skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This statement is not true, the 2020 election had both a higher absolute total turnout and a higher number of absolute votes for the winning candidate.

Regardless, the cleaner way to compare election years is by % VEP or %VAP - otherwise you're effectively comparing population between the years by accident. From this perspective I disagree with GP, 2024 was still a great year for turnout... just not as good as 2020. 2024 sits 2nd in VEP and 7th VAP (out of the last 24 elections).
You should read the rest of the thread.
There is no general purpose compressor that can achieve compression on all random streams of bytes... but there is a possibility to compress a specific random stream of bytes, if you get lucky
otherwise we obviously wouldn't have been here.
I can't talk about liberal arts, but, in engineering, your peers aren't going to be incompetent.

And, in my case, I found that the increased access to grad students and professors more than made up for any possible "weakness" in my peer group.

The Westinghouse engineers used to have a friendly rivalry because so many of them came from both CMU and Pitt. However, if you got both groups drunk, the CMU engineers would grudgingly admit that the primary difference between the two was an extra 10+ years to pay off their student loans.
Just a fun fact: some later forms of cuneiform were alphabets. Like Old Persian Cuneiform:

https://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm

If you wanted to tell people you "learned cuneiform" you could memorize this in an afternoon!
Somewhere (discussed on HN) someone devised a "better-than-perfect" compressor. Most inputs get compressed (smaller than input), except for one input that does not. That one input is cryptographically impossible to find - or something along those lines.

Unfortunately I can't find the article I'm describing here, maybe someone else can? It was a long time ago so I might be misrepresenting it slightly.
"The people" are the president's superior.
Indeed! A thought experiment I have some times is to imagine that every machine on the earth was destroyed overnight. We still have mines, people, books. How long would it take to get back to the level of industrialisation and science that would allow us to make (in this case) a 3 million transistor chip?

The vast majority of people have little idea of how much intellectual effort has gone into the current state of technology.
It appears to be an extremely difficult problem involving serious tradeoffs in each direction.

The only real solution is to have honorable actors on both sides: the citizenry and their govt.

What that means is that we're left with, at best, trying to find the second best solution.
My first thought: imagine this child growing up and deciding to google this event in their life and finding dozens of strangers speculating, arguing, and joking about the situation
But you don’t need to compress every possible file to make playing such a game a good idea.

Suppose if you shave 1 bit off of a sample bit stream you win and you lose if that fails. Your compressor looks at the first 2 bits and if it starts 11 it starts with 1 and otherwise it starts 0 then the bit stream. Now you have a 1 in 4 chance to compress a random string by 1 bit and. A 3 in 4 chance of making it longer by 1 bit.

It’s ultimately not about compression but what odds are worth it.
Tx - updated.
> pseudo-jobbers like project manager

Just want to share my experience at the large, well-known tech company where I work: good product/project managers are worth their weight in gold, and I've never worked with a bad one.

Ours work at the intersection of backend, frontend, design, and product and help those of us who work in just one of those areas to coordinate, cooperate, and collaborate. I can't imagine trying to build such an enormous product or suite of products without them.

God bless them, every one.
Your partner is the one with the biased view, not the general public.

Only sick people go to urgent care, so your partner saw a very biased sample. The rest of us saw something much closer to reality.
The president is not above the people.

In fact, given the context we're talking about (having to go debate to try to get their votes), he's below them in the hierarchy in this particular social context.

The president may be more powerful than any individual person, but when facing the public _collectively_, they're quite literally his boss, as they get to decide if he keeps his job.
They're usually 150μm thick. Humans fit in about 300mm thick spaces, so you need 2000x linear scale.
As Patrick said, if he had gotten a 1000-byte file and sent a 999-byte file/decompressor file back, nobody would have counted the inode data as a part of the solution. Why count it now?
Can you tell me specifically which experts said it would only take two weeks?
That gets us halfway there. It makes unwrapping easy, but you still need to remember to rewrap if you've implemented anything.

use std::ops::Deref;

trait Test {
fn test(&self);
}

#[derive(Debug)]
struct Wrap<T>(T);

impl<T> Test for Wrap<T> {
fn test(&self) {
()
}
}

impl<T> Deref for Wrap<T> {
type Target = T;
fn deref(&self) -> &Self::Target {
&self.0
}
}

fn main() {
let thing1 = Wrap(3_i32);
let thing2 = Wrap(5_i32);
let sum = *thing1 + *thing2;
thing1.test();
thing2.test();
sum.test(); // error[E0599]: no method named `test` found for type `i32` in the current scope
}

Also using newtypes to reimplement methods on the base type is frowned upon. I believe that this is why #[derive(Deref)] isn't included in the standard library. See below (emphasis mine):

> So, as a simple, first-order takeaway: if the wrapper is a trivial marker, then it can implement Deref. If the wrapper's entire purpose is to manage its inner type, without modifying the extant semantics of that type, it should implement Deref. If T behaves differently than Target when Target would compile with that usage, it shouldn't implement Deref.

