skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a buddy that helped me out with some DIY/construction projects. He thinks he is a 10x as well since he gets so much done so quickly. He will finish up and sit down saying its done. I go look and every tool is literally everywhere, garbage and debris thrown about, and half the stuff is incorrectly installed as he didn't think he needed to read the instructions and missed key details.
I really hope OpenAI fails in doing this. If this usage is allowed, then it means that there is no path towards me being OK with publishing anything on the internet again.
suex and usrx priviledge switching and user info querying written in C
suex – lightweight privilege switching tool for executing programs with different user and group permissions, su and sudo alternative.

usrx – a companion utility for querying user information from system files (/etc/passwd, /etc/group, and /etc/shadow).
I want to believe, but has anymore ever worked at such great organization?
"Focusing is about saying no." — Steve Jobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgL8fpya8BA
> Charles Petzold

Haven't heard that name in a while. For me he's the WinApi guy - learned a lot from him when I first started programming.
Sure, we can debate how creative or not LLM is right now, but that is not the real point that this all hinges on.

The real point is copyright is no longer enforceable, and some of our biggest societal forces incentivize us to not care about copyright.

This debate and these laws are effectively dead, some just don't know it yet.
Why won't it?

If you get fined millions of dollars (for copyright, of course) if you're found to have anything resembling DeepSeek on your machine - no company in the US is going to run it.

The personal market is going to be much smaller than the enterprise market.
I'm assuming this has zero effect on non-US AI companies?
Sure it happens sometimes, but it seems like a marginal exceptional case, rather than a rule. I have a very high property tax in my area and people seem mostly concerned with increasing their property values, not lowering them. There are other things they try to do to lower their property tax burden, but actively destroying their own property values is very low on the list.
> Instead of relying on a single server to store all data, we can replicate it onto several computers. One common way of doing this is to have one server act as the primary, which will receive all write requests. Then 2 or more additional servers get all the data replicated to them. With the data in three places, the likelihood of losing data becomes very small.

Is my understanding correct, that this means you propagate writes asynchronously from the primary to the secondary servers (without waiting for an "ACK" from them for writes)?
No one said they "don't want it".

No one said "it's scary".

No one is "dismissing them".

It seems like you're arguing against some other person you've made up in your mind. I use these systems every single day, but if you don't understand the argument about consent and the extremely obvious difference between Python programs and humans that I already pointed out, then no one can help you. I'll keep making these arguments, because they are good ones, and they are obvious to any human being who isn't stuck in tech-bro fairy land blabbering about how human consciousness is completely identical to Python linear algebra libraries when any 6 year old child knows with certainty they are not.

> In a word, yes.

This is, frankly, embarrassing.
Agreed!

Though if you think about it laws typically change after we agree (at the grassroots level) they are irrelevant, not before.
what local nvme is getting 20us? Nitro?
I've written an article series on the topic covering all the major objections here. Hopefully your questions are answered therein.

https://gameofrent.com
100%. Western tech needs the competition. They are very prone to navel-gazing simply because SV ended up being the location for tech once.

Funny how they like to crow about free markets, while also running to daddy government when their position is threatened.
If you can get uv in, ruff should be easy...
The SQLite filesystem is laid out to hedge against HDD defragging. It wouldn't benefit as much as changing it to a more modern layout that's SSD-native, then using NVMe
Really, the likelihood of all of them having backdoors is almost 100%.
I agree with you. I'd go further and suggest that candidates should get anonymized information about applicants in the pool. Nothing like negotiating with yourself for a job...
Even Google eventually realized that if all you incentivize is 10x engineers, you end up with a sack of cats clawing at each other for advancement perpetually and spend a fortune on trying to retain enough institutional knowledge to do the keep-the-lights-on work. They removed the "Engineers at this level are expected to continuously improve and seek more responsibility" language from several higher rungs of their expectations ladder.
This is obvious? This seems like a terrible solution.

Lease durations are important here; if you're like England and have 99 year leases instead of freeholds or something, then that's great, it's basically ownership, but you get no unit pricing signal until the next 99 year renewal rolls around.

Practically speaking, from a Georgist perspective, ths isn't even useful because it doesn't convey anything about the unimproved value. What if you make improvements to the land, like build a house or something? Do you have to knock it down when you leave? Is the government the only entity that can build houses?

