skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Insulation used to be a ton less important—wood and gas heating were cheap, and nobody had air conditioning because it didn't exist yet.

What was more important was the layout of the house, the windows, and the ceiling heights, all being thoughtfully arranged to allow the right kinds of airflow in the right seasons.

Most modern houses in climates like seen in most of the US turn into an unbearable mold-farm of a wet oven if the AC is turned off over the Summer—they depend on AC or they start kinda decaying in place within a year, aside from being unbearable to enter on a hot day. A 1900-construction house that hasn't been updated to something like modern standards is far more comfortable to live in, in those circumstances.

(your broader point that some things in modern houses are better due to e.g. improving materials or engineering even as other things like framing have gotten worse due to worsening materials, I don't dispute, but modern house design as far as airtightness and insulation is very much a trade-off that leaves them dependent on AC in many—and, as the Earth warms, ever-more—climates, not strictly an improvement)
$100M is certainly an overestimation and some types of pollution are more solvable than others. In general I think it's important for price tags to communicate the full price of an item

Also no need for the patronizing comment. Economic externalities are a valid criticism of market failures and you haven't provided the more convincing, "advanced economics" jargon-laden analysis you're pretending to harbor
This low-quality Twitter bot is very hurt by your cruel words.
Ancient Watchtowers of Kaiping (2010)
Diaolou (碉 樓) are fortified multi-storey towers, built by returning Chinese immigrants from America, Canada, Hong Kong and Malaysia in the 1920s and 1930s. They display a fusion of Chinese and Western decorative forms and were designed to protect against forays by local bandits (and later the Japanese).
In LA, cooking emissions rival fossil fuels as ozone pollution source
I am one of those who does naturally find the beauty; nevertheless, I think your claim is indisputably true. It matches the empirical evidence, as well as my personal experience teaching math.

With that said, there is a spectrum. And even people like you (you alluded to this with Euclid) will have tidbits of appreciation. And it matters if you have a good teacher doing good curation -- you might see 2 or 5 times as many of those tidbits. And there might be 1 or 2 more students in a class of 20 who get pushed over the edge into really liking the subject. But yes, these are improvements at the margins, and your point stands.
this line got me:

> under what conditions do you believe the civilization you're living under will collapse? [...] Oh, you just haven't made that list yet? [...] Or you could take the question from the other side and list the conditions that are necessary for your civilization to continue to exist. That's an interesting list too.

I've always dismissed collapse talk as "batshit crazy" as the author says. but he raises good points here. maybe I'm not batshit crazy enough.
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You should try it. It's good for fast stuff, but if you want to have tons of control over editing, you probably wouldn't like it.
On March 25, CIA Director John Ratcliffe told the Senate Intelligence Committee that when he became director, he was given a phone with Signal pre-loaded. He was briefed that Signal was “permissible” for work use, and “That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.”
Sorry if it's been said already, but "stoop life" has been a thing in inner cities for... well, forever. It's more common with underprivileged communities in inner cities, so I can see how more affluent people would "suddenly discover" that hanging out on their stoop helps create community. In my experience, where the two intersect, it's usually the more affluent people pissed off that less-affluent (or perhaps "more culturally diverse"?) people are hanging out on the stoop. I've lived in DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and NYC, in multiple neighborhoods in each city, and I assure you, "stoop life" is everywhere, except on the wealthier stoops. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Another thing that helps create community is stoop gardens. People will stop and gather round a stoop garden to marvel at what's being grown. Neighbors will lean out their window to yell a hello at a stoop gardener. I can't recommend it enough.
Yep! We have two roles open https://railway.com/careers#open-positions - Datacenters and Infra that might be of interest to you. Idk if many of us use LinkedIn so not the best way to get in touch. Can I share the email on your HN profile link with our in-house recruiter?
Probably worth linking to https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2025/02/27/whats-t... in which Jean goes into further detail about some of nuances that go into building these types of data structures.

In particular it is mentioned

"For Ractors to be viable to run a full-on application in, Ruby would need to provide at least a few basic data structures that would be shareable across ractors, so that we can implement useful constructs like connection pools.

Perhaps some Ractor::Queue, maybe even some Ractor::ConcurrentMap, and more importantly, C extensions would need to be able to make their types movable."

Which we see in Mike's library he has started work on a Queue and a Map.

I haven't fully wrapped my head around all the nuances to using Ractors nor have I tried to do anything with them yet. But its encouraging to see the discussion around them ramping up
Vibe Composing: Mozart and Confutatis (2022) [video]
I don't mean to criticize you but... my God, this is such a sad statement to me.

