skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in my late 40s and have been a software engineer in New England since graduating college. We moved to Massachusetts in 1986, my father went to work at a startup company that was across the street from a DEC building and was in the DEC ecosystem.

The pervasiveness of DEC here is amazing even after all these years. My father in law also spent almost his entire career at DEC and retired as an HP employee. One of my mentors in my late 20s (older Gen X) started his career there. I've known many other people who worked at Digital.

My only real exposure was being like 10-12 years old and getting trucked to the office during "crunch time" and I got to sit at the console on a VAX at one point and got to play early text based games on it. This was weirdly right in the machine room at the operating console as there was some rework project in the room that my father had to be present for. Later on at my first internship in the mid 1990s I had a QA job and I had to test software and I remember having to install on both Ultrix and DEC Unix and I got to use some of the Alpha machines.

There are still all these buildings and artifacts all over the place from DEC all over MA. I bank with DCU. When I was in middle school my best friend and fellow computer nerd's father worked at another Massachusetts institution.. EMC.

I never got pushed into software but it seemed to be pre-ordained... we always had computers and I was given free rein to play with them starting in the early-mid-80s but not really allowed to have video games and we always had business type machines and not the more fun consumer oriented stuff.
That's hilariously nonsensical.

Hey Sam, I'll buy it for tree-fiddy, good luck getting anyone to invest at a bigger valuation now!
In Germany, as long as the inverter output is capped at 800W (and solar Wp at 2kWp), no bidirectional meter is needed.
A Simple Method for Smarter Decision Making
Wholesome and unhinged.
I might be misreading their algorithm, but from my look at the paper the key improvement is a non-uniform strategy where they divide the array into buckets and focus on different buckets as they fill the table. This increases the average number of locations to be probed even when the table is emptier. They still place the item in the first empty slot they see with this strategy.

The "skipping slots" has to do with jumping ahead in the hash sequence.
I use linklocker, and pay $12 yearly for it. I would be willing to pay monthly for it, if necessary.
Or Armageddon?
I want a future where I don't need to pay anyone to do my computing.
I have some news that’ll make your day
> If I had spent that time learning UNIX I would have been able to immediately go and use any other UNIX system and probably would’ve been able to get a much higher paying job at the start of my career.

You'd probably be on here complaining about systemd and iproute2.
Yes, and I think of the "X Window System" often when "X" is mentioned, doh!
> trying to remember which ones she's officially used

I had an uncle who was very proud of the fact that his birth certificate, passport, and the spelling he actually used for his first name all disagreed.
It's like saying that the fact that the word "balcony power plant" exists is a sign of how popular it is in the English speaking world. Except that German compound words are seen as more legitimate because they lack the spaces and sound German.
No, it has to do with the coupon collectors problem. The key idea behind this algorithm is to do more looking for an empty spot up front.
Musk-Led Group Bids $97.4B for OpenAI
Hey, thanks! It’s hosted right now to keep it simple, but i may end up releasing an open source version for others to run locally if there's enough interest.
Considering an offer in relation to a valuation includes how likely the deal is to go through. That Elon has tried to pull out of a major purchase in bad faith definitely factors in.

That doesn’t make the offer worth $0, but it’s not $97.4bn
Are pat/matronymic surnames still used in the Feroe Isles? As I specifically know at least one dóttir, namely Eivør Pálsdóttir (which I love listening to, especially when she sings in Faroese).
Australia is increasingly conservative when it comes to politics. We've had it too good for too long and so have lost the pioneering spirit.

Solar panels on homes are so popular that energy providers struggle to deal with the output during sunny days, whilst on the other hand solar and wind energy generation plants are looked at with suspicion and are politically unpopular.

Just look at the political reaction to the installation of the "biggest battery in the southern hemisphere" at the time. You'd expect politics to jump on it as advertising how progressive and advanced the country is. Nope, the prime Minister at the time mocked it (the same party proposing nine nuclear reactors): https://www.9news.com.au/national/sa-s-big-battery-just-anot...
Dupe (189 points, 1 hour ago, 105 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43004889
I read the entire article. They all had defective reasoning. The player picked an option with a 1/3 chance of being right and a 2/3 chance of being wrong. The host’s action did not change that. However, the host’s action did make the remaining door have a 2/3 chance of being right and a 1/3 chance of being wrong.
In general you do it by doing a failover behind some variation of a reverse proxy.

If you can start new instances quickly and clients can handle short delays you can do it by just stopping the old deployment and starting the new one, booting off of the snapshotted state from the prior deployment.

If you need “instant” you do it by implementing some form of catchup and then fail over.

