skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, there are usually enough differences in the downstream applications that it can be difficult to adapt these solvers to different use cases. These libraries often make subtle choices about the way data is laid out that can be hard to reconcile. I agree that not being able to read the author's mind can put you at a big disadvantage.

The libraries that are more generically useful are lower level ones like the linear algebra libraries: BLAS, LAPACK, SuiteSparse, etc. I think the key to their success is at least in part because of a shit simple common data format. A dense matrix is just a bunch of floats packed in memory... if that's your common format, you can do a lot.

Also, relative to other domains in scientific computing, there tend not to be too many ways of doing something in linear algebra. Gaussian elimination with optional full or partial pivoting is basically good enough. QR factorization, rank revealing or not.

On the other hand, even "simple" things like function approximation get complicated quickly. There is no one-size fits all solution. Do you want to do an L2 or minimax approximation? Or would you rather interpolate a function? What polynomial basis do you want to use? What degree of polynomial? Piecewise? Splines? Oh yeah, there are rationals, too...

Solving linear or nonlinear equations brings in many different iterative solvers. Maybe you need preconditioning?

Solving PDEs combines all this complication and difficulty and then throws geometry into the mix, which is even more subtle and difficult to get right than all the rest.

I think in a lot of cases writing your own stuff just means you can sidestep all this. Writing a library that is general and handles all this stuff elegantly and efficiently is really hard. Using one can be just as hard.

Edit: I think my point about the common data format also partly explains the success of "scientific Python" and MATLAB, with Julia struggling to gain a foothold. In MATLAB, everything is a matrix; in scientific Python, numpy's ndarray is the common data format. I've seen people waste a lot of time shuffling data back and forth between different Julia libraries' idiosyncratic data formats.
This is the most creative idea I've seen in a long time.

It is also the smoothest way of "declaring an imperative" I've ever seen.

It is also the most amazing use of the parser which is built-in to prolog (no, not the DCG's, the other parser, the railroad/operator precedence parser).

I wish it had been discovered around 1981. The world might be very different.
China's Legal Preparations for a Taiwan Invasion
Everyone uses Chrome basically for crypto extensions anecdotally. They did a good job there.

All developers I know build pretty much exclusively on Chrome desktop wise.
There is a discipline, it's just very fast-growing. Many techniques remain and become classics, it just takes awhile to realize what is fad vs classical.
Super Mario Bros 3 completed in 0.32 seconds, or 19 frames (2021)
Yes. I'm not implying only SF produces great engineers. I'm saying that for a specific large set of problems, SF is swimming in great engineers for those problems.

For other problems, elsewhere may well be better. Gamedev, I'd say SoCal, NC, TX are all better places.(Though the studios have done a "great" job choking off the indie scene). If you talk high performance non-gfx, I'd go with NYC, HFT is pretty interesting.

But that's the whole point. Pick a place that has people who care about the thing you want to do. Because top engineers are almost always engineers who deeply care about the field they're in.
Patents and copyright are very different beasts.
There is an incredibly large space for decisions and belief systems in software that are not evidence-based but that can all lead to programs (in the general sense) that all function and produce the same results while being internally very different.

The _need_ to build higher-level abstractions to manage the complexity or verboseness required to do things from lower level components always seems to be fighting with the _desire_ to build your own higher-level abstractions that fit your own view of how things 'should be', despite many of the decisions going into this being abstract and not easily objectively measurable.

On top of that, software components as 'reusable boxes' only seems to work up to a certain level. The idea seems to be that higher-level abstractions and reusable pieces are all nicely shaped square boxes that all perfectly fit inside other boxes, but the reality seems to be more that even the best reusable boxes aren't perfectly square, have weird edges, and themselves have to fit into larger non-square shapes with weird edges.

