skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
these videos are better than most, but are still bad in one sense, they really fail to capture just how random walk the movements are. For example, in the first video the script says "a mediator protein complex arrives" as if it is directed there by some sort of orchestration agent. It's not. It's more like "a mediator protein complex drunkenly stumbles in and connects after a few thousand misses". Of course it's hard to make that into a captivating video.

As I said, the WEHI movies are pretty good in that at least they add some random walk into the motions. There was a harvard artist-professor (can't remember who) who literally made videos with exact parabolic and helical trajectories and then was crowing about how beautiful the biological system is.
"Why are we having to pay 10x what we paid a couple years ago for a senior developer???"
let Claude answer questions about your files and even modify them
What about ChatGPT Desktop? Do you think they will add support for this?
Related:

Oracle, it's time to free JavaScript (277 points, 70 days ago, 127 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41557383

Deno is filing a USPTO petition to cancel Oracle's JavaScript trademark (7 points, 3 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42212949
Apparently it does, just none of them happened to know about their condition before they joined. What are the chances?!
I tried buying a monitor direct from a Chinese company (Innocn). It broke within 8 months. They never listed a warranty, but I (stupidly) assumed it was at least a year; but no, it was 6 months. After having such a bad experience, I went looking and apparently was not the only one. Many others had their monitors die and the company would purposefully drag out the RMA process past the warranty period.

Long story short, warranties still matter, and it should be a big part of any expensive purchase decision.
I have forgotten the recent example, but there are sites that don't have a banner at all because they don't track users and others that see the Do-Not-Track header and replace the banner with a discreet acknowledgement.
I like this definition for a "proto"-intelligent trait.
GLP-1s to take the weight off, a mechanism leveraging this knowledge to keep the weight off?
Hi,

Having this sort of "table polymorphism" is something we've thought a lot about for PRQL and is definitely something we want to get right. That said it's not straightforward but you can do a lot of it already. You can try the following examples for yourself in the PRQL Playground (https://prql-lang.org/playground/).

First a simple example using functions as they are documented:

```prql

let fullname = func firstname lastname -> f"{firstname} {lastname}"

from customers

select full_name=(fullname first_name last_name)

```

Now the example above isn't quite what you're looking for because you still have to specify the columns as function arguments and there really isn't much gained here. It serves to illustrate the principle though as the `fullname` function could be doing something more complicated.

What you want is:

```prql

let add_full_name = func tbl<relation> -> (

from tbl

derive full_name = f"{first_name} {last_name}"

)

from customers

add_full_name

select full_name

```

Now this requires the `<relation>` type annotation which hasn't been documented because it's still quite experimental. However this works right now and can be applied to different tables or relations, for example you could use the same function in the following:

```prql

from i=invoices

join c=customers (==customer_id)

select {c.first_name, c.last_name, i.total}

sort {-total}

add_full_name

select {full_name, total}

```

I'll add some more examples in child comments.

Disclaimer: I'm a PRQL contributor.
so... Delta Lake?
The times I’ve bothered to write explicit state machines have created the most solid, confident and bug-free pieces of software I’ve ever built. I would send someone to the moon with them.
Note that both Sourcegraph's Cody and the Zed editor support MCP now. They offer other models besides Claude in their respective application.

The Model Context Protocol initial release aims to solve the N-to-M relation of LLM applications (mcp clients) and context providers (mcp servers). The application is free to choose any model they want. We carefully designed the protocol such that it is model independent.
Why are you explicitly saying "human"...
I don't know if I'd describe the difference as "love" or "warmth." But older consoles' design decisions were definitely more varied and developers had to tailor to those limitations and features. Sure, now the Switch has less power than a PS5 and is portable, but that doesn't matter much when it comes to game development unless you need to push graphical boundaries. Very different than old systems with unique input methods, controllers, capabilities, etc. As you said, hardware used to matter. Which is why I find the Playdate a neat system.

Large expensive games need to appeal to the lowest common denominator and feel like they are designed by committee, much more so than they used to due to the huge increase in development costs. But I'm happy with the variety in the indie scene, which includes games that hearken back to older games (e.g, Ringlorn Saga, which takes old Japanese computer RPGs as its inspiration), and games that provide totally new experiences with plenty of creativity. Plus there are niche games that would have never sold back in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., ones with more serious emotional or more adult themes).

Despite that, games tend to follow design trends, so it certainly makes sense that you might just prefer games made during a particular era. I love exploring older games too (I've spent way too much time messing around with old consoles on my MiSTer), but I still find plenty of interesting new experiences as well.
Not the worst argument I've seen! I've been down numerous rabbit holes with regard to the "God is beyond time" concept. I even prayed for Abraham Lincoln at least once or twice, and started conceptually mapping out the number of prayers various historical figures may have tallied up over the centuries.

