skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't disagree that it results in broken incentives and otherwise undesirable outcomes.

But to take the example of your roof - in a business scenario, you would amortize that expense over the number of years you expect the roof to last. 15 years means you'd take 1/15 (and probably multiply by the inflation rate to account for rising costs) and put that into your annual budget request.
You’re thinking of it from the perspective of someone who cares about reality.

At the scale most governments work, reality is impossible to actually care about. It’s too much detail, and too confusing.

Instead, they allocate money, and then punish people when ‘the wrong things happen’.

Dealing with the reality is someone else’s problem, further down the hierarchy.

Also known as ‘shit rolls down hill’.
My experience is different. I have full autonomy whether I am paid hourly or a fixed rate for the job. Often I'll prefer hourly if it's hard for me to get an idea how long it will take.
Not a radar, it’s ADS-B.
Cline
US software engineer. I have 24 days of PTO, 15 company holidays, and 9 sick days. 10 weeks for parental leave (16 for moms). $240K salary, $400-600K in annual vesting equity. That’s private paper equity, but I’ve already been able to cash out $700K and buy a house with cash.

Fully remote. I can expense $120/month for phone and internet, and a few lunches each month, too. I can get a new laptop and/or monitor sent to me just by asking.

When I do visit the office, the trip is fully expensed. Free daily lunch. Coffee and drinks and snacks everywhere, free. Private desks in a semi-open office with couches scattered around. Lounges with hundreds of board games, nearly all of which have seen table time during work hours.

Primary projects are tracked in a knowledge-sharing system, but I can mostly work on what I want to. I’m encouraged to merge small fixes and refactors without any ticket-pushing at all. Yelling by managers or anyone would not be tolerated.

“At-will” is more FUD than reality in my experience. Most companies, when firing or laying someone off, give something like 2 weeks of severance for every year of service.
Do you have any evidence this is happening? In order to swing an election, you'd have to buy a lot of votes. That's a lot of people to rat you out.

You're proposing that secret vote-buying conspiracy is going on and thousands of people are all keeping their mouth shut in order to keep getting that... $10, $50, $100 bribe?
You're looking at everything as one budget that you control.

Consider instead that you're part of a co-op and your responsibility is to buy the groceries always. Someone else does the home repairs. Someone else keeps all the cars fueled. Someone else pays the utility bill. There are fifty different people with responsibilities. Sometimes there will also be "You must spend $100 on supplies for an event on July 17th."

On January 1, you get all the money that you will get for the year to buy groceries. How much do you ask the co-op board for?

Government doesn't see it as one big account, but rather "this is how much we get, this is how much we allocate to the different accounts."

Home budgets work differently. There's one pool of money and if you have an expense you can skimp on another part of the budget. Had to get a plumber? Hold back on going to the movies for a few weeks. You can't do "we had a natural disaster so we're short on money and not going to pay the prison guards for a few weeks."
I'm not much of a functional programmer either, but generally in the beginning you'll feel this way because you're not used to thinking about problems in a functional way. You're used to solving problems with imperative structures. So you try to implement that in a functional language and it turns out completely stupid because the language isn't made to solve problems that way. But it usually has good ways to solve things.
> "authors" who know almost nothing about the papers they've "written"

I agree this is quite common at least in the field that interests me: Neurodegenerative diseases.

> "True. Mostly because compared to the pharma industry and research foundations..."

I don't know, at the same time we would have no medical drugs without these organisms and yet they are vastly inefficient in their resource allocations:

Testing drugs that were already tested or testing drugs without any pre-clinical indication they would have any beneficial effect or using animal models like mice, fishes, worms or even worse immortal cells that do not model human anatomy or physiology at all.
Update your resume immediately. If you want to remain at the company then start looking for an internal transfer before he inevitably gives you a bad rating for your next review (and a PIP will inevitably follow). Also start looking externally either way.

The only alternative is to brown nose good and hard and convince the new boss you will be an asset for his shenanigans. But odds are good he’s already decided you aren’t a piece in the puzzle he’s building and nothing you can do will change that.
C is trivially upstream of everything. Rust is slightly less upstream of everything, in that you have to essentially go through C to do it.

C is also very small and easy to hold in your head, with minimal required dependencies, aside from standard system libraries. Rust typically pulls dozens of dependencies for even small libraries.

These are just tradeoffs. If I were going to build a small library to do something with libcurl, I might do C first then Rust for expanding if required. Same for specialized processing like rasters or computational geometry or even linear programming - all those are C already, and rarely do you find a perfect Rust crate that exposes everything you want.

