skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was kind of hoping you'd respond. One look at your profile page was enough to dispel the two assumptions I made (Doctor of Iranian descent :), but that was exactly my point. There are things we can't know categorically, and there are lots of things we don't know because we are deeply limited and don't have experience with them.
Regardless, we can still imagine arguments, which can lead to knowledge, and that is a much better approach than rejecting/dismissing behaviors we don't understand.

For the folks who fled to the woods, they were shot at by the Bolsheviks, which you were probably not shot at- so you can't assume your experience relates to them (and the Bolsehviks murdered millions of people during and after the time they fled, which is probably very different from when you fled). Not all people who fled the Bolsheviks went into the woods (my grandfather went west eventually to America), but these people had already been leaving on the periphery of the forests, so retreating into it probably made sense to them because they already knew how to live in it (they would have probably been as bewildered trying to live in the west as my grandfather would have been trying to live in the forest).
Likewise with homeless people in America- they live on the streets in the culture they know how to live. They don't retreat into the forest probably because they don't know how to survive there, and similarly probably do not know how to work as a fast food cashier, office worker, or lawyer when they have no money or housing (and all the other prerequisites for participating in the economy). My hunch is that you are blaming them for their condition when this is much better seen as a cultural, social and economic failure rather than a personal one. If entering into the economic trap of poverty is a possibility in our society, we should at least educate people how to survive- at least if we're not going to take the time to fix the obvious failings in our economy

I.e., don't blame this on religious zealotry or personal failings- those traits seem largely circumstantial, in the absence of a caring and equitable society
Thats the first thing I noticed! I've been doing bits of genealogy research into a couple great grandparent lines that already have quite a bit of research done (on males) from the mid-1500 to late-1800's and one line is Henry's and John's (and a random Abraham); another is all Peter and James (then a random Jesse)
Not the same thing and not at the same scale
> You probably won’t get to choose what to work on, and you may not agree with all the decisions of the powers that be. In fact, it’s practically certain you won’t. After all, you know more about the subject matter than they do.

Wait a minute if the people most suited to make a decision are overridden by people less competent than them (they have to be most of the time, given the different focus of their career), that's kind of a problem, isn't it? Is there any way to avoid such structural failures?
Can you share a link that describes what exactly they do?

What I would expect to be table stakes is that they only ever have an encrypted version of the data on their end (like a password manager) and that the encryption key is stored on my machine or if on their side that it by itself is protected by a passphrase that I have to enter each time plaid needs to do something. If we are talking storing the clear text password somehow coz they use screen scraping to implement their features for some banks.

All I find on their site (casually looking) is marketing fluff.

Also really I would expect that they never even need my password at all and that instead they have a proper API between them and the bank(s) where I authorize specific scopes only (preferably read only scoping being available) and my password stays with me and if something bad were to ever be done with a write scoped token from Plaid it would be traceable to their token authorizing it and they would be liable. When I give them my password they basically get full monetary power of attorney and the bank would always fault me ("we can see you logged in with your user and password. We tell you to keep your password/PIN secure and to never share it. Sorry, money gone".
There is no problem in CS that can't be solved by another level of indirection.
This argument assumes that code is an ends not a mean, which is false. The value you deliver is not your code, it’s the enablement of business functions. Let’s say you launch a new product that gains traction. Sure, in 5 years your code may be refactored out of existence. But the people doing the refactoring only have jobs because of the value you delivered when launching the initial product. That is your lasting contribution, not the lines of code you wrote.
Land values increase, though it is still possible to make a specific plot of land available to more people by building tall buildings on them and installing elevators. The total rent of a small plot can then potentially be divided amongst hundreds or thousands of people.
Michael Saylor explains in relatively simple terms here:

https://x.com/Vivek4real_/status/1860737655442432504
I shared this on the other HN thread, but I spent some time revisiting the HowStuffWorks c 2001, and highly recommend as a catharsis and reminder of the web as it once was:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010202064900/http://howstuffwo...
I never worked with it directly so this may not be totally accurate, but IIRC a lot of the fundamental networking code for managing data centers -- DNS, traffic routing, etc -- was legacy Perl scripts. While I was there, at least one major us-east-1 outage was directly linked to a problem with one of these scripts.
Which physics and biology prevent the utopia from existing?
> It's clear that the industry is shifting from being geeky and nerdy to being more business and management focused.

