skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Solved, and it was fun! But...some of the colored lines were hard to see. Particularly the light yellow ones. I had one "alternate" solution that it was marking incorrect for reasons it took me over a minute to spot...and it was just a super light yellow line I missed without really scrunching up to my screen.

Improving the color choice might help, but slightly thicker lines I think would also be of significant help.

Also, it's common for sudoku solvers to allow you to press Shift+number to do a one-off toggle for the "note" checkmark.
well, I need to understand something to make any progress... I'm obviously confused about what I'm confused about
I love that you asked this, but I think it's not quite the right question.

I've been wishing for years that someone would maintain a "dependency graph" for mathematical concepts. I think Khan Academy tried to do something like this at one point but took it down a long time ago. As long as we're far enough from the bleeding-edge of research topics, I feel like maths is the one field where this might be possible to do really well. You should be able to point at something you don't understand and trace backwards in a very granular fashion until you hit a concept you already know/understand, and then learn what you need to fill in the gap!
This may help your particular case and I hope it does if you ever address it. But what would be even better is if any of the managers who might still be reading along (doubtful but you never know) internalized this: if you find yourself about to ask one of the people you manage a question that can be correctly answered "that's really none of your business," then just don't ask it. Couldn't be simpler.
> I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 minutes and lost interest. It just felt lame, a complete waste of time. (...) Contrast that with my love of older cars. I love finding old cars on Craigslist, taking them home and tinkering with them, restoring them.

Perhaps the reason has to do with your approach. You're not going to have a chance to get hooked on the C=64 if your interest is in tinkering and restoring. That's barely enough time to load up a piece of software and refamiliarize yourself with it, never mind experience it in a new way. In contrast to your cars, it sounds like you spent enough time with them that you were experiencing them in a new way.

My apologies if that sounds a bit harsh. In some ways I am similar. Even though I am fascinated by old technology, I never could get into old computers the way most people seem to get into them (e.g. by playing games from their childhood).
Abolishing the DoE is wildly unpopular, even among Republicans: https://all4ed.org/publication/voters-views-on-education-in-...

You're in a significant minority even within your own party.
There are dedicated types for archival called mdisc. Still made. Much more durable, don't mind heat, sun, moisture.
Generic components will always be higher volume, therefore cheaper, than previous generations specialised components. In the retrocomputing scene there are lots of little ARM boards that emulate larger chips. It’s a matter of time for even the more complex ones.

OTOH, we now have to manage the complexity of software even in components we would never imagine would run programs.
Microsurgical manipulators.
That is always option #1, if only it was this easy. 3+ years now and countless applications later I'm still in search of this somewhere else. All I got is bait and switches in places where they just want a one man army or "can't see how you can do this if you don't have management experience" (i.e., direct reports, of which i have a whooping zero)

In the meantime, I guess I have to thrive here.
DeepSeek really shook them to their core. Now they go for regulatory capture. Such a huge disappointment.
Open source AI will win: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/the-laymans-...
I mean another reason to do this is because Tesla literally commited fraud with these rebates. They bought thousands of their own cars and then sold them as slightly used to get in on the rebates before other car companies could.
Depends on how much you practiced high school math. It's not hard but we forget it without practice.
Were you at all inspired by the work of Bartosz
Ciechanowski? My first thought was that you all might have hired him to do the visuals for this post :)
Not really. As history shows, progress in one field of science/engineering/philosophy doesn't necessarily imply progress in others.
Yup, we live in a pretty depressing world.

More generally the best we can hope for us to discourage concentrated power, both in government and corporate forms.
Go for it. Perfect use case. But make sure to buy mdiscs, not just standard bdxl.

Much more expensive, but makes sense for that use case.
Show HN: Get webmail link for any(ish) e-mail address
When building applications that use magic links or email verification, I kept being asked to implement a link that sends the user straight to their email client to see their newly arrived e-mail.

Haven't found an existing tool for this, and the feature always gets bumped because it's slightly too complex to comfortably implement and maintain on a client's budget. So I finally threw one together this morning.

It's pretty simple on the backend - just an MX record lookup and then a map from MX domains to webmail URLs.
Ask chatgpt to explain it to you like you're 18. It made it really easy to understand.
Don't focus on finding work, you'll just be selling your time to the lowest bidder.

If you can afford it, build something for free, blog what you learn, and ship it. Build a portfolio of real working software and technical writing. If your software has users, talk to them and you should find plenty of work.
If the author is in here, thank you. Been looking for a text for my daughter on the subject. This might just fit the bill. If you're just the linker, then thank you Ozanonay.
Sadly not about transport tycoon deluxe
> So if you tried such a stunt it'd be pretty obvious

Yeah. Humans are crafty though. I don't think it would take conspiratorial coordination in order for this to turn into somewhat of an arms race in prime areas. I'm imagining homeowners associations shifting prices from land value to HOA dues or some such. People putting tires and broken toilets on their lawn in front of a privacy fence. Sometimes HOA's requiring this kind of thing. People getting pissed at the nice lady who keeps trying to plant flowers everywhere. Nonsensical home renovations like putting a toilet on the ceiling or installing doors that go nowhere. People buying used syringes from diabetics so they can throw them on the street. Products that let you make your roof leak on demand. Mold markets. Just goofy humans responding to incentives.