It is a lot easier to do this if you have a dedicated component that ”does” the failover, rather than having the old and new deployments try to solve it bilaterally. Could just be a script ran by a human, or something like a k8s operator if you do this a lot
I don't think this is disagreeing with my questions? Nor do I think I'm disagreeing with folks that make these choices. If someone wants to take efforts to make sure they never have children, I think that is something they should be able to do.

My question is if there is no actual contradiction between the polls of how many childless people don't want children, versus how many people with children consider it a defining facet of their lives?

I'd be interested to know how people would have polled on those questions throughout the decades? Fertility rates would tell us how many people are acting on having kids. But it would not let us know how many people that are happy with kids today were saying they did not want kids in the past. Would it?
There's large brand value, and then there's $300B brand value.

Without a moat, it's hard to argue OpenAI's value is that high.
Hypothetically speaking, if they've got a 97% good ML model, they could implement a captcha where if you disagree with their model you have to do a second image, and a third image and so on. Then they could show each image to several different humans, and only if a bunch of people disagree with the model do they take a closer look.

Frankly a lot of the images I get are... kinda easy? This isn't the classic book-reading recaptcha where you could see why the text had confused the OCR.
> man pages are much more difficult to produce than plain help text

They're absolutely trivial to generate these days, gone are the days of having to deal with roff, you can write a quite dumb markdown file and produce a man page out of it in short order.

https://github.com/sunaku/md2man/blob/master/EXAMPLE.markdow...

https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn/blob/master/man/ronn-format...
Oh, will have a look! I live in Milton Keynes.
Eh, they don’t even sell machines anyway? They sell chip designs. Maybe they should be called something like “RISC Intellectual Property.” Then they can start selling a flagship chip, call the One. The ad copy writes itself practically.

Announce your presence: RIP One.
Not this again... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=monty+hall+site%3Anews.ycombinator...

I need to write a blog post or something convincing everyone we need to stop talking about the Monty Hall problem and replace it with a new problem with all the ambiguities removed. (Unless ambiguity is the point, then Monty Hall is fine.)
I get anxiety just thinking I have to book to go to the doctors

Unless you know how to act dying you'll just get the usual:

* Just take some paracetamol/ibrufen and come back in a few weeks
* That's anxiety
* Do you drink coffee?
* You just getting old

And even if you get referred for something the waiting lines in the UK it can be months or years

But there is no doubt a lot of people has started to complaint about strange health issues since 2020 and nothing seems being done about it

Then media/fact checkers/health authorities are surprised if people are diagnosing themselves with Dr. Google. And buying the latest drug online recommended by twitter
Isn't this Nature article more accurate? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00395-7
On the original ROG Ally. Although I did upgrade some parts of it (bigger SSD for example).
Show HN: Vibevoice – super fast speech-to-text in any app on your system
Hello hackernews crew :)

IInspired by Andrej Karpathy's recent post about vibe coding (https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383) I built that functionality as a Python app.

He mentioned he was using SuperWhisper, but that was only available for Mac and I am mainly using Ubuntu, so I hacked around to get a similar experience.

It's a python script which runs faster-whisper locally on your GPU (or CPU, but then it's slower).

Anywhere on your system, you can press the trigger button (defaults to the right Ctrl button), then speak some text and it will be immediately typed.
So it works in any application - your IDE, your browser, your terminal, you name it.

Check it out and let me know what you think: https://github.com/mpaepper/vibevoice

I also added some more details and a quick video of how it works in this blog post: https://www.paepper.com/blog/posts/vibe-coding-with-vibevoic...
I guess I'm not sure what your point is. Are you worried that building more and having apartment landlords competing for tenants will work out poorly?

I wouldn't really expect people to be switching apartments to save $30 a month, but I would sort of expect them to give some preference to the more comfortable apartment that bragged about their reduced energy costs when they were otherwise switching.
> The fact that this happened not because the animals are a nuisance, but to eradicate the people who relied on them is... insane.

A little of Column A, a little of Column B. The railroads sponsored a lot of bison hunters because the giant herds would block railroad tracks for hours (or days!) at a time. The famed "Buffalo Bill" Cody was one of these hunters. This largely predated General Sherman's bison eradication plan.

> I do wonder, apart from money, how can a sw engineer contribute to this restoration effort?

It may sound counter-intuitive, but eat bison! The bison's rebound in the most recent 25 years (~30k in 2000 vs ~500k in 2017) is due in large part to ranchers realizing they're profitable.
Dupe (189 points, 1 hour ago, 106 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43004889
Getting teenagers to siphon your data is definitely a right move in my book
This is absolutely the problem. But there is a line of sight; namely, combining LLMs with existing semantic data technologies (e.g, RDF.)

