skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, Covid is likely made In USA.
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/foi-litigation-on-origins...

And RF really changes your DNA
https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E....
For some kind of software, another call to the DB is the best way to add bog-standard functionality without adding complexity and failure modes.

Granted, not for all software. And there's something to be said about a config file that you can just replace at deployment. But that's something that varies a lot from one environment to another.
Why would you expect otherwise? Titles are assigned ISBNs by publishers as they are being published. Books published simultaneously as a set might have sequential numbers, but otherwise not. Books separated by a year or more are not going to have related numbers. It's an inventory tracking mechanism, it has no other meaning.
Maybe after Obama's people decided that one should've been inside and any future ones at similar temperatures should be inside?
403ing Questionable Referrals
The call out on premature optimization is valid. However this article misses the mark on a couple fronts.

One, as others have called out, is the ability to control rollout (and rollback) without needing a deployment. Think mobile apps and the rollout friction. If something goes wrong, you need a way to turn off the offending functionality quickly without having to go through another deployment or a mobile app review.

Second, is to be able to understand the impact of the rollout. Feature flags can easily measure how the rollout of one feature can affect the rest of the system - whether it is usage, crash rates, engagement, or further down the funnel, revenue. It’s a cheat code for quickly turning every rollout into an experiment. And you don’t need a large sample size for catching some of these.

By having this power, you will find yourself doing more of it, which I believe is good.
Great summary.

Just starting with them and learning to improve your application of them is the best way to learn, too.

There is one book on feature flags that had been written earlier, some of the independently published books by experienced tech folks out there are a goldmine.

Feature Flags by Ben Nadel is one such book for me. There is an online version that is free as well. Happy to learn about others.

https://featureflagsbook.com/
It's probably not done due to political reasons.

Most of the complication is probably accidental, due to history or human traditions.

From first principles, the problem is obviously straightforward to formulate (assign nonoverlapping regions of spacetime to aircraft containing their position and destination, that they can maneuver in and such that the travel time is approximately optimal).

Applying simplifying constraints to the form of the regions (e.g. a discrete set of departure slots and fixed takeoff/landing envelopes, a route that follows the optimal trajectory in latitude/longitude plus a discrete lateral offset, discrete set of altitudes that change only at route crossings), it should be possible to reduce to a discrete optimization problem solvable in linear time.
This is the new normal. Welcome.

And honestly, if you looked at how weird politic was before the World Wars and the Cold War, we may be reverting to the mean. RIP Pax Americana
I'm not an expert but from the benchmarks I've seen C# consumes considerably less memory than Goroutines.

Eg: https://alexyakunin.medium.com/go-vs-c-part-1-goroutines-vs-...
Do you think these differences worthy or worthless?
The website literally says "Earthstar has a new specification powered by Willow." in a banner at the very top
The author's argument is that aptitude requirements did not change, but what changed is that some candidates were now less experienced after not having gone through ATC degrees. (But the author doesn't attribute the tragedy to that, in any case, so speculating about a counterfactual is something else.)
This was me. The LA party scene was wild in the late 2000s. I knew two girls who partied with "Good Time Charlie" and were vocal about it. I partied with one of them so I definitely got tested when I heard the news.

LFP
You might get a kick out of this: it's an attempt to remodel funding to reward and reinvigorate research with the intelligence of the folks who straddle fields -- to reward those who make correct predictions about where future "breakthrough innovations" (ie. Intersectional and significant research convergences) will appear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLDNMAOn24

Puja Ohlhaver has some great ideas and interventions in this space <3
Ye I get that but my main point is that it is not Orwell the real person that is quoted, but a fictional character that is a high level official in a dystopic police agency. If you haven't read the book it might be as Orwell the author is complicit.

But sry might be a nitpick and obvious from context.
Just like economics has been found to have far from rational actors, it's clear that there are millions of "low information voters". Many of them likely voted for him because he's that actor on tv who entertains them.

But yes, plenty of his voters heard what he had to say and liked it.

Tangent: in the United States, more people believe in angels than in evolution (69% vs 60%).
Many stories that (correctly) get flagged on HN are critically important, far more important than anything which does appear on the front page. There's a simple reason for this: if importance were the high-order bit, then HN would be a current affairs site.

In fact its mandate is something quite different, as everyone here should know—see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and (for endless elaboration on the point) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
The President's ability to affect spending is definitely limited, and hasn't been exercised really since Reagan, but still exists.

