer pricing schemes and hoard all extra profits in Switzerland because of Swiss laws taxing licensing IP only at 15%

example:

1. Pharma, Inc sells drug for $10,000 in US

2. it licenses IP from Swiss entity and swiss entity charges it $9999 royalty

3. Pharma, Inc pays US tax on $1 of profit at 35%

4. Swiss entity records $9999 profit and pays 15% tax

so US consumer is screwed in the end.

US consumer think twice: do you want to pay $10,000 for a drug + $20,000 in insurance premium+copay when you can travel to India/Egypt/Turkey/Germany and get the same treatment for the same brand name drug for 1/10 (or 1/1000 of cost).

We need to talk about geographical arbitrage of healthcare costs more
I agree. For definitions, I'd roughly say:

* If something changes to refine its future behavior in response to its experiences (touch hot stove, get hurt, avoid in future) beyond the immediate/direct effect (withdrawing hand) then it can "learn". I think even small microorganisms can learn, with the main requirement being that it has some mutable state (can't learn if you can't change)

* If something can map modalities into representations in a semantic space (the word "horse" into the concept of a horse) then it can "understand". There are varying degrees to how useful an understanding is (Does the semantic space link related concepts closely together? Can it be used to reason, extract information, and make predictions?). I think current LLMs can, to a certain extent, understand text

* If something has a continually changing internal train of thought (representations of concepts and intentions, evolving over time) then it can "think". I wouldn't say current LLMs think, but that's mostly just down to architecture (no persistent internal state) opposed to any fundamental impossibility

More broadly I believe people already have definitions similar to these, but will then create a distinction between, say, standard "learning" (as above) and then "actual learning" which is something special only attainable by humans (or at least biological brains).
Using Spanner as a Better Postgres
Spanner has been a terrific part of our architecture. It's a great piece of tech and very impressive from a cost/scalability/ease-of-use perspective.

It's particularly worth taking a look if you have a postgres table that has the potential to become enormous.
Someone should release an APL that uses cuneiform. Might be easier to learn.
That probably happens, but if it happens it is due to bad implementations.

USB is not like Ethernet, in USB it is possible to reserve an amount of data transfer capacity for latency-sensitive applications like audio and then none of the other users of the USB interface can use it during the reserved time intervals.

If a USB audio device does not use this kind of data transfers with reserved bandwidth (isochronous transfer), its designers have been incompetent.

If the audio is transferred over DisplayPort or over HDMI, then there the time intervals for transferring it are reserved too, so it must not be influenced by anything that is transferred at the same time.

Problems with audio being perturbed by other transfers over PCIe, before reaching the USB controller or the GPU for audio over DisplayPort or HDMI, are unlikely to be caused by hardware but by the operating system, which might not give adequate priority to the audio transfers.
I think it’s too expensive for that at this point
Small turbines can capture wasted energy from man-made wind sources
17th Century Death Roulette
IIRC the single biggest source of contributions are Intel, Google, RedHat, AMD, and Huewei. Not necessarily in that order.

Something like 80-90% of said contributions are essentially corporate.
On the other hand:

"Click here" screams "this is a link". It is not as obvious a call to click upon as a big shiny button, aching to be pressed, but it is more obvious than a few words that are in a harder-to-read color and underlined.

"You can go to _your_account_" is a much smoother sentence than "To change your account, click _here_". But is that always what you want? Do you want all your links to be smoothly integrated into the body text? Sometimes you do! Sometimes you don't.
Those definitions are anything but straightforward.
Come to think of it, there's got to be a financial product like: a passive index, minus a few stocks that you hand pick :)
Dependencies should be small and focused. When scope is limited, it's not rocket science to write implementations that have very few bugs.
These endeavors virtually never make sense. Their intention is to single out consumers and make them feel bad for their habits.

In actuality, consumers have little to no choice in the products they use. I couldn't live a plastic-free life even if I tried, and I'm somewhat well off. When you have to shop at Walmart to make it, your influence is even less.