I've heard this same complaint for the last 30 years, probably starting with this - Bret Hart helps you debug a null pointer dereference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSmKiws-4NU
BYD has factories in Brazil: https://valorinternational.globo.com/business/news/2024/09/0... https://en.byd.com/news/byd-company-announces-first-factory-...
To actually implement it we would have to completely understand how the underlying model works and how to manually manipulate the structure. It might be impossible with LLMs. Not to take Asimov as gospel truth, he was just writing stories afterall not writing a treatise about how robots have to work, but in his stories at least the three laws were encoding explicitly in the structure of the robot's brain. They couldn't be circumvented (in most stories).

And in those stories it was enforced in the following way: the earth banned robots. In response the three laws were created and it was proved that robots couldn't disobey them.

So I guess the first step is to ban LLMs until they can prove they are safe ... Something tells be that ain't happening.
We do have resiliency - the internet reroutes around these cuts l. Knock out every Atlantic cable and traffic from NY to London would route via LA and singapore.

I see this all the time on traffic from far east to Europe when a Red Sea cable dies, and I’ve seen it from India to Europe too (and seen traffic rerouted via South Africa and up the west coast a fair bit)

Latency is higher, but on the whole things continue to work. Until there’s enough damage - problems tend to be if you cut enough that cables and the routers they are connected to start to bottleneck.
Unless they demand twice the work from you.
I know it isn't fair. Life isn't fair and neither is climate change.
Most of our infrastructure was built a long time ago (except roads) and don’t actively see maintenance. No one from the current generations has had to pay for real impactful infrastructure for decades. Now that all the infrastructure is failing or has security holes nobody wants to pay for it to be fixed. If you look up major infrastructure repairs in the last few decades you will see much of what could have been long term fixes were reduced to short term fixes.

Properly fixing infrastructure has become expensive as construction costs have skyrocketed in the last few decades.

Look at the CHIPS bill, huge infrastructure gain but also was a part of the 9% inflation because building this infrastructure is expensive. The American people were warned about it causing inflation but wanted it anyways. When inflation hit they all conveniently forgot the cost of new infrastructure in the US and chose to cling to lies about how disastrous the last 4 years have been.

That is why today no one does anything about problems until a bridge collapses. You can make more money today by passing the buck to the next generation and passing blame to whoever came before you.
Just to double check my understanding (because being wrong on the internet is perhaps the fastest way to get people to check your work):

Is this saying that regular tasks that haven't been scheduled for two minutes and tasks that are uninterruptible (truly so, not idle or also killable despite being marked as uninterruptible) that haven't been woken up for two minutes are counted?
And there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_process too
Spoken like a true out of touch professional managerial class person. Regardless of country, your kind just got totally rebuked this past year. If you didn't realize, auto manufacturing was the last major home grown profession where you could have some semblance of stable middle class life. Once that is gone, the hollowing out of the middle class will be complete and there will be no money to transition to your garbage solution that the population clearly does not even want.
Uh, we did…? Alexa, Siri, Ok Google…

A lot of money was poured into that goal, but because every type of action required a handcrafted integration, they were either costly to develop or extremely limited. That’s no longer the case.
Why do you think the Chinese will invade their neighbors?
> Finally I want to point out that using assert is not ERROR checking (file not found, IP address not resolved, TCP connection failed, system resource failed to allocate, etc.) but BUG checking.

> Do not write code for BUGS.

I have nothing to add, but am quoting the above because it is very well put.
How are we supposed to think about SIMD in Big-O? Because this is still linear time if the kernel width is less than the max SIMD width (which is 16 I think on x64?)
While "portable MP3 player" implies "not a cell phone", have you considered use of an old cell phone and an open source music player (i.e. one example here: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.van...).

The "phone" does not even need to work as a "phone" anymore, it just needs to work enough to open the player app and play music.

And with the example player above, it "does not require a user hostile music ecosystem". It simply reads the phone's filesystem and catalogs all mp3 files it finds, and then lets you play those files.