And what are the weird sharp edges? Decisions that had to be made about solving a problem. Every higher-level software component is on some level a set of (mostly arbitrary, sometimes measured) decisions about how to take a set of lower level generic components and make something more specific with them. Libraries might assume a certain structure but leave choices for how they're composed to the user. Applications make many more decisions about how their components are used in order to provide a more specific tool. There is a move from genericity to specificity as you move up layers of components.

And finally, software requirements change all the time, but the need to change is itself at odds with the requirement that problems are solved only by making hundreds of decisions that have to work together for a working solution but also may be difficult to undo.

> the constraints and the discipline that it imbues on their craft.

Perhaps the constraints and discipline here comes from a desire to move towards some kind of standard or expected way of structuring software, knowing from experience that the cognitive cost of making (and sometimes having to read and understand) all the arbitrary decisions mentioned above is actually quite high. (This itself also leads to the notion of 'best practices' which seemingly change too often to ever really be considered best).
There's a useful clang-tidy function to warn on this, for when you want to ensure there is no recursion lurking anywhere in a large codebase sensitive to stack overflow issues:

https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/checks/misc/no-recur...
"creating a demand where there wasn't one before"
Yes, 100% if it's a new product, there was no demand for it.

"exploiting psychological weaknesses to prompt actions not necessarily in a person's best interest"
This is any sort of communication with malintent.
Nobody should use recursion in production code, period.

And no, it's not like malloc. If you don't understand why then you definitely shouldn't be putting recursive calls in your codebase.
Not if you're in Senegal, Zimbabwe or South Africa. They've already outlaws or are on their way to outlawing Starlink from what I've read.
I have heard that LNG has a larger carbon footprint than coal vs natural gas which is much better
What proxy war? Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine is fighting back with some help.

Please exercise some critical thinking. Ukraine had the nukes and physical possession is most of the work. Its not hard to imagine that they could have made them workable again after inhering much of the army, spies and military of the soviet union.

If north Korea can make nukes from scratch Ukraine could have easily made nukes. Of course the economy was collapsing and people were starving in both russia and Ukraine in the 90s. They needed western aid. If they had ignored pressure from Clinton to give up nukes it would have resulted in them becoming an even poorer pariah not unlike NK. But if Clinton had not pressured them. Or more importantly if they knew that Russia would otherwise invade and start the deadliest European war in decades they would have kept the nukes and easily made them serviceable to prevent that.
> wonder to what extent the economics of coal will render the relaxed rules for coal power plants moot

I'd guess nothing. This seems aimed at gas. Coal is sort of coming along for the ride.

(This is assuming they revoke the rules properly, which given the last 60 days and Trump 1.0 seems unlikely.)
You're likely using a TN screen, which basically does dithering over time.
> 1-2 people who do a big bulk of the work

Pareto principle.

> why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate

Some people are just work horses by nature. They're too busy fulfilling their idea of a "job well done" to worry about the relative fairness of their employment.

Not to mention being a 10x coder doesn't mean you can simply parlay your skills into the greatest possible rewards. There's a lot of important context that makes a 10x possible in the first place.
> have heard that LNG has a larger carbon footprint than coal

Where? Given we're talking about energy transport, any analysis will be sensitive to the assumptions made about the carbon intensity of said transport.
Boox Go 10.3, two months in
Can you give some examples of things you'd consider fads versus classical in software?
Update “Entirely Unbeatable Aliens” winning with 1319 rank
Still can! His classic book Code is fantastic and has a recent second addition.
You're best off just running a socks proxy to aws.
A pleasant game, love it! Also, the name Bubbles reminds me of:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33566924

Another fun game from the same author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35032506
I'm almost certainly not the intended audience for the EPA's press release, but it's remarkable how many of these bullet points read like "Remove the ban on orphan burning machines to ensure American small businesses have access to alternative heat sources".

You might think I'm exaggerating, but here are a few real bullets from their list:

> Reconsideration of Particulate Matter National Ambient Air Quality Standards that shut down opportunities for American manufacturing and small businesses (PM 2.5 NAAQS)

Opportunities for them to decrease air quality?

