skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Retry for a while until the destination becomes reachable again. That's how email was originally designed.

Sure, the SMTP email protocol states guidelines for "retries" but senders don't waste resources retrying forever. E.g. max of 5 days:
https://serverfault.com/questions/756086/whats-the-usual-re-...

So gp's point is that if your home email server is down for an extended power outage (maybe like a week from a bad hurricane) ... and you miss important emails (job interview appointments, bank fraud notifications, etc) ... then that's one of the risks of running an email server on the Raspberry Pi at home.

Switching to a more energy-efficient language like Rust for server apps so it can run on RPi still doesn't alter the risk calculation above. In other words, many users would still prioritize email reliability of Gmail in the cloud over the self-hosted autonomy of a RPi at home.
Nasty Nerds Cryptocurrency Fraud Commited by Kiarash Hossainpour [pdf]
I finally got around to building and hosting my personal website on my own tiny VP. In the medium to long term, I'm hoping that people will find me through my website or word of mouth, instead of online social networks.
Right, so you build a business out around forcing people to buy something they don't need (updates). That seems... fragile. It will work for products I need and have no good alternatives for, but.

Then again, when apps require subscriptions I avoid them, 100% of the time.
GPUs have much more memory bandwidth than CPUs. Meanwhile, the ALU:bandwidth ratio of both GPUs and CPUs has been growing exponentially since the 90s at least. So, the FLOPs per byte required to not be starved on memory is really large at this point. We’re at a point that optimization is 90% about SRAM utilization and you worry about the math maybe at the last step.
I keep my Waydroid session running in the background, managed by a systemd user-level service. Works great, and if it increases resource usage I don't notice--this is on a converted Chromebook so pretty low specs.
I mean my wife and I pay $700/mo premium, we both hit our $2500 deductible this year already, my physical therapy is out of network and costs me $800/mo

That's $23k already before prescriptions and we are in our 30s with no major health issues.
These "silver pennies" are worth $2000 each, according to a comment on the page, while a current UK penny is about $0.01.
> it's fun and simple

Not sure if it was mine or my friends car, replacing one of the lights was neither fun or simple :). Some manufacturers really seem to prioritize style over repairability!
I mean there were a million, including the game, which everyone was freed of by xkcd.
I wish doctors would enter my symptoms in ChatGPT. In my experience they have the opposite problem. They think they know everything and when they hear something they don't understand they just brush it off as nothing. Twice in my life doctors have completely screwed up a diagnosis and later upon doing research it turns out my symptoms were basically a dead ringer for the condition it turned out to be. If the doc had just taken a few minutes to Google it, he would have found it. I don't walk into a doctors office today without doing research first.
>In this sense care and self interest are not in tension but amplify by constructive interference.

Perhaps in a well designed system, but if self-interest can be derived at a cost to the collective good, that also scales rather efficiently and without such a wholesome outcome.
Re-working my course on Android Development. Next year will be the third year I've taught the course, and usually the third year is where I'm happy with the content. It's a fun course to teach, but I would never, ever want to work in the area professionally.

The biggest problem is the instability of the tools. IntelliJ is already complex, then you pile on all the Android Studio stuff. Within Android Studio, you are working with a hugely complex framework (Jetpack Compose) that depends, directly or indirectly, on probably hundreds of libraries. Sometimes, things just break, for no apparent reason. On some students' computers, the whole wobbly tower never works quite right. It reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/
I remember a last minute cancellation on a Toronto-JFK flight meant I couldn't connect to my JFK-MAN flight.

Was downgraded to economy and rebooked on a Tornoto-Amsterdam-MAN arriving 7 hours late, having had very little sleep.

Plane travel isn't viable for those travelling on tight schedules.
Nowhere near as exciting as some of the other cool stuff in this thread but... I'm building https://trytalo.com - an open source self-hostable game backend. Talo makes it easy to drop in features like leaderboards, player stats, analytics and more into games. There's a Godot plugin, Unity package and Steamworks integration too.

I'm really early on in getting Talo out there so appreciate any feedback/criticism/roasting!
Subjectively, I've already lived an entire other "perceived life" since 21 and I've still got many years before 40. I think the phenomenon of the years getting shorter has more to do with routine and homogeneity of experience. As you settle into a routine and stop having your life divided into discrete blocks as is it when you're in school, you start perceiving the flow of time less. Your book has 'fewer chapters', as it were.

But for me, my experiences from K-12 were far more static than the experiences I've had as an adult >21. I've traveled the world, lived in several different cities, massively expanded my culinary lexicon, moved jobs and entire sectors, gotten married, etc. The only exception was COVID, 2020-2021, which was basically a time-warp.
>Sure. None of this requires a doctor, though.