It (using either an old cell phone, or your current one if you have one) will allow you to "just to be able to load and play mp3".
Terraform Proverbs
An homage to Go Proverbs
Did anyone here use Genera on an original lisp machine? It had a pseudo-graphical interface and a directory listing provided clickable results. It would be really neat if we could use escaping to confer more information to the terminal about what a particular piece of text means.

Feature-request: bring back clickable ls results!

Bonus points for defining a new term type and standard for this.
Sounds like an exaggeration, cause there must be plenty of worse places. But yeah Silicon Valley rubbed me the wrong way.
DJI is already the worlds largest drone maker, better to let them continue then rebuild a car factory.
Basic human greed is why. It has made the cost of shelter astonishingly expensive. That has a knock on effect to all other aspects of life.

Oh and because a new iDevice comes out every year.
I use git command line interface. Not because it is good (it isn't) or because I enjoy suffering (I think I don't), but because it is a standard on all the machines that have, you know, git.

What good is a ls alternative if I need to install it everywhere I need ls? I'd prefer using the standard ls even if it is not ideal. But maybe that's just me.
Yeah the variable contrast issue (contrast dependent on background content) is a real problem for accessibility guidelines. For enterprise apps if you want to pass the various accessibility reviews it needs to be a user preference at least.
People rise to their level of incompetence[1]. This simple principle explains most managers completely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
People are waking up, and to be fair, Tesla really led the way in the US for the last few years because they had no choice(no one would take them seriously). The question is can the West turn the ship around before its too late?
Please provide some sources, because I think your 40% is also based on monetary and not nutritional value.
What “benefits” does a baby get from a family friend kiss? In this anti-vax world there are huge risks. I read on a running forum in 2021 that a mom took a 5mo old on a run saying “babies have been around for millenia and they are fine.” This is similar erroneous reasoning.
Good luck convincing a business user to even let you finish the first sentence explaining Pandoc and Markdown to them.

They don't even know what .docx is necessarily. It's just "the report" or "a Word".

They don't even know where it's saved. And it's only getting worse: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
> Water stewardship has always been a guiding principle for Nestlé Waters, underpinning the business model for each of our factories and for the local communities of stakeholders who rely on these shared water resources

> We treat water with the care it deserves and are committed to protecting local water sources. We work closely with local stakeholders to ensure we are protecting watersheds and the availability of water resources. Last year, across Europe, we returned 98.7% of the water used in the production of our drinks

Scary and creepy to see corporate speech applied to natural water wells. These should never be in hands of companies like Coca-Cola, Nestle, Danone. It's pure evil.
Yes of course. That's the point of my comment, which is being downvoted for some reason that eludes me.
Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.
Ask HN: Has anyone created a Mac mini doc with a battery?
I was thinking that a mac mini dock would be pretty good for home use, but a mac mini + an ipad would be good for the occasional travel a portable computer. Why couldn't a dock/battery exist for the mac mini?
What's HR'a rationale?
How on earth do you get caught plagiarizing and still pass with a C+?
Did the first teacher who asked him to just keep the device in his backpack "jump at shadows"? He knew what it looked like and was trying to help his student stay out of trouble. He didn't report him. Ok, so that's one "crazy" adult. The kid didn't listen.

Another teacher thought the same thing and asked him to put it away, and the kid didn't listen, again, and proceeds to set the alarm on the device. Only then they called the police. I guess, I don't see how brining this kind of a device, looking like a typical movie bomb, to a school in LA, NY (I don't know? think of the least "jumpy-at-shodows" area of the country) could have ended up any better without the police involvement. Heck, I am surprised the first teacher didn't report him and they didn't immediately evacuate the building.
> not that expensive to put down a bike lane

Scale-wise insufficient. We aren’t going to get to net zero with bike lanes.
I don’t think it is obvious which is the “throw money at it” solution. Energy utilities are already heavily regulated. Users aren’t really exposed to a market with transparent pricing to enable supply and demand. The folks who want smart grid stuff are the ones trying to let the free market actually work on the energy problem.

Currently, petrochemicals might be:

-Benefiting from consumer-focused subsidies, like heating or energy assistance.