> Restructuring the Regional Haze Program that threatened the supply of affordable energy for American families (Regional Haze)

Definitely looking forward to some more regional haze

> Reconsideration of Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that improperly targeted coal-fired power plants (MATS)

Who doesn't love mercury and other toxins in their air?

> Reconsideration of wastewater regulations for coal power plants to help unleash American energy (Oil and Gas ELG)

Presumably unleashing it directly into our water supply

Obviously the wishy-washy wording in each of these bullets (reconsider, restructure, etc) leaves a lot of leeway for how much actual change will happen. But it's pretty remarkable to me that the premise is getting rid of wasteful, unnecessary regulation but the actual topics are things like unhealthy particulate matter and toxins in the air or coal plant waste in the water. Where to draw the line can and should be a topic of reasonable debate, but one would think any effort to move the line towards "more stuff in your air and water" would take a more tactful approach.

Tangential to the press release itself, but it's a very interesting note on coordinated messaging that the phrase "Biden-Harris administration" still remains ubiquitous among Republican sources despite being a relatively uncommon way to refer to past Presidential administrations and something that came up basically out of nowhere last year when Biden stepped aside and Harris became the nominee. There's clearly a style guide and man are they sticking to it.
So the problem is with the monetary system then.
…now with Power BI data source!
A Maksutov 127 is an excellent lunar and planetary scope, light with great portability.
"No, John. You are the neckbeards." And then John was an incel.
It coincides with this: OpenAI calls DeepSeek ‘state-controlled,’ calls for bans on ‘PRC-produced’ models

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-deepseek-stat...

On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355779
... in the way of writing code with undefined behaviour. "You don't tell me how to live! Maybe I want to shoot myself in the foot sometimes! I already shot myself in the head, and it was awesome, instantly made me an old fart that refuses to learn. Ignorance is bliss!"
I'm pretty sure Google, LLVM, Firefox etc use the stdlib without exceptions so it's probably possible. You can retrieve the error with errno right?
People always over emphasize negatives. As a species, we always want to know about risks that we may better remain alive. So, we notice them more. The good things that happen, people don’t always emphasize. This also means that the good outcomes are studied less and thus harder to replicate.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/18/chinese-regulators-begin-tes...

"Socialist values" is literally the language that China used in announcing this.

Here is a recent article from a Chinese source:

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202503/1329537.shtml

Although censorship isn't mentioned specifically, it is definitely 99% of what they are focused on (the other 1% being scams).

China practices Rule by law, not Rule of law, so you know...they'll know its bad when they see it, so model providers will exercise extreme self censorship (which is already true for social network providers).
Can you beat Minecraft with literally nothing? [video]
Systems tend to ossify over time. Thoughtful solutions to problems usually stand the test of time better than rapid fire solutions. On my team, we often take an extra day to verify and validate design decisions before binding ourselves to them. Yes, some may deliver faster, but developing with intention is the road to sanity in my book.
The thread on plain HTML pages comes to mind.

Boring is the key, the commercial says.
Just seems like a huge waste of time for everyone involved. The Trump admin lost a number of legal challenges last time around. No one is going to trust that the deregulation will stick.

If they have control of the house and senate, they should just pass legislation.
The Rise and Fall of the Hanseatic League
Everyday I grapple with the legacy my coworkers left behind..
From other sources it looks like Portugal never actually made concrete plans to procure F35s. It was just a possibility to buy a small number of around 20.

> Fast forward to March 2025, with the F-35 seemingly off the table, Portugal’s next move remains unclear. When asked about the possibility of acquiring the Dassault Rafale, Melo declined to comment. Various options will likely be considered, most probably including the Saab Gripen and the Eurofighter Typhoon.