Congress rarely makes spending money it's goal, rather it appropriates money to accomplish some goal. Which is to say that if Congress wants a bridge across a river and appropriate 10 billion to build it, the President is not obligated to spend $10 billion if 7 or 8 or 9 will do. In some cases, Congress does appropriate money toward causes and intends all the money to be spent in furtherance of some guiding principle and in these cases all the money must be spent.
AccessorySetupKit is an Apple framework, not part of swift
flagged - rorschach test
Publishers buy blocks of isbns based on expected need, how the actually assign them may be arbitrary.
my plans are to time-travel without company
Something with meaningful restrictions such as register count and RAM that you'll hit quickly when hand-coding assembler is a super IMHO useful teaching tool. 16 registers is luxurious!
That and how, between block arguments and optional parens on method invocation, Ruby allows (and the core exploits this) defining lots of constructs that look like keyword-based syntax as methods.
> DO NOT COMPRESS ANY DATA WITH THIS PROGRAM UNLESS YOU ARE PREPARED TO ACCEPT THE POSSIBILITY, HOWEVER SMALL, THAT THE DATA WILL NOT BE RECOVERABLE.

I know every open source project (and quite a lot of expensive proprietary ones!) come with a "btw this software might wipe your computer, if it does that's your fault lol" clause in their license but I can't imagine trying to convince anyone else that using this for anything remotely serious is a good idea with that line in the readme.
Makes you wonder if an LLM wouldn't be the perfect air traffic controller.

Only one on duty? How about 100 agents continually monitoring
Not really. I guess most people are at least thinking about what is possible, if not actively building things with LLM’s every day at this point.

Certainly I get new ideas of what is possible and what experiments people are trying with them all the time just by lurking hackernews.

As with all things you need to cut through the signal/noise.
It's OK, but the climax is absolutely classic.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
> the cloud-native space

I'd argue that a big chunk of that particular space is sales innovation rather than tech innovation. But I'm admittedly pretty jaded and cynical of all the bs at this point.
I’m curious to know if medication helped you conform to the societal expectation regarding attention, and whether you experienced other effects from it (positive, negative).

I’d value anecdata to know more and decide whether to push back if school starts pressuring for an adhd evaluation which is usually for an ulterior goal of medicating the kid.
Is DOGE meant to be pronounced like the thing that you toke? Is that supposed to be a little joke?
STRONG agree with your sentiments btw
it can be (and likely is) both at the same time.

management wants to execute their fancy plan to make more money, and see control, supervision, faster iteration, tighter feedback loops, blablabla ... as one part of it, hence the amazing "all hands on deck" idea that today is "everyone in the office".
> "the problem isn't me, the problem is other people" is exceedingly harmful.

I can still work with it though. I recognize that I can't fix their flaws and the power I have is to adapt.

Recognizing flaws in others was gateway thinking for me. It lead to me seeking and finding flaw-groups that I'm a member of. That led to me seeking reasonable causes for mass flaws.

And that led me to a small group of causes. They center around individual capacity (everyone is doing ~the best they can) and reactions to feelings of helplessness (the other end of a bad behavior chain).

FF to now. I'm considering a unified flaw that seems to hobble every group eventually.

No one anywhere wants to clean their own house

Thank you and I hope you enjoyed this tour.
If I was a bootstrapped startup, I'd do a json file and then when I've outgrown, I'd hand write something that long-polls a CDN for updates, with a tiny rails or react app behind the CDN.

But these approaches are insane for companies above a certain size, where individuals are being hired and fired regularly, security matters, and feature flags are in the critical path of revenue.

Last time I looked at LaunchDarkly Enterprise licensing, it started at $50k/year, and included SAML.

Now that sounds like a lot, but if you're well past the startup stage, you need a tiny team to manage your homegrown platform. Maybe you have other things for them to do as well, but you probably need 3 people devoting at least 25% of their time to this, in order to maintain. So that's at least $175k/year in the USA, and if your company is growing, then probably the opportunity cost is higher.
My grandmother was an elementary school teacher for 50 years. She told me that when the kids started getting rowdy she would stop class and play the piano and sing a song for a bit. I always thought that was amazing.
I heard that since there’s only one SQLite vendor and nothing else comparable to allow for multiple options, they wouldn’t support it.

I would like to hear more about the hostile environment comment. I thought they sandboxed every page. Cross origin data theft?
> bombarding lead with a beam of titanium-50 accelerated to 10% the speed of light

Please forgive the poor understanding, but isn't titanium non-magnetic? How does one accelerate titanium?
I'm a unity developer who works with artists and the number of art friends who have had their projects absolutely destroyed in multiple different software packages by upgrading to windows 11 has committed to seeing how well the unity linux client behaves rather than upgrade.
This is just the modern equivalent of clip art laden docs from the "desktop publishing" days, it'll pass.
First I hear about Debian on pixel phones with graphene. Do you have a link to information on this?
Yeah, but GTK5 will not target it.
I too hit the 50. For the last 8 years I been 100% remote and seen the office ONE time only and that was just to hug a buddy happy retirement. Later on I found out his wages were cut and he found a new job. I quickly joined him with a competitor.

