MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-11 13:57:54+00:00
Henry Ford's point wasn't that people didn't want faster horses but that they'd buy the car they never knew they needed - instead of a horse.

With Spotify, the point is that lots of people pay for it and it's popular. So good for them. Individuals wanting something else does not mean that it's worth for Spotify to build that. It might be worth for someone else to invest in such a thing. But judging from the lack of successful things in this space, probably not.
by IIAOPSW | 2025-04-11 13:58:39+00:00
Incidental to this, I'm now convinced that the tube map is overrated and a quasi-geographical map would suit London better. And by "quasi" I mean slightly expanded or contracted in certain spots for clarity but basically correct.

But the district labels are a bit too in the way right now, and in any case it would be nice to see the stations.
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by bluGill | 2025-04-11 14:00:09+00:00
Until I finally get fed up and leave. There is value in my sharing pictures of my kids with distance friends and seeing pictures of their kids - but Facebook has got so bad at that I finally gave up logging in and not I'm not a product that exists for them. And in turn because I'm not there facebook is less valueable for my friends and so they are more likely to leave in the future.

The only question are people like me outliers that can be ignored - there will always be a few people you can't get. However I could be a sign of the end.
by mediumsmart | 2025-04-11 14:01:00+00:00
fwiw ... to test the site you can load and read it on a desktop and on a phone. if it also passes the validator and jslint without error or warning you are half done. It should load within 1 second on mobile (pagespeed) have zero errors on wave webaim, A+ on securityheaders.com, and full marks on webbkoll.5july.net, a proper dmarc reject entry and pass dr-dsgvo webcheck. That would be a good start. Oh, and no divs. Not allowed ...
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-11 14:01:05+00:00
The most impressive thing, to me, about LISP is how the very, very small distance between the abstract syntax tree and the textual representation of the program allows for some very powerful extensions to the language with relatively little change.

Take default values for function arguments. In most languages, that's a careful consideration of the nuances of the parser, how the various symbols nest and prioritize, whether a given symbol might have been co-opted for another purpose... In LISP, it's "You know how you can have a list of symbols that are the arguments for the function? Some of those symbols can be lists now, and if they are, the first element is the symbolic argument name and the second element is a default value."
by nxobject | 2025-04-11 14:01:18+00:00
I love retro68, but as much as I love it I'm frustrated the"black box" dependency on CMake to specify the build process + app metadata (e.g. distinguishing between apps and desktop accessories which treat system globals differently, rsrc compiling, resource fork creation, etc.) My first instinct with (hobbyist) programs is to go for a lean and mean makefile.
by akrylov | 2025-04-11 14:01:53+00:00
It’s basically just a fancy bash script (mkimage.sh) and Makefiles for calling scripts with different sets of paramaters. The process – is the same exact process of creating base docker images – chroot and using package manager apt or yum to install packages in chroot jails. That is how ubi9 or debian slim base images are made. With this tool you can extend the process – install dependencies, run security checks, sign it all in one go. It’s easy to extend it, so you can create base images for Kafka with different Java distributions for example. Which is very useful for testing and performance tuning.

Imagine you work at a large org and you want to control all images used for CI/CD workers. Instead of scattering it across different Dockerfiles and scripts (Java, NodeJS, python, etc) you can just use a single tool. At least it was why I built it in the first place.
by tim333 | 2025-04-11 14:02:10+00:00
I don't think Black Mirror is supposed on it's own to lead us to a better future. It's list of things that could go wrong maybe counter the Sam Altman like tech boosters.

I can't help feeling

>Biotechnology like GMOs and mRNA offered existential hope, rather than risk.

rather skips over the fact that the whole pandemic was probably set off by a lab screw up illustrating the value of warning about such things.
by gregwebs | 2025-04-11 14:02:32+00:00
Another poster linked to this study that states [1]

Existing rates of lead absorption are about 30 times higher than inferred natural rates

It's not the case that all soil is contaminated with lead that then ends up in high levels in food. Top soil is composed mostly of decomposed plants. Plants only take up a small fraction of the lead in the soil. So the contamination of the top of the soil must reach some threshold. Due to leaded gasoline, there is widespread lead contamination in top soil, and I have read many parts of the world still use leaded gasoline in agriculture. Without human activity my understanding is that most soil samples would test very low or non detect and most food would as well. In some types of food (I know this is true of spices and to a lesser extent chocolate), much of the lead in food can come from processing phases after it is already harvested.

