skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After thinking about it a bit more, I think I am actually on your side. I previously claimed to be on "Const when things should never locally change".

But thinking through the example

function expectedRevenuePerAttempt() {

(const/let) successRate = success / attempt;

return successRate * revenuePerSuccess

}

I would prefer to use const there.
Show HN: News Minimalist – News ranked by significance
Hey HN! I'm the author of News Minimalist — a news aggregator where all news is ranked by significance on a scale from 0 to 10.

The project was born out of personal pain — I wanted a way to read only significant news, like major humanity milestones, or historical political events, filtering out all the celebrity gossip and smartphone releases. But I couldn't find a way to do that — everywhere I looked, the news was ranked by popularity, coverage, or relevance, not significance.

I first tried to solve the problem in the beginning of 2023 with GPT-3 (the top model at that time) by asking it to estimate the significance of some news stories. The results were painfully bad — for some reason, the model preferred tragic, personal stories, completely missing the essence of what makes the news significant. No amount of prompt engineering could fix that.

But it all changed in March 2023 when GPT-4 came out. The scores it gave made much more sense. After a month of work, the first version was ready. News Minimalist had its first successful Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388), and I realized that a lot of people had the same problem I had.

I've been working on improving the project ever since. As probably most tech founders, I spent too much time on technical improvements, completely ignoring marketing. But I think that work paid off, and I'm finally satisfied with the scores it gives.

The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/

Let me know what you think!

Vadim
Adding to this that before Livescribe there was the Fly pentop computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_(pentop_computer)
shocked, shocked I tell you
“Should get paid less” is the obvious value judgement from the employer’s perspective. Nothing subjective about it

In the original comment, the argument of "should be paid less" was based not on an objective evaluation of productivity components on the part of the employer, but rather on a very much subjective evaluation of the employee's now "easier life".
> but the reason for its existence is precision

In some cases yes, but the majority of the time jargon is primarily used as a shibboleth to establish group identity, camaraderie, and a sense of exclusivity.
openrsync is a neat story, it was made because they wanted to use rsync in the rpki system, but the standards body balked, saying they should not be using something where the standard was the implementation, so the openbsd folk(specifically Kristaps Dzonsons) stepped up and made a second rsync implementation so that the standards body could accept the protocol.

http://man.openbsd.org/rpki-client
It's been a decade but I have previously fuzzed multiple linux file system implementations and was able panic the kernel. I would be somewhat surprised if none had code execution vulnerabilities at some point, but I can't think of any publicly known ones off the top of my head.

Of course there absolutely have been auto-run vulnerabilities too. And modern Linux desktops have more auto-running auto-indexing stuff than ever. I've absolutely seen mounted drives being eagerly explore by gnome thumbnail generation stuff and likewise.

The challenge for modern security isn't avoiding vulnerabilities, it's avoiding whole classes of behavior that might be vulnerable because the attack surfaces are so huge that we'll inevitably miss vulnerabilities so long as they're not structurally impossible.

So for example, I'd always prefer to interact with a potentially malicious file system via an ephemeral read-only VM that reads the files and exports a network-fs like interface to my working system... It's just too hard to be certain there are no filesystem vulnerabilities-- they have huge surfaces and they're not usually tested against that. I can't even be sure latest genius systemd feature doesn't silently run stuff on removable media (just as it did stuff like given unprivleged users the ability to modify the system time without clearly documenting the change), if it's allowed to touch it. And if there issues are I'll be thankful that the malware payload would have also had to contain a VM escape for it to compromise my system.
I think the saddest thing is that it's highly likely that real people will start to produce aesthetics that look/sound/etc like AI slop
I agree that it is unusual that YouTube and Instagram don't seem to be trying harder to court TikTok users. I assume this is because it would expose how much of an unpopular alternative they are.

The user base is probably more important to the quality of the feed than the interface or the algorithm.
This is very basic Scheme syntax (plus Guile's keyword argument extension), nothing advanced and definitely not all of Scheme.
Magnetic field is that aether.
https://archive.ph/cg4we

I do not like UnitedHealth, I do not like our existing crop of health insurance executives, and I might even be viscerally glad at some level that the UnitedHealth CEO was killed in a world where justice clearly takes a back seat to greed, but I wish the headline didn't say "overcharged", because there's no established amount of markup that is the correct amount of markup other than what people end up paying. Is that shitty? Yes. Does it violate a social contract? I think so. But tell me how much the right amount to charge is first. Is that cost? Cost+percentage? They've chosen their percentage. What's the correct one instead?

The article body presents the story in a more meaningful way, "UnitedHealth Group is charging patients a markup for key life-saving drugs that could easily exceed their cost by a factor of ten or more".
> Why is this relevant when presenting scientific research?

