skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That’s a great way to never expand the frontier of knowledge. We don’t know the returns on the investment of a Moon program ahead of time, but exploration drives human knowledge forward. If we only ever funded things that had a clear economically viable reason, we would have never progressed past steam technology.

Think of space exploration as basic research. It’s fundamental to moving human knowledge forward and that should be worth any price.
Annecdotal, but some of win32k.sys got ported to rust. If you run a search for win32*.sys you’ll see the way it’s been split.
Absolutely, barring the company bringing them to court for violating the "taking withouy compensation".

But what people forget is that the CA state doesn't want PG&E.

The state already exerts significant control over PG&E operations through the CPUC (members nominated by Gavin Newsom). CPUC approves/rejects all capital spending down to new fences for electrical substations. You can read about all the decisions in the 931 page rate decision, which is public.

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M520/K...

But what about executive compensation? Well, a separate CA state agency approves that as well.

https://energysafety.ca.gov/what-we-do/electrical-infrastruc...

So at this point the CA state government basically runs PG&E. But if they purchased it, they'd be exposing themselves to all the political risk when things go bad.

But right now, they get political air cover. Despite the tight level of control over how PG&E is run, the CA state government gets none of the blowback.

It's the optimal setup from a political perspective.
> two contracts that have missed deadlines.

Just two. Wow. That’s an unprecedented track record in the space industry.

Every industry has different critical indicators. “Late” doesn’t mean much here.

Even routine individual launches are often scheduled as “NET” or “No Earlier Than”.

For major new rocket designs, it’s a lot like me and social events. “If I’m not late, I’m not coming!”
i am a full stack dev, i can help create an index for that page if you want
at this point, it is not possible. Whatever you develop, the student can just use another phone /tablet to take a screenshot and upload it to llm to generate solution and then he/she can just type it out.
This happens in other countries too. I thought this podcast about it was good: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Dya11oWUSsbCkBA9AAzrM?si=E...
Looks like the Vice President wrote this in 1993 and it was released to the public in 2011.

I do wonder why it was apparently only approved for release all those years later.

I could be misinterpreting the document though.
Private enterprise doesn’t advance advanced technology because they are constrained by profit requirement. It’s impossible for private enterprise to do so because of that. That’s why we rely on government to advance literal moonshot programs.

Space-X can’t even do this without government funding.
they will probably fix it once the lawsuits settle, kind of like what they did to SF's millennium tower. The article seems to really focus on Fortis and surrounding scandals, but all the drama aside, this is the most expensive land in the world and the building doesn't seem to be doomed yet.
Quebec is 4x as large as California, has far more forested land, and is often very dry in late summer.

It also has massive snowstorms, ice storms, which bring down vegetation, and ranges from -40F up to 100F yearly, depending.

We can nitpick on specifics, but by no means is California more rural, or more forested. Quebec is also far less populous, and has a far more hostile environment.

Hydro Quebec does well, because vegetation is cleared, maintenance is performed, and corners aren't cut.

Unlike PG&E.
Rural electrification was needed at the time. In many cases, it no longer is (distributed generation, microgrids, etc vs large, distant generators having to transport power to residential load centers).

This is very similar to how Africa will leapfrog the legacy model with cheap solar and batteries.

In Australia, they have a model of colocating stationary battery storage in neighborhoods to balance buffer solar production locally for time shifting purposes (vs shipping that power far only to bring it back in the evening).
TMSC realizes the designs. They only aren't designing because they choose not to. Basically everything you see around you Asia does better. I think the last thing we have is military technology and passenger planes.

As for software, we're only slightly better than asia.
The ML ink-detection models aren't spitting out Greek text. They're just predicting ink locations, which can be calibrated and cross-checked by manual inspection with the original. (E.g., an earlier article showed how ink particles showed up as a shift in texture.) They operate on a lower level than letters and words, so if the ink does correspond to Greek letters that come out to recognizable Greek words forming sensible passages, it's good evidence that the output is correct.

Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors.
I wholeheartedly approve of the (potential) termination. The Senate Launch System has overstayed its welcome even by pork standards, and with DOGE going into the budget to slash it down to size there is no excuse for this program to survive.
So far the American system has been for the government to fund basic research and private industry to commercialize it. This has worked stupendously well. We should be very cautious about moving away from this arrangement.
find useful org charts:

### *1. Official Hospital Websites*
Many hospitals publish their organizational charts in their *About Us* or *Leadership* sections. Examples:
- Mayo Clinic ([mayoclinic.org](https://www.mayoclinic.org/))
- Cleveland Clinic ([clevelandclinic.org](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/))
- Johns Hopkins Medicine ([hopkinsmedicine.org](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/))

### *2. Healthcare Management Resources*
- *American Hospital Association (AHA)* – [www.aha.org](https://www.aha.org/)
- *National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)* – [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/)
- *Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)* – [www.ahrq.gov](https://www.ahrq.gov/)

### *3. University & Research Papers*
- *Google Scholar* – Search for hospital organizational structure site:edu
- *PubMed* ([pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/))

### *4. Government and Nonprofit Reports*
- *World Health Organization (WHO)* ([who.int](https://www.who.int/))
- *Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)* ([cms.gov](https://www.cms.gov/))

### *5. Generic Templates & Examples*
- *SmartDraw* ([smartdraw.com](https://www.smartdraw.com/organization-chart/examples/))
- *Lucidchart* ([lucidchart.com](https://www.lucidchart.com/))
- *EdrawMax* ([edrawsoft.com](https://www.edrawsoft.com/))
ask chatgpt -- tons of data there that will help you
Waste is waste. Squeeze it all out. Excessive management comp, share buybacks, dividends that could’ve been spent on infrastructure.
This is such a cliche, not to mention inevitable pattern, for any ambitious research or development project if any date is mentioned.

But we all want to talk about dates anyway, so we get “delays” that are not delays at all because the dates are never, could never, be real.

A better way is to look at ambitious date projections as targets. If we don’t talk about dates, we feel less pressure and go even slower. But if we talk about dates, we get some urgency even when we miss them.

“Target date” is a good phrase that communicates we know we can’t beat that date, but if absolutely everything went to plan, we might hit it, so we are going to try for it. Knowing that as long as we keep having to learn anything whatsoever, we are going to have a moving target.
How so? I can give Waymo money and they send a driverless taxi to pick me up in SF. That's a market. Can't do the same for Tesla despite Musk saying they'd have robotaxis for years now, they're so far behind they're not even an option. How do you reconcile that with what you're saying here?
I have happy childhood memories of hex editing using SpartaDOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpartaDOS_X
Same here! Figured it was the HN hug of death and left.
Debian works on it, but graphics support is still very early.
> without any noticable difference in operation and functionality

Presumably a security update would mean a difference in operation somewhere. They were probably referring to the updates that just exist to add ads, promos, design changes, etc.
> To clarify, I don't mean having no concern for the business or customer, but rather having that as a priority and the primary way to determine contribution. Engineers should care about the engineering first, which implicitly has value if done correctly

There is no “implicit value” of software to a company. The only value of a software to a company is whether it makes the company money or saves the company money. That’s it, there is no other reason for a company to pay anyone except to bring more value to the company than they cost to employ them.

If software can be so powerful such that you can have a general intelligence that can do almost any cognitive task... then it follows that all this time engineers can also engineer clever systems that can add a lot of value to the company if engineered correctly.

It’s just the opposite. If AI can do any of the coding that a software engineer can do and I am not saying that’s possible or ever will be, what’s becomes even more important are the people who know how to derive business value out of AI.

> There is no ceiling of how much performance and value can be squeezed out of a software system

That may be true. But what’s the cost benefit analysis? Should we all be programming in assembly? Should game developers write a custom bespoke game engines and optimize them for each platform?
SandGPT
it's wrong. I have tried a Debian distro running on a Snapdragon based machine just last month. Not everything was perfect. but it worked well enough that you could use Box64 to run some Windows games.
That's great, thanks for the read. I feel like there should be a bounty for finding Moose Boulder now (at the end of the story the adventurer is headed back at some point just to be sure he didn't miss it on his first go-round where he was undoubtedly pre-occupied with being terribly lost). I'm sure that bounty would never be claimed... but never say never.
In the TV show Barry, this is what NoHo Hank was doing. I thought it was sort of a joke, but guess not.
It is important to remember that the Space Race was a front of the Cold War, the "Why do we need a Moon program?" question was squarely answered by "Because we are at war."

Today we are not at war, at least not one that concerns space or the Moon. China is in a fierce self-imposed race to land on the Moon and Do The Other Things because it (probably correctly) views the West as an enemy to overcome. The US has not reciprocated that sentient, we've just shut them out of our space programs and then left them be.