I understand where you're coming from when it comes to technical stuff - I would agree that I haven't gotten very much of my engineering knowledge from books, but rather from shorter-form stuff.

But there are so very many things I've read over the years that have stuck with me, that have informed the way I think about the world, that have provided comfort or food for thought or new lenses through which to view things. My life would be so much poorer without the books I've read, they all mix around in my brain and come to me at random times, and give me a lot of use, even if it's the kind of "value" that is hard to quantify and pin down.
I don't know, kotlin has its pros, and is absolutely here to stay due to Android alone, but I always felt it being more or less just syntactic sugar for Java 8, to the point that now even Java has some more advanced/elegant features, like proper pattern matching with algebraic data types, while Kotlin is stuck with dumb sugar for instanceof checks.

Scala was always much more elegant and actually going the extra mile.
> I agree with you but as a thought exercise: does it matter if there is a lot of boilerplate if ultimately the code works and is performant enough

Yeah it matters because it is almost guaranteed that eventually a human will have to interact with the code directly so it should still be good quality code

> But I do wonder if eventually it won't make sense to ever write code and it will turn into a pastime

Even the fictional super-AI of Star Trek wasn't so good that the engineers didn't have to deeply understand the underlying work that it produced.

Tons of Trek episodes deal with the question of "if the technology fails, how do the humans who rely on it adapt?"

In the fictional stories we see people who are absolute masters of their domain solve the problems and win the day

In reality we have glorified chatbots, nowhere near the abilities of the fictional super-AI, and we already have people asking "do people even need to master their domains anymore?"

I dunno about you but I find it pretty discouraging
Hype is not about better performance but about upstream support. It's valuable.
AWS Nat Gateway
> That's where ~all of Next.js' complexity comes from

Complexity does arise there, but equally arises from limitations imposed by the Vercel service that Next.js ultimately needs to deal with. A lot of its seemingly dumb design decisions make sense once you consider the constraints Vercel (the service) forces upon it, but they are still poor decisions you have to live with that wouldn't have been necessary if it were intended to run in a "normal" computing environment.
Luckily for those people, more messages were released this morning, with times, planes and weapons described.
Since Wasmtime can run programs built for Wasm GC, I'm curious if this can as well. Would be neat if so.
Debian bookworm live images now reproducible
The message you're replying to is sarcasm.
You just can't be Googling 'Select'
I really don't like this as - similar to many comments here - it feels like an attempt to outsource the essence of programming and at best give you a pseudo-code summary of your changes vs. a valuable description of the intent.

But if it tamps down the holy wars of "pick a git comment style; be a dick about it" maybe there's value?
Out of curiosity, what sorts of things do you find beautiful? Clearly maths and model trains don’t make the list. Surely you find beauty in other aspects of life?
As a long-time Vim user I am very happy to learn this trivia.
Can we please stop calling "bigoted views against anyone not WASP, and a refusal to acknowledge current and historical oppression of anyone not WASP" "anti-woke"?

It's like "PC" ("I hate the gays and/or blacks and/or jews and I'm annoyed I can't just be open about that without someone calling me a bigot"), "pro-life" ("I refuse to allow a woman to make decisions about her own body and insist on trying to legislate my extremist religious views"), and so on.

I always thought "PC" was a funny term given the people using it are the most likely to be trying to tell everyone else what can/can't be taught in schools, what people can/can't publish, what people can/can't read in their library, etc.
Supercomputing memory management tool makes data storage more efficient
Something is not right. The sequence of the story starting with the accidental invite and the total ignorance that the "guest" was there. The pieces of the puzzle are not puzzling. The ideal next step would be a forensic device audit.

Also, taking into consideration something as simple as UNC5792, what if the "guest" was bridged-in? iykwim
I realize that government is terrified of the Captains of Industry, but it really should have cracked down on that hard and made it clear that if it happened again, the next crackdown would guarantee there wouldn't be a third repeat.
Supreme Court takes up $8B phone and internet subsidy for rural areas
>so some students are in some classes purely to tick a checkbox

As a student I was forced to take classes I would have never willingly chosen to take, and yet I still learned from them. I worked for an A and didn't consider cheating an option. I'm not really sure why, I can answer why I wouldn't today, but I can't particularly say why my yesteryear self was so against it, yet it remains as a key point in me gaining a very useful education.

>Forcing people to take a course they don't care about is a futile ability.

While I think sometimes we include too many unrelated courses, I also don't agree with the idea of only giving someone courses they are interested in. I would have been weaker for it. I think the issue is the culture that encourages cheating as a valid response, but where does that come from and how to fight it are massive problems.

>The only viable way is to have a extremely controlled exam environment, but that greatly restricts what sort of things you can examine.