And unsafe rust is definitely harder than just writing C. It often is easier to write it mostly in C then expose app/higher API level functions to Rust, rather than do the business logic in Rust.
It would be cool if RFCs would be turned into Haskell, so we could use __that__ as the specification instead.

Same for all the remaining web standards.
> A government that kills squirrels that get too famous on social media, not as much

How fast do we forget...

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/pet-cats-killed-chinese-...

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/08/china/shanghai-corgi-deat...

https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/china-city-kill-house-pets-co...
The worst of both worlds is where the US has landed. The public private cooperation is government bureaucracy and accountability coupled with a private company that knows there's basically no penalty to overshooting a government contract "What are they going to do, leave the road unfinished?".

There are natural monopolies that exist, road building, water, sewer, power. All these things shouldn't be controlled by private entities.
Bwaha. Have you wondered why California and Germany have some of the most expensive energy in the world, while also being on the forefront of renewables - especially solar?

It is because of this. Literally. You’ll need to do your own math though, because it’s too politically embarrassing to acknowledge. After all, California now has ‘too much solar’!

It’s also why California is keeping their Nuke plant alive (doing a strong about face), and building a ton of natural gas peaker plants, and Germany imports massive amounts of electricity during certain times of day and year - and has been keeping coal around a lot longer than they were supposed to.

Because this is a way harder problem than naive back of
the envelope calculations suggest. But that would be awkward to acknowledge. So, we don’t.

Or is it really ‘there is no way they could be lying to us, or doing something stupid! That would be crazy!’?. Because if so, I’ve got some math that shows it literally could be no other way.
At some size a corporate and government have a lot of similarities. Much more then small vs big companies. Only difference I've seen is that companies do a big clean up every now and then, which helps although doesn't solve everything. Governments just keep pestering on.
Mastering DynamoDB: Batch Operations Explained
My problem isn't really waking up though, it's the going to sleep.
Show HN: I made an AI summarizer to summarize articles or URL links for free
The US needs more chip fab startups. Put the money there.
Some large companies acquire the characteristics of government (spending becomes remote from the source of funds; political cover from being too big to fail; lack of meaningful competition). So when large corporations become malign or inefficient, it can be because of how government-like they have become, and some kind of competition & markets authority should step in.
Yet, there are still millions of humans working in factories.

There is value to the human form, our versatility and adaptability.

A machine that replicated a human would have incredible economic value (though not for the people whose jobs it replaced). A machine that exceeded a human in versatility, e.g. by having more arms, even more so.
> And native apps on most platforms are also a security nightmare

You make it sound like a web browser is not a native app.
Maybe, but GPUs are also used in virtualized environments (datacenters), where you can't ignore these security issues.
I was just trying to explain others' perceptions of spamminess, but death of the author. My comments can mean whatever you want them to mean!
Vote by mail is completely negligible in countries where the described process works fine.
You can write Rust code with no dependencies (not even Rust's standard library) and coders do so regularly when writing code for microcontrollers.

That is one of the primary advantages that distinguishes C and Rust from most languages (which tend to depend completely on a library to do automatic memory management for example).

It is advantageous not only on constrained systems like microcontrollers, but also when interfacing with code written in one of the languages that has a hard dependency on a runtime library to manage memory.
"something that isn’t based on…", Many of the CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League in eSports) qualifiers were based from online rankings for players. Normally round-robin (more common known swiss) format-of tourment systems applied; go from the previous ranks, it's often hidden for different reasons, however, you look at the most recent qualifier, who performed well, then try to order everything slightly differently offline-in tournaments, then report online.

The important thing to note, when the numbers look odd-number, removing players to join-in into the event, placing the limits!

Normal orders based on name, country of origin (sometimes these individuals travel far!), time of entering tournament (sometimes people late!), then getting it to play as well as possible sometimes based on how it looks… you want some kind of catch measure, to catch 2-players early on that would play normally in the final, having 1 going home early onwards. Is this a hack? Yes and No. Losing information happens when you don't apply planning, (1-day planning then more when possible?).
Hi! A few years ago I found myself wanting an equivalent of `column` that didn’t strip color codes. After I implemented it in Haskell, I found it was useful to use Nix to force statically linking against libraries like gmp to reduce startup time. Perhaps what I ended up doing might be helpful for you too: https://github.com/bts/columnate/blob/master/default.nix
It's already illegal to do voter fraud!
Because a decent chunk of America is in a performative cult.
You will most likely be fired.
The playbook is so fucking obvious. Take over quasi monopolist, loot through stock buybacks, offload to retail, start writing articles calling for rescue
Scientists May Have Found Origin of One of History's Most Important Inventions
A message about accessing “(null)” suggests something pretty specific to that machine IMO
Nyctography (Lewis Carroll's method for writing in the dark)
As an example, in the 2021 election in Germany 47.3% of votes were cast by mail: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/01/PE22_036_14.html

Are you trying to say that the process doesn't work fine in Germany?
They managed to double from 6 Petabit per second in 2022 to 13 Pbps in 2023. I assume with ConnectX-8 this could be 26 Pbps in 2025/26. The ConnextX-8 is PCI-e 6 so I assume we could get 1.6Tbps ConnextX-9 with PCI-e 7.0 which is not far away.