Planes that first flew over 30 years ago. I’m sure they’ve been upgraded but it doesn’t seem like a good plan. If Europe started designing a new fighter today, I wonder how long it would take to get to having it in service.
Save the date: Progress Conference 2025
Another day, another nazi on HN
There are big rewards in future pay, referrals, etc. for establishing a reputation as a great engineer. If you find there aren't then jump jobs.
Wait. 81 years old in 1892, 89 years old in 1940.

Ruth truly did master time.
And an hour of exercise, no sweets, a healthy diet, 10+ hours of sleep, etc. However the real world works differently.
Fast and Random Sampling in SQLite
First of all, this isn't a problem with voluntary renewals as I mentioned earlier in another thread (voluntary renewals is where the price is adjusted based on averages for the local area and only renewed if the owner thinks it's too high, down payments also discourage people from over-zealously renting when renewals happen). Secondly, the entire point of Georgism is that people who are under-performing are priced out of hoarding land. The only situation where it makes sense for Elon Musk to overpay on rent to force someone out of their land is when that person is a competitor of his, and this is illegal under existing anti-trust law. Otherwise, him outbidding owners on the lease is the whole point of the system.
Archive version of the above science.org article "Where did India’s people come from? Massive genetic study reveals surprises
Analysis confirms Iranian influx, but also finds genes from Neanderthals and a mysterious human ancestor": https://archive.is/Wd4tP
Free market y all !

OpenAI calls DeepSeek 'state-controlled,' calls for bans

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355779
>even in the traditional case of the banking issuing the loan to an individual, there would not be sufficient recovered capital to repay the loan.

This just is not necessarily true, and more importantly runs into the issue that now lenders will not lend to people and land that they believe cannot be be positively valued for the entire term of the debt. In real life if you buy a home on a 30 year mortgage, the lender does not need to care much if it could be less valuable in 20 years, only that it retains enough value to be worth the rest of the loan if it needs to be seized.

As for embezzlement, go try to get a loan as a new LLC without assets, or revenue, or personal collateral. The reality is that under your proposed system, no bank would ever take the risk of loaning money to a plot of land. Forget fraud and embezzlement, there's zero mechanism for preventing flat out bad management from ruining a plot over and over again if you don't attach debts to people.
Anyone with a sink, a flat surface and an open window has access to a kitchen. You can buy a 2-plate induction or propane/butane burner for relatively little money.
That’s an artifact of the 2020 census.

2012: 50.7 million Americans identified as German.
2022: 41 million
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
Same on pixel 6a
The mercury and greenhouse gas rules seem more or less laser targeted at coal. The steam one also (where lots of gas plants are gas turbines rather than steam turbines).
The Tea Party Republicans are a counter-example (or more accurately, a counterinsurgency). While there are still only two parties, one of them has become something that would be nearly unrecognizable to its members from the '70s.

It is possible to organize within the party to bend it. But in general, one side of the aisle tends to seem to have difficulty with finding enough common ground to actually work as a bloc, while the other side has managed, impressively, to unify Christian fundamentalists and ultra-rich billionaires.
Are there any Bloomberg Emulators or similar to mess around in? Essentially the equivalent of Lemmy to Reddit.
Looking at the list of 10 equations.

For me 2,5,8,9,10 being simplified with Pi=3.141 is the best outcome, especially 5.

I'm definitely: e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0
Contractors have to do the leetcode monkey dance for prospects?
Hey, really appreciate such thoughtful reply. I’ll address your questions while explaining our design decisions and how Blip works.

We set Blip to use email addresses because we wanted to make it convenient for people who are less tech savvy and for business customers who need to quickly find and know who they’re sending files to. If you sign in on another device, all your other devices and recent people are just a click away—so you don’t need to set up or sync that list by yourself.

Blip is a local-first app in the sense that it works with files on your devices, but the interactions are server-driven, letting you negotiate transfers with your devices and other people, no matter where they are. When transferring files, we try to connect devices directly over IP, but when that’s not possible (and it often is not) we relay files over our servers. We use TLS 1.3 to encrypt files in transit. When devices are connected directly, we use mTLS for an even higher level of security. We plan on adding full E2EE in the future.