Now that I'm more of an agnostic utilitarian realist, it all seems a bit silly at this point, but there are certainly some fun thought experiments to explore.
Ruby Central November 2024 Newsletter
I found it useful.

I just put an asterisk on the number and moved on. Even without the exact number, I was reminded that 5 million in 1999 value for a company who's crown jewel was what, the riva tnt 2, means a serious amount of the company's worth now.
> Employers strive to pay employees the minimum they can bear, on employer's terms.

This is one of the things I try to drive home when I mentor young people. Employment is a market and it responds to the forces of supply and demand. Never think that your relationship with a company is anything other than a business transaction.

It's a hard lesson for young people to accept these days, but everything becomes much more clear once you stop fighting the idea.
Raising a false alarm doesn’t mean the underlying issue isn’t there.

It just means the cause of the alarm is unrelated to the issue.
Thanks it seems interesting and I’ll take a deep look for sure!
Japan was different in that it never became the world's factory, and then, manufacturing skills hadn't atrophied in the west, so it's a little different now. Even so, past performance is no guarantee for future results.

> But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have

I struggle to reconcile this with stock buy-backs.

Also, China seems to have deployed a hybrid strategy: the national and regional governments provide incentives to industries, but the individual companies compete against each other. Product-wise, US defense contractors have done surprisingly well under a more extreme version of this regime (cost-plus contracts) for decades.
How can you possibly know -- if (as seems likely) in your entire adult life, you've never known a world not mediated by online interactions?

Do you think that in the pre-internet world, people had 90 percent less contact with their friends than they do now?
There was one as recently as 2022 in rongjiang. And yes it was a natural disaster, but do remember that the bullet train operated during the tohoku earthquake with a derailment but no fatality.

IIRC there were three derailments in 2020, I'm not certain any of them caused fatalities.

> except the 2011 wenzhou hsr accident.

Reminder. Bullet train: zero fatalities. Even during the "early days". No excuses. How to be safe is a solved problem since the last century.

> wheel issues

There are leaked videos of HSR in china shaking.
If you consider anything such a big issue, then your suggestion solves nothing - people still complaint, and now they also complaint about no transparency (see Apple)

> It’s exhausting having to deal with abuse on public forums when you’re on the receiving end and always have to keep your conposure.

What's so exhausting about ignoring like all of these corporates do?
LA purchased a few BYD e-Buses a few years ago and BYD is still trying to make a bus with a lifespan longer than about 1 month. While L.A. is trying to make the purchase work, most of their other U.S. transportation agency clients have simply demanded refunds.

BYD succeeds in places where quality and safety doesn't matter. It's why they've taken off in Asia but have made minimal inroads in countries with strong automobile safety regulations.
Elixir FTP Client: GenServer – Part 1
I wonder how this all will work when the department of energy is cut.
Exactly. This is a criticism of the article where it says that HR has a good reason for assuming employee performance would be Gaussian, since IQ is Gaussian.

IQ is defined a being Gaussian
I'm not sure I understand the tone and goals of the piece overall, but the concluding list is certainly interesting (reproducing below). One thing it appears to be missing is reference to young women's mental state at present, which on average is very low per recent studies -- i.e., women are generally very unhappy right now.

----

1. We can make houses more affordable for young people, but that means we need to lower the “asset value” for existing property owners.

2. We can make intergenerational family houses the norm, but that means undoing the last several decades where we made fun of people for “living at home.”

3. We can start adopting the values of high fertility cultures, such as Israel or the Mormons, but that means taking a hit to our GDP.

4. We can move back to an agrarian society, but that’s another hit to our GDP.

5. We can convince people that the future is going to be bright, and that it’s actually a great time to have kids, but that means convincing people that worries about AI risk, climate catastrophe, crumbling infrastructure, nuclear wars, and future pandemics are just overblown.

6. We can create a robust social safety net where people who get fired or have a medical emergency aren’t worried they will be completely ruined, but that means creating a society where we pretend to care about poor people.

7. We can make child care more affordable, but that means creating a society where we pretend to care about children.

8. We can convince women that it’s better to be a stay at home mom than a worker in the economy, but that’s going to be very difficult to do without coming across as completely regressive.

9. We can convince men that it’s better to be a stay at home dad than a worker in the economy, but that means valuing men beyond their bank account.