What do you do when Elon Musk decides he doesn't like you and outbids you on every parcel you try to get a lease on?
The Fourth Amendment seems like a more appropriate starting point. Most people call the “privacy movement” “the American revolution“.
I wonder who the "we" are that you speak for in this manifesto? Or is it the majestic plural?
that seems like a super clean solution as long as nothing ever gets built, but the problem is the same: it's not a question of how much the land is worth, it's a question of how much the unimproved land is worth.

everything gets messy as soon as you start improving the land, because the improvements are not easily removed from the land. if the state owns the land but i own the skyscraper i built on it, what happens to my skyscraper when the state auctions my lease off to somebody else? the whole point of a land value tax is that the value of land changes after things have been built on it (and around it), and you need to capture that change in value.
I may have something for you. Please DM me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ragpandey
Conversational UI experiment – it led to 3x longer user sessions
I've been hearing that the future of UI is conversational, so I built ARIA (Autonomous Resource Intelligence Assistant) for our website - an AI interface that guides visitors through content instead of using traditional menus and navigation.

ARIA walks users through different sections of our site conversationally, adapting to their interests and questions in real-time. I went with a deliberately retro 80s aesthetic that feels paradoxically appropriate for this forward-looking approach.

Currently, ARIA runs on a simple script, but we're planning to connect it to a fine-tuned model with voice capabilities soon. Early metrics show visitors spending 3x longer on pages with this interface compared to traditional navigation.

I'd love feedback from the HN community: Is this approach genuinely useful or just novelty? What other conversational interfaces have you seen that worked well or frustrated you? Does the retro aesthetic enhance or detract from the experience?
What you encountered here is a dark pattern, but not the way you think it is.

They try to upsell a feature, but because it is a B2B SaaS product, the users are not the ones holding the credit card.

So, to upsell they have to get through your users to the admin / license owner. They prominently display a shiny feature, sometimes leading the users there through misdirection. Then they call for action: you need to request a bigger license, go ask your admin!

And of course, someone thought it is a good idea to add a button, which sends a templated email to the primary address to reach the person with the credit card.

This notably does not count as a marketing communication, so they can just send it even without explicit permission given prior.

So yeah, someone in your team probably triggered it, likely without knowing because they were misled.
Malcolm Nance suggested the administration has decided to invade Panama, Greenland, and Canada. I guess the destruction of our country is “America First”.
This follows directly from the fact that exp(x+y)=exp(x)exp(y).
Feminism is as old as society, so it’s not a movement per se, but a philosophical framework for thinking about gender issues in society. Like any other philosophical framework, it has branches and subsets.

On average when people think Feminism, their frame of reference starts with the suffragette movements, which is how we came up with demarcation of “waves” of different periods in recent Feminist history which are defined by overarching themes.

But Feminism as a philosophy accepts that there is a spectrum of Feminist thought which on one end enables the freedom to be a trad-wife, and on the other end enables the freedom to be a man. Therefore, feminism is not just for women’s freedom, but also for the freedom of men. Its underlying root is to question authority and the status quo. Consequently, it’s in line with Feminist ideology, then, to question Feminism itself (and therefore justify giving up one’s freedom and power to another).

As far as group incoherency is concerned, that’s something which applies to all groups, sadly.
Isn't it actually like (100% - tranfer loses) efficiency ?

In modern co-generation you can for example burn gas in a gas turbine & produce electricity. Then heat water to steam with the gas turbine exhaust & power a steam turbine to get more electricity. And then the steam is condensed by the district heating water loop.

So in theory you will get more electricity & almost all the "waste" heat is used to heat houses.
Czech scientists study trees' ability to absorb traffic noise
boring configuration files in ~/.config
"Kaggle's notebook environment is now based on Colab's Docker image" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42480582

kaggle/docker-python:
https://github.com/Kaggle/docker-python
> I had to do things like guess hostnames and find out how and where things were running..

This isn't the worst thing in the world. I'd rather inherit something with little/no documentation that followed the standard business practices (e.g naming conventions, nothing crazy bespoke) and have to do an afternoon of investigation than have to read documentation that's inaccurate. Of course the best option is full documenation but due to the nature of business that isn't always possible.
Long-term leases exist for this function.

Often 99-year leases (e.g., Hong Kong to the UK).

In practice, the tenant can typically break the lease with minimal consequence as the landlord (the government) can generally find new tenants, and diversifies risk over many landholdings.
"A recent study found that a fireplace pumps out 58 milligrams of particles under 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5s) per kilogram of firewood burnt. This means that every hour you spend in a room with a fireplace burning wood reduces your lifespan by about 18 minutes, equivalent to smoking 1.5 cigarettes"

These kinds of stats really irritate me. Sure, smoking isn't great. Breathing in small particulates also isn't great. However, the 18 minutes is such a weird thing. There are so many people that have lived longer lives by smoking than people that work out all the time. There's just no real evidence this stat is true. You can't clone a person and sit one clone in the room with a fireplace, and then the other not in the room. Then watch which one dies first.

