skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
lmao i deleted and readded a new key thinking my key was fucked
Metrocards were not phased out yet, they definitely still work.

The trick did work on regular cards that you could just pick up off the floor - but at some point they fixed the general glitch. It's interesting that it continued to work on only certain types of cards though!
The problem is that now, when your colleagues/contributors push out shitty code that you have to fix... you don't know if they even tried or just put in bad code from an LLM.
I meant absurd in a good way. Given my internet is also powering my professional line of work, I'd still probably pay $80/month for double the speeds. But it's great others can get some actually decent internet for a small fraction of the cost.
> The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.

Yes, but this is also the part that glues together the larger coalition of people left of center. Racially segregated affinity groups and affirmative action are the thing that AOC and Jamie Dimon can agree on.

A 2022 poll showed that something like 20% of Biden 2020 voters would pick Liz Cheney in a three-way race with Trump. The current democratic coalition is extremely dependent on affluent white economic conservatives who are willing to put up with woke stuff. Including Paul Graham himself.

If Fetterman comes out and says we are going to ban racially segregated affinity groups, and the compromise is he’ll raise my taxes to pay for more healthcare services, I’d vote for that. But my experience with the last 10 years is that team blue never raised my taxes but did recruit my daughter into a “BIPOC” group. The policy is what it does, as they say.
I never understood why people bought Sonos products. They were fairly poor in terms of usability even before any shenanigans. My first and only Sonos ended up in a rubbish bin (well recycling bin) when it turned out it couldn’t reliably Play back audio books at 1.5x speed.

I never even considered giving it away because that would be a dick move.

Got a Teenage Engineering designed BT speaker instead.
> if the manual of a library you're using is 700 pages, you're probably using the wrong library.

Statement bordering on papyrophobia. (Seems that is a real phobia)
Except you saved yourself all that mental effort. If it takes the same amount of time and I don't need to put 110% focus in, it's a win.
This is pretty much it. I don't trust code produced by AI, tbh, because it almost always has logical errors, or it ignored part of the prompt so it's subtly wrong. I really like AI for prototyping and sketching, but then I usually take that prototype, maybe write some solid tests, and then write the real implementation.
Ancestry has a somewhat smaller copy of the BIRLS database online, covering just the years 1850-2010 [1], and it seems to have been published on their website in 2011:
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2441/

Our data set from the VA contains data through mid-2020, and was turned over to us in 2022 after undergoing extensive double-checking by the agency, including through non-public VA sources, to confirm the veterans really were all deceased. There's a paper showing the agency's methodology on our site, which we FOIAed from them.

There are a significant number of deceased veterans whose data is *not* included in the BIRLS database, because they (or their family/heirs) simply did not have any contact with the VA concerning benefits in or after the 1970s, which is when the database was first starting to be built. That is, their files almost always still exist on a warehouse shelf somewhere, but they weren't active any time in the past fifty years so they didn't get pulled and indexed into the database. You can still make a FOIA request to the agency asking for one of those files, but the VA will have a lower chance of successfully finding the file, and it usually will take longer for you to get a response.

[1] 1850 is very likely an approximation. While there are certainly deceased veterans listed in the BIRLS database who had birthdates or deathdates in the mid nineteenth century and/or service in the late nineteenth century, they are relatively few. Many of them are actually veterans with likely birthdates or deathdates in the twentieth century whose data seems to have been initially recorded by the VA with a two digit year of birth or death or enlistment/entry, and then assigned to the wrong two digit prefix, causing an incorrect four digit year of birth or death or year of entry/enlistment into service.

In other words, the VA's historic data is very messy and is a great example of an actual Y2K issue.
My charitable reading is that he believes the concept of wokeness is a bigger problem than racism. I feel that's wrong on its face, but an actual point-by-point (indeed, line-by-line) retort to this essay would be exhausting and ultimately pointless.

To whit, he repeatedly brushes aside the concept of hostile work environment, in particular professors making their students feel uncomfortable, as if its just a question of one person making their equal feel uncomfortable due to a simple disagreement. This is a dramatic misread of why a professor (who is by definition in a position of power over the student, and such power may well include the career and profession of the student, even ignoring the sexual overtones, which are all-too-common as well) needs to be aware of and avoid hostile environments. Like, a woman who constantly hears from her math professor how s/he thinks women are bad at math will likely not be super-psyched to continue with math coursework. I would certainly leave a company if a manager was constantly insulting whatever group of people I was born into, and they pay me to be there. If I'm paying thousands of dollars a semester, the least the professor can do is stay in their lane.

That's five sentences to retort 2 more-or-less throwaway statements. The entire essay is stacked with stuff like that.