For the US government to fund another Moon program we definitely need an answer to the question of Why. So far we don't have one other than THE PRESTIGE and OUR SCIENCE GRANTS as evidenced by many other threads on similar subject matter here. That's not going to convince the taxpayers.
Password hash functions are intentionally designed to be extremely slow (at an exponential scale). While this makes perfect sense for password hashing, it is nonsensical to have such an intentional, configurable slowdown mechanism in KDFs. KDFs have computational cost, but having the kind of extreme slowdown that password hash functions have makes no sense for purpose designed KDFs, especially when needing to derive many keys.
21st century C++? AKA Rust?
Scientists just cracked the perfect boiled egg
that was vastly better than today's "guess which things are interactive" design where what's clickable/editable/interactable is just a guessing game.
Any sources for the shoot-to-kill policies?
I strongly believe if there was no browser, companies would have taken over the PDF viewers. Brochure files that let you select the product you want and then you email it back to them.
It's not that it's offtopic by politicness or whatever, it's that it's a followup detail of a story that's already had a couple of pretty big discussions. So a way to think about it is 'is this new bit of info going to produce a meaningfully different/interesting discussion compared to the one we just had'. It's not hard to see how many people might conclude 'no'.
Your comment indicates a pretty poor understanding of why multilingual text rendering is a lot harder than it was in the early 90s. Back then, to display some text on the screen, the steps were: for each character (=byte), use the index to select a small bitmap from a dense array, copy that bitmap to the appropriate position on the screen, advance.

But modern font rendering is: for a span of bytes, first look up which font is going to provide those characters (since fonts aren't expected to contain all of them!). Then run a small program to convert those bytes into a glyph index. The glyph index points to a vector image that needs to be rendered. Next, run a few more small programs to adjust the rendered glyph for its surrounding text (which influences things like kerning spacing) or the characteristics of its display. And then move on to the next character, where you get to repeat the same process again. And if you've got rich text, all of this stuff can get screwy in the middle of the process: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

Indic text rendering, for example, never worked until the mid-2000s, and there's even more complex text rendering scenarios that still aren't fully supported (hello Egyptian hieroglyphs!).
> Miss the old look of the site?

> Visit it here:
> original.origamee.net

This immediately endeared the creators to me. The new design is not even too heavy or flashy or anything, but the empathy in saying "hey, we understand the old design might have worked better for you for whatever reason, here you go" is lovely.
> From my understanding, the easiest way is to use the <video> tag with mp4.

The easiest way for everyone involved is... using GIFs as GIFs.

The 19% in savings (when converting to lossless WebP) aren't worth it. Not even 60%, when you consider what you lose in usability.
>> I've completely lost the urge to "change the world"

Changing the world sounds like a lofty goal, but in practice is just a cop out. I too started out with that in mind, but looking back with more maturity I see it differently now.

"Changing the world" means what? A billion users? More? Less? What I got instead was hundreds to thousands of users. But to those folk my software really matters. It makes every day suck a bit less, and if that's "all" I've achieved then I'm happy with that.

Here's an analogy (not my field at all). Do you think writing a program that allows 100 blind people to navigate the world is less satisfying than say improving ad-tech? And if helping blind people is perhaps a fulfilling goal, then what groups of metaphorical "blind" people are all around you?

You change the world by changing one person's life. And if what you make can remove just a little bit of pain from just a few people, then rest assured, that's good enough.
Discussion on the source paper (60 points, 2 days ago, 37 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42963934

.. shame on PBS for not linking to it
A tribute: https://origami.kosmulski.org/blog/2024-06-12-meenakshi-muke...
Alameda had municipal internet. In the 2009 financial collapse the city was facing bankruptcy and sold off the internet and cable to comcast. The alternatives weren’t great, the cost of borrowing at the time was high and cutting services is unpopular. The residents benefited from having the infrastructure either way. And this let the city keep municipal power, around half the cost of pg&e.
Reads like it came straight out of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook, nice. (For those unfamiliar: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf)
In my mind, going to a bar and drinking is factually unhealthy
I don’t think these things are considered “politics”. They are tangible things with tangible consequences. It’s affecting real people, and the world in some cases, and I don’t think people consider it just “politics”.
>So far the American system has been for the government to fund basic research and private industry to commercialize it.

In that case SLS definitely needs to be cancelled.

We are well beyond "basic research" into how a Moon program could be executed, private companies are already doing it and the only question left is how to commercialize it.
Random number generation?

There still is:

R. R. Coveyou, R. D. MacPherson,
"Fourier Analysis of Uniform Random
Number Generators", Journal of the
ACM, Volume 14, Issue 1, Jan. 1967,
Pages 100-119.

From memory (might check the paper):

i -- a positive integer
ip1 -- a positive integer
Set i = 1
Do Forever
Set ip1 = i * 5^15 + 1 mod 2^47
Return(ip1)
Set i = ip1
End
You said in the article "PG&E rejected this offer for being too low" but then proceed to use that as the baseline cost that drives the rest of the estimates, that doesn't make sense. If I offer someone minimum wage to do my job and they refuse, I don't start a spreadsheet to calculate my savings.