> Another strategy is to make it so that if you want your land to be worth X for tax purposes, you're not allowed to refuse a good-faith offer to buy it for some multiple of X (plus the value of improvements)

Ah yeah this is a haymaker to the issue. Would have to let people set one exempt property or something to prevent grandma from losing her foreverhome because the neighbor's lawn toilets had made her vulnerable to a hostile takeover.

Thanks for the discussion.
(I'm sure this is in the book) John Napier, the father of logarithms (the N in ln), basically had a sweatshop of human calculators making log tables over something like 20 years - critical for celestial navigation. There was a huge price attached to the person that developed a method to safely navigate across the oceans, also lead to the invention of the pocket watch
Ironically, that notation, which I just discovered, confuses me more than anything else.
Logs clicked for me when someone online said "amongst all the definitions we have for logs, the most useful and less taught is that log() is just a power". At that exact instant, it's like if years of arcane and foreign language just disappeared in front of my eyes to leave only obviousness and poetry.
Hi there!

As someone who's had some amount of professional work on games/toys I have bad news: I hate this (it's okay, I hate lots of perfectly good things!) from a UI/UX standpoint.

"Nobody has changed the layout of Sodoku..." there might be a reason for that. When you're trying to create organized lists/sequences, a messy visual is going to be frustrating. The geometry/symmetry of a Sodoku is part of the appeal. Think of a crossword: does the shape affect the fun? You might see circles vs squares, or some people building shapes by arranging the word lengths creatively, but nobody is trying to have the across words in one column and the down words floating in a nebulous space nearby, because that's not a crossword.

What value does this change bring? Why do you think there's more fun in the difficult to parse shapes over the clean rows/lines of standard sodoku? The changes seem to make it much harder to gronk how the game works and provide little added "fun" value. Think of it this way: you can play sudoku blindfolded and have someone fill the grid in for you. This would make it much more challenging (with essentially a UI change like your change) but not necessarily more fun for most people because the challenge isn't what the game is about. It would be similar to playing baseball in ankle deep water, or Halo using a DDR pad: novel and quirky, but missing what makes the game compelling in the first place.

I think this is a cool thought experiment and a great way to illustrate some concepts of game design (sadly, as a way of what NOT to do) and for that you should be really proud! Hope you're able to take something productive from my post.
I learned the multiplication using addition and a lookup table in a class taught by Huffman (of Huffman compression fame). You weren't allowed to use a calculator on the test.

But my absolute favorite trick is base conversions, https://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra2/x2ec2f6f830c9fb89:...
with some practice you can do approximate base conversions (power to 2 to power of 10 or e) in your head
TFA is about not having a designer. If you have a bad designer, then fix that glitch.
Tape needs expensive and hard to get drives. It's a gamble if that will be replaceable in many years, if it's already an expensive journey today. USB-C disc writer works with any modern system and is available new at reasonable price. Tech is well known.

Plus you archive on dedicated disc type for archival which is much more durable.
(shameless plug) Another JavaScript you might like https://make210.com/ (I'm the author). Do "Restart -> Hard" for a challenge.
Casual Make
How big was the check that came with this request? For the right price their logo can go on the rose garden lawn.
1. That is simply a budget cap. There is still no pressure to optimize. It's like if I tell this function has to run in 10 seconds. You will make it run in 9.9 seconds and stop there. Maybe the function could run in 9.0 seconds, 5.3 seconds or even one second. Forcing continuous optimization is what is needed. Not a hard budget cap.

2. Firing individual people is obviously not what this is about. It's about department wide processes.

3. Oke, see my prior point.

4. Well yeah now there is, it's called the department of government efficiency.
I don’t see any reason for an apology…
Most 10x engineers I've met are usually very creative and care deeply about the user experience and keeping code maintainable over time.

Most 1x developers just care about getting the job done regardless of care or code quality, which in my experience has led to conflict.
more on the topic: 2023

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451
Wasn’t John Gruber the inventor of Markdown?
I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field.

These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor.

It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the rest of your life, and working "extreme" hours is both a bad policy and a bad sign that the system you're operating in is brittle. Nothing that we do is so unique that another competent engineer shouldn't be able to fill in for you when you are having an off day.

The effect of consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time trumps any number of crunch weeks and burnout episodes, to an almost absurd degree.
Unless I'm missing something, this can just be directly verified, no “understanding” necessary. All you need to know is that probability distributions can be characterized by their probability density function (PDF).