And its all pointless because odds are, instead of changing any minds, or even engaging with what I've said, the anti-woke types will just vote it down.
Another (better?) target should be homes used for short term let - i.e AirBnB etc.

Homes have such extreme valuations because of the underlying cash flow (or 'rent' in its most abstract sense). Without tourists willing to pay many multiples of what they'd pay at home for accommodation, that cash flow wouldn't be there.
SNL is more like an improv/skit talent show where a successful outcome is becoming a household name movie star. Lorne is more of the person running the talent show, selecting people, and then reaping rewards with the spin offs rather than the star. If you think of SNL like that, then there are others that could likely take the helm and keep it going once he’s gone.
The problem with Bluetooth is it doesn't have a really good audio codec. I really like the Sonos model of being a server that doesn't require a connected device to work as well.
Nah, I can watch skits from the 70s and 80s, before I was born, and find them humorous. Hell, Steve Martin and Martin Short also just starred in a wildly popular Hulu series as senior citizens. While it was funny when I was 15 too, it has been absolute garbage for 10+ years. This is just some pathetic line he’s trotted out to gloss over the fact that he’s lost his knack for producing good work.

There is plenty of great sketch comedy being made (just look at the popularity and memes from Tim Robinson’s work), just not anywhere in Lorne Michaels’ orbit.
It's almost as if only Git is distributed, but people sold out to Github for convenience. Too bad Git lacks a distributed bug tracker and wiki system like Fossil. Guess Github has to fail a lot more for things to change.
That’s not the panacea you make it out to be. Tree monocultures significantly impact the environment, wreck the soil, harm biodiversity, increase forest vulnerabilities…
Enthusiastic article for sure. Lots of the hype in this piece suggests that effective semantic search for populating limited context windows of LLMs will be big business.

My thoughts:

1. Will context windows grow enough so that we can afford to be lazy and drop entire knowledge bases into our queries?

2. Will the actual models of LLMs be able to more reliably capture data in a semi-structured way, perhaps bypassing the "data moat" that the author claims?
I don't know or claim that it's any truer, but I thought the oft-reported reason, for Vancouver/BC especially, was Chinese investment, and explicitly not immigration even, the chief complaint that the growth has been/is expected to be such that they're left unoccupied?
Ask HN: How to work at a bigger tech company?
My career trajectory looks something like this: medium sized publicly traded company, early startup, another startup over the course of about 5 years.

I’m pretty tired of the startup scene to be honest and would like to try to work at a larger tech company but I’m having a hard time even getting interviews.

I think this is partly because of a bad job market, and partly because I have two no name companies on my resume that I’ve worked for. How can I fix this?
I got to the bottom of the post and thought, wow this sounds like Steve Yegge, I wonder what happened to that guy.

So, I scrolled back up to the top, and, lo and behold...

I'm positive about coding + LLMs, personally. I like it better than going without. I also think it's ok to just use a thing and be happy about it without having to predict whether it's going to be great or awful 10 years from now. It's ok to not know the future.

While we are here, I'm currently using Cursor as my programming assistant of choice. I assume things are moving fast enough that there are already better alternatives. Any suggestions?
I think I read 20,000,000 need housing and this will impact 20,000 per year so broadly the numbers are inline.
Is it an "enormous amount of resources"? How do you think it compares to the amount of resources historically put into racism, including all the waste and lost opportunity costs?

In my experience, most people complaining about wokism are projecting their own annoyance at language policing into some kind of massive social problem. But I'm open-minded, and if you have a good argument that the resources put into wokism far outweigh the losses from racism, I'm happy to listen. PG's essay makes no effort to present that argument.
Fair point. I'm mostly just making a reference to the Lonely Island + Seth Meyers podcast. Every few episodes they joke about being in "an Golden Era" of SNL :). But they also do point out that people tend to idolize the folks from the era they grew up in for sure as well!
How many % of flats are empty? At least in the US the hottest housing markets usually have the lowest vacancy rates. This makes sense, because the opportunity costs for leaving a property empty is higher, so owners are more tempted to rent them out.
Likely project manager or architect.
Verifying code is much more mental effort than writing it because you have to reconstruct the data structure and the logic of the code in order to show that the code you’re reading is correct.
They never understood. AI is the new Mythical Man-Month.
I think that many people, perhaps the majority, would not draw that connection or jump to that conclusion. For myself, it seems paranoid and delusional, moreso due to your certainly. It speaks of being primed with a hair trigger to suss out and accuse people. Based on our past conversation, I know that you have deep seated emotional responses to ideas around social justice and race, and view the world in very extreme and binary terms. This is not everyone's lived experience.