The pro RTO people are nothing short of power hungry. They like flexing their will against others. That’s why having leverage and a huge f*ck you fund is necessary. Especially when it’s going to take a year to un frack this IT job economy. A quick fix would be removal of all IT h1b. The that would get Americans back to work. We all know they use it to keep wages down.
OK I understand now and will fix that title. Sorry for that inconvenience. My bad. :-/
To say I'm not a fan of Trump and particularly of his wrecking-ball approach to his new administration would be a severe understatement.

Still I'd have to say the narrative I outlined above is more of an attempt to hang the crash around his neck than something that reflects the truth particularly well. Of course Trump for his part as always immediately tried to hang it around Biden's and Obama's necks (neatly skipping over his own prior administration) with no evidence, so turnabout is fair play. Now, whether the Muskification of the whole government will be the cause of problems going forward, that's another story.

I was writing something here about having great confidence in the NTSB to perform a thorough investigation and account for various factors if they're allowed to remain independent and operate without interference... and then I saw a post from the NTSB today that they'll no longer be sending out email to media and instead only posting updates to their Twitter account... so put a lot of emphasis on that "if."
The uppity, highly paid technical employee has recreated our SaaS offering on his laptop and it is now effectively free for self-hosting.

VP of Sales has left nine voicemails, would you like to play them now?
No it's not, even with MSVC on Windows dereferencing a null pointer is not guaranteed to do anything:

Here's a classic article about the very weird and unintuitive consequences of null pointer dereferencing, such as "time travel":

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140627-00/?p=63...
All office discussion today is seen through the post-COVID WFH lens. It's easy to forget that there was a time before, largely filled with complaints about office conditions falling on deaf ears. The cat is out of the bag - we know remote can work and we know how different hotdesking in a room full of zoom calls feels.
These assholes.
Even worse when you run into those folks who a surface level knowledge and sound knowledgeable but somehow come up with the worst possible conclusions.

Then the rest go around repeating it ad nauseam.
>second week we've heard of the building of concentration camps for undesirables

Mind posting a reference for such a declaration?
I've many friends and family members over-diagnosed with mental illness in preteens, plied with legal meth (Ritalin and Adderall), psychotropics & anti-psychotics. They are now adult basket cases.

There is a confirmation bias especially in tech, since many high-achievers are also taking these drugs. I want to warn people that you are only seeing the winners not the victims.

For every successful Adderall addict you know, there are dozens of lives that have been ruined by parents and quacks.
> How realistic is it to have ATC performed by an AI?

Not very. For safety-critical systems, you probably want something deterministic, and doesn't break when faced with novel situations.

Solvers are probably a better solution than ML approaches, but they can't capture every possible constraint, such as airplane that can only make left-handed turns because of equipment failure.
Haven't written C# for 8 years, but Visual Studio used to be dog slow. But that's the only criticism I can think of, love the language. I remember when ReactiveX came out, C# became close to unbeatable at that point.
> self-knowledge, spectral sight, DRM stripping

So, yet another new age cult?
I’m with you. The author makes bold claims about not following the assumptions imposed upon you about success and productivity, but what, exactly, is the alternative? Maybe I could go live in the wilderness, hunting and foraging at my own pace, instead of the pace imposed upon me. Of course, that isn’t realistic for the vast majority of people.

> Instead of feeling bad, examine the gap between your current life and the one you yearn for.

Say, for example, my definition of fulfillment is having a large array of close friends. If I find myself distracted from or am unwilling to shower, that will drive many people off. If I miss social cues and communicate “in a different language,” so to speak, that will make it difficult to relate to people and become close with them. If I don’t let myself sleep, I’ll be robbed of the motivation and energy I need to pursue this goal or any other.

That’s just an example. But the vast majority of people, regardless of how they define fulfillment, will have to “play society’s game” to some extent.
When you lower the boom and release the bucket.
The scale is easy in practice, cause you outsource to a CDN. But everything takes time and has opportunity cost.
Author here. Anyone have interesting mainframe stories?
Googlers asked if they'd like to bury themselves with Stadia,Chromecast,DropCam
A lot of that is true. Evolutionary advantage is always relative to the environment.

ADHD can have material impact on other aspects of your life though not just stuff related to studies or cognitive jobs.

A recent bit of research linked ADHD to shorter life expectancy (7-9 years). Reasons probably vary but I'd wager a big part of it is that those with ADHD can have a much harder time keeping up with regular life maintenance, including matters of personal health.