When literally googling your question is more reliable than asking your 'doctor', something is in need of fixing.
I'm building a service for podcast websites with transcripts[^0]. I have paying customers, including Volts[^1], and I'm genuinely passionate about serving them.

What's holding me back from scaling is primarily my own resistance to marketing, plus some pending improvements to the ChatGPT-based transcript editing system. Once I finish optimizing the LLM integration, I'll have no more excuses to avoid sales outreach. One thread I want to pursue is a magazine of podcast transcripts that I inherited: https://podread.org

I'd appreciate advice on authentic outreach strategies for reaching knowledge-focused podcasters. If anyone here has experience in this space or wants to collaborate, I'm open to connecting.

[^0]: https://www.withfanfare.com/

[^1]: https://transcripts.volts.wtf/
I think this is misplacing the need for a rethink. Compilers are amazing at optimizing small programs. What they are less amazing at is optimizing large programs.

The query planner for SQL databases is a good example of this. For small queries, the odds of the planner making a bad choice is rather low. Large queries, on the other hand, are comparatively easy to lead down a bad path. This is why the "no sql" family of databases see more predictable results for a lot of uses. If you can't do complicated queries, then you don't have that peril to worry about.

Worth trying if you have the programs to play with. Run it with and without -O3 and see how the compiler does for you.
Not at all - forgetting kanji just isn't similar to forgetting how to spell English words, as I think TFA made fairly clear. It's the simplest analogy to make, but it's not near enough to draw conclusions from.

The analogy I've used in the past is, you read kanji with your mind but you write them with your hand, so being unable to remember a kanji is more akin to forgetting a guitar chord or a keyboard shortcut - if your hands stop making the motions, you'll eventually forget them.
Do you really think it mattered whether the people in Jonestown drank Kool Aid or Flavour Aid? What matters is the poison and both Apple and Google ship plenty of it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682
if you'll forgive my prior snark, some people successfully involve the children in the cooking. When this is done, the children seem to prefer the home-cooked because they are part of the cooking and they are part of the feeding/providing to others.

Don't underestimate the human desire to provide value to the tribe, it runs deep in the evolutionary make-up.
I interpreted it as programmers (the FSF’s people) are moving on to a technology (LLMs) where existing notions of free and open source are dead or misused or impractical. And the FSF’s movement will be irrelevant unless they build a movement for this AI world, which this is.
This does seem like a big jump in performance from their previous model.

I'd really like to see comparisons vs GitHub Copilot and Googles Gemini equivalent, but these kinds of metrics are much more developer specific and I don't see them published often.

They're also only publishing deltas, so if GitHub did publish their equivalent metrics we still couldn't compare.

I'm a bit surprised I guess, because I always associated JetBrains with being more transparent.
I went looking for a quote that explicitly references gothic architectural details, and quickly found one in Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, from 1839.

The room I came into was very large and high. The windows were high, and pointed at the top, and so far above the black floor that they were quite out of reach. Only a little light, red in color, made its way through the glass, and served to lighten the nearer and larger objects.
My eyes, however, tried and failed to see into the far, high corners of the room.
I don't think "big pharma" is creating more addictive foods, lol. I will say our food industry is fucked but what they're doing isn't magic.

Fast food is addictive because it contains high amounts of fats, sodium, and carbs. That's all there is to it.
Certainly the case in Summer when I travelled from London to Leipzig on one ticket. Delays (Germany is awful over the last couple of years) and flooding meant I had to reroute. No problem with my ticket, despite through 4 countries.

Likewise a delay from Berlin to Geneva (only two countries, but a long trip) and again no problem with my re-route. Ended up 30 minutes late
Generally share price. NPV has a connection to that, but it's not the only factor investors are considering when buying and selling.
No bulbs at auto stores are inflated far too high to be a profitable parts for me. I have to order through a supplier and keep supply on-hand, which is honestly fine and more profitable for me.

Hey thank you for that idea! I am going to be adding in headlight/taillight housing replacements as well, but I do like the idea of wiper blade replacement, I may keep that on the back-burner for some time until demand approaches.

However, the headlight restoration idea is a fantastic one. Definitely will add this to my list of primary services after launch.
Envil, a Nix Environment Manager
Can def echo that sentiment in London, how do you avoid the commute? Work from home? Found a job outside of London? Job opportunity/pay inequality is often the biggest constraint for most people.
Connecticut. Everything is like this here. I have genuinely considered moving because of this. My current employer has another location in California, and as much as I hate the idea of moving back there, it might be necessary for my own physical well-being.
> What changes from subject to subject is what the underlying spaces of interest are.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. I need some clarification. How does this have any bearing on whether functionals count as functions or not? What is the "underlying spaces of interest" in this example?