The only test I've seen with evidence of one doing something the other doesn't was the twin brother astronauts where one went to space and the other did not.
Yes. Did you read what I wrote?
Because it’s a lot easier to compromise one email provider instead of a million. I’m surprised I have to explain the benefits of federated over centralized systems here.
Sounds like South Korea and her Chaebols
Exactly. While 10x (or whatever) is possible on pure technical ability, I would argue that the majority of engineers who provide outsized value do so through enabling others to do their best work and unblocking the wave that raises all the boats, rather than coding by themselves in a dark room.
I think LVT is a pretty terrible way to find government, but most states already have a property tax and assessment process. I have to pay property tax in California.

Part is a land value tax for my land, and part is a wealth tax on unrealized gains.
Software is different.

All other engineering disciplines are ultimately limited to building things in (at most) 3 euclidean dimensions. There is only so much junk you can hide in a finite volume of space.

Code by comparison lives in hyperbolic space [0] and you can hide _anything_ in such a space without it being obvious. This is exemplified by the unpleasant discovery all of us have had of a supposedly peripheral folder holding source code called all over the code base and the near impossibility of moving it in a location that makes sense for it without having to refactor the whole code base.

People, including myself, have a seriously bad intuition just how much volume there is in a space which grows at least exponentially.

The closest discipline to software engineering is mathematics and that has an even worse track record. There's the folklore about half of all math papers giving the wrong proof for the right conclusion. By comparison software engineering only gets catastrophic bugs less than every other time a program is run.

[0] All trees are natively embedded in some hyperbolic space of whatever curvature matches the average number of children per node, and all code can be ultimately represented as a tree.
I had wanted to build a website like this as a hobby, except not limited strictly to mathematical concepts. I wanted to build a graph of the skills/concepts you’d need to understand electrical impedance, fix an air conditioning system, bake bread reliably.

One source of information could be course syllabi, which describe a progression of topics and their prerequisites.

Rather than be the authority on what concepts must precede others, I envisioned making a system that could represent different educational approaches: not every educator agrees that Calculus I ought to be a prerequisite for studying Physics I. Not all bread recipes use yeast.

I had a hard time finding a good domain for this effort. “Tree of knowledge” dot TLD was taken.
> That is not true.

Why? I'd say it's been self-evidently true for at least three decades now.

> Even our cells, with features that look a lot like machinery such as a proton pump, is on the whole several orders of magnitude more complex than any machine.

How many is several? I think that, at the level of a proton pump, individual components comes close to the order of complexity humanity deals with in man-made machines.

Also, at this level, things really look like machines, act like machines, quack like machines - there's no reason to not call them machines, given they obviously are. It's naturally originating molecular nanotech.

> Even a single human cell is more like an ecosystem than a machine.

Certainly. But then, an ecosystem is defined as a system made of bunch of varied stuff interacting with each other, finding balance through a set of feedback loops. An ecosystem of machines is still an ecosystem, and is arguably a machine in itself, too - after all, the term "machine" also applies to self-balancing / feedback driven systems, ever since we invented control theory and formalism to describe feedback loops.

> Let alone entire humans or even just the human brain.

Complex machines don't stop being machines when you keep adding moving parts to increase complexity. Or, at which point between a protein pump and a human being you believe the assemblage of molecular nanotech stops being a machine?

> Consider that both cells and humans are capable of reproduction.

What's that supposed to tell us? Human reproduction involves cell reproduction.
>Not really. How do you quantify tech debt? How do you quantify the tradeoffs that someone made to add new functionality?

Time is quantifiable and comparable. Time spent on making things happen and then dealing with the consequences. The percentage of people leaving the organization in their first year is quantifiable.

Tech debt and tradeoffs from the previous feature will show up either as time spent on adding the next one or time spent on fixing bugs. Estimating is difficult, but measuring and figuring out post factum what amount of time was spent on yak shaving isn't exactly impossible. It maybe be uncomfortable and self incriminating, but that's a culture problem.
Elasticsearch Hybrid Search Recipes – Benchmarked
Yep and IIRC you can even dump waste heat back to the loop at what would normally be just consumers - eq. to cool a hockey stadium or for a big building AC system.
Have you tried getting in touch with the team directly and asking for these things?
Poison the land to reduce your tax basis.
It definitely doesn't apply to jobs like McDonald's that can easily adapt its workforce numbers. McDonald's has maybe a 3-5 day training period, ATC has a 3-5 year training period.