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/should-you-implement-deref-for...
The Biden case seems like an example of when the senior leader was not given any honest feedback in private and then was humiliated in public. If anything that’s a reason to give feedback to the leader privately without sugar coating.
Keep in mind that Gaza's Health Ministry isn't really functional any more, and they are in no state to keep numbers.
The US already spends $1000/month per citizen on entitlements. If you just give everyone $500/month instead, you'd eliminate the deficit and have a few hundred billion leftover to spend on colonizing planets.
This is actually an extremely interesting question. 'Weak' files that are more easily compressable than others certainly exist, but with low probability.

For example, the all-zeros file is a member of the set of all random 3 megabyte files, and it would certainly be possible to compress that, if by great good fortune you were lucky enough to receive it - albeit something that is unlikely to ever happen in the possible lifetime of the universe, given current physical theories.

Is it possible to quantify this idea of a 'weak' file more accurately?
Sorry, if you're trying to hustle people by xstging $100 per try, don't catch the sleight of hand in the "multiple files" question, and accept, you were beaten at your own game, fair and square.
It often takes 10 years or more of use before you discover that your technique is execrable.

For example, most use of macros, especially when you invent your own language implemented as macros.
Malahide is very nice, just like Mt Vernon ^^
Absolutely! Can this probability be quantified?
That is a truly fantastic answer. Thank you so much. Our high school son was studying his high school genetics today, so it's also a fantastic tie-in. (He prefers his days off during the week, so he put in some hours today; flexibility FTW.)

This is the best of what the intenet can be.
Only in the same sense that bottom-level employees are the CEO's superior. Which is to say, they aren't.

Formal structure can stabilize a system and make it resilient to shocks. But there's a limit to how much stability can be provided, and if you provide enough shock, the structure will change.
Thanks, that's another fantastic answer.
Building a Next-Gen Video Platform – Need Technical Pioneers
Hello, Hacker News community!

I’m a 19-year-old entrepreneur with a bold vision to reshape the video platform landscape. The idea is to combine:
• TikTok’s intuitive swipe mechanics,
• YouTube’s powerful creator ecosystem,
• Gamification to engage users without being intrusive,
• And blockchain integration for a transparent, fair monetization model.

Here’s the core challenge I’m tackling:
• How can creators get paid fairly without relying on traditional intrusive ads?
• How can we enhance the user experience with seamless animations and sound effects?
• And most importantly, how can we gamify the platform in a way that incentivizes creators and users to stay engaged while driving revenue?

I’m currently seeking:
1. Developers and engineers passionate about building scalable, innovative platforms.
2. A potential CTO to lead the technical direction.
3. Feedback from visionaries in this space who have seen what works and what doesn’t.

What I offer:
• Equity in the project.
• A fully remote setup.
• The opportunity to work on something revolutionary from the ground up.

This isn’t just an idea — it’s a challenge to the status quo of video platforms. If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or even your skepticism. Feel free to reply here or contact me via Instagram: @bonsuaq (Newton as my profile picture).

Let’s create something exceptional together.
the kids are going to be in a different world than we are. just like it was useful for us to learn a foreign language (still being taught it schools but those days are numbered) for kids these days it is a waste of time (I am sure there are many studies that say being bi/tri/… lingual has benefits beyond communication but you get my point).

I think while we may think “they need to learn the subject first…” do they really? and if they do why? e.g. someone teaching their kid “web development” in soon-to-be 2025 is insane given the tools
we have now… so while there are things for sure kids should learn it is not easy to figure out what those things actually are
None of those are exclusive of being anti-vaccine or a conspiracy theorist.

But agreed he doesn’t seem to be all that bad. Best of luck to him surrounded by that team of experts!
Async Django in Production
We have traditionally used Django in all our projects. We believe it is one of the most underrated, beautifully designed, rock solid framework out there.

However, if we are to be honest, the history of async usage in Django wasn't very impressive. You could argue that for most products, you don’t really need async. It was just an extra layer of complexity without any significant practical benefit.

Over the last couple of years, AI use-cases have changed that perception. Many AI products have calling external APIs over the network as their bottleneck. This makes the complexity from async Python worth considering. FastAPI with its intuitive async usage and simplicity have risen to be the default API/web layer for AI projects.

I wrote about using async Django in a relatively complex AI open source project here: https://jonathanadly.com/is-async-django-ready-for-prime-tim...

tldr: Async django is ready! there is a couple of gotcha's here and there, but there should be no performance loss when using async Django instead of FastAPI for the same tasks. Django's built-in features greatly simplify and enhance the developer experience.