I’m guessing that the difference lies in the potential value extraction possibilities from the idea.

If comparing the transformers paper to an algorithm or geometry, that is not used by anyone, I think the differences are obvious from this perspective.

However, if that paper on geometry led to something like a new way of doing strained silicon for integrated circuit design that made manufacturing 10 times cheaper and the circuit 10 times faster, then that would be more important then that would the transformers one.
It is a political thing as much as anything. Some old people feel they learned it so it must be good and therefore kids today must learn it. Same with "new math" - I didn't learn this way it must be wrong, go back to the way I was taught since I know math. At no point is anyone asking if the new way is better or not. Nor are we asking if maybe the skill is obsolete and not worth learning. Or maybe it is a niche skill that most won't need and we are better off spending time with something else (like going to the playground). There are probably other good points to debate as well, but generally it comes down to old people teaching what they learned.

I do come down against teaching it. But then I never could read my own writing and am mad about all the trouble I got into in school for it (I have to credit the one teacher who did realize I wasn't lazy and tried to get experts to help me - but dysgraphia wouldn't exist for several more years so nothing came of his attempt). However I'm not clear if manual writing is obsolete for everyone or just me. Right note typing is a useful skill, but text to speech is making progress so maybe in a few years nobody will type and so teaching that skill was wasted.

My school spent a lot of effort teaching me WordPerfect because that is what industry used. A complete waste of time that I never used again. Anyone care to guess what will be useful or not?
Because the combined intelligence of an intelligent but non-genius human and highly intelligent AI might be really good.
> This is comically common, but because it has SpaceX in the name, it makes headlines.

I once had a flight from Puerto Rico to Chicago delayed because of a (SpaceX) launch at Cape Canaveral that happened exactly within the planned launch window. On the plus side, the flight was delayed just barely enough to be “safe” - we got to watch the second stage separation off in the distance just by looking out the window at whatever the 737 cruising altitude is.

I’d guess that space launches just aren’t numerous enough to bother modifying commercial aviation schedules, so they don’t (SpaceX or not). When it looks like a launch is actually going to happen and not get scrubbed, they clear a hole in the sky and then get on with their day.
It's somewhat this, a lot the fact that a huge, unbelievable chunk of "devops" guys are former sysadmins pigeonholed into devops because every organization thought that was a natural progression, so the odds of finding a devops engineer that is very good at writing go or javascript is kind of a unicorn, at least in my experience (I have to hire sometimes). They're usually fairly proficient with scripting languages, but sometimes not even that. Since terraform/HCL/YAML are more configuration languages with a lot less "logic" in them, it's more comfortable for a lot of people with that background, especially when they're already used to tools like ansible/helm/etc.
Nothing exciting if you look at the code near the end.

for(i=0;i<8;i++)
LEDRegister[i]=LEDRegister[i]+TMR0+addr;

Note this is also technically a bug, the for(i=0;i<8;i++) loop executes so fast that TMR0 (an independent PIC timer that increments every 740uS) is usually the same value added to each LEDregister. I actually added +i to the end of this line in my version, but I'm guessing someone making this will tweak the code to do whatever they want or store some patterns as consts. The code really is quite crappy now that I look at it sober, the watchdog timer is turned off and should be on, there is no checksum on the serial data, procedures called from interrupts, defines with double-slash comments, all stand out like a sore thumb. Lucky it just blinks lights and doesn't run a dialysis machine!
You are making up stories now. We have proven news article of flagrant corporate espionage happening from Chinese actors. We know that CCP upper leadership holds seats at the major mainland corporations. Will I say never has US intelligence participated in corporate espionage? There are documented cases of the US meddling but as far as we have evidence, not at the level of Chinese interference. So nope, I won't say for sure but I am also not fabricating stories.
Anatomy of an Internet Argument #5: "Your writing is dumb"
The teachers produced most of the lecture notes. The textbooks excerpts were short and in hindsight must be covered by fair use.
> Its one that lets students figure out what they're good at before they have to be on their own.

The best way to figure out what you are good at is to do it. That is not the role of school and will never best be served by school.

I know we've gotten caught up in a society that dreads children doing anything other than academics and sports, but it needn't be that way. In this hypothetical ideal society, it is most definitely not that way. Be careful to not let a poorly considered status quo cloud your judgement.
What is new math
The party that should get virtually all of the benefit should be the consumer.
I don't recall legacy media spreading tourettes-like tics...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9553600/
Convert.nvim: A plugin to do CSS unit conversions
How many users does Genshin Impact need to have before it gets banned?
I dont think i have ever used cursive outside of the class teaching me cursive.