In other professional jobs, people generally aren't forced out at a certain age, so that's fairly unique to FAA ATC and adds the dynamic that I mentioned in another comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356217
Thanks. What a weird API.
This is the same Applause that bought Bartender last year. Use the search for 'Bartender 5' to see what a disaster that was.
I understand that it is more complicated and has wider error bars than property values, but is it really so difficult or need to be so precise that its effectively impossible?
Tend to agree. Been through so many spring summer fall winter changes that I've just grown to accept that the climate changes. It's not a big deal.
No worries, he got me too.
No I do not subscribe to everything he thought on a cosmological level
but the importance of vintage photons direct to brain for everyone resonated.

Bringing telescopes out of the rarefied world of astronomers
where they were "precious" to professional and amateur alike
is what I see as his greatest legacy.

I build "public friendly" scopes as a result.
If anyone is thinking of a new mount for a Newtonian
may I suggest looking up "Sudiball" mount as they allow you
to accommodate a wider range of eyepiece heights for a given target.
(so parents are less likely to put their kids in a half-nelson screeching "DON'T TOUCH DON'T TOUCH" as they poke them in the ear with your scope)
Datoviz: High-Performance GPU Scientific Visualization Library with Vulkan
When I think of a 1x engineer, I think of all the guys I've worked with that had a decade plus of experience but were advanced beginners at best. If you don't work for a FAANG company, you will be surrounded by those types. They make the same mistakes over and over and write the same unreadable code, year after year.
Yes -- taxing on the estimated full value of the property is a very common thing. Almost universally the case in the US as well. And you can use previous sale values and assessments to try to get what seems to be a market valuation.

Two problems though. One is that this is very anti-Georgeist; the main idea with the school of thought is that you should not be penalized for improving the land; you do not want counter-incentives to land improvement, because that's a net negative for neighbors and for society.

The other is that this process is very very very bureaucratic and corruptible. I can see for myself how this manifests in places I've lived because the estimated value for tax purposes is so wildly different than the actual sale price of real estate. I can't speak to NZ specifically as to how much of a problem this is and how it is addressed, but I'm going to go out on a limb and offer the hypothesis that it is poorly addressed and there is a big divergence between the estimates and the sale prices for real estate. Prove me wrong!
As a manager, you want a report who does not require handholding, cajoling, or close supervision. You want someone who makes problems disappear. It's fine if they're 1x engineer. It's fine if they pick up their shit at 5PM no matter what and leave for dinner. Just do what you're supposed to do, at a predictable cadence. That's all that's really required in 90% of the teams.
> Never once did it even matter - there was no material benefit to the company.

I think that the idea of having people (at startups) working at a frenetic pace is because

1. The VC money is running low
2. Being first to market used to be a major determining factor on whether the product would succeed or fail
35 years is a press release sentence. The way DOJ calculates sentences when they write press releases ignores the alleged facts of the particular case and just uses for each charge the theoretically maximum possible sentence that someone could get for that charge.

To actually get that maximum typically requires things like the person is a repeat offender, drug dealing was involved, people were physically harmed, it involved organized crime, it involved terrorism, a large amount of money was involved, or other things that make it an unusual big and serious crime.

The DOJ knows exactly what they are alleging the defendant did. They could easily looks at the various factors that affect sentencing for the charge and see which apply to that case and come up with a realistic number but that doesn't make it sound as impressive in the press release.

Another thing that inflates the numbers in the press releases is that defendants are often charged with several related charges. For many crimes there are groups of related charges that for sentencing get merged. If you are charged with say 3 charges from the same group and convicted on all you are only sentenced for whichever one of them has the longest sentence.

If you've got 3 charges from such a group in the press release the DOJ might just take the completely bogus maximum for each as described above and just add those 3 together.

Here's a good article on DOJ's ridiculous sentence numbers [1].

Here's a couple of articles from an expert in this area of law that looks specifically at what Swartz was charged with and what kind of sentence he was actually looking at [2][3].

Why do you think Swartz was downloading the articles to learn from them? As far as I've seen know one knows for sure what he was intending.

If he wanted to learn from JSTOR articles he could have downloaded them using the JSTOR account he had through his research fellowship at Harvard. Why go to MIT and use their public JSTOR WiFi access, and then when that was cut off hide a computer in a wiring closet hooked into their ethernet?

I've seen claims that he wanted to do was meta research about scientific publishing as a whole which could explain why he needed to download more than he could download with his normal JSTOR account from Harvard, but again why do that using MIT's public WiFi access? JSTOR has granted more direct access to large amounts of data for such research. Did he talk to them first to try to get access that way?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230107080107/https://www.popeh...

[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...
Interesting, I built a whole rpc / file-server ala saltstack on top of something like this:

https://github.com/mattbillenstein/salty

Been using this on a couple startups for a couple years, but it lacks polish in terms of user-friendliness.

Interesting how we came to some of the same types of things - like you have .notify() - I return a result object with a "changed" flag, etc.