It's a strategy in responsibility shifting. Rationally, the source of pollution does not lie in the single mother eating with her family at Waffle House and using a plastic straw.
Useless is in the eye of the beholder I guess. I wrote a slowcat filter one time to help test something. It's like cat, but with random latency between lines / bytes.
Agreed. We have many "old" people that use our website and I can tell you for a fact that the "click here" is less confusing than some random blue link (which at this point has lost it's meaning because of seo keyword stuffing).

Not to mention "click here" is a call to action and a random blue link is not. Call to actions are important.
Seems similar to (though a shortcut version of) Apple sharing mobile and desktop hardware/software tech.
The headline made me think Apple was giving up on the Vision product line which made me feel disappointed. Happy to hear that it lives on!
Not the OP, and not at all an expert in this area, but I was curious what the answer was, and from a bit of reading it seems like a potential reason that might not work is because volatile also prevents caching the value in a register. So if you want to keep the computation in a register, but you want to explicitly clear the value to zero before writing to it, it seems like C semantics are insufficient (at least without inline assembly).
Buyer beware with "lifetime**" guarantees. The asterisks and fine print often are enlightening.

Scammers always have an out too... go out of business and setup shop under a different name. I remember hearing a local tire shop offering some type of "tires for life" deal. They went "out of business" and the owners started a new shop.
Simon Tatham’s minesweeper is the best minesweeper https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/mine...

« The first square you open is guaranteed to be safe, and (by default) you are guaranteed to be able to solve the whole grid by deduction rather than guesswork. »
Such a fine line between helpful and malicious!
Coins found in farmer's field declared treasure
I think it’s less of an issue for e2e testing because e2e testing sucks. If teams did it well in general you would be completely correct, but in many places a LLM will be better even if it hallucinates. As such I think there will be a decent market for products like this, even if they aren’t may not even really be testing what you think they are testing. Simply because that may well be way better than the e2e testing many places already do.

In many cases you’re correct though. We have a few libraries where we won’t use Typescript because even though it might transpire 99% correctly, the fact that we have to check, is too much work for it to be worth our time in those cases. I think LLMs are similar, once in a while you’re not going to want them because checking their work takes too much resources, but for a lot of stuff you can use them. Especially if your e2e testing is really just pseudo jobbing because some middle manager wanted it, which it unfortunately is far too often. If you work in such a place you’re going to recommend the path of least resistance and if that’s LLM powered then it’s LLM powered.

On the less bleak and pessimistic side, if the LLM e2e output is good enough to be less resource consuming, even if you have to go over it, then it’s still a good business case.
Thanks for your thoughtful response! Agree that digging into the root cause of a failure, especially in complex microservice setups, can be incredibly time-consuming.

Regarding writing robust e2e tests, I think it really depends on the team's experience and the organization’s setup. We’ve found that in some organizations—particularly those with large, fast-moving engineering teams—test creation and maintenance can still be a bottleneck due to the flakiness of their e2e tests.

For example, we’ve seen an e-commerce team with 150+ mobile engineers struggle to keep their functional tests up-to-date while the company was running copy and marketing experiments. Another team in the food delivery space faced issues where unrelated changes in webviews caused their e2e tests to fail, making it impossible to run tests in a production-like system.

Our goal is to help free up that time so that teams can focus on solving bigger challenges, like the debugging problems you’ve mentioned.
Automatically write AI prompts for problems with well defined inputs and outputs
Very similar to prompt fine tuning but orders of magnitude cheaper and works with far less data.
You can file a form with your local county/postmaster/something (probably varies by state) to request an address to be assigned.

(That doesn't mean you'll be able to receive mail at that address.)
>I was around before that wiki page was written

Ditto (first tech job was in '87).

So I guess you are saying that you're aware that "open source" means a specific thing to many people in this field, but are going to use it in a confusing (to many) way rather than using the unloaded "source available"? You do you, but don't expect everyone to agree to switch from this fairly common usage. Makes it look like you're just searching for an argument.
It already exists for KDE: https://community.kde.org/Selenium
Show HN: Curated list of tools and resources for Indie Devs
With so many tools and Saas out there, I simply wanted to list the ones that offer a free tier and the ones I’ve tested and I can recommend for any developer wanted to build something.