Kinda like if I assumed you aware a Nazi based on your username including frog, in reference to Pepe the right wing hate symbol.
I use an iPad Pro exclusively for programming, have for a while now. But I use it as a mostly-dumb terminal. Blink shell for ssh/mosh, Github client and Working Copy for git, Textastic for editing locally offline. The Inspect browser for web dev tools.

That means most of the work actually happens on a remote VPS with command line tools, my preferred environment.

I travel constantly and like the iPad for convenience, battery life, and the focus of having one app at a time on the screen.
But you also need to measure the dampening impact on home building.

If builders would have built N units knowing they could easily sell some % them to foreign buyers but now they can’t, then you might lose the whole supply. And all the knock on effects for contractors, suppliers, etc
Chromecast Audios are still easy to pick up on eBay (or if you're in the UK, CeX, that's where I got one).

Any old cheap plug tied to Home Assistant (or plain old Google Home in my case) for auto powering on my Cambridge Audio amp. (I'm not fancy enough to care about automated input switching between TV and music, I just get up and turn the knob, but turning off the hifi remotely I like)

Music Assistant supports streaming to Chromecast from TIDAL at the native (24 bit, 96khz, flac/m4a?) format. And TIDAL mobile app itself supports casting to Chromecast devices as you'd expect.

Those 3 things combined got me an old school hifi set up which I can include in my Chromecast groups of shitty sounding second-hand nest minis, so I get multi room audio where one room has the most audio :-) but I could swap out the shitty pucks for some more CC audios if I wanted to fork out for more amps and bookshelf speakers.

I trust Google to at least not intentionally brick their old devices and chromecast is built on mDNS and documented http endpoints enough that you can automate your own stuff in your LAN that you should be able to keep that stuff working in home assistant + music assistant should Google ever decide randomly they wanna sunset Google home (so, 50% chance of them announcing that in 2025).

Homebrew you can roll your own DIY multi room hifi audio using stuff like Hifiberry, too. Pipewire/PulseAudio/JACK on raspberry pi / NUCs should be able to get you surround sound over the network with minimal latency (although you probably want decent ethernet), since you can make a virtual sink that bridges the audio servers together.

You have one of those fancy hifis that has hdmi inputs and digital input selection and whatnot? Okay yeah you'd have to roll your own HDMI CEC automation again with a raspberry pi or whatever. Eminently doable.

There's definitely ways to get multi room audio of equivalent or better quality and at-least-equal user experience as long as you're willing to invest the time in doing loads of DIY shenanigans, but honestly it's pretty easy these days. For me, I think the "this is too complicated for me to implement" bar is not high enough to warrant buying Sonos
> once-popular servers have stopped accepting new registrations

That's why providers.xmpp.net gives a good overview on where to sign up. The clients I know of also allow you to create an XMPP address directly from the app. The whole ordeal is to choose an username and a password then.

> involved in some nation state espionage activities

This is really more of a TLS thing than an XMPP thing, since the attacker was able to intercept traffic with a valid TLS certificate. Of course the second line of defense is E2EE here, but arguably, since the XMPP community was directly affected, they learned (monitoring certificate logs, channel binding , DANE, https://certwatch.xmpp.net/ ) a lot about defending even against this level of attacker from this incident.

> still current best but unmaintained [client]

I wonder which one you are talking about. My recommendations are Conversations, Gajim and Monal. They're all modern clients, actively maintained and have been around for a while now.
> The volume of snow to be collected would have been significantly greater than the resulting water.

Yes, dependent on the nature of the snow but a broad idea is that if you want a litre of water, you need five litres of snow.
Where are these numbers from? How does 5 million housing units from 2020-2023 (this was published in 2024) translate into "90K housing units"

>The United States has added almost 5 million housing units since 2020, most heavily in the South and most of them single-family homes, making a housing shortage look conquerable in much of the nation.

https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2024/05/16/housing-boom-....
believe it is new purchases
The density is a function of our travel system. Putting dedicated passenger train routes into the US to connect the biggest cities would lead to the smaller cities along the routes receiving increased immigration. Every city has a road through it to do the same thing.

>In the USA, for passengers, it makes much more sense to fly than trains

You don't live in the midwest I take it. It makes more sense to drive than to take a flight that passes you through one of the airline hubs for most every trip that is less than 400 miles.
Right. Personally I think Android has gotten worse with every single update since 4.4
You also absorbed no knowledge of the problem domain. I'm pretty positive on LLMs but with the caveat that the programmer still should be an active participant in the development of the solution.
Pedantically (also semi-curiously) the Matrox M3d didn't need passthrough. Not sure of specific mechanics but AFAIR it was a flat blank slot cover.
Deregulation had far less impact on prices than people generally quote. Getting out of the energy crisis did a lot to shift prices quickly which made it seem like deregulation was suddenly working. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis

Longer term Airlines got a lot better and a lot cheaper worldwide at roughly the same rates because things like fuel economy and engine maintenance timescales skyrocketed.
One should also add that (at least in Canada) newer buildings are not built for families but for investors. Who needs all of those 30 square meter studios?
Buy, or build?