Cant wait to see the FreeBSD Netflix version of that post.

This also goes back to how increasing throughput is relatively easy and has a very strong roadmap. While increasing storage is difficult. I notice YouTube has been serving higher bitrate video in recent years with H.264. Instead of storing yet another copy of video files in VP9 or AV1 unless they are 2K+.
I’m not so sure. Building chips isn’t like building software.
Would you be happy with two clicks? Three clicks? Like what's the principal difference? As I said, you can download and run arbitrary application with one click today. And may be second click to confirm to operating system (not sure if it's always necessary).

Insane thing is that arbitrary application has instantly full access to your computer. And web application still heavily constrained and has to ask about almost every permission.
Well, to be fair, the use of semicolons in the shell has nothing to do with their use in other languages, here they are simply line separators.
It looks like the message type can be anything:

type Msg = MyFirstActorMessage;
Ask HN: Is there a VR/AR headset that I can use for work?
The biggest constraint is I cannot download any software on my work computer: no Steam, no Virtual Desktop, etc. These are all blocked. It’s not immediately obvious to me from my cursory search that this is available yet.

I would really like to see if it’s possible to completely replace my monitors when I work from home on my company issued laptop.

For context, my wife and I recently had a baby and instead of upsizing our home for me to have an office, I would like to see if I can work from, say, the kitchen table, but with a full three monitor setup inside VR.
Restoring rivers' natural curves can prevent flooding
Okay, imagine a scenario like this: A small oligopoly of AI companies come to dominate the marketplace and using regulatory capture manage to make it almost impossible to compete with them through e.g. "AI safety" regulation or just a mess of complicated requirements.

Over time this small number of companies further consolidates and ends up with interlocking boards of directors while the AIs it runs become more and more powerful and capable. Since they have a market monopoly they actually don't share the most powerful AIs with the public at all. They keep these internal.

They become incredibly wealthy through being the only vendors for AI assistance. Using this wealth they purchase control of media, social networks, games, etc. They are also powering a lot of this already through the use of their AI services behind the scenes in all these industries, meaning they may not even have to acquire or take control of anything. They're already running it.

Then they realize they can leverage the vast power of their AIs to start pushing agendas to the populace. They can swing elections pretty trivially. They can take power.

Fast forward a few decades and you have an AI monopoly run by a bunch of oligarchs governing humanity by AI-generating all the media they consume.

The key here is using AI as a force multiplier coupled with a monopoly on that force multiplier. Imagine if only one army in the world ever invented guns. Nobody else could make guns due to some structural monopoly they had. What would happen?

Even without regulatory capture I can see this happening because digital technology and especially Internet SaaS tends to be winner take all due to network effects. Something about our landscape structurally favors monopoly.

I'm not saying I definitely think this is going to happen. I'm saying it's a dystopian scenario people should be considering as a possibility and seeking to avoid.
No, it’s definitely changed. As tech has become bigger and bigger the demographics of the field have approached the demographics of the overall population. Back in the 90s the tiny subset of self-selected people involved were almost all mission oriented true believers. As it grew and became extremely lucrative the folks with other priorities were attracted.

As you say, there is always politics, but the difference in quantity is large enough to have a quality of its own.
Using jQuery CDN might have helped with cross-site caching in the past, but now all major browsers have cache partitioning by origin for privacy reasons.
someone wrote, it's Win or Lose, in these situations, sorry!

Event organisers, they like encourage the "good games" happening, when problems arise, it looks bad on every people there, the result OK, however this affects more. It is the event happening on time, people leaving at right times, everyone is OK, that people consider the "friend" aspect of tournaments, the professional points of view; this is "sportsmanship" online towards the real eSports victory.

Meanwhile the electronic groups have different "matchmaking" systems, I have even heard it is more matchmaker, it cannot be 100% perfect, however, people always try hard doing good.
Of course this is true with minor effort.

