MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andai | 2025-04-10 11:10:09+00:00
Using a system based on randomness for a process that must occur deterministically is probably the wrong solution.

I'm running into similar issues trying to use LLMs for logic and reasoning.

They can do it (surprisingly well, once you disable the friendliness that prevents it), but you get a different random subset of correct answers every time.

I don't know if setting temperature to 0 would help. You'd get the same output every time, but it would be the same incomplete / wrong output.

Probably a better solution is a multi phase thing, where you generate a bunch of outputs and then collect and filter them.
by geokon | 2025-04-10 11:10:36+00:00
The scenes really remind me of the painting "Along the River During the Qingming Festival"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Along_the_River_During_the_Qin...

The juxtaposition really brings out how isolationist they were back then. A country that is like a time capsule to the Tang dynasty

It's like if there was an island full of people still wearing Roman togas and going to the local hippodrome
by vdupras | 2025-04-10 11:10:54+00:00
Thanks. While I'm fully self-motivated (when you feel you're in uncharted waters, it's hard to stop exploring), I still appreciate some sort of external validation that I'm not delusional.

But this stuff (well, Forth in general) requires such a big shift in mindset as to how we approach computing that I understand why it stays niche. Kind of like Lisp but, IMO, deeper.
by apercu | 2025-04-10 11:11:09+00:00
I don't know, I've had tons and tons of clients over the 20 years I have consulted. Off the top of my head, 80% have been fine, 10% run in to issues now and then, but there's a hardcore 10% that will stretch you and stretch you because they can (I'm talking about paying NET 60/90 when the contractual agreement is NET 30).

If you withhold services, you usually lose that client. To be honest, that's not always a bad outcome, because a bad or slow paying client is usually the noisiest, most demanding and most unreasonable one as well.
by boelboel | 2025-04-10 11:11:37+00:00
No credible source says 1.7, the source that says this must be based on some kinda UN projection of 2010. Real TFR is probably around 1.0, in some parts of china it's below 0.7 (in the northeast it's around this number, in Macao it's 0.4). A lot of other countries are completely fucked as well and google pushes up UN projections from years ago (Like colombia UN projects the fertility rate to be higher in 2100 than it is according to the official numbers right now).
by satellite2 | 2025-04-10 11:11:50+00:00
It's a great comment thank you. The part about the changes that would have enabled us to scale as society is really brilliant. I've read a bit about this in historian theories but the focus is often very material (probably because that's what you have evidence of).

I've always been in awe at the (absolutely crazy if you ask me) concept of money. The fact that we accept to give up possessions or time in exchange for the promise that anyone in the future will provide something equivalent because we just show some token/proof (which in itself are intrinsically valueless: sticks, stones, minerals, papers, now bits...).

We've been educated to be a bit suspicious and maybe show a slight contempt for it, probably to avoid being inelegant and also particularly because a lot of big owner of it are seen as not necessarily deserving of it.

But from an evolutionary perspective it's absolutely stupefying. And at its core its extremely positive. It shows absolute trust in our peers. It's probably one of the few behavior that really binds us together.

One could argue that it's the actually one trait that really distinguish us from other animals.
by signa11 | 2025-04-10 11:13:53+00:00
perhaps i might interest you in display-buffer-alist ?

useful resources:

1. https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-02-08-emacs-window-rule...

2. https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/demystifying-emacs-wi...

3. <this space is for rent>
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-04-10 11:15:43+00:00
One person's purple prose is often another's style. It's not really a measure of something, and more an assertion of taste. You see a similar thing when someone says a writer uses "too much description and not enough action!" without realizing that, sometimes, the action is in the description. It's a style of writing with a different reader in mind, a different understanding of how word choice and prose functions.
by radiowave | 2025-04-10 11:15:56+00:00
Youtube channel InCamera did an interesting series of videos showing their use of practical effects in the creation of a submarine-based short. Not directly related to Red October, but folks might find it worth a watch.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0pnlLzhW4c1v-vKUWRWXZBD4...
by fennecfoxy | 2025-04-10 11:19:42+00:00
I mean: * I don't think we've seen any major release or new architectural changes in the major (large companies) models recently

* Model creation has exploded with people training their own models and fine tunes, etc but these are all derivatives of parent models from large companies

So I'm not really sure what they mean when they refer to "recent model progress"...I don't think anybody is putting out a llama finetune saying "this is revolutionary!111" nor have I seen OAI, et al make any such claims either.

Is the sensation just because forward momentum is stalling while we wait for the next big leap?
by roenxi | 2025-04-10 11:20:47+00:00
> But it does! All the bonds pay out after X years, and everyone is completely fine with this.

I'm happy to argue with you but you're going to have to read the entire sentence. Possibly even the entire paragraph. Otherwise it is a bit pointless even for the fun of it.

> You've not looked at the numbers, have you.

I have, I put a good 5-10 minutes in to it. I suspect you haven't looked at the numbers.

You can find references on places like the BBC [0] but there are also charts that go back to the 1800s and the story is reasonably consistent. Historically most years the UK pays down debt. In fact, the last time it didn't was the 1930s and after that klutzy fumble it didn't get to be an empire any more, so that was a mistake.

[0] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/800/cpsprodpb/16CB7/pr...
by tim333 | 2025-04-10 11:20:59+00:00
That seems to be confirmed by el presidente:

Bessent said the decision had nothing to do with the markets.

“This was driven by the president’s strategy,” he told reporters outside the West Wing. “He and I had a long talk on Sunday, and this was his strategy all along."

Trump later contradicted Bessent.

“I was watching the bond market," he said. “That bond market is very tricky.”

(https://www.yahoo.com/news/week-trump-pushed-global-economy-...)
by caseyy | 2025-04-10 11:21:37+00:00
As someone in game studio leadership, I found UK business loans easy to access up to 1:1 debt-to-assets. Perhaps it was different in the 90s. And I can understand if it's a scrappy start-up with no assets, though the older I get, the more I believe those business models are irresponsible and often have negative externalities (like someone going unpaid).

You justify working for free, and I get it. Sometimes, I worked for free in my companies, but it built my equity value. I can also somewhat get it if it’s for a good cause—if you personally want a change that your labor effects in the world.

Working for free for someone else without anything of value in return is a different matter. Even if, in the end, you became friends and got a job. Some people in the games industry will say this is normal, but it’s not (and by law in some cases). For example, the UK's living wage is where society decided to draw the line between fair labour relations and abuse.

When it comes to working for free or almost free, I think whether you'd get much better labor conditions elsewhere matters. In many cases, the answer is yes. That's a good litmus test for unfair compensation.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-04-10 11:23:50+00:00
GAO already looks at efficiency.

From Wikipedia:

DOGE: “ cutting federal spending which it characterizes as "waste, fraud, and abuse"”

GAO: “auditing agency operations to determine whether federal funds are being spent efficiently and effectively; investigating allegations of illegal and improper activities; reporting on how well government programs and policies are meeting their objectives; performing policy analyses and outlining options for congressional consideration;”
by eneveu | 2025-04-10 11:26:51+00:00
Previously, if you had a BigQuery external table on top of GCS files, and those files had Nearline / Coldline