We certainly know it is the case that food produced by one producer varies dramatically in lead levels from another due to testing. Some of that may be attributed back to the soil, but it still goes to show that we could be testing soil levels and avoiding growing in lead contaminated soil.

Thank you for those links. For the nut study, they are studying finished products bought in the supermarket, so it is possible that some of the contamination may come from the processing (removing shells, etc) which is pointed out in the study itself.

[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14334042/
by topologie | 2025-04-11 14:03:26+00:00
Made me think of that Silicon Valley episode with the Patent Troll.

I don't remember it exactly, but I think near the end Richard solves the situation by building a (fake?) music app that detected that the song that had made the Patent Troll rich was actually a ripoff from another song that Richard had acquired the rights to, so now Richard could technically sue the Patent Troll for all the money he had made...

If anybody has a link to that scene it would be great.
by Anechoic | 2025-04-11 14:03:33+00:00
Ron is a fixture at acoustics conferences, he's a nice guy and was very passionate about making the facility work when he was raising funds in the aughts. If you're going to be in the area and give him enough notice, he'll be happy to give you a tour.

Last I heard (which was admittedly about 10 years ago, things may have changed since then), the facility was struggling a bit. It's true that these types of testing facilities need quiet background noise levels for testing, but that can usually be achieved either through putting the facility in the middle of nowhere, or over-engineering the structure. NWAA obviously has both, but that results in increased costs. On the other hand, you have facilities like Orfield Labs and Microsoft's newest anechoic chamber that manage to be _very_ quiet while still located in relatively convenient areas. Plus many audio/speaker/acoustical products companies have their own facilities.

That said I'm glad NWAA is still getting press and I hope it remains a fixture for generations to come. We need more of these moonshots.
by anonfordays | 2025-04-11 14:04:01+00:00
>You're conflating racial and ethnic diversity in ways that are distinctly western or even really US-centric.

Not at all, these are pretty universally agreed upon by global sociologist.

>Europe is extremely ethnically diverse, as is China

Indeed, Europe is extremely diverse, much more so than China.

>they just don't use skin color as the primary ethnic marker the way that is commonly (and still incorrectly) done in the US.

Neither does the US. Skin color is not a primary ethnic marker. No one versed in sociology in the US considers a Black American ethnically similar to an Eritrean. Nor do they consider a Ukrainian ethnically similar to a White American.

>The 90% Han Chinese number isn't especially useful because it's comparable to the way that most of Europe has historically identified itself as the successor of Rome.

It is extremely useful because the subgroups specifically make these claims: "Modern Han Chinese subgroups, such as the Cantonese, the Hakka, the Henghua, the Hainanese, the Hoklo peoples, the Gan, the Xiang, the Wu-speaking peoples, all claim Han Chinese ancestry pointing to official histories and their own genealogical records to support such claims."

Germanic people do not make the claim to be of Roman or Mediterranean ethnicity nor origin. The languages are vastly more varied in Europe versus China, where 70%+ speak Mandarin.

Additionally, Han Chinese are much closer genetically than Europeans. Italians, Brits, and Estonians have much more varied genetics compared to Han Chinese.
by happytoexplain | 2025-04-11 14:04:07+00:00
First of all: You're preaching (ranting) to the choir. I 100% agree with your Morgan Freeman quote. But it's an intractable problem. Imagine if a president legally abolished Black History Month or something like that - the impression would be unavoidably hateful and antagonistic. Changes that are ostensibly positive suffer the ratchet effect.

So yes, it would be nice if everybody just somehow agreed to "stop", but once a society has cultural distinctions along a racial line with any negative connotations, there is no path to "stop focusing on it" aside from letting time pass.

E.g. my elderly friends and many of the people on the social internet aren't going to stop encouraging hatred of black people and encouraging beating or killing them for non-violent crimes, because of a call to "stop focusing so much on race"; and likewise other people aren't going to stop reacting to that hideous part of their own society (various reactions, that aren't all reasonable!) because of a call to "stop focusing so much on race".

It's not a "just stop doing it" problem. Only centuries of patience and luck can evolve a society past such a stark divide (both sides think there are decades-scale forced fixes, and they're both wrong).

