MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yencabulator | 2025-04-22 21:52:46+00:00
> In Old English, the day was called Long Friday (langa frigedæg [ˈlɑŋɡɑ ˈfriːjedæj])—referring to the lengthy observances of fasting and religious services, making it a day of extended devotion—and equivalents of this term are still used in Scandinavian languages and Finnish.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday#Etymology
by nosianu | 2025-04-22 21:52:48+00:00
In this day and age, you can do this for FREE and on the side, whenever you have time!

There are tons of very well-done professional level video courses on Youtube.

There are more organized courses that only ask you for money for the "extras", like some tests and a certificate, but the main parts, texts and videos, are free.

You could start with a really good teaching professor (Eric Lander, MIT) and his course: https://www.edx.org/learn/biology/massachusetts-institute-of... (the "Audit" track is free, ignore the prices; also ignore the "expires" - this course restarts every few months and has been available in new versions for many years now)

It's very engaging!

There's similar courses for everything in the life sciences, there on edX, on Youtube, many other places.

I feel the true Internet is soooo underutilized by most people! Forget news sites, opinion blogs, or social media. Knowledge is there for the taking, free. Only the organized stuff, where you end up with a certificate costs money, but they usually still provide the actual content for free.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-04-22 21:53:07+00:00
I'm in late 30s and finally gave up booze after something like 25 years of drinking. I still smoke a tiny bit of marijuana every few weeks. I do notice it causes mood swings next few days. Ironically it is prescribed for anxiety. Alcohol depression took nearly a month to clear. I'm sad I can't drink socially, but I still go thru a ton of zero alcohol beer.

I'll change the strain from indica to sativa just for a check. Occasionally I do enjoy silliness it brings that makes me wanna play with my kids. Or have some superficially deep thinking while riding bike. Otherwise I'll likely stop too.
by tombert | 2025-04-22 21:54:55+00:00
I lost about 60lbs last year because I was officially "obese" and I wanted to be a bit healthier.

While the exact time that I formed the healthier "habit" is harder to quantify, I definitely felt like the first three weeks were the hardest. It did feel, almost overnight, by the beginning of week four it was relatively easy to keep my calorie intake lower.
by immibis | 2025-04-22 21:55:03+00:00
Its a disease all over software engineering. We add just enough layers of abstraction, but no more, to make it about ten times slower than a Commodore 64. The excuse is that it's to avoid having to think end-to-end as one human can't possibly think end-to-end these days. The reality is the reason they can't is because of all these useless indirection layers in the middle and if those were deleted, they could.
by ortusdux | 2025-04-22 21:55:31+00:00
I've been eyeing a Pikaboost 2 conversion kit for a while now, but I share your skepticism. For me it's more of a distrust of first gen products than it is startups. Even apple messes up 1st gen.

I live up a hill, and all my destinations are at sea level, so I just want enough E-bike to get home at the end of the day.
by igouy | 2025-04-22 21:57:10+00:00
>... Smalltalk ... every IO and every message-based communication is non-blocking and async

Only if you explicitly make that particular IO or message send async.

"When a block receives value, it waits to return until all of its expressions have been executed. For example, the following expression does not produce a value until all three clocks have been completely displayed.

[EasternTime display. MountainTime display. PacificTime display] value

"

"When a block receives fork, it returns immediately, usually before its expressions have been executed.

[EasternTime display. MountainTime display. PacificTime display] fork

"

page 252 "Smalltalk-80: The language and its implementation." 1983

https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Blueboo...

~

Also 2019 "GildaVM: a Non-Blocking I/O Architecture for the Cog VM" https://hal.science/hal-02379275
by kennywinker | 2025-04-22 21:57:11+00:00
The phrase rent-seeking is such a funny one to me. Like, if rent-seeking is bad that should apply across the board. I.e. being a landlord, literally seeking rent from tenants.