Boulder CO tried municipalization with Xcel and the gap between the city offer and Xcel position was very large. How do your figures look if you double the price and/or add in a decade tail of having to pay 25% of billing to PG&E?

The small munis you mention are in the same position as PG&E with respect to owning decades old poles and conductors with decades of life remaining. The incumbent has all the cards in this negotiation. An existing muni can do it cheaper for the obvious reasons you stated - legacy network, all the customers are close together. Buying the most profitable bits of the PG&E network at a price they would agree to would not be profitable.
It'd be nice if we had a good one, alas ... https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
Ah, but it's not so simple. Here's part of the majority opinion:

"Chinese persons, born out of the United States, remaining subjects of the Emperor of China, and not having become citizens of the United States, are entitled to the protection of, and owe allegiance to, the United States so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here, and are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the same sense as all other aliens residing in the United States. . . ."

You'll note the "so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here" part. His parents weren't illegal immigrants. They were 'legally domiciled,' which was a thing at the time. Again, from my understanding it gets more in the weeds than that.
One can eschew complexity without breaking changes. If the initial abstractions are done well enough, a lot of things can be swapped out with minimal breakage. There are also ways to keep existing apis while adding new ones. Outdated apis also don't need to change every time an underlying dependency changes if the abstraction is good enough.
Yeah if they have time for "deeper discussions" about this, just run. Apparently, it's higher up in the article than the "choose postgres" managerial advice lol
You believe what we want you to believe.
If you are interested in what anarchy would actually look like as a political system, Latin America gives some very good insights
> One game caught in the spotlight is Heartbound. Players were quick to criticize the program after Steam suggested it hadn’t received updates in 13 months. The twist? Developer Pirate Software actually posted an update in January 2025—but it was tucked away in an opt-in development channel not visible to all players.

That Pirate Software guy is just an overall terrible, dishonest person. Just wanted to warn people.
We are destroying software by writing it. Perfect, bug-free software is the software that doesn't exist.
I agree that you should avoid too many dependences. When I need dependencies, I usually try to reduce how many I need. Often, when I do need dependencies, I will include them with the program (which avoids the problem of breaking compatibility) and they should be small and should not have any of their own dependencies (other than possibly the standard library); often they will be programs that I wrote by myself. Dependencies will sometimes be optional, and those that cannot be included often should be made to be possible to replace with an alternative implementation.
> How do we know the AI output is accurate?

From the blog post where they announced 2023 grand prize: they did a couple of things to verify the results, including scanning the same area multiple times and making sure that multiple models produce similar results.

https://scrollprize.org/grandprize#how-accurate-are-these-pi...
I use a single large screen (55”) but I keep my MacBook open so I can send things like my music player there where I can glance at them.
> Microsoft Edge is in third place, with a distant 5.2% market share despite being bundled with Microsoft Windows. This is unfortunate, especially as Microsoft Edge is a good alternative to Chrome.

I stopped reading after this because it became clear author does not know what he's talking about.
Is he not doing that now?
Yes, here you go https://reproducible-builds.org/_lfs/presentations/2025-02-0...
I'll take Kurt Vonnegut, from "Mother Night":

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
Well to be clear, my question there was more broad than any one company's financial statements.

I was asking a general question of the motivation for large corporations to avoid having profits on paper. I asked the question rather than claiming it as a statement because I am less confident in the details and want to raise the issue without presuming that I know exactly what I'm talking about on the topic.
Less satisfying? Not necessarily.

Less likely to make an impact? Statistically, yes because it touches so many less people.

It’s similar to the generalist vs specialist debate or the quality vs quantity. No one right answer.
I was just talking about this with my wife. I have so many tabs open that I run out of memory but I find that all the solutions to save sites or resources I find and need to reference in the future are aweful. Bookmarks suck, search sucks, saving browser sessions sucks. I don’t have a good workflow and can’t even imagine one.
This is the exact reason for the jacked up prices in many things.
That is great advice. It’s something I’m actually working on.
Shady af
Ya but how many of the results of what you're describing as obvious are evaluated critically afterward, based on their intention?

If you're working on a piece of software, how likely is it that people are regularly comparing it to the most effective alternative alternative means to accomplish the same task, and the revert course of it turns out you've actually created a more convoluted and time consuming path to the same outcome? Often times, software just adds gets in the way and makes life less easy than it would have been otherwise.

The opposite of these principles is often easier to reason about. For example, people attempting to make "better" versions of Hacker News seem to rarely be aware of these, and when they post to Show HN, hopefully realize that the way it is is hard to beat because it follows at least some of the principles. To make something better, you'd absolutely need to follow similar principles more effectively.