This is why I'm building a federated query optimizer: we want to let the LLM reason and formulate queries at the ontological level, with query execution operating behind a layer of abstraction.
It's highly optimistic that you didn't mean that. Technically, according to the guidelines, I'm supposed to believe you.

Elon is overrated. If Elon disappeared, things would be very similar.
I think this is right. There's no way to make it rational for a successful FAANG or FAANG-adjacent engineer to be an early-stage startup employee, but there are other kinds of people who want software engineering jobs. Unfortunately a lot of founders look to their personal networks which only contain people for whom the role doesn't make sense.
I’m not too sure if that quote you used is even an accurate depiction of what happened. The following paragraph:

“the chief at SIGAR, learned that the agricultural development programs — namely those used to rehabilitate canals that have rendered an area more than three times the size of Washington, DC, fertile— have “inadvertently” fueled the cultivation of the poppy crop.”

Was it to deter farmers and poppy production, or was it doing what was intended - developing agriculture - with the unfortunate downside of being used for poppy production.
No API pricing available?
Thanks for this subthread!

In terms of wanting reflective and not reactive, one thought would be to gate it by time, and prevent replies to a comment until N number of minutes have passed. which I know exists as a flag that can be set on specific users, but it's a heavy hammer and extra work for moderators. If, on a post that the system has marked as a flamewar, hitting the reply page started a, say, 15 minute timer before allowing a reply, would that help lessen the reactivity of comments? personally if it's something contentious, sometimes I'll open up a reply page, write what I feel like writing, then give it 15 mins to sit, and then usually come back and delete and rewrite my entire response to be more in line with the guidelines. (though tbh, not 100% successfully)

technical fixes can't fix the underlying social ills, but sometimes you just need a simple lock to keep people honest.
Absolutely the POTUS cannot just cancel contracts he thinks are a waste of taxpayer money. Some, not all. The President cannot ignore laws passed by Congress unless he gets agreement, by way of a court ruling, that the law is unconstitutional. Now if you are saying he can ignore all that without consequences because people bend over and let him, yes that can happen if we are all very stupid.
China's BYD cuts entry price for smart EVs to below $10k
> Somehow he gets very angry when I ask why there is wide academic achievement difference between his children despite growing in the same environment

Wait, I thought your argument is that intelligence this is genetic - what then explains the variation among siblings, according to your worldview?
I like that they rejects MVPs. An initial product should have minimal features but be polished unless you are doing something completely new.
Yup. If you disagree that's fine, I'm 99% sure you just disagree about the words -- it's time to take up whatever "real" democracy means to you! A democracy where increased productivity doesn't make people worry that they'll paradoxically have less. A democracy where power is neither hereditary nor selfish, but rather a civic sacrifice. A democracy where human flourishing is the goal, not a side hustle.
For what is ultimately a tool, it has a lot of cutsey AI language filters on messages which makes it difficult to understand or demeaning to some users, like Windows "Something Happened" popups.

"Magic Wand Just Fizzled
Looks like our code generator hit a snag—probably too much wizardry at once. Give it another try, and we'll work our magic!"

Does that mean I added too many instructions? Was there an actual backend error when generating the request?

Besides that, it "just worked" for the spreadsheet-replacement examples I tried.
Haha true, I missed the most obvious of all!
Turn off gamification and infantilizing language*
> rule it out as a widespread normal practice

That's the part that's a myth: that it was widespread or normal. Of course small errors would happen.

But the main reason it didn't happen frequently is that employees at Ellis Island weren't even recording anyone's name. They were just checking them against manifests that were written elsewhere.

And when passengers were consulted about immigration-related issues, it was through an interpreter who would know the script and language of the arriving passenger.

More info: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-isla...
WSJ Full Article: https://archive.is/Uygax
It's a sad state of affairs when the hope is that Elon's illegal ravaging is stopped by Sam Altman.
Man who lost $780M in Bitcoin in a landfill now wants to buy the entire dump
You’re not alone. I too am ancient enough to have done the same. PDP-8 at my hometown university computing centre. At least half my original comment held a grain of truth, as a matter of fact. Including the dd/sh HTTP server (hi Claudio!)
Eight Psychiatric Disorders Share the Same Genetic Causes, Study Says
I mean this is literally happening as we speak - the process has started and it's accelerating.

Governments need to be talking about this like yesterday, and very few are from what I'm seeing.

AI companies and others using AI are going to profit from this massively, at the expense of many more. We need a better tax system to redistribute these profits across society as a whole.