Yet I fear the issue most people on here have with “rent seeking” is the harm it does to a theoretical idea of free market capitalism - rather than the tangible harm of extracting wealth from someone’s need for a place to live.
by hackingonempty | 2025-04-22 21:57:36+00:00
> These are asymmetric: brew runs at a point in time, and most people decidedly do not want brew running in the background or blocking while leechers are still being serviced. They want it to exit quickly once the task at hand is done.

Yes, brew exits when it is done installing, nothing would need to change about that if you used BT protocol to speed up downloads. I'm sure you do have some helpful users who would volunteer to seed their cache though, which would become feasible.

> That's not the challenge. The challenge is distributing those updates.

The metadata goes in the formula alongside the current metadata (URLs and hashes.)
by ianferrel | 2025-04-22 21:57:42+00:00
This strikes me as the sort of first-order thinking that often plagues ideas about macroeconomics.

The US market is highly concentrated... right now because there are no tax benefits to being diverse. Apply significant tariffs to services and watch thousands of micro-service providers bloom.

There's really no "and be done with it" when it comes to tax policy. It's always an arms race.

None of this is to say that you couldn't tax service providers. Just that it's likely not as simple or obvious what would happen if you tried.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-22 21:57:55+00:00
Look these people usually suck and are rationalizing not caring about people, or giving themselves comfort with their mortality, or etc., but what really gets on my nerves is the hubris to assume you’ve got a clue what the future holds. Why would hyperintelligent post-humans stop improving; why would they want to make simulations of smart people instead of some massive, singular entity or hive mind or whatever the hell you can’t think of because you’re a dumb non-post-human? The beauty of the future isn’t in the robotic assembly-line reproduction of pleasures we’ve already experienced, it’s not a fucking resort, it’s in the new, in the unknowable, irreducible things we can’t imagine. Beauty can be horrible too, the natural world is both beautiful and horrible. Why would we ever presume that the post-humans wouldn’t exist in a state of immense suffering, struggling and fighting the way all life we’ve ever known has? Why would we celebrate or denigrate the far future when we have no hope of predicting it or measuring its moral value from our limited perspectives?
by archagon | 2025-04-22 21:58:39+00:00
Palantir is a company that loves to saber rattle and post disturbing polemics about how “the West” needs to dominate the rest of the world. Moreover, Thiel is in bed with Yarvin, an out-and-proud monarchist. This is the last company I’d trust to build weaponized drone technology.

If Palantir ever gets the green light to use these weapons against libruls, illegals, BLM, and/or antifa, they would in a heartbeat.
by cfreksen | 2025-04-22 21:59:29+00:00
This reminds me of the PIK image format (a precursor to JPEG XL) whose name happens to be a word for penis in some languages[0]. In the present case "SPH" is a kink/fetish term meaning "Small Penis Humiliation"[1]. I don't know how many people would think of that, though.

I am not sure if the lesson is to try harder to avoid offence, or live with the fact that words can have multiple meanings and we can be "professional" enough to ignore some of those meanings in some contexts.

[0]: https://github.com/google/pik/issues/6

[1]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sph
by lnwlebjel | 2025-04-22 22:00:23+00:00
Thanks for posting this, it's a very interesting case study. Considering that the thing they seem to excel at is this type of writing, it's interesting that they still seem to be only ok at it if you're trying to produce a serious, genuinely useful output. This fits with my experience, though yours is much more extensive and thorough. In particular I fully concur with the voice/tone, and the need to verify everything (always the case anyway), and "Never abdicate your role as the human mind in charge" -- sometimes the suggestions it makes are just not that good.

Question is, do you think this process was faster using the various LLMs? Could two (or N) sufficiently motivated people produce the same thing in the same time? (and if so, what is N). I'm wondering if the caveats and limitations end up costing as much time as they save. Maybe you're 2x faster, if so that would be significant and good to know.