I think oral exams are great at testing knowledge, but they suffer other problems. They don't scale at all, and they leave more room for bias than other forms of exams. I'm sure there are other problems, but those two are enough to start with. If only there was some option that had the benefits of an oral exam with an expert without the issues (this sounds like I'm hinting there is such a solution, but I promise I'm not, it is just wistful thinking).
The anti-intellectual/anti-science bent of the Republican party knows no bounds
zdnet... now that's a familiar name I haven't seen in a while
WASM isn't memory-safe through (no more than just having the application running in a separate process) because it doesn't type tag the memory. JVM was safe but that's also a serious disadvantage, because it bakes type system into the runtime system.
Maybe each developer / creator / maker needs someone around them to "sell" them (and their creations). To push it on the vine/rumour/vibe. Yes, an advertiser/ salesperson - herald - on a fractional basis :) , one per village.

To create and to sell are very different skills and things , even somewhat contradictory - and they rarely appear in same person.

The Organisational patterns book [0] have a role of Matron - a person who knows everyone and what they're up to (without need of deep understanding) - but that's not the same, and it's organisational.

i think that such people are needed in everyday, personally, too. To knit and entangle the threads of society.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0131467409/

[1] https://www.svilendobrev.com/rabota/orgpat/OrgPatterns-patle...
Actions are not immutable, period: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/592. This issue has been open for years and continues to be pushed back, so I would not recommend anyone use any github action as a dependency if they want to protect against supply chain attacks (basically, don't use GHA at all, it's a horrible product if you care about cost/performance/security).

You also cannot trust a git commit ID as an immutable reference. Even if you have a checksum available, you have to validate it.
Firefox Is Finally (Re)Adding Support for Web Apps
I hate to break it to you, but Linux has always had a very significant amount of development done by and for various corporate interests. There are whole companies that exist solely to commercialize Linux.
I don't get it - why the world, Excel can't just open the CSV, assume from the extension it's COMMA separated value and do the rest.
It does work slightly better when importing, just a little.
The purpose of this study is to allow the administration to say "Official CDC Study Concludes Vaccines Cause Autism". Then, the rebuttal to that statement will be not "No, there's no such study", but instead "yes it does, but the study was run by a discredited crank", which is a huge win because the target audience will stop reading after "yes".

The study doesn't need credibility for this purpose, it just needs to exist. I think it technically doesn't even need a body, just a title page and maybe an abstract to quote from.
MS can be treated with stem cells, but it's pretty scorched earth. Basically it's a similar protocol for stubborn forms of leukemia: extract stem cells, program and cultivate them into immune cells, nuke your ENTIRE immune system, then put you in a bubble for a few months while the stem-cell-grown immune cells develop into a new immune system in your body.
The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack
You think Microsoft wants Windows games to perform better on Linux?
Yeah if we get an open model that one could apply a LoRA (or similarly cheap finetuning) to, then even problems like reproducing identity would (most likely) be solved, as they were for diffusion models. The coherence not just to the prompt but to any potential input image(s) is way beyond what I've seen in diffusion models.

I do think they run a "traditional" upscaler on the transformer output since it seems to sometimes have errors similar to upscalers (misinterpreted pixels), so probably the current decoded resolution is quite low and hopefully future models like GPT-5 will improve on this.
Hanlon’s razor still has to account for why Goldberg was in Walt’z phone to begin with. If you’re going to butt dial or fat finger the editor of a publication into your super classified bombing plans I don’t think even Hanlon could reconcile it to random number dialing instead of just hitting the wrong contact.
Show HN: Debugging data, not just code: Using Claude & Cursor with Kuzu MCP
Kuzu is an open source, embedded graph database that supports the Cypher query language. We wrote a blog post that serves the dual role of explaining what MCP is and how the MCP server of a database system can be useful. Our demo is based on getting Cursor (or Claude Desktop) to debug a bug in a database (and not in the code itself, which LLMs can already do without any access to the database). The biggest advantage of this way of interacting with a local embedded database like Kuzu, is that a typical 4-5 step debugging session (where the developer would write manual Cypher queries to understand the data), can now be automatically done by an LLM with a single and very simple starter prompt.

Perhaps a lot of similar data engineering/analysis tasks (e.g., ETL, quantifying results, visualization) in the future can be much more easily delegated to LLMs with simple prompts via MCP servers of database systems (possibly multiple of them at the same time). It would be fascinating to see the programming patterns that emerge in this space as MCP clients/servers evolve alongside! We'd love to get feedback and hear more about how otler folks are getting LLMs to do cool stuff using database MCP servers!
Is this a preview of things to come or just macho template programming?