We care a lot about speed! We don’t throttle transfer speeds when devices are connected directly. Sending files on home Wi-Fi should be as fast as possible, as long as devices can ping each other. Reduced speeds only apply when using our relay network. If demand is high, business customers get priority to ensure their work is delivered on time.

Our business model is still very much evolving. Our main goal was to structure it in a way where people who benefit from Blip commercially should be supporting it the most. We considered a licensing model, but Blip relies on infrastructure maintenance and continuous development, so we need everyone on the latest and most secure version. We decided to make a clear distinction between community and business users, because we learned there’s more demand for speed at work. Of course, if community users start experiencing slow speeds (in practice, this hasn’t been the case), we’d love too bring this to personal users to. One way is for one-time donations to provide high-speed data boosts. Since personal users don’t require extra support and business features, pricing can be more affordable.

All that said, it’s so good to know that speed matters! Our goal has always been to make Blip the fastest way to send files.

Thanks again for the feedback, and for the heads-up on the typo—already fixed! :)
Victims have to be victimized first. Most surveilled Americans feel about as victimized as a well-kept dog.
Actually, the UI was built by MotherDuck…
100% my greatest issue with these tools, I really need a "source".
You are using language and you seem to make an equivalence of temperature to warm/cold which doesn’t work. Now your saying that it only makes sense to use kelvin because it’s the only scale that doubles when you double it (which is actually also false they all do that). When in fact the concept of “twice as warm” is a fuzzy language construct which matches better to celcius. Which isn’t surprising as both the language and celcius scale are designed around our subjective experience.
I’m going to be straight with you.

I have one rule.

Friendships must be based on mutuality. Give and take.

The day I wake up and find myself in a one-sided dynamic—

I drop you like a sack of potatoes.
Sorry, not sorry.

I don’t care who’s mad.

Extreme?

Call me biased if you must.

But I stand by this principle.

I’ve seen what happens too many times when connections become one-sided.
There’s a corrupting factor in one-sided dynamics.

This happens every time.

When one person carries the entire load…
The other loses respect.

The less they have to invest…
The less they value the other person.

That’s not the kind of connection I want.

Certainly not with my Permission to Be Powerful readers.

Here’s my vision for you:
Picture this —

Where you finally see the world around you for what it is.
Where you feel more sure of yourself than ever before.

You speak with authority.
Your voice commands attention.

People don’t mess with you.
They move out of your way.
They follow your lead.

They talk about you—
Because you’re the kind of person people talk about.

And most importantly—
You feel free.

Free in every sense of the word.

And I won’t help you get there by coddling you.
Of that, I’m sure.

I won’t enable weakness.

At the Zen Center, we do things differently.
Everyone pitches in.

During sesshin—several days of deep meditation—everyone has chores.

Other weekends, the community cleans the entire place.

On Sundays, we have breakfast, and someone always jumps to wash dishes.

Someone always steps up.

Someone needs a ride to the airport? I’m on it.

Why?

Because pitching in is good for you.

In Zen, nothing is as it seems.

Dish duty isn’t just dish duty. It’s an opportunity.

To become one with your sponge.
The water.
The pots and pans.

Your problems?
Worries?
Doubts?

They fade away—because that sink becomes your entire universe.

No hurrying up to get the job done as fast as possible.

No off to the next thing.

There’s no next.

We treat every aspect of the monastery with reverence.

Because true reverence requires integration.

So now I ask you…

Are you in? Or are you out?
I hate to put you on the spot, but I’m calling you out.

What are you going to do about it?

Don’t worry—I’ll wait…

But before you answer…

You must know something…
Talk is cheap.
I think this was a really brave call for help from the writer. They needed help and they asked for it, from strangers!