In the abstract, this is similar to my experience with AI produced code. Except for very simple, contained code, you ultimately, need to read and understand it well enough to make sure that it's doing all the things that you want and not producing bugs. I'm not sure this saves me much time.
by uycyp | 2025-04-22 22:00:36+00:00
Today, a charger is a full-fledged computer with more processing power than the Apollo 11 spacecraft that brought humans to the Moon. Before the charging adapter starts pumping the voltage, it must first communicate with the smartphone. Incompatibility of the communication software protocol is the reason why a smartphone with USB PD, for example, cannot fast charge from a VOOC charger.

Read on technical details of fast charging technologies. Find out why the best charger – is your old feature phone's charger.
by nunez | 2025-04-22 22:02:12+00:00
woof; huge drop all across the board. definitely looks like a bloodbath to me.

anecdotally, two people, who don't have EVs, reacted negatively to me renting a model 3 recently.

this was definitely not the case last year.

tesla has a reputation problem. they need to admit it.

i agree with the hivemind that this is 100% the reason behind the massive drop. given that they still have the best EVs on the market with the best EV supercharging network on the market, this is the only possible reason.
by cvoss | 2025-04-22 22:02:48+00:00
Especially because, I suspect, in a lot of people's minds, the concept of Atlantis much more closely resembles what the author enumerates as the possible (non-fictitious) sources of inspiration for Plato. That is, I certainly don't picture Atlantis in the way that Plato describes it exactly. So in my mind, I agree with the author's assement of Plato's story and conclude that, yes, a place such as that one did exist. The author concedes as much, too, and doesn't realize it.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-22 22:03:59+00:00
I recently served on a grand jury that saw several "Xth offense driving without a license" cases. It was clear that minor punishments were no deterrent at all. Seizing vehicles might help a little, but as you say, they'll borrow one or buy a cheap beater.

There's probably no way to really crack down on it without heavy penalties, but from what I hear, California isn't big on penalizing criminals these days. Can't say I love the idea of feeding and housing another whole class of criminal either. There may not be much of a solution.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-22 22:05:38+00:00
Which country? I think you'll find that the Americas and the "New World" consist of dozens of nations, and the confluence of several empires and other overseas powers which sent people here, in the capacity of explorers, evangelists, colonists, traders, you name it.

And let us not discount the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492. Perhaps underpopulation kept that violent contention to a minimum, but surely, Indigeneous peoples learned warfare from practicing it on one another, whether in the Polynesian islands, AUS/NZ, China, or the Americas.

And, White people have used more varied means other than violence in order to get around. Indeed, there has been intermarriage, and economic trade, and all sorts of peaceful, in fact quite agreeable means, of intermingling our culture with the indigeneous ones. It was the same with the Norsemen, the Vikings, the Slavs, and Celts, just to name a few: sure, there was conquest. There was violence and raping and pillaging. But there was also intermarriage and trade routes and merchants who picked up quite willing spouses. It went in both directions.

Let's not attribute to violence what has also been achieved by diplomacy and peaceful means.
by socketcluster | 2025-04-22 22:05:56+00:00
I built a 'serverless' platform that's similar, smaller but more focus on low-code than Supabase https://saasufy.com/

All the components are declarative HTML and update in realtime. Similar concept as HTMX but doesn't require any backend code. You can still implement complex UX, authentication, access control and filtered views (indexing and all).

I built this app with it over a few months as a weekend project: https://www.insnare.net/app/#/onboarding/country/All
by Lammy | 2025-04-22 22:06:06+00:00
> My understanding is that there's no standard way to update a torrent file; you re-roll a new file with the changes.

Kinda. You do create a new torrent, but you distribute it in a way that to a swarm member is functionally equivalent to updating an old one. Check out BEP-0039 and BEP-0046 which respectively cover the HTTP and DHT mechanisms for updating torrents:

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

If that updated torrent is a BEP-0052 (v2) torrent it will hash per-file, and so the updated v2 torrent will have identical hashes for files which aren't changed: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0052.html

This combines with BEP-0038 so the updated torrent can refer to the infohash of the older torrent with which it shares files, so if you already have the old one you only have to download files that have changed: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0038.html
by ericmcer | 2025-04-22 22:06:29+00:00
We do seem to imbue the greek & roman writers with a more serious tone then they might have had.