I think the problem is that modern ball point pens dont glide well, making it not a useful way to write.
Youth polling consistently ranks public schooling middle-high school as the literal worst time in their life. However, I still think they should do it as it gives them exposure to the bottom quartile of the population. It gives them motivation and reason to structure the rest of their life to do anything and everything to never have to interact said population group again.
yeah, in what world would that not help? they're not getting kicked out of the school system, just the school. lowest-common-denominator idealism like you are espousing here is one of the primary reasons why schools have gotten so terrible.
So does it support downloading something that requires a specific account? This sounds like a job for a browser extension and not a website.

Otherwise a very good idea and definitely necessary in today's world.
the forever wars are not winding down :)

and if graham is pissed all he has to do is wait for 2028 :)
The cost of driving a gasoline vs. an electric car across US states
Remember that part of the current testing program includes testing whether or not they can reliably relight their engines on orbit in order to do things like a controlled re-entry. Given the nature of that testing I imagine there's very little room for narrowing their re-entry corridors. If the test succeeds they may re-enter earlier and if it fails they'll re-enter later... or laterally different... either way lighting up the engines for the test probably changes the trajectory of the spacecraft.

The one thing they can do is be sure the original trajectory that gets them to space intersects the Earth within some reason so that if things don't go as planned it doesn't go too far afield.

At best this article is a complaint about communication of whether or not a launch is happening. And even that's hard to really do reasonably: weather, maybe a stuck valve during the countdown, maybe a leisure boat close to the launch site enters the exclusion area... all of those things have happened and prompted changes in launch times and many of those things are outside of SpaceX control.

So seems to me you can lock up the airspace on a "just in case" basis with lots of advanced warning but also reserving lots of time that you won't really need in the end... you know... just in case... , or lock it up much less, but at the cost of relatively short notice to others that might want to use it. Either way you'd still get the article protesting... it's just the complaint would be different.
I attended a private school for a couple of years, and I have to say it was worse than the public ones.

Now obviously this is going to be neighbourhood, country, and community specific, but the problem I had with observing private schools was that now the school had an additional incentive not to expel students, rich and influential parents had extra influence over whether their child could be disciplined and how the school should do things, and half of the time the problematic behaved people were... the rich people and their children. Having and paying money isn't exactly a free ticket to well-adjusted children especially if the children are mimicking the culture they see at home and the society awards bullying and various behaviours with more money... Which most of ours do.

And this was on top of the downsides of private schools: being image obsessed over academics and intellectual investigation, surrounded by non egalitarian private school twats, and bunches of arbitrary private school rules. Now obviously this is not all private schools, but in the same way it's not all public schools either.

I think in this system it's a roll of the die. In my country, neighbourhood and in my life, my kid is currently going to public school and, touch wood... thriving for now. The other private schools around here have too much woo like Waldorf and Steiner and they steer away from evidence based methods in literacy and numeracy.

But I don't know if that's going to hold off into the older ages, and I can't promise, much to my wife's chagrin, not to consider homeschooling considering my own experience of high school also approaching that of a dysfunctional prison and a poor educational environment.

PS: there was plenty of interpersonal violence at the private schools when I grew up.
Robyn Hitchcock blames 1974: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVDDXFpVjNU

(directed by Jonathan Demme!)
When you've exhausted legitimate means for change, you begin searching for illegitimate means. Sorry, but at the end of the day, leverage is leverage and if a person in power says "this really hurts," congratulations they've told you their weakness.
Let’s go full meta and build a product hunt… but for product hunt alternatives!
The 30lb backpacks were only a function of our deranged society, economy, and government. I am sure others here will be able to attest that education in Europe not only was better for reasons that cannot be openly discussed in our censorious society, but the textbooks were denser with information that was also better structured, while also being lighter in weight. Lockers are simply not even a thing in Europe because children are carrying less and they have standardized backpacks.
> Are kids actually able to just get on social media on these things?

Where there's a will, there's a way.

I think the actual interest is in playing games. (IO games, Minecraft online, etc.)

By the time they are old enough to be into social media (14+ years?), most here in the US have their own phones to provide internet access.
I mean, if you describe a relationship in terms of a protocol, sure, you're giving an interesting signal about the relationship, but probably not what you intended to say.
Genomic prediction of IQ is modern snake oil
https://archive.ph/PHOU5
A bank transfer requires both parties to reveal their account number. I have been told by several people in both the US and the UK that this is a risky thing to do. In fact in those countries where there is no national register of residents and identifying oneself relies on things like utility bills that show your address rather than on a unique ID (personnummer in Norway) that a bank, for instance, can verify online they might actually be right, or right-ish at least.