Second of all: Your reply to me was tangential to the criticism I was making of the previous parent. You can and should choose not to rant about race/gender/sexuality abroad. You can't leave your own pronouns at home, like you can a hat. And even if you could, it would still be twisted and unfair to use it as an example of being "political" in direct comparison to wearing a political slogan hat - not to mention it being the slogan of one of the most politically antagonistic figures in the world's living memory. The comparison is emblematic of exactly the target of your rant: Misapplied focus.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-04-11 14:04:10+00:00
I thought basic human rights and creeping authoritarianism was "too political" for HN?

Are the foundations shaking even for the super rich? I guess tariffs threaten the number of "fucks" in "fuck off" money they have.

We're close to the phase that Trump casts off Elon and the rest of the techno oligarch utopia people that got him elected for the raw racists, and that's just me reading the tes leaves.

Insiders know a lot more.
by righthand | 2025-04-11 14:04:17+00:00
> Natural language is proving to be a more powerful interface than drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editors.

Completely disagree. What “vibe-coding” weirdos are experiencing is that 99% of the time they need code for a solved problem. However this magical vibe coding falls apart as soon as you need nuance.

There is a difference between “generate me a nextjs app with typescript and unit tests” and “create-next-app” with typescript and unit tests. The first is guessing at what you need the latter is pushing out what you need exactly according to a template. Vibe coding falls apart when you need to spend time tweaking your typescript config because the LLM just used the most popular collection of code strings it found that leads to a working app instead of create-next-app.

A wysiwyg editor provides better interface because you know what you are getting when you click the button. You aren’t asking a computer to infer your intent. Vibe coding requires writing natural language that then needs to be parsed into intent. There is your error gap right there, going from “I need this” and “hoping” a computer grasps your intent correctly.

There are also people actively poisoning the well for LLMs with LLMs so your prompt will always be at risk to be misinterpreted. That is not “production grade”.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-11 14:05:00+00:00
AIUI, the Pentagon failing an audit is essentially akin to most people failing an audit because they can't produce every single paper receipt for everything they've ever purchased. Combine that with the fact that the Pentagon is (I believe) the single largest purchaser on the planet, the fact that much of what it does is compartmentalized in different security buckets, and that the managerial staff tends to be younger than most organizations, and it shouldn't be so surprising that it's persistently in a state of being unable to literally dot every i and cross every t.
by sepalous | 2025-04-11 14:05:05+00:00
I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense!

It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.
by dharmab | 2025-04-11 14:05:16+00:00
Works fine for a tank, but something like Imperial Guardsman, Sisters of Battle or a Necron Tomb Blade all have features that are too small for FDM. Look up the "Celestine the Living Saint" model - the entire sculpt is small enough to fit inside your hand.

The extra cost of resin is negligible at this scale, it's mostly the safety requirements and extra labor that makes it harder.
by uoaei | 2025-04-11 14:05:28+00:00
The spectrum of political opinion isn't 1D. The causal links between political opinion and someone's propensity to vote are also far from straightforward. The feedback loops between media and the evolution of people's political opinions might be stronger than any principles people imagine themselves having. Altogether, Bernie was the compromise candidate, except that companies with "news" in the name but who emphatically argue in the courts that they are not news and only idiots would believe that they are, are the ones who really won this election, at the expense of nearly everyone else.
by camdenreslink | 2025-04-11 14:05:34+00:00
Even if that is true, a lot of business software is not public and not in the training set.

And another thing to consider, is if you are copying software from another business you need to compete in some way. Yours needs to have more polish (LLMs are bad at this), or a unique feature, or a different focus. LLM copying another business will only allow you to compete on price, but not those other things.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-04-11 14:06:08+00:00
It comes down to less is better. You don't want a faster horse, you want less horses on the road so your horse isn't traffic, it's a horse. You don't want less TikTok, you want less crap using TikTok. Horses were the same, leaving crap all over the cities until Henry Ford's Model A. So we can solve this problem by inventing a lot better, much cleaner TikTok. In the meantime, sell manure shovels.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-04-11 14:06:28+00:00
No, I totally don't mean that people are idiots, I think it's largely ignorance. I, for instance am fully ignorant of audio stuff. I'm mostly happy with Sony/Apple audio products, which audiophiles probably feel the same way I feel about chain restaurants.