-Subsidized by, like, actual intentional industrial subsidies

-Subsidized by infrastructure investments, like a road out to some hinterlands that is only needed to get to some mine, pipeline, or whatever

-Subsidized by allowing these companies to externalize their costs onto society by dumping them on the environment. All those greenhouse gasses, cleaning them up isn’t going to be free, and we’re going to pay for it.

-Subsidized by international relations. This isn’t a political site, so let’s not dig into the details there. But the long dependency chains for petrochemicals have made some odd international relations bedfellows. These constraints on our diplomatic options have a cost that is hard to capture.

We could start by making sure to price all that in to petrochemicals if we wanted to give ourselves a ton of extra homework (actually we shouldn’t try to run the numbers because it is big country-dependent mess, but we should at least have the size of the picture in our heads).

Renewables have fewer built-in, structural, or snuck-in by negligence subsidies like that. They don’t produce as many toxic byproducts to dump on the planet (though, semiconductors aren’t byproduct-free for sure), and energy falling from the sky is easier to just grab without any drama. So, I think if it were possible to actually run those numbers, renewables would look pretty good.

Then we add in the fact that renewables probably are the future (eventually we will run out of oil). So, subsidies for renewable R&D are an investment that should pay off with future manufacturing jobs.

Overall, sticking with petrochemicals seems very expensive to me.
I am 67, and equestria is mostly correct. I still get great satisfaction from my tech career, but sure, friends and family matter more. This story involves some work I did that did not bring me satisfaction.

I worked at my first consumer-oriented tech company, right after the dotcom crash. It was a really unexciting interlude in my career. I was given the job of writing the database and Java representation of credit/debit cards, and the related business logic. As often happens, the code grew over time, as requirements and card types were added. And it was finally time for a rewrite, and this code became a poster child for technical debt.

Startup activity resumed, and I left for a far more interesting startup.

Then, maybe 15 years later, I was retired, and doing consulting, and ran into a friend from the company, who told me that a new company doing something very similar, and was looking for help. I go in and talk to them, and discover that they actually licensed the software from my former company. Including my long-in-the-tooth credit/debit/xyz-card software. The code was still completely recognizable, disturbingly so. It lived on far past the point that it should have.

I decided to not take the consulting job. I really did not relish the idea of going back to this very forgettable and uninteresting code. But most importantly, I had just retired, and wanted to spend my summer on a lake, not keeping this code alive a bit longer.
Pretty much all the FAANGs adjust for location so not what I would call rare. In addition it’s not about adjusting, many jobs just aren’t offered remote for better or worse (look at many Bay Area YC startup location expectations for the last year), so yes your current job might be ok with it, but the next bump up to make more isn’t even an option because many high paying jobs will be in office.
There is a sci-fi series that I am absolutely blanking on that features that concept - I remember a few characters each having access to a somewhat godlike ability to manipulate physics, and using it to restructure the universe to create computers to augment their own capabilities - definitely some planetary stuff and some quantum / atomic level stuff.. hmmmm maybe gpt can help
Youtube, netflix, tiktok, instagram isn't entertainment then? You are talking about last century media that holds just a small fraction of people's attention currently.
So when GHG absorbs energy from the sun, it's on a per capita basis?
Would be clear if it did not seem to me that you are including three languages that have been around for a while in the "whatever cool compiled language of the month" group.

If not -- then clear. If yes, then this is getting even more confusing.
Why early success online is a trap
I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and pretty much everyone else in the (admittedly quite small) classes either had Dutch ancestry or was an art history graduate student auditing so that they could learn to read primary sources about Dutch painters as part of their research. Early on in my first semester, we learned how to explain in Dutch why we decided to take Dutch, and I had the distinction of being the only one taking the class "voor de lol", which even today still makes me chuckle due to how similar it is to the common English meme phrasing.
Nio: An Async Runtime for Rust
I wonder if this would work for python.
Not entirely correct. Boeing, despite all the bad press, actually reversed course on this recently. 787's wing was made by a supplier, but 777X's wing is actually built in-house, right next to the main factory, starting from carbon fiber fabric.
Same! I owe so much to him. Heartbreaking and forever grateful for the time we got to spend together.
My thought on this is LLMs will replace all this stuff within the next 5 years. Skilled conversation partners work better than these apps do anyway.