I'm not doubting rusts benefits, I write rust full time for a reason. Just answering why sometimes C is first.
It's really not. Yes it's possible to figure out how to build and install the Go compiler, but then you have to repeat that process every time you want to upgrade to a new version. With Guix (I assume Nix is similar) you just save the patch somewhere and then run `guix install --with-patches=go=/path/to/patch go` and everything just works (including reapplying the patch on upgrade).
> And now they are probably too stubborn to change.

Sounds like we agree!
> Like much common wisdom, the idea that companies are efficient (and specifically more efficient than government) is a myth.

There is a book - Recoding America - that gives a behind-the-scenes look into government IT and the more recent changes that improve efficiencies and outcomes. It was published in the last 2 or 3 years and your local library almost certainly has a copy.

FYI - the first chapter or two seem to imply developers are to blame for things that are truly the fault of leadership; power through that section and the rest of the book shows developers in a different light: perhaps she was setting up a strawman to make the change look even better.
I think the real damage to X is the loss of important posters. X is no longer the place to find status reports from companies. It seems to me that nobody wants to be associated with the filth being promoted. I sure don’t want nazis responding to non-political posts I’m in.
The (to me) obvious parallel is school smoking bans.

Back in the 1960s, when 16 year olds could legally smoke, schools would have designated smoking areas.

Over times these restrictions tightened, but students used a 'certain ingenuity' to get around that band (hence the 1973 song "Smokin' in the Boys Room"). One former student of my jr. high, who was there during that transition, told us they used to smoke behind a certain low wall, since the teachers never checked there.

I'm certain that some kids smoked "for comfort and self-management" - nicotine cravings, I understand, are not to be trifled with.

Did the smoking ban policy "lack[s] a clear plan to help students adjust"? I honestly don't know - it was before my time. OTOH, what would that plan have been?

If we use the logic presented here, it sounds like smoking should also sometimes be considered as an essential part of someone's support system.

Also, what's missing from the suggested language is the use of non-smartphone alternative devices. If calming music is that important, then a dedicated MP3 player may be appropriate. If non face-to-face messages are that important, then an dumbphone with only SMS may be appropriate.
Yep, a classic case is governments have to serve all their citizens, including all the really problematic and expensive ones. Businesses don't have to do that.
In the unsubsidised world it only seems to work for marijuana. Other than for that the low costs of fields or regular greenhouses seem to win.
All fun and games until Enderman starts shitting bad sectors all over the place
Phewture: AI Prompts for Thinking Managers
I have just started this site: https://phewture.org because I was tired of the facile prompts that were available for ChatGPT and other chatbots. I'd love your feedback on it.
Why Leaves Change Color
https://archive.ph/vacBj
>It is much easier to stop a stabber than someone armed with an assault rifle, and it’s much harder for the assailant to stab a dozen people.

You're wrong about this. A knife does not need to be reloaded and many knife wounds can be more deadly than gunshot wounds. A person with a knife can stab random people in the back and run off, probably indefinitely. If they decided to stab them all at once then they might have a bit of difficulty and have to do it in a confined space. But this does happen in China.

As for stopping someone with basically any gun, any other person could stop them with a gun. It doesn't matter if the guy with the gun is an elite soldier and the defender is a little old lady, so long as the lady has decent aim. Guns are only a problem because people scoff at their right and duty to defend themselves.

>Is there any other country in the world where there are more mass killings per inhabitant than the US?

So-called "mass shootings" are not the only violent crime you need to worry about. The definition is skewed to make the problem sound worse than it is, by including gang violence and gang wars in there. You need to consider violent crimes vs. violent crimes. And frankly, the agencies that report violent crime have a conflict of interest when it comes to that. You also don't get stats about violence prevented or mitigated because of guns, because it is not tracked.

I think there are other factors that go into violent crime prevalence beyond gun availability, that make it impossible to reach any meaningful conclusion about whether banning guns would lower crime overall. Guns were very common in the entire world until recently, and nobody was really concerned about mass shootings. Any perceived violence problem is really a cultural issue or a perception issue. Even if banning guns did lower crime somehow I would not be interested, any more than I would be interested in banning cars because someone might get run over or banning printing presses because they can print offensive words. Self-defense is a human right and we all need effective tools to defend ourselves from all enemies. Some amount of regulation seems to be a necessary evil, but a ban on guns is as preposterous to me as a ban on pointy sticks.
How is this latest not an emergency, I wonder.
It’s ease of completion doesn’t change the calculus of its importance.
Review Application
I am looking for some yc founders who want to review our application. I would greatly appreciate this also if selected i bring some Belgian Chocolates with me as a gift for the people who helped us.
The order in which you sum a large collection of floating-point numbers is also important, if you want the result to be stable.