If Y=-ln(X)/lambda, then P(Y<a) = P(-ln(X)/lambda<a) = P(X>exp(-lambda a)) = 1-exp(-lambda a).

And if Z is exponential with rate parameter lambda, then P(Z<a) = P(lambda exp(-lambda t)<a) = integral from 0 to a of lambda exp(-lambda t)dt, which can be directly computed to be 1-exp(-lambda a).

They have the same PDF, so they're the same distribution.
isn't the n in ln "natural" ("logarithm natural")?
Most textbooks on probability have some discussion of the relationships between the various distributions commonly in use. If you just want a quick overview, I found John D. Cook’s diagram to be handy:

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/distribution_chart/
Russia is not intrested in peace. The only solution is supporting Ukraine until Putin changes his mind. Undermining them only makes peace less likely because then why would Russia stop
The key element here is that the power exchange in this case goes both ways. The corporations do favors for the administration (sometimes outright corrupt payments and sometimes useful favors, like promoting certain kinds of content in the media, or firing employees who speak up.) And in exchange the companies get regulatory favors. While all economic distortions can be problematic — national champion companies probably have tradeoffs - this is a form of distortion that hurts citizens both by distorting the market, and also by distorting the democratic environment by which citizens might correct the problems.
Show HN: Hooplog – Letterboxd/Goodreads for NBA Games
I watch a lot of basketball.

Last year, I began grading every NBA game I watched based on enjoyability. Here's why: https://mediumlights.substack.com/p/hooplog

It started as a spreadsheet, then I built a simple website to make it easier. It's like Letterboxd/Goodreads but for NBA games - find any game since the 1984-85 season, give it a letter grade, add notes, and create lists.

https://hooplog.io/

It's 100% free, no ads, and I don't collect any personal info - I originally made it for myself and a few friends, but we've all found it useful so I thought maybe others would like it too.

If you're curious, this is what my profile looks like: https://hooplog.io/jerry

Thank you for reading, if you made it this far. I'd love genuine feedback on how to make Hooplog better!
Yeah not happening
Welcome to Colab
How are you cooking that rice? With rainwater collected from gutters over a trash can fire? Both of which are illegal, by the way.

How are you preventing others from stealing your rice? Where are you eating it? Where are you sleeping at night?

Yes, of course you need thousands of dollars to survive. The problem is rent, not food.
Five Things to Know About Intel's New CEO
Is there are reason to think suddenly a bunch of manufacturing pops up and pushes prices down?

I’m not convinced there’s any real strategy here.
Google Quality Issues: Part of an Intentional Strategy?
I love the visuals, and if it's ok with you will probably link them to my class material on block devices in a week or so.

One small nit:
> A typical random read can be performed in 1-3 milliseconds.

Um, no. A 7200 RPM platter completes a rotation in 8.33 milliseconds, so rotational delay for a random read is uniformly distributed between 0 and 8.33ms, i.e. mean 4.16ms.

>a single disk will often have well over 100,000 tracks

By my calculations a Seagate IronWolf 18TB has about 615K tracks per surface given that it has 9 platters and 18 surfaces, and an outer diameter read speed of about 260MB/s. (or 557K tracks/inch given typical inner and outer track diameters)

For more than you ever wanted to know about hard drive performance and the mechanical/geometrical considerations that go into it, see https://www.msstconference.org/MSST-history/2024/Papers/msst...
The energy usage is massive though, and we definitely should be asking ourselves if other solutions from cloud, crypto, streaming etc are worth expanding. The industry’s environmental footprint is on par with aviation, and with AI we’re set to increase our emissions massively when we should be decreasing them.
Took 12 Years
It’s so common. Amazing nature documentaries filled with the wonder of life, cute animals, interesting science…and a long parade of grim warnings about ecological destruction and catastrophe.

I know why they do it, and I am already deeply concerned about that stuff, but outrage leads to fatigue.
Disk latency, and one's aversion to it, is IMHO the only way Hetzner costs can run up on you. You want to keep the database on local disk, and not their very slow attached Volumes (Hetzner EBS). In short, you can have relatively light work-loads that will be on sort of expensive VMs because you need 500GB, or more, of local disk. 1TB local disk is the biggest VM they offer in the US. 300 EUR a month.
That's because it's not a definition, it's simply a summary of a description of one characteristic.
As a student in a school band that debated whether to choose Pirates of the Caribbean vs Phantom of the Opera for our half time show, I remember the cost of the rights to the music was a factor in our decision.

The school and library purchased the materials outright, again, OpenAI Meta et al never paid to read them, nor borrowed them from an institution that had any right to share.