Making that doctor's appointment for a checkup or cancer screening is always 5 minutes away. Encountering even the least bit of unexpected friction can derail you even when you manage to get moving. Next thing you know, 6 months have gone by.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/23/adults-diagn...
My take away from this article is that the super heavy element Rutherfordium can barely be agreed to even exist outside of a theoretical sense.
tech people are the ones running and driving "it" forward. almost all of them. the rest of the constituents is meek, irrelevant in terms of actual relevance - beyond hierarchies & chains of command.

indie/ low tech is rare.

people striving for symbiotic methods are even rarer.

the now got reduced to a ticktockish attention span and sphere. even among artists.

the buck counts more than the message. the message is no more than "compensation". "i blinded myself, mhwiwiwi"

fuFAANG/Fortune5000 are more vulnerable than todlers but even peeps with toddlers don't "transcend" ...

it's a full metal jacket kind of rationale ... "better u now and the rest of us later than me boss now" ...

it's just a couple of million years, don't worry.

the huge rock implicitly linked to the development of Earth doesn't know mercy.

life will evolve somewhere far away yet again. only a matter of time until your genes get combined again, ... if you are not among the reasons why that rock got on its way, that is ... like too many of 'dem dinosaurs, 'member?
I keep my taskbar on the left. Windows 11 does not allow this. I do not want to login with a Microsoft Account. This is mandatory in Windows 11. My PC’s CPU is not supported by Windows 11. My other PCs run Ubuntu. This is the last one still on Windows and it’s because of gaming. I’ll pay the $30 for extended security updates and wait and see if anti-cheat supports Linux by 2026.
He looks like he started a bender two days before this interview and hit a point where he wouldn’t be sober in time to get there and just said fuck it.
There are three biological sexes: male, female, and inter. The latter is rare but exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
> The average SS recipient receives more in benefits than they contributed. (including reasonable interest).

This is unsustainable. The people running it know and have known this for decades, instead of fixing it they have been at work finely tuning everything to ensure that the boomers receive full benefits just before major overhauls are require, significant additional taxes and/or reductions in benefits are 100% a guarantee at this point, but they continue spending and even increasing benefits all the while. A quarter century ago, Al Gore suggested putting a small amount of money aside to fund the program in the future and everyone laughed at him, on both the left and right. Instead they cut themselves stimulus checks and went to the mall, kicking off a decade of indulgence that ended with the 2008 global financial crisis while spending 7 trillion pounding sand in Iraq and Afghanistan with no particular goal and little to nothing to show for it.

This generation has acted like overgrown children their entire adult lives, they've spent and borrowed and kicked every can in sight down the road. They rigged this program along with every other as another massive transfer of wealth from the generations with the least money to the one with the most. As a final FU to future generations, they are as we speak in the process of dismantling the global world order that has protected and enriched them for their entire lives. I hope in the near future they will at last see some retribution for all of this.
what do you mean??

usually this signifies the year some article was finalized and published.

and this is a GitHub repo with recent commits so this is not correct here.
No no yeah that might explain why I attracted some other weird comments as well.

I only mean, natural selection is the survivability of e.g. a nose shape trait across generations, which can happen via reproduction, early death, etc and it’s not about survivability of the person WITH the nose except to the extent that facilitates the former

Survival of the fittest traits
What happens when a situation that the agent hasn’t been trained on occurs?

Is it going to have the critical thinking skills to understand the situation and make the right decision or is it going to just hallucinate some impossible answer and get people killed?

I’m not saying human controllers don’t make mistakes but this should be one of the last areas to fully automate.
Wouldn't "habitually one-pointed" people be very focussed, rather than distracted?

Or is the idea that a very distracted person being honed into a focussed and aware person is a duality that's valued -- able to live in both worlds? (Rather than a very focussed person being taught to be distracted and highly integrative?)
The salaries were in comparison to the private sector. TBH I'm not sure what jobs & ages they chose to compare Federal salaries to the private sector. Seems kinda arbitrary. Perhaps it was in comparison to private sector union workers?
> Your comment assumes the current system can be scaled indefinitely.

Why couldn't it be? We need fewer ATC than we need pilots, by a long shot. The actual requested new hires for ATC is in the range of 2k (with 1k expected to stay on staff).

With roughly a 120k salary, and assuming all 2k stay on-board that's what, an additional $200mil needed to fully fund?

Meanwhile, the airline industry had a $30b net profit, so it doesn't look like this is even something that'd bankrupt the industry if we taxed them to cover the costs of ATC. It's a 1% tax that's needed.

Even with a super duper fancy modernized system, we'd still want towers staffed sufficiently. Having just 1 person there is a problem even if everything is super modernized. When an issue comes up that the system can't or isn't handling well that's 1 person to make all the calls. Hopefully 2 things aren't happening and hopefully they don't need or want a second opinion.

As for hiring competent people, the DC metro has 6.3 million people. I find it really hard to believe there's not 3 more in the area that could handle being an ATC operator.

And it's not like we don't already have 99% of the existing buildings, infrastructure, and computers already setup. It's literally just the personnel that's lacking.