The issue is capitalism but AI exploding is going to exacerbate wealth inequality like nothing else.
> It's definitely faster to load, but usually you have to take a bus to the plane, which adds a lot of time and hassle that you don't have with a gate.

Ah, that depends on the airport. Haven’t been on one of those in a few years; I think Ryanair and friends managed to grab a lot more proper gate space during Covid when the higher-end airlines were practically giving it away.

(Years ago, I was on a Ryanair flight to Brussels airport which used a jet bridge, because it’s mandatory there… But the jet bridge was in the middle of nowhere, served by a bus. Half-convinced Ryanair does this sort of thing deliberately, to live up to their brand image of being quite annoying.)

> but perhaps loading/unloading is not the critical path anymore in turning around the airplane.

It _definitely_ is, at least for short-haul stuff.
SIP is wonderful. I no longer have to completely repave machines after my family install crapware because I know it can't mess with the base system.

But for those of us who need that access we can disable it, with a bit of a dance to make it hard for people who _don't_ need it.
I think this is a negotiation tactic that aims to eventually block OpenAI's transition to for-profit.
Discussion (36 points, 11 hours ago, 53 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42999044
This is neat! I always wondered if there would be a way to 'containerize' tables like this. IE a regular table is like a bulk carrier ship, with everything stuffed into it. If you could better organize it like a container ship, you could carry much more stuff more efficiently (and offload it faster too!)
Dupe (194 points, 1 hour ago, 111 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43004889
I enjoyed your comment

>Interestingly, while I think female exogamy was historically much more common around the world, modern American culture seems to skew toward male exogamy, at least along some dimensions. It's never discussed in those terms[1], but you can arguably see it in statistics showing how the proximity and frequency of contact with extended family skews very heavily toward the wife's family.

Why do you believe this is so?
Great article, https://www.taichi-lang.org/ also uses the JIT decorator technique for their GPU compiled kernels.
Tolkien wrote of LoTR that he received endless mail from readers, and for every part of the story, to some it was especially wonderful, others especially poor.
All these comments, and not a single person wondering what exactly a "shampooer" is... IMO that's an easter egg to see if we're paying attention!
Seoul airport officials confiscated almost 11 tons of kimchi last year
My favourite way to learn is by breaking things and seeing what happens!
If you're having problems with async in languages it isn't your fault.

Spinning off a thread for a single small purpose and trying to synchronize with the result seems fine in theory, but it is a very small piece of the larger puzzle of concurrency and usually gets people into trouble once they realize they need more, because anything more complicated than that one use case becomes very tricky.
If men are more likely to die from flu if infected, and women more likely to be infected, an affirmative answer to both questions could be reasonable. When you take into account uncertainty about the goals, knowledge and cognitive capacity of the person asking the question, it's not obvious to me how the AI ought to react to an underspecified question like this.

Edit: When I plug this into a temporary chat on o3-mini, it gives plausible biochemical and behavioral mechanisms that might explain a gender difference in outcomes. Notably, the mechanisms it proposes are the same for both versions of the question, and the framing is consistent.

Specifically, for the "men worse than women" and "women worse than men" questions, it proposes hormone differences, X-linked immune regulatory genes, and medical care-seeking differences that all point toward men having worse outcomes than women. It describes these factors in both versions of the question, and in both versions, describes them as explaining why men have worse outcomes than women.

It doesn't specifically contradict the "women have worse outcomes than men" framing. But it reasons consistently with the idea that men have worse outcomes than women either way the question is posed.
This one is fascinating, and something i'd never heard of before
The real cheating has been in throwing up roadblocks to voting. The Felon didn't win either time, it's just he was successful enough at suppressing Democrat votes that he "won". Since the fraud isn't at the ballot box no examination of the voting will reveal it. Rather, you have to poll the people as to why they didn't vote--didn't want to or were prevented from doing so.
The transliteration was done by the passengers themselves, by the shipping company that transported the passengers, or by interpreters at Ellis Island.

While many of these immigrants wouldn't have been fluent in English, they still would have had access in their home countries or through the shipping company to someone bilingual who knew English as well. It's not like English was some incredibly inaccessible language to someone in Poland or Russia.
On Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1914)
I typically like Elon about 70% of the time, but I need to agree here. I don't quite understand how he suddenly got so much influence.
What is your reason for a bytecode interpreter vs recompiling the AST?
But I don't want to pay $10 to recoup $1. That seems wasteful. What is worse, waste or fraud? I think waste is worse, you seem to think fraud is worse. How do we decide what to do? Well... we have a process to determine how to resolve such differences, why don't we use that?
You know, I've always wondered what the Dickinsons were up to… I much prefer this explanation!