I was reading some of Ovid's Metamorphosis while waiting for someone else. I turned to a random page and it was an action packed description of Achilles riding his chariot while spears deflect off him and he effortlessly impales opponents. It almost resembled an anime style power fantasy or something. I wonder if Achilles was viewed more like Wolverine or Superman and people didn't really believe that there were immortal warriors blessed by the gods mowing down enemies in battle.
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-22 22:06:50+00:00
I'm quite the introvert. I just am flummoxed why you would build around something so much less substantial than equitable distribution of resources, which necessarily implies our bothering each other to enforce.

If you want to be left alone above all else, you can always turn into ted kaczynski.

But reaping the benefits of society comes with costs. one of them is accepting annoying neighbors and other social contracts that might not specifically cater to your desires.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-04-22 22:07:31+00:00
High school physics and chemistry equips students to make (a very limited set of) predictions. High school biology super doesn't. When you're learning chemistry and physics, it feels like you're learning a systematic set of rules that let you approximate and model the world around you. Biology...doesn't, not really. Life is just more complex and higher order, and it's that much harder to actually use the study of it to understand the world immediately around you in any meaningful way.

It's still super cool, but it makes learning about it as a science less satisfying, since it's less friendly to the standard scientific method.
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-22 22:08:06+00:00
"If there were truly some sort of globe-spanning advanced civilization existing ~11KYA we'd have found at least one single piece of their material culture by now, but we haven't."

What about Gobekli Tepe?

"Nor have we found any genetic evidence in people or crops that there was any kind of "Empire" connecting parts of Europe or Africa as we find time and time again with real empires that actually existed in prehistory."

Wouldn't Europe have been mostly tundra/ice that long ago?

Also, what about this article (not Europe, but other global implications), do you dispute it specifically?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9629774/

You seem to be really upset (and frankly insulting) at the prospect of people being curious about the idea that we don't know everything about our history yet. There is a very wide gap between believing a theory is true or being certain its not true, and that gap is the humility to accept we aren't sure yet and there is room to be surprised.

Skepticism is healthy, but why be dismissive of peoples' interest to consider or search for new evidence? What exactly is the risk? Isn't it more risky to stop developing the science and pursuing the truth? Is this really about scientific rigor, or do you have some reason to want there not to have been more developed civilizations pre-younger dryas than we previously thought existed? What's the harm to you in other people asking these questions and going out and trying to answer them?
by mkl | 2025-04-22 22:09:01+00:00
The degree-10000 polynomial is definitely overfitting - every data point has its own little spike. The truncated curves look kind of nice, but the data points aren't shown on those plots, and the curves aren't very close to them.

There are also some enormous numbers hidden away here too, with associated floating point precision problems; the articles show the coefficients are small, but that's because the polynomial basis functions themselves have gigantic numbers in them. The Bernstein basis for degree-100 involves 100 choose 50, which is already > 10^29. You have to be careful calculating these polynomials or bits of your calculation exceed 64-bit floating point range, e.g. factorials of 10000, 2^10000. See the formulas and table in this section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendre_polynomials#Rodrigues...
by caseyy | 2025-04-22 22:09:32+00:00
Yes. ML has advanced many fields related to modelling - meteorology, climate, molecular. Classification models have done much for genomics, particle physics, and other fields where experiments produce inhumane amounts of data.

DeepVariant, Enformer, ParticleNet, DeepTau, etc. are some well-known individual models that are advanced branches of science. And there are the very famous ones, like AlphaFold (Nobel in Chemistry 2024).