10. We can take away women’s bodily autonomy — which, well, let’s check back in 2028.
Whatever gave you the idea Microsoft "left" C++ years ago? It has massive code bases in C++ and continues to invest in its compiler teams and actively tracks the C++ standard. It was the first compiler to implement C++20 mostly completely, including modules, which other compilers have yet to catch up to. Like other mature companies, Microsoft realized decades ago that they can be a one-tech-dependent company and hence has code in C++ and .NET, and is now exploring Rust.
Jack Smith files to drop Jan. 6 charges against Donald Trump
WASHINGTON — Special counsel Jack Smith has filed a motion to drop all four felony charges against President-elect Donald Trump in connection with his effort to overturn his 2020 presidential election in the lead-up to the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S Capitol.
You have to be storing them outside a traditional filesystem to not have filenames, so the way you keep them ordered depends on what your storage mechanism is.

For example, you could store them in a Set object in many programming languages, one that preserves insertion order. Or you could be extracting them one by one from a tar file that has blank filenames stored in it.
Ignoring luck is a requirement - conditions born from luck may be worth consideration but past luck is not a predictor of future luck.

I'd clarify - trying to ignore someone's education because it's a result of their citizenship or the wealth of their family is going to be endlessly frustrating... but if your metrics can't exclude luck and happenstance during the execution of the task then they're not worth much of anything.
It might be the hardest problem of them all, because you'd have to understand how all problems work.

But on the other hand, maybe it all comes down to a Turing machine requiring a particular length of tape and runtime.
Asking why we don't have a high speed cross country railroad in a nation that had most of its airports build out 60 years ago is an excellent pattern match for odd complaints.*

Thinking whether you're a Sinophile is a subject of discussion, and then most damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail" shows there's a lot more going on here than the idea that maybe overcapacity is good. Way more than I expected, so I'll leave it at "overcapacity is bad". :)

* n.b. for future arguments I'd avoid this, a map shows china's is cross country in that you can piece together, exactly one route that is high speed only, requires multiple transfers, and leaves you about 20% short of a full horizontal trip cross country while taking a winding route that wasn't designed for it.
Fine! I'll Play with Skiplists
You don't need to specify your key file like that if you've got your keys loaded into an SSH agent. Or even better, IMO: use 1Password or similar that can both store your keys securely _and_ can be used directly as an SSH agent. That way, your SSH keys never need to be stored on disk in the first place.
Security? We've heard of it: How Microsoft plans to better defend Windows
And I see more possibilities now that https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-s3... is available. It will get easier and easier to build serverless data lakes, streaming, queues.
Why do you think that's a good idea?
> But for now, I definitely need my low performers.

Firing people if you can't get backfill is illogical, obviously. Once a company institutes a hiring freeze, low performers get locked in until forced layoffs. You'll see some people stop working and start job searching because they know that any contribution they make at all is better for their manager than having them fired.

However, deliberately keeping low performers around as a buffer becomes a self-own on a longer time horizon. Smart managers will negotiate hiring exceptions to replace a low performer now rather than keep that headcount occupied for safety. Yes, it's frustrating to have to lay off a good performer, but it's more frustrating for everyone to have a poor performer dragging the team down for some invisible game of chess that goes on for potentially years without resolution.
First, visible/invisible isn’t a dichotomic distinction, it is a spectrum. Stealth isn’t to make an aircraft “invisible” to radar, it is to reduce its radar signature, which means that radar can’t see an aircraft at all beyond a certain distance, and can make it more difficult to identify and track at closer locations. What that means is that a stealth aircraft can fly “in between” radar stations without being detected, where other aircraft couldn’t, and get closer to an adversaries location before being detected, and be more difficult/take more time to identify it as hostile and engage. That adds up to being able to strike many more of your adversary’s targets and escape without them being able to meaningfully engage you and gives you a significant advantage.

It is just like regular camouflage. You cant just throw on a camo jacket and walk around Walmart and be “invisible”. But in the woods, with the right camo, and the right technique, you can move very “stealthily” and if it allows you to get in a position to kill your enemy before they can see and kill you, that is the point.

Second, is an issue with AI I didn’t see anyone bring up. Related to my first point, stealth is about minimizing signatures and that that includes sending/receiving signals. Situations where an aircraft is operating in a highly contested environment means it may not be able to communicate reliably or safely and maintain stealth (they do have MADL but I am sure it can’t work 100% and maintain stealth perfectly). You would have to delegate complete shooting authority to the onboard AI. That is very difficult for many reasons, just one being accountability (who is responsible if an AI commits a war crime?).
Raw milk recalled for containing bird flu virus, California reports
I don’t think it’s helpful to use inflammatory labels like “toxic”. There’s no such thing. It’s an unfalsifiable claim.
I had the nest lock for a long time and was really disappointed with battery life and reliability.

The Schlage encode plus smart lock is the only one that seems to work right at the moment (it also looks the worst). NFC is the way to go for most uses, and matter over thread beats WiFi anything by a long shot.