In some trivial way, every mathematical object can be seen as a function. You can replace sets in axiomatic set theory with functions.
I think it is pretty obvious. Native languages are expected to be faster than interpreted or jitted, or automatic-memory-management languages in 99.9% of cases, where the programmer has far less control over the operations the processor is doing or the memory it is copying or using.
Personally, I would guess less smoking. We're really good at replacing addictions with other addictions. Not so good at stopping addiction as a whole.
If it could really do that, then it wouldn't be DDR, right?
And even ignoring the tones, how many foreigners can pronounce pinyin correctly? It takes a very different approach to representing non-Latin vowel sounds with Latin characters than English does, there's 'c' being pronounced 'ts', etc.
As a software developer who later got into hardware design, I've always been pretty disappointed with the quality of HDL tools. You get a bit spoiled by the quality of compilers like gcc and clang, and then you run into ridiculously expensive closed-source SystemVerilog compilers that fall apart on valid and obvious code, can't be run in a build farm, and which report cryptic messages for errors. So I've been working on my own open source SystemVerilog compiler / frontend for a while now, and it's nearing 100% completion in terms of language support.

https://github.com/MikePopoloski/slang
It's likely because Telsa will lose the $25k EV market to Chinese EVs:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/cars/china-tesla-byd-competit...
It's the result of the data isolation above anything else attitude of Javascript.

Or, in other words, it's the unavoidable result of insisting on using a language created for the frontend to write everything else.

You don't need to rewrite your code in Rust to get that saving. Any other language will do.

(Personally, I'm surprised all the gains are so small. Looks like it's a very well optimized code path.)
Nice try, I'm still not going to write scala code.
Ok, I should be fair, it's 4 paragraphs of fluff, 6 paragraphs of specs, then a fluff conclusion. It's almost like 2 different unrelated articles smashed into 1.

Still makes for an annoying read.
"While the author seems to interpret this problem as something crucial"

Does he? Read his last paragraph.
That's a problem in most alphabets as well. Several Latin letters (and the number symbols we use as well) have significant differences between printed and handwritten versions, and several handwritten versions around (g and z have some of the most variations).
> Language difficulty is not absolute

> Writing systems can be absolute in difficulty

These things contradict each other.
I've noticed rural communities tend to have more extended family and larger families which helps a lot. Besides less different types of work.
People love to complain about how much work other people can do in order to slightly convenience themselves. And the media loves to run air their complaints, because they are snappy, and photogenic, and easy to pitch as "feel good stories about how much I care for the old ways unlike those lazy sloppy people over there"... even if "I" also find myself forgetting how to write kanji.

It doesn't matter. It won't be a top-down decision. It'll just be a long, slow progression of people slowly realizing that writing in kanji for this character is annoying, so maybe I'll just write it phonetically, and then that character, and then there will be a year or two where there's a phase change and suddenly it's everywhere, even though nobody decided.

And people will complain and whine and moan about the "beauty" of the kanji disappearing. And even though they have a point, it won't matter because the kanji will still be there as much as they ever were, and all one has to do is go study them... but they won't. Because complaining about how other people should keep doing something hard is easy, but actually doing the hard thing yourself is hard, and the vast, vast majority of the complainers won't actually do anything about it other than complain, but take the easier options themselves, just maybe a year or two later than others.

I have no beef with the people taking the easier option. Life is full of things to spend effort on and we can't give maximum effort to all of them. I am annoyed at people who complain about how other people can do vast, vast quantities of work so they can briefly feel slightly better about themselves in some way.
AI Web Layer to communicate with people and AI models. https://wwww.kontxt.io
I fear you might have stopped reading halfway through my post. Continue reading after the word "willing":

> They come here willing to do those jobs.

Someone willing to do a job means you don't need to force them to do it. After all, they aren't slaves.
By the way I'm curious how long ago you had your children, as I'm finding that advice from previous generation parents does not age well at all.
Vscodium for me

binary releases of VS Code without MS branding/telemetry/licensing

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
Children notoriously prefer consistent meals over diverse ones, home cooked or not. The issue with serving blueberries for example is that each blueberry is different. My mother home-cooked for me a boiled egg and rice porridge every morning, and it was that consistency that associated me with care.
My hot take - this isn’t that much different than English speakers not being able to write in cursive anymore. It’s just not something that’s as practiced as much now that we have digital input methods.
It is interesting that the rebellion against consumer capitalism is more consumption.
In uBlock's case, when you first install it on Firefox you are peomoted to give it permission to "Access data for all websites that you visit". Even if you disable adblocking on a specific website Unlock still has access to it and can see it.
Not sure how much it weighs on the balance in those types of decisions. But Rust has safe concurrency. That's probably quite a big boost of web server quality if anything else.
You're not allowed to be proud of your condition if you did nothing to earn it. I'm skinny, I did nothing to earn it. I could be proud, but that's rather sad and pathetic, no?