It seems very esoteric, hard to understand.

Some of the examples don't even compile, but in any case, this isn't the working man's C++.
An ordinary link to the article with its original title is the way to show HN something you wrote…typical submissions are how to show HN something interesting.

You can always get clarification from the moderators using the contact
Link at the bottom of the page.
I'm in on the "shit on microsoft for hard to use formats train" but as someone who did a LOT of .docx parsing - it turned into zen when I realized that I can just convert my docs into the easily parsed .html5 using something like pandoc.

This is a good blog post and Xan is a really neat terminal tool.
Altman using this as his profile picture makes his previous statement that artists should be able to opt out of training off of their work feel incredibly disingenuous (assuming he’s aware of Miyazaki’s past opposition on AI). Obviously Ghibli isn’t just Miyazaki, and there exists a lot of Ghibli-inspired art that could’ve been used for training, but it still feels inappropriate to me.
>>Where is WASM in the browser really used apart from crypto miners?

Amazon's Twitch service (and by extension also AWS's Interactive Video Service product that uses all the same backend stuff). Their video player is either fully a WASM thing or has some WASM components, I'm not completely sure which.
Originally, I thought it was Russia.

Lately I've been wondering if its Israel or Saudi Arabia
Solid advice all around.
What contributions to the development of the west are you attributing specifically to Christianity?
Maybe 2-3 week project would be better to say. But yeah it’s quite small.

The industry average seems to be around 100 LOC per day per developer. So if you have a team of 10 that’s only 15 days of work. Once you’re involved in some existing legacy code base it’s likely in the millions.
Tesla Is Allegedly Withholding Wages of German Employees on Sick Leave
I think the name of this Ruby feature is unfortunate, as it doesn't really communicate what it's about, and promises something it can't really deliver.

Using ractors as actors in the Erlang genserver sense is not really feasible. They're too heavy, you're not going to start up thousands of them.

Ractors are an interesting feature, with maybe some specific applications related to data processing, but they're still highly experimental and have yet to be understood and embraced by the Ruby community.
> Since 2015, Apple has designed iPhones to be inaccessible to law enforcement agencies and governments, even with a warrant.

Unless you lived in China, or Russia, in which case your data was stored with trusted government-owned entities that Apple directed to store your personal data. And unless you're American, where Xkeyscore, PRISM and FIVE-EYES ensures warrantless collection and proliferation of your private data.
It could, but it doesn't want to. The whole MS Office dominance came into being by making sure other tools can't properly open documents created by MS tools; plus being able to open standard formats but creating small incompatibilities all around, so that you share the document in MS format instead.
Side glance, whispers.

(rubber necks directly at the target) WHAT?! Did you just SAY BE DISCRETE BUT ....
I expected there to be something interesting in this loveliness. Instead, I found boredom. I wanted to share in the joy, but found despair in both the original comment and the shocked responses.

Understanding the definition of percentages and expecting them to commute is more basic than some random API. For someone trained in math it's like a "programmer" not understanding what a function is, and vibecoding their way through.

I had to stare at Euler's identity for a while to recover from this.
If you're saying there are equivalent shirts today that are as good but just in different styles and materials, I don't think there are, not at the inflation-adjusted ~$18. $50, and maybe you're getting somewhere. Maybe.

I do get that the specific type I called out might have some functional equivalent that's simply a different style & material but is just as good, but not that cheap, they don't. Under $150, probably, sure. Under $50? No.

This suggests that the cost of clothing has inflated at more like 3x the nominal inflation rate, despite the existence of $18 (or cheaper!) shirts—the inflation was eaten up by worsening quality, rather than showing up in prices, but like for like, even with a generous "functional equivalent" accounting, the change was more like $0.79 -> $50+ than $0.79 -> ~$18—your "equivalent" dollar under the latter calculation in-fact buys less.
a lot of evidence as in most europeans, eurasians and east asians have some percentage of neanderthal genes in their DNA
EU OS takes a 'layered' approach to its new Linux distro for the public sector
It's definitely possible. But in my case so far it's fine. I work as a DE so I only need the auto-completion to remind me what the column name is once I typed out the first few characters, because there are so many columns.

In my side projects I mostly use C/C++ so auto-completion helps me to find a struct member or something similar.

I guess it can become quite complicated when the projects becomes very large.
Well they're certainly walking the walk by serving this website over plaintext HTTP/1.1
You know, Gates and Nadella wear pants, so maybe we should all go pantiless because of that, just so we don't emulate them?

I don't see how improving compatibility is a bad thing in itself, unless it breaks native functionality, which it doesn't.
Yeah totally agree on this. And I think that's should be the example of good product.