So - go ahead and use async Django in your next project. It should be a lot smoother that it was a year or even six months ago.
This article is the canonical recap of what's happened:

- https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt
Almost 10% of South Korea's Workforce Is Now a Robot
> You don't do it in public.

The comment you're replying to specifically nullified your example.
Sorry for the text xdd
And those results contaminated Google for almost 5 years before Google got enough bad press that they finally had to do something.

Yeah, Google is a monopoly.
In terms of mortality COVID-19 was way, way worse than polio ever was.
What You Can Do Now to Help Prevent Osteoporosis
> I’d advise against going in the first one throwing punches.

I’d advise against going in any one throwing punches. Instead, give actionable, honest, factual feedback with the intent to legitimately help the other person.
32k context length text embedding models
Morally, kind of.

Legally, even taking the whole "copyright infringement equals theft" attitude at face value, it's not, because WordPress is GPL and GPL explicitly forbids adding new restrictive terms to the license, and also forbids combining it with more restrictively licensed code. In fact, in the past, Automattic did to Envato what they did to WP Engine specifically because Envato had taken the position that nulled plugins are infringing.

Of course, Automattic is now suing Festingervault for hosting nulled plugins, because Matt Mullenweg doesn't have principles, he has emotions.
There's also no such thing as a single heliosynchronous orbit, because different latitudes of the Sun rotate at different speeds. So an orbit which keeps a point on the equator (25 day period) under it would see the polar regions (36 days) rotating backwards. Every three equatorial rotations or so, you'd "lap" the polar region, which would only make 2 rotations in that time.
The fact how simple it is to re-implement a large part of Docker because all it fundamentally is a bit of glue code to the kernel is the biggest problem Docker-the-company faced and still faces.

Where Docker adds real value is not (just) Docker Hub but Docker for Windows and Mac. The integrations offer a vastly superior experience than messing around with VirtualBox and Vagrant by hand (been there, done that) to achieve running Docker on one's development machine.
Because the solution specifically was for 1 file submitted, 2 files back (compressed and decompressor). This topic ise the next level trolling that went on. The summary and ng faw, explained why these file metagames aren't useful. They obscure the lack of a compression strategy (eg if the inode equivalent was 2ft of tape) by nature of dispersing information into the fs.
Enery compared to what? many crews are running a generator all day which is less efficient as it is running even when the says are not, while the chainsaw shuts off between cuts.

of course battery works well today. Other sites now have grid power.
Why is it so unbelievable to you that a different platform with seemingly happy users could have a viral moment through word of mouth, right as a whole lot of people are actively seeking alternatives?

Let’s put it this way: if a huge amount of people suddenly find themselves done with twitter, what serious alternatives are there beside Bluesky?
Well, "senior leader", if this is the kind of incomprehensible stuff you routinely come up with, I'm amazed your teams produce anything.
Will be doing it in F# this year. Last year I did C#/Rust split until real life took over and they ended up being too similar to each other at solving AoC type of challenges.
As I remember from that time, all C64 users also had tiny screwdriver for adjusting head azimuth. Could be related to pirated tapes in ex Yugoslavia, copied on who knows what kind of equipment.
Perhaps related is that the voting age population (vap) only increased ~30% of what would be predicted by the curve fit up to that point. Could be that some people died out of the vap early.

Compounded with that, the voting eligible population (vep) increased exactly as predicted. Which means for each early demose of someone in the vap, someone else already in the vap became eligible when they hadn't been previously. Perhaps some states changed their laws about who was eligible?
Call it a tipping point, call it a collective action problem finally being resolved, snowballing, viral liftoff, or belittle it and call it a "herd stampede" if you really want.

But those are all "organic" phenomena. The grandparent comment that called it "inorganic" seems to be mistaken.
> Banking services provided by Evolve Bank & Trust and Thread Bank; Members FDIC.”

I just don't understand why on Earth it's legal to use the term "FDIC" one sentence away from "not a bank" without there being a regulatory framework defining minimum record keeping and reporting requirements to avoid exactly this type of failure.

The European "e-money" scheme seems to be exactly the opposite: Deposits are not insured (I believe there are requirements on the stability of the depository bank), but intermediaries, i.e. "financial technology companies", have to make detailed reports about their customers' balances available on a very short time frame to avoid exactly such problems.

Ideally, there would be a combination of both (pass-through insurance against bank failure and reporting requirements to reduce the blast radius of non-bank failure).
There is a polynomial expression that will match the file.
I wonder if expressing it would be compressible to a lower size than original file?
[edit] I’m wrong - not all sequences can be expressed with a polynomial.
Not to answer your question exactly but ...

Chips seem to be around 25mm sq, and the smallest features around 10nm.
If you scaled up so the smallest feature is one mm then the chip would be around 2.5km square. (over 1.5 miles on each side)

If the smallest feature was about the width of human hair then divide the above by 100.
Have you ever wondered why padStart is part of the standard library?