I would rather be proud of my achievements. I suppose if you don't have those, you might settle on pride in something more superficial.
Google creating an AI agent to obliterate any vestige of privacy you have left on your PC.
With that many tourists using and abusing London public transport, why should only Londoners pay for the service (via taxes - the money must come from somewhere)?
I suppose for the same reason that law in English-speaking countries still uses so much Latin?
Science doesn’t work that way. Many phenomenon that happen in small ways don’t happen in large ways.

A person hits a golf ball a long distance, a basketball is round, and therefore it should do that, too. A person observing golf, but not physics, might extrapolate that. It’s not until they experiment with the other claims that they learn the two behave differently. They’ll eventually learn principles of nature that say what’s possible for that small, dense ball is impossible for that larger, hollow ball.

Likewise, many mechanisms found in science, esp biology, work only in local ways with limited or no use outside that. They might require their environment to exist to even work at all with no increments allowed. They might also work with other components in a precise way where neither separate nor incomplete combinations will work. For this reason, we can’t extrapolate much in biology without experiments to verify that.

Then, I question why you’d be extrapolating that. Observations of the fossil record show no stream of intermediate forms in most species. Instead, we see extinctions followed by fully-grown animals appearing out of nowhere. Today, we observe zero… zero!… animals changing from one type into another. Everything tastes like chicken because the chickens are still chickens. :)

So, your default positions should be these things: much evidence from adaptation within existing forms, billion plus examples against macro-evolution happening in a 2,000 year window, large-scale changes causing organism’ deaths, and changes being so hard to humans’ knowledge can’t create novel creature from existing ones.

This combination of observed, replicated data should lead you to default on an intelligent designer, God or something else, being needed to create ultra-high-complexity changes to creatures along with it not happening often. Second, you should treat macro-evolution as falsified since it failed all its predictions.

It doesn’t bother me as a scientist at all to say God created and sustains the universe by His will. And made man and the animals. And then drives the universe’s machinery to work in the ways we observe, which includes adaptation (micro-evolution). This fits all observations from complexity theory to universe fine-tuning to how all the laws are elegantly connected to the miracle of self-reproducing/maintaining life forms.

Then, the Word of God (Bible) separately explains Jesus Christ did it to redeem us from evil to live with our Creator enjoying Him and His creations forever. That’s revelatory, not empirical, knowledge. Studying the creation is great but knowing the Creator is better. Especially seeing Him modify the laws of the universe to makes specific things happen in response to our needs or prayers. If anything, science deepened my knowlege of how powerful and good God must be.
This strikes a chord with me (not that I'm the only one). Every time I write longform, I intuitively want to include, "maybe", "might", "I think", but then axe them from my writing so as to not invite total dismissal.

In the abstract the authors write "Among the existing studies, there is also divergent understandings." It'd be interesting to see the methodology of this paper (doesn't seem to have access without pay) and how it differs from previous studies.
> 90% of the article is just finding new ways to integrate "AI" into a purely fluff sentence.

I mean, to be fair, that’s half the industry right now. Hard to blame them all that much.
JPMorgan Says AI Power Demand Is Straining US Water Supplies
There is no reason data isolation should cost you 100x memory usage.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/two-anonymously-se...

Some good Samaritans sometimes send in Ireland's priceless heritage to the national museum. But of course they're not going to reveal who they are, or where they found it. They don't want to go to prison. So I guess we'll never know.
https://archive.is/vB1DF
Even in a local setting, batched inference is useful to be able to run more "complex" workflows (with multiple, parallel LLM calls for a single interaction).

There is very little reason to optimize for just single stream inference at the expense of your batch inference performance.
I've been making https://AppGoblin.info for an overview of mobile app advertising ecosystem. I've been expanding it to include development tools and marketing companies as well.

My main, but longer, main project is building an MMP (mobile advertising attribution platform). It's really far from done, so if anyone is interested please reach out. I need help writing Android and iOS SDKs and with the analytic dashboard for the frontend.

Also, interested in starting a skyscraper construction blog if anyone is interested.
> I'm puzzled by opinions like this

I'm for testing. In practice I think there are many drawbacks though.

Specifically, engraving implementation details, which makes changing code way harder.

In the commercial projects where I worked, integration testing (by non programmers) are the one that I think added value.

I myself spam unit tests when I code like I want. It is not that.

> experienced developers can indeed point out "code smells" that are worth discussing at the very least

Ye I agree. I am not really sure what I am getting at. I think I need some sort of 'dogmatic wisdom is unwise' aphorism.

Many newbies seem to take aphorisms way too litteraly. But maybe we would be even worse of without them?