Hacker News Reader

dimeson Microsoft and CMU team up to train early career software engineers

I see 517 openings on 52 pages of results.

Should we similarly expect those who use their muscles more to be in worse condition than someone who doesn’t exercise?

“Just suck it up” coming from a person who doesn’t have to deal with the consequences has to be the least convincing take on the situation I’ve heard by far. So congrats on that.

To offer a perspective from someone in the field: I built my career as a craftsman. Not just my livelihood, but my family’s livelihood depended on this craft. And within a few short months, my value has plummeted. I’ve tried to adapt, but I will never be as good with the newer tools as I was with the old, just like most carriage makers didn’t become mechanics, to use your analogy. At the same time, the value of the work is just less. Weavers could work in fabric mills, but their pay would be less. Now, just like back then, I, my wife, and my two young children face a financial reforming just beyond the horizon. It will be painful for many. There is no amount of adaptation that is within grasp of all those affected.

I think the general problem with your argument is that you assume that, because there was a transition from horses to cars, many people successfully transitioned from one profession to the other. The reality is that they didn’t. Many suffered in anonymity.

dimeson Every Novel Is Boring–Until It Isn't

I recently read Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s pretty much interesting from the very beginning.

On the other hand, Blind Assassin was extremely boring to me until the very last page, but that last page blew my mind.

dimeson Saber-toothed cats became inbred–and struggled to move–before they went extinct

An assertion without conclusive evidence is an assumption.

dimeson How GitHub gave every repository a durable owner

Don’t organizations solve this problem?

dimeson Waldi: A quiet place to write, and to be read

Looks cool! After signing up, “today’s stranger” was written is Arabic, so I wasn’t able to read it.

dimeson House passes bill to enact year-round Daylight Saving Time across the country

Couldn’t you say the same thing about time zones? Why adjust the clock when you can adjust all aspects of society instead?

dimeson Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

Multiplexing would have a number of benefits. As you say, each client would only need a single connection regardless of the number of queries being sent. Resulting in:

On the client side, there is usually a local connection pool. When a burst of traffic comes in, the client needs to either wait for the pool to free up or establish a new connection, which adds latency. This latency hit wouldn’t occur with multiplexing.

With multiplexing, systems like pgbouncer would be unnecessary.

Also, even with a thread-per-connection, you can still quickly exhaust the servers resources when you have lots of connections because threads have a lot of overhead. Reducing the number of connections needed would greatly increase the number of clients that a database can serve.

dimeson Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

While a thread-per-connection seems like an improvement, do you have any plans to allow query multiplexing over a single connection? That would be a huge improvement IMO.

dimeson Queen bees emerge from special wax chambers

https://www.cdc.gov/folic-acid/data-research/mthfr/index.htm...

> You may have heard that if you have an MTHFR variant, you should avoid folic acid and should take other types of folate, such as 5-MTHF. However, this is not true. People with an MTHFR gene variant can process all types of folate, including folic acid. Folic acid is the only type of folate shown to help prevent neural tube defects (NTDs).

dimeson Queen bees emerge from special wax chambers

Folic acid

dimeson IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses

Linking to a huge list of supplement guidelines, most of which cover labeling of nutrient content is not helpful. I did try to dig in, however, and found this:

> A qualified health claim is supported by less scientific evidence than an authorized health claim. FDA requires that qualified claims be accompanied by a disclaimer that explains the level of the scientific evidence supporting the relationship.

> Unlike authorized health claims, FDA does not issue regulations for qualified health claims.

That does seem to indicate supplement manufacturers have broad latitude to make claims provided they are disclosed as such.

dimeson Canada in Technical Recession

“Real GDP” accounts for inflation already.

dimeson My new obsession: A horse-racing board game of pure luck

Agreed. You might as well play candy land.

dimeson Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens

1984 is a much better book. The writing is beautiful and the story is gripping. For that reason alone, it occupies a larger part of society’s psyche. I agree that many aspects of Brave New World were prescient, but 1984 isn’t entirely inaccurate either.

dimeson Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens

Without spoiling anything, I wouldn’t say anything “goes wrong” in Brave New World, at least as far as procreation is concerned.

dimeson My Favorite Bugs: Invalid Surrogate Pairs

I have a similar, Unicode-related “favorite bug”.

We were expanding our product to a new language that used non-ASCII code points. Part of the system involved invoking binaries using text as input.

Locally, everything worked great. Once deployed, we got corrupted text output. As soon as we SSH’d on to the server to inspect, everything started working again.

It turns out that SSH servers can modify the LANG environment variable. The default value on our servers didn’t support Unicode, but LANG was updated as soon as we connected via ssh. It was a head scratcher for sure.

dimeson Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert here, but I remember a study that found gut bacteria composition predicted whether or not an individual was chocolate-craving or not in individuals eating identical diets: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17929959

dimeson Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)

Just to play devil’s advocate, isn’t it also possible that the preference for a monotonous diet is driven by gut makeup?

dimeson Principles for agent-native CLIs

I don’t mean that expect should be used. But flags like —no-interactive are unnecessary. CLIs can just check `isatty == false` instead of requiring an explicit flag.

dimeson Principles for agent-native CLIs

CLIs should check isatty and, if it returns false, disable any interactive functionality because it won’t work.

dimeson American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were

Isn’t this the exact sentiment used by those who oppose vaccinations?

dimeson Lessons from building multiplayer browsers

I also built a canvas-based, multiplayer product during the pandemic (ohyay).

The product was social-event focused (classes, festivals, etc.) so we focused on multiplayer audio-video experiences rather than general purpose browsing.

One of my favorite memories was when someone used our collaborative YouTube playback to set up a karaoke room. WebRTC added a little latency, but it was close enough to work.

dimeson Work with the garage door up (2024)

> Doesn't feel particularly different to me

> The effort required to adapt them has dropped

AI is an entirely different situation because the effort required to copy has dropped by multiple orders of magnitude. You used to be able to build in the open without worrying about copycats because the vast majority of people didn’t want to spend the effort. Now (with AI), even someone with the slightest, most fleeting whim can copy your work.

It’s great that you’re open to being adapted. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re not open to having your ideas outright taken, then it’s not safe to build in the open any longer.

dimeson US Department of Justice has officially reclassified cannabis as less dangerous

Correlation doesn’t imply causation. The US has one of the most relaxed opiate policies imaginable until about 10 years ago. You could walk into many doctors and walk out with an opiate script. It didn’t end well.

dimeson Work with the garage door up (2024)

It’s not a fear. It’s reality. It’s literally happening on HN right now.

Take this game, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698455

Within an hour, someone had cloned the game with addition mechanics that multiple people mentioned they like more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47729573

dimeson Connie Converse was a folk-music genius. Then she vanished

The private equity company that scooped up her music rights, most likely.

dimeson Porting Go's strings package to C

I could be wrong, but I don't think the initial Go implementation was a C transpiler. It was written in C, but it did its own compilation.

dimeson Ask HN: Cool side projects you have written using Golang

I wrote Dihedral, a compile-time dependency injection framework for Go [0]. It was inspired by the Java framework Dagger. It worked pretty well, but was a little clunky with Go's syntax. Ultimately, decided it wasn't worth it given the simplicity of manually constructing Go objects in a service setting.

0: https://github.com/dimes/dihedral