Build -> opportunity cost, ongoing cost, legacy

Buy -> upfront cost, integrate, ongoing cost, and maybe eventually extortion leading you to Build a replacement.

This leads to many different implementations of roughly the same concepts all over, which sucks. Or open source, if it already exists. Or both. Not that open source doesn't have integration costs.

But think of this from an executive's perspective. Building really sucks. But buying sucks more in the future. You might just buy.

I've seen all of these. My preference is to grudgingly build if suitable open source doesn't already exist.
And if you can't quickly find a racist comment to confront but you still really want the confrontation? That's when we get debates about blacklist or master vs mainline.
GIT is down today,
Code rests in snowy silence,
Developers play.
Yeah, this is almost literally the 80-20 rule[1]; often getting the first 80% of something done takes 20% of the work, and getting the last 20% takes 80% of the work. Debugging the last 20% is already the hard part for most things, and as you mention, it's going to be a lot harder debugging LLM-generated code.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
My point is that that can all be true about stock buybacks (which I disagree with your interpretation of, but anyway), but that is completely orthogonal to what was asked, which is, why would stock buybacks allow more time and less work for workers? That is what I meant when I said that people respond to such questions with something unrelated because they have no real alternate solution.
> But most people don't eat raw corn syrup.

Growing up, I went through a very brief period where I put corn syrup on my pancakes instead of regular syrup. My parents weren't home, we had no syrup, and I didn't know exactly what corn syrup was except that it tasted sweet and was thick like regular syrup. I continued to do it just for the novelty until one of my parents saw me putting corn syrup on my pancakes and told me to knock it off.

Thinking back on it now always grosses me out and makes me avoid corn syrup where possible, but eating it raw like that honestly didn't taste bad.
>If it's the former, than even flaunting such a plan is a complete catastrophe for any foreign investment in Spain from now on.

There's investments that don't involve real estate. Moreover, property isn't a productive asset, so discouraging investment into that is arguably a good thing. Investing money into a factory means you get more stuff produced. Investing money into property just... sits there.
What is so interesting about Nix is that it's not one thing. Its not (just) a distro. Its not (just) a package manager. Its not (just) a system manager. Its not (just) a language. Its not (just) a build tool.

It is all those things, but specifically, what you want it to be. Yes, that makes it super confusing, but also powerful.
I think you might be right. Perhaps I’m just looking for reassurance that this problem isn’t as universal as it looks from my current vantage point.
however, like roads, it is entirely possible that building more in desirable neighborhoods simply leads to more wealthy people having more options for which (otherwise empty) residence they choose to spend the weekend at.
The rape charges were due to the women's testimony, not Cosby's confession of same as far as I can tell.

But my point is not the minutiae of Cosby's trial, but that he is "unconvicted" - and if you want to claim to not encourage rapists/murderers/the corrupt are we talking about:

1. THE CONVICTED: people who have been convicted of these felonious crimes (e.g. Stewart, Tyson, ),

2. THE UNCONVICTED: unconvicted people who have made statements relating to these crimes, which may not even be crimes in their country or era (Cosby, Ford, Gandhi), or

3. THE ACCUSED: people who have simply been accused of these crimes (i.e. #metoo or other public accusations with no conviction and public denials, Woody Allen, Sam Altman, etc)
> There is a style of grey-beard that never wants to reason in parts. He simple loads the whole program into his big brain and works from there

Well said.

I'm reluctant to trust composability in these languages because of abstractions that were supposed to be composable, but turned out as non-composable. Separation of concerns, single responsibility etc are all good ideas, but code that is less explicit seems to make those things harder to verify. (I feel completely differently about composability in genuinely functional, managed programming languages.) In a way, C's qualms should have been mitigated by C++ already; but in fact, C++ has only replaced a small set of problems with a huge one.

> With "goto" I need to reconstruct what the arbitrary control flow means

I agree with your point in general (reading code means reconstructing the whole from the parts, which is more difficult than writing code, i.e., deconstructing the whole into parts) -- but not in this specific case. A proper cascade of gotos is very recognizable. And a broken cascade is fairly recognizable too.

> You don't need to know the order

My experience with C++ destructors (which I didn't write) suggests otherwise. "Trust, but verify"; and for that, explicit code is better. IMO.

> the desugarer should always be a click away

Source code should be readable without external tools, IMO.
1946 was a special case. It was the start of the baby boom, kicked off by the victorious soldiers returning home and wanting to get on with life.