Not sure about capacitive buttons, but I can see real buttons wearing out or allowing moisture through.
Switch + goto is very close to being a native syntax for state machines. It's also very efficient.
iPhone 17 Slim too thin for SIM tray, may not have mmWave
This is an interesting comment because Russia and China have been sending satellites for many countries over the years .Do you have an example of a Chinese company refusing to launch a payload for a foreign customer ?
I'd love a link so that I can get educated more
It's just some inspiration I can have when typing in my URL bar I guess
The Model Context server is similar to what we've built at Spice, but we've focused on databases and data systems. Overall, standards are good. Perhaps we can implement MCP as a data connector and tool.

[1] https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai
> I am sure it's doable if all the space providers work together and there aren't any showstoppers.

Are you living in a different world that me?

NO company or Government on Earth outside SpaceX has the capability to launch more than about 15 orbital rockets per year. Most are in the 5-10 per year range.

Who the heck is going to launch all these sats?
The first time I used Gemini, I gave it a youtube link and asked for a transcript. It told me how I could transcribe it myself. Honestly, I haven't used it since. Was that unfair of me?
The thing is, even if performance was Gaussian, even if we run with the following 2 statements:

- IQ is gaussian

- IQ correllates well with performance

hiring practices would probably produce an employee population that went through some right-curve cutoff test, meaning most people would be much closer to the hiring threshold, with a few positive outliers.

For a given arbitrarily chosen values, you could massage the distribution and make it look Pareto, but I'd be hard pressed to come up with a reason why it makes rational sense.
> mistakes: the first is they assume employees are (or should be) paid according to how much they "individually" earned the company

From the article:

Economists will teach you something called the Marginal Productivity Theory of Wages, the idea being that the amount of money that a company is willing to spend on an employee is essentially the value that the company expects to get out of their work. This strikes me as mostly true, most of the time

From internet:

The marginal productivity theory of wages states that under perfect competition, workers of the same skill and efficiency will earn a wage equal to the value of their marginal product. The marginal product is the additional output from employing one more worker while keeping other factors constant. However, the theory has limitations as it assumes perfect competition, homogeneous labor, and other unrealistic conditions. In reality, competition is imperfect, labor is not perfectly mobile, and other factors like capital and management efficiency affect productivity.

The marginal argument is confusing to me.
We just need much cheaper catalysts to enable these sorts of industries that could be a very efficient use of ultra cheap excess electricity. Right now catalysts to create hydrocarbon fuels from the atmosphere are so expensive that it isn't worth it to build them, only to run them the ~20% of the time when electricity is so abundant that it can't be stored.
The whole "demographics" scare about China is clear nonsense. Even if that becomes true, it will take 25 to 30 years for it to manifest, because China consumption is in a growing curve. The current young working population is more educated and productive than ever. And China still has hundreds of millions of people to be included into its consumer and labor market in the poorest areas. So don't hold your breath about a "demographics" problem for China, it will take decades for this to happen if ever at all.
"ę" is not [e] followed by [n], it's a single nasalized vowel.

Kinda like "ň" in Czech is not just [n] followed by [j], although it kinda sounds like that to people whose native language does not have a palatalized N sound.
I just want to say kudos for the design of the protocol. Seems inspired by https://langserver.org/ in all the right ways. Reading through it is a delight, there's so many tasteful little decisions.

One bit of constructive feedback: the TypeScript API isn't using the TypeScript type system to its fullest. For example, for tool providers, you could infer the type of a tool request handler's params from the json schema of the corresponding tool's input schema.

I guess that would be assuming that the model is doing constrained sampling correctly, such that it would never generate JSON that does not match the schema, which you might not want to bake into the reference server impl. It'd mean changes to the API too, since you'd need to connect the tool declaration and the request handler for that tool in order to connect their types.
I disagree, carbon taxes seem to be the best way to ensure your country starts to outsource all of it's carbon producing activity to less developed countries who do a worse job containing their emissions. This has been happening in europe for quite some time with the manufacturing of their wind turbines iirc. It's a super carbon heavy emission to produce them, so the europeans have them made elsewhere to make it look like their emissions are super low, which is essentially a lie for politicians to sell environment-crazed voters.
Switch + goto is the classic way to implement a state machine in C.
> rust will just say no

This is just not accurate, you can use atomic data types, Mutex<> or RwLock<> to ensure thread-safe access. (Or write your own concurrent data structures, and mark them safe for access from a different thread.) C++ has equivalent solutions but doesn't check that you're doing the right thing.
Ask HN: I am thinking of quitting my PhD program
I dislike the school administration and the advisors. The senior faculty here seems disinterested in science and research, and are basically glorified project managers. What are some thoughts from others who’ve been through a similar experience?
To add to that, public transport based on trains is and always will be a source of noise, even if they are purely electrical