You are unaware of a core part of JavaScript history, which is why you don't understand why "I'm not importing a library to do left pad" is not only a proper example, but THE BEST example.

String.padStart was added in 2017.

This happened in 2016 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident
TidalCycles (https://tidalcycles.org/) is indeed written in Haskell - another take on 'music as language', though through live coding

Full disclosure: I'm the author of Glicol (https://glicol.org/)
I need you to know how sick and callous that "it will be good if they die" attitude is to me. I know you think it's just, but as an outsider who isn't as politically inflamed as you are, it looks truly sick.
> Because the solution specifically was for 1 file submitted, 2 files back (compressed and decompressor).

Patrick:

I meant can I send you a decompressor and several compressed files whose total file size is less than the original uncompressed file and from which I can regenerate the original uncompressed file

Mike:

Sure.
Related (the indefinite pause) The Death of NYC Congestion Pricing (171 points, 5 months ago, 365 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40817079
The Stormlight Archive’s would like to have a word
The org has to be small for the firing to be immediate, but I have seen a "top of stack rank to unpassable PIP" be caused by a single conversation... and that's even in companies most of this forum would consider top performing. I would argue that trying to figure out the fragility of your management chain's ego is a key part of a successful career, even if what we are going to do with the news is to choose to change jobs.
> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects.

You also don't have access to those interesting research projects to begin with. To be that's the biggest downside (if you're in the sciences / engineering).

I do generally agree with your post -- but I think it only works if you 1) apply yourself sufficiently despite not having peers pushing you (have to be able and willing to buck the tide; not everyone is), and 2) go to a top grad school (as you did), which requires point 1 to get accepted
Agreed. Only the first chair is really done, rest of the mountain needs a lot of work. Im thinking of adding a map where you can fast travel.

Thanks for playing and for commenting.
I know. He was bad. The effect of ousting him was bad. Everything was bad.

If the parlament was concerned with killing their own people they should have fronted some sleazy social democrat that made everyone equaly pissed off and unhappy instead of going yolo nationalism.
> If you go to most hospitals at 2AM and need a specialist of some kind (say a specific type of surgeon), there’s going to be someone in that specialty on call whose going to get paged to wake up, come in, and see you.

Only if you're dying.

Come in late Friday and you're going to be sitting in a bed until Monday even if your gall bladder is about to explode.
This is neat, but I'd rather just pick my platform from a list of binaries. Those who don't know what they're running probably aren't spoofing their user agent either, so you can just* serve them the correct option with a big button first.

* It doesn't seem that you can reliably get the CPU architecture from the user agent yet.
Don't we have a stockpile of flu antivirals?
I know very little about this, but a little googling suggests that the measure you're looking for is entropy, which has a mathematical definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
> How to give a senior leader feedback (without getting fired)

I don't do it because it can play against me in the worst case. And I won't get anything out of it. People can be more sensitive than it seems and unsolicited feedback isn't always welcome.

My company is big on feedback, so we're expected to give peers and managers feedback. I never fill the "constructive feedback" part of the form, or I just put something harmless. We also have anonymous evaluation forms. If something is wrong with manager or leadership, it'll show there.
That's how all compressors work, in that likely files (eg. ASCII, obvious patterns, etc) become smaller and unlikely files become bigger.
Nothing is 100% under your control.

But there’s a great number of things that increase risks of cancer to the point where you can be well below average cancer risks.
Assuming anti-vax administrators allow us to take new mRNA vaccines, which is far from certain.

But yeah mRNA is a game changer for quick vaccine response. In theory after sequencing the virus a new vaccine could be in testing days later.
Rancher desktop is also a viable option and free. Many including my work moved to it after Docker's new licensing kicked in.

IMO the real magic of Docker was the Docker/OCI image format. It's a brilliant way to perform caching and distribute container images, and it's really what still differentiates the workflow from "full" VM's.
https://netnewswire.com/

Though it may not meet your criteria around infinite retention. The developer has written about their philosophy on that here: https://inessential.com/2018/10/13/netnewswire_article_age_l...
I would not have accepted multiple files nor scripting. Scripts offers up the entire contents of the linux operating system and this could allow you to use operating system files as partial data. To really test compression/decompression the rules need to be a lot tighter. The challenge was met and beat because the criteria was bad. It leaves open a number of dishonest approaches.

The decompression program needs to be constrained to itself and the singular file to decompress and can not utilise anything other than basic operating system functions for the purpose of reading and writing the constrained files. Any bytes the program accesses otherwise can be used as part of the total count.

It's very hard to constrain this without some form of chest being possiblemespecially if you have some years to set it up.
I disagree. Superiors are people too, and they make mistakes. I've had subordinates give me feedback (which I followed), and I've given feedback to superiors (which they've followed). Both ways were extremely positive experiences and everyone involved was happier for it.