It's true that it's also increasingly easier to be presented with an average choice because everything is aggregated somewhere and will mostly converge on a few options.

To your other point, a lot of this is also on an indifference curve. I said what the average person wants, not what the average person is ecstatic about.

But most people don't spend time seeking out the best possible experience and go with the good enough experience they're presented with.
by bell-cot | 2025-04-11 14:06:51+00:00
> Question is why hasn't Blue Origin managed the same then, or ArianeSpace ...

Or any of hundreds of other national space programs and companies, in countries which would have been ecstatic to pay 10X the US Govt's "subsidies to SpaceX", to put themselves or their nation's company into SpaceX's current position of utter global dominance.
by ajross | 2025-04-11 14:06:58+00:00
So, FWIW the text of the article says explicitly that it was not a conviction.

But regardless: we all know that it isn't "because" of a DUI conviction, that is a proximate cause (or just an excuse). Deportation is an explicit and very clearly stated policy goal of the current administration. Very clearly this is being pursued in that context and for the reasons stated. They're doing what they were elected to do.

That it is also unjust and horrifying is an unfortunate side effect, demanding (I guess) that some people try to excuse it as a DUI thing.
by vacuity | 2025-04-11 14:06:59+00:00
Personally, I have a negative opinion of LLMs, but I agree completely. Many people are motivated to reject LLMs solely because they see them as "soulless machines". Judge based on the facts of the matter, and make your values clear if you must bring them into it, but don't pretend you're not applying values when you are. You can do worse: kneejerk emotional reactions are just pointless.
by the_af | 2025-04-11 14:07:03+00:00
> Doesn’t that impugn a whole lot of classics?

I'm sure it impugns many of the classics (and later), not only Garfield! In my mind, it does impugn He-Man, G.I. Joe, etc. YMMV, of course.

> Dudes sitting in a smoky room: “Yeah, so the pig’s a big fat pig with mobility issues and get this, he stutters hahahaha gonna sell like moonshine, go tell the artists.”

There was a lot of artistry in the Looney Toons, the artists were both doing it for the money (of course) but also out of love for cartoons and they had ideas about them. It wasn't pure cold hearted market research. They didn't go "what would sell more stuffed toys, a pig or a rabbit?".

There must have been some of this too, of course, but have you read memories or articles about Tex Avery and other people involved? They truly cared about their craft. They had ideas about what they wanted to achieve, and it wasn't just "make money".
by TrapLord_Rhodo | 2025-04-11 14:07:14+00:00
Most of those subs linked are from direct negotations from the state, and they are in the form of tax incentives, not cash in account.

How are you going to use that against a company that nevada agreed to give them X amount of tax incentives over a year if they build a giga factory there?

Using that as a justification that "tesla only lives because of tax payer money" is ridiculous.

Also, poking around the SpaceX data just seems entirely false too. The biggest 'loan' of $98M to spaceX for "Missle technology development". And when you follow the authorizations it was just a firm fixed price contract.
by agentultra | 2025-04-11 14:07:20+00:00
In my experience, people aren't so static as to have dualities. They don't fit so neatly into little descriptors.

What is a strength? Something you are inherently talented at? A skill you have plenty of experience with? A subject you have a lot of knowledge of? What you are motivated by?

What is a weakness?

I see that most people are rather adaptable to context. When you're working at a startup building an app make AI complete your Uber orders for you, there's no reason to be focused on making sure the system is scalable to a million requests per second. Most people tend to understand that. They may have a lot of experience building highly scalable backend systems, they may want to build another system like that again because it pleases them to do so. But most people will see the forest for the trees and focus on getting the project out the door in the fastest way possible because they probably won't have a million customers for a long time... if at all.

I tend to look for what people value when building a team. You'll need to match the set-intersection of the teams' values with the goals of the business. People are motivated to work on thing they value. We can tolerate working on things we don't but try to avoid doing that for too long. So if the business needs a highly reliable system because failures can lose their customers millions of dollars a minute for downtime then you'll want to stock your team with developers that value those things the company cares about.

What you're good at today can change tomorrow. You can be better at it. It's a skill, it's knowledge, it's something you can acquire: it's not an attribute or trait of you as a person.
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-11 14:07:38+00:00
>> The pacts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform

The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers to do more in-house.

... which means more work in-house.

... done by the same teams they just cut the size of.

Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work itself well.