I rarely hear of identity theft in Norway where banking relies on common ID services (BankID for instance) and the folkeregister (population register) but it seems to be a major problem in, for instance, the UK where there is no equivalent.
On the one hand, yes, I agree. There's something about the tactility of a book, about dogeared pages, and marginalia, and having muscle memory to open a book at about the same spot where I left off.

I grew up with that and it's a very comfortable skill set.

On the other hand, I've learned ways to manage and reference information in digital formats. Bookmarks and links and pasted snippets. Attachments and full text search. Not to even get into real sicko stuff like Notion and Obsidian and DEVONthink.

Being able to easily flip back and forth between pages is a very useful technique, but so is being able to snap a screenshot of a pdf and keep it open it in another window.

I'm a sucker for paper but I'm resistant to the idea that all of these things are irreplaceable
I'm surprised this post has not gotten more traction here.
If the bag is too heavy (especially if unbalanced, like carrying it on one shoulder) then the kid can cause back problems.

See https://scoliosisinstitute.com/heavy-backpacks/ for more details.
If you ever want to return to it, the nonguix ISO can be notoriously buggy. A better approach is to use the normal Guix ISO with an ethernet cable during installation and while setting up nonguix and your drivers.
I thought the defining feature of a text editor (as opposed to a word processor) is that it didn’t have rich text decorations. Are we talking about the same thing?
I went fully digital some years ago, gave away most of my printed books and bought ebooks only. Now I have my whole library in Calibre and on my Kindle. Why? Because I have my whole library with me. And I can download my highlights and process them. Into notes in Obsidian, that I can link to in my study notes.

Recently I started buying paper based books again. Man, I missed holding physical books in my hands. And I start to regret having gotten rid of my physical library. There were so many memories I had with most of these books. I remember their covers, and instantly my emotions , thoughts, feelings are triggered. I don’t have these emotions when I think of my digital books.

My spouse has books that she was gifted when she was a child. Still in our kids shelf. I cannot give her my digital books.

I regret the decision having gone fully digital, which can only be a complement to physical books.

Printed books are a physical experience. Something that allows me to attach thoughts, emotions, feelings to it. And they can become part of my life. Like a good friend.
yt-dlp wrapper?
I don't know whether that's literally true, but I can certainly tell you that there is no point in banning stuff nobody in the EU is thinking of using anyway. US companies are way more "adventurous" with their additives, which makes regulation here even more important.
more of a big brother watching tech added to their countless cameras throughout the country
That depends on the number of books obviously
I think you're the only one who understands what I was trying to say here, which means I didn't say it nearly clear enough. But thanks.
>who knows if that'll work ever again

Unless you restrict your nix files to specific channel revisions, which when I had to deal with it was poorly documented, and involved searching through specific channel commit hashes in a particularly opaque way, you also can't know that your nix derivations will ever work again.

A number of people on my field used nix as a way to make their research code repositories reproducible, and everything broke within around three years.
> Same with "new math" - I didn't learn this way it must be wrong, go back to the way I was taught since I know math. At no point is anyone asking if the new way is better or not.

I mean, i think feneyman did have something to say about if it was better or not, and why.
Ask HN: Thoughts on a Configuration-Driven Data Pipeline Platform?
Hi HN,

I'm working on a startup idea for a configuration-driven data pipeline platform designed to simplify and streamline the process of building and managing data pipelines.

The Problem
Managing modern data pipelines is often complex, requiring developers to integrate multiple tools manually, deal with vendor lock-in, and handle a steep learning curve for diverse technologies.

The Solution
Our platform acts as a wrapper for open-source tools, offering a plug-and-play approach to:

Data ingestion, transformation, and quality control
CI/CD and test-driven pipeline creation
Easy switching between technologies (e.g., Snowflake to Delta Lake)
On-premise deployment for organizations avoiding the cloud
Key Features
Low-code configuration: Build pipelines through simple YAML/JSON configurations, no custom code required.
Modular and Flexible: Mix-and-match open-source tools seamlessly.
Scalable Architecture: Designed for a variety of workloads, from small startups to enterprise-scale data needs.
Questions for HN
Does this idea resonate with the challenges you've faced in managing data pipelines?
Are there any features or capabilities you’d consider must-haves?
How important is vendor lock-in avoidance to your organization?
Would you prefer an open-source tool with premium add-ons or a fully hosted solution?
I’d love to hear your feedback, suggestions, or critiques. If this idea interests you, I’d be happy to share more details!

Thanks in advance for your input!
Free game puts you in the shoes of a startup CEO
Taiwan forms the first Island chain that currently keeps China's navy constrained.

Loosing Taiwan is tantamount to accepting Chinese military hegemony in SEA and East Asia. No need to export ideology, it's more like if I put up tariffs against Chinese goods to protect domestic business and then a few PLAN warships park up right next to my trade corridors.