We need to think of AI not as a product (chats, agents, etc.), but as neural nets (AlexNet). Unfortunately, large companies are "chat-washing" these tremendously useful technologies.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-22 22:13:31+00:00
This is a horrible idea and nearly impossible and I cannot believe they didn't bother addressing the nearly insurmountable technical hurdles which face any group trying to synchronize a musical performance online.

Even using specialized software and hardware, it is difficult. Trying to (ab)use Zoom or Teams for simultaneous performance is an exercise in futility and frustration.

It is not merely latency that gets in your way, but that is a large part of it. It is also the nature of the codecs, and the nature of the processing. These videoconferencing apps are designed to spotlight one speaker with many spectators. They were never designed to accommodate everyone having a go all at once!

Many people found out, during the pandemic, that they needed to "fake it" if they were trying to record a choral performance. Record your piece one at a time. Send it over to the next person and they add to it; it's manually "touched up" and synced by an editor. And so forth.

"Virtual choirs" are divisive and ableist. Only those who have the "proper technology" can even consider admission to these groups. I have been a member of various choirs in my life. Sometimes this was even possible when I was living on the streets. I did not require a car, nor an iPad, nor an Internet connection to be a choir member. I only needed to bring myself and a positive attitude.

Membership in real choirs is a fulfilling and uplifting experience. There are no words for the way it makes me feel, to sing together with other people, in a room. Especially when we are fully rehearsed and we perform for an audience who applauds and appreciates our work. Choirs are the ultimate in collaborative and cooperative recreation. I've sung Disney songs, I've sung songs by Rogers & Hammerstein; I've sung ancient Greek hymns. The experience is simply unparalleled.
by einpoklum | 2025-04-22 22:13:47+00:00
> with file specific flags

But you don't want to disable warnings throughout the file, just locally.

> Then you don't have non-portable cruft littering the code,

You can make it perfectly portable, with a little macro work. See, ,for example:

https://github.com/eyalroz/printf/blob/013db1e345cbb166a7eb7...

(this is from the standalone-no-libc-printf-family-implementation I maintain; the library is C, the test suite is C++ but it doesn't matter for the purposes of my point here.)

and that you only need to do once in your project (you can make it your own header). Even when it comes to use - you can place your warning-disabling within another macro, so that you end up only using a simple single macro for your actual code.
by karmakaze | 2025-04-22 22:14:44+00:00
I installed Ghostty. Found I couldn't search the text buffer. Found this issue[189] that was opened on Jul 6, 2023. Latest comment is from Feb 9:

> To be completely clear, it’s not on the “IMMEDIATE” roadmap[...] It’s absolutely on the roadmap[...] But as a passion project, we prioritize working on whatever we want[...]

The search function isn't even listed in the README.md's ambitious plan:

The high-level ambitious plan for the project, in order: # Step Status 1 Standards-compliant terminal emulation 2 Competitive performance 3 Basic customizability -- fonts, bg colors, etc. 4 Richer windowing features -- multi-window, tabbing, panes 5 Native Platform Experiences (i.e. Mac Preference Panel) 6 Cross-platform libghostty for Embeddable Terminals 7 Windows Terminals (including PowerShell, Cmd, WSL) N Fancy features (to be expanded upon later)

[189] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues/189
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-22 22:15:01+00:00
I imagine you could either A) just modify the dumped state, B) paramaterize it, C) have the program split up the state into transactions and modify those. The program will probably have to take more than one step, in order, in order to accomplish everything. If it fails, you'd want it to try to undo it, ala transactions. And since it can do all that, it can stop, start, or resume at specific steps.

Like, Terraform has always sucked because there was no way to dump existing resources as new code. So a team at Google made a tool to do it (Terraform-er). If Terraform had already had that feature, and if it didn't rely on having pre-existing state to manage resources, that would be like 90% of the way to what I'd want. Just dump resources as code, then let me re-run the code, and if I want I can modify the code to ask me for inputs or change things. (People think of Terraform as only working on Cloud resources, but you could (for example) make an Ubuntu Linux provider that just configures Ubuntu for you, if you wanted)