I hope you will find some tools to help you build and ship more!
I agree. Click here also provides better context if the CSS doesn't clearly indicate a hyperlink or if the user is unfamiliar with html link styling, and in cases where the web browser veers into non-standard territory.
Squirrels block everything. Just the amount matters.

The fact is if you travel around anywhere you will not be blocked by people or bikes. This is a car problem. Or, rather, it should be their problem but becomes everyone's problem.
First and foremost, reduce the scope and spending of the federal government by 90% .

Assuming that is healthy, activate leasing on federal land (USFS & BLM) to generate income. e.g. logging, petroleum, recreational leases, mining , etc.
It's a damn shame. I've stopped using pretty much all apps because I can't trust any of them. My phone is practically stock.
Very well said. We can appreciate that there are a plurality of perspectives while asserting our own predispositions, preferences and value judgments (and I would share yours in this case), all without giving in to the contradictions of moral relativism.
I believed this until I kept getting tickets about people not knowing where to click. So, we made links look like buttons, and stopped getting tickets. Then our designer didn't like the buttons, so the click here links were the only option.

People struggle with discovery, even though they shouldn't.
> Bazel is designed to be optimal and has perfect knowledge of the state of the world, yet it’s too slow for quick operations.

This is one of the biggest challenges where Bazel falls short of non-Bazel tooling for us in the Web development/Node.js world. The Node ecosystem has characteristics that push Bazel scaling (node_modules is 100k+ files and 1GB+), and Bazel's insistence on getting builds correct/reproducible is in a way its own enemy. Bazel needs to set up 100s of thousands of file watchers to be correct, but the Node.js ecosystem's "let's just assume that node_modules hasn't changed" is good enough most of the time. For us, many non-Bazel inner devloop steps inflate from <5s to >60s after Bazel overhead, even after significant infra tuning.
I agree with your point.

Some ISAs are more, or less, amenable to implementations that are fast for modern workloads.

E.g., a really bad ISA could make SIMD ops, floating point math, prompt interrupt handling, 64-bit addressing, etc. really hard to make into a fast implementation.

So based on the novelty of RISC-V, that's a plausible interpretation of the title.
I'm generally with the author on this, but their examples are inconsistent. I think from a language perspective, the linked text should be a verb phrase. We want the user to do something (click here), and verbs are "do words."

So, instead of

For additional order details, go to [your account].

use

For additional order details, [go to your account].

(The author does this inconsistently.)

And in this case:

To review or adjust your AutoPay settings, [click here].

You can review or adjust your [AutoPay settings] at any time.

they change the meaning of the sentence ever so slightly with the extraneous "at any time," showing that it is not always simple to remove the "click here."

Maybe in this case, it should be a button or a simple stand-alone link, like

[Review or adjust your AutoPay settings]
I just checked, I drive my truck just a few times per month, and it is still cheaper to keep it (paying taxes and maintenance) than to rent the correct vehicle for my rare needs to drive. Renting is expensive, but I did discover enterprise truck rental which I didn't know of before isn't too far from my house. Plus by owning my own truck I have it when I want to go.

Of course I ride my bike most places. There are a few trips every month I make not in bike range though. If like most people I drove a car to work, then a tiny compact car and rent a truck when needed would make sense. But for me I drive to little that a large truck that does anything is cheapest (I've had the truck for 15 years)
you're in the excruciatingly tiny minority of users that care about spectre, most non-enterprise customers aren't significant enough targets to exploit with a spectre type attack vs. less sophisticated attacks like phishing
> Companies pulled off leaving Alpha and Sparc

Considering the commercial failure of these efforts, I might disagree
Jakob Nielsen’s advice is, to put it politely, not “the recommendation” but rather “someone’s recommendation.”
Electric Boat (US navy submarine maker) is trying. They were down to under 5k employees in the 90s (IIRC) after the end of the cold war and significant cuts to defense spending. Now they are probably over 20k and trying to increase production of one type of submarine, add a modified type to the same line, and build a new line for a new type. Not going perfectly but having billions shoved in your pockets sure helps recovery.
My coding style has evolved over the decades and I can't honestly say that any book had a major influence over what it is today.

But, early in my career, the book that was most influential to my style was the K&R, mostly because it corrected bad style habits I had learned from languages before I learned C.
This article is 18 months old. There are even more options now!