I'm a bit of an anti intellectual property anarchist myself but it grinds my gears that, given that we do live under the law, it is applied unequally.
That's more-or-less the purpose of https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ or at least, it's significantly better at it than, say, wikipedia.
“Please help us. We’re only a little business worth $157 billion!” - The company ripping off everyone that’s ever written or drawn anything. Company’s like AirBnB and Uber breaking the rules, gaining control of the market, and then pushing up prices was bad. “Open” AI is just a whole other level of hubris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaprun_disaster
Oh, looks like it. I disabled extensions one by one til I found it was reflect.app's extension. Edit: reported on their discord.

False alarm :) Amazing work!!
I don't trust any particular media to remain available or usable long term, either due to degradation or hardware availability. BD in particular has a very uncertain future.

I had to read a 20 year old Ultra320 HDD last weekend, and I had to dust off an old Sun workstation to do that.

I've been using LTO tape for many years, trailing a few generations for cost reasons.

Every couple of years, I read the data from my old tapes and migrate it to new tapes of the next generation, as the cost comes down.

I only have about 500GB of stuff that I particularly want to keep, mostly photographs and very short videos, along with copies of various personal documents that would be tiresome to replace. The 1.5TB provided by LTO5 is more than plenty for my own needs.
Write a law. We don't have an emperor.
Oh, the hours I'd spend browsing through tech books back in the day... good times.
"IP" is a very new concept in our culture and completely absent in other cultures. It was invented to prevent verbatim reprints of books, but even so, the publishing industry existed for hundreds of years before then. It's been expanded greatly in the past 50 years.

Acting like copyright is some natural law of the universe that LLMs are upending simply because they can learn from written texts is silly.

If you want to argue that it should be radically expanded to the point that not only a work, but even the ideas and knowledge contained in that work should be censored and restricted, fine. But at least have the honesty to admit that this is a radical new expansion for a body of law that has already been radically expanded relatively recently.
That was fake news, didn't happen. Tesla just sold that many cars because people bought them after news that the rebate was ending came out.
Interesting. Does it matter which LLM provider we use?
Nope, have to feed it into an llm first, afterwards it's legitimate.
I tried one. As I recall, the examples were gigantic, they expected scenes to be described in XML, and it took an hour to compile.

It looked cool in demos, but there was no way to get a foothold on it as a library. I never got it to do anything useful. I only made modest progress by implementing a custom XML tag that let me get my data into one of their huge example programs.

I'm a better programmer now than I was then, but I still kinda think that software sucked.
I don't actually believe DEI policies were why our air safety was good. I'm drawing attention to the fact that OP doesn't think DEI was why it was bad either, because it wasn't.

They want segregation again and this is their most sympathetic case for it. One that journalists and HN commenters are happy to "steelman" into a policy that sounds like it makes sense even though it does not.
gpt-47 costs at least $1m/tok
Couldn't agree more. I read a book (okay, I half read a book...I couldn't finish it, it was so bad) where the author (a marketer!) argued that software engineers are the most skeptical audience, and I was like, "Um, have you ever met an investigative journalist? Or people in the many many other professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking?"

The sooner the software engineering field can be rid of its beliefs about the inherent brilliance of programmers, the better for everyone involved. Inlcuding software engineers!
I really hate this analogy. Yes it's also published by Sega but the director, development team, and gameplay elements are quite different. Shenmue to me was mainly about NPC interaction and open-world exploration whereas Yakuza is just a straight brawler re-intepreting classic Yakuza tropes.

The move from Shenmue I to Shenmue II almost makes me think that was the direction Yu Suzuki was heading but never really ended up there. Have not played Shenmue III yet so I could be wrong.
Let’s throw this relevant link of yours in here as well: https://faster-than-light-memes.xyz/conversation-1.html
Land is assessed for value when it's sold. That's the number you pay taxes on. In some states they assess annually.

If you tried to drive the property value down to avoid taxes, your neighbors would lose their shit and report you (because most people have their "wealth"in the form of their home). It's a neat system of weird incentives.
I like 5x developers that get the job done and don’t spend the additional 5x over engineering the work — causing the 1x engineers to disengage.

Some engineers have an obsessive, sometimes compulsive, nature which is actually at odds with the business. These types usually spent a large amount of time in institutionalized learning settings and will be far more opinionated about how their labor is allocated.
> right-click (and long tap on mobile) is super undiscoverable because there's no indication or hint it'll do anything.

I really miss the days where it was common for tap-holding on any control to show a description of what it is. It may still be common in certain Android apps but I haven't seen it or anything like it on iOS.
Not at all. Even if you have a completely hypothetical situation with well defined circumstances, the responses will be all over the place.

Just think of abortion, wars or legalizing drugs. People disagree completely over those because nobody agrees which choice would be the moral one.
Never heard it before, but just listened to it and we both enjoyed: so thanks! (Also, what a killjoy whoever downvoted my above comment is!)