• Auth0
• AuthKit (WorkOS)
• Authress
• Auth.js
• Authentik
• BoxyHQ
• Casdoor
• Clerk
• Cognito
• Descope
• Firebase
• Frontegg
• FusionAuth
• Keycloak
• Kinde
• Logto.io
• Magic.link
• ORY
• Pangea
• PropelAuth
• Rownd
• ScaleKit
• Slashid
• Stack Auth
• Stytch
• Strivacity
• Supabase Auth
• Supertokens
• UserFront
• Wristband
• Zitadel

I work at WorkOS and we naturally think AuthKit is the best solution. It's also free up to 1,000,000 users and supports advanced features like SAML/SCIM/RBAC/etc. https://AuthKit.com
This was literally why we went IPv6 in a previous company. We were acquiring other companies like crazy and it and the conflicts were constant pain where we'd either have to re-IP a location (Active Directory does not like) or do internal facing NATs and DNS weirdness (AD also not a big fan).

We quickly discovered it was easier to get the new location up and running on IPv6 and mesh that so all inter-office traffic was IPv6 rather than resolving the conflicts. Sure you couldn't reach the printer in Boise from New York because it was IPv4 only, but for the stuff normal users were doing it worked great.
> Money is the way we quantify the relative value of anything vs anything else

Most common != only
Indeed, a reasonable person would find that its usefulness has tanked!
This makes it seem like it's just easy, but doesn't really say that for sure I guess:

What if the bacteria become resistant to the phages too?

Well, that can happen easily – probably even easier than with antibiotics. Cells have been duking it out with viruses since the beginning of life. (Did you know CRISPR-Cas9, now used for gene editing, evolved in nature as a way for bacteria to recognize and cut up phage DNA?)

But the difference is that whereas new antibiotics are very hard to find, there is a nigh-inexhaustible evolutionary font of phages constantly pulling ahead in the arms race. So in short: once a bacteria becomes resistant to your special phage, just find a new phage.
these are people specifically choose to work under the poverty limit to be eligible for safety net welfare: EBT/SNAP/WIC/Medicaid and then work for cash unrecorded.

like they work 4hr/day and accumulate ~1000 hours/year and then work off w2-payroll
DevDb – A zero-config VS Code extension for auto-loading databases in VS Code
Would need to be a very targeted social program -- Facebook's annual profit would pay for about 2-3 weeks of our medicare costs alone! (But agree w/ should dismantle Meta, although preferably via better privacy policies and alternative less predatory social media apps)
> Guess a conciseness is a virtue.

Indeed; quoting from my winning entry [1] that same year:

> This program celebrates the close connection between obfuscation and conciseness, by implementing the most concise language known, Binary Lambda Calculus (BLC).

> The submission implements the universal machine in the most concise manner conceivable.

[1] https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html
I think either you're overselling the maturity of the ecosystem or I've been unfortunate enough to get stuck with the worst option out there - Cypress. I run into tooling limitations and issues regularly, only to eventually find an open GitHub issue with no solution or some such.
Ask HN: Timeless/Classic Engineering Essays?
One of my favorite parts of HackerNews is when old (for some definition of old) blog posts and essays are resurfaced and discussed.

I imagine that in the 30 year history of the internet a lot of really great pieces have been written about software engineering, technology, etc. But I worry about those pieces being lost to the winds of time. And, more selfishly, I also just want to read them.

What's your "oldie but goodie" piece that impacted you or that you always share with people?

PS. Not limited to internet essays, of course. Pre-internet essays are also welcomed.

PPS. Bonus points for links to repositories or sites that aggregate said classic essays.
OpenStep was developed on SunOS, and was the primary GUI out of the box
How a Victorian Era Engine Made Spaceflight Possible [video]
I wrote a bash script to put a colour dot in the mac menu bar to represent the CPU temperature. I barely used it when I was on Intel, and it doesn't work on Apple Silicon. It's now only possible to ask for the thermal pressure, and be told a descriptor, always 'Nominal' in my case. I wrote the change but haven't pushed it.

https://github.com/tobylane/Bin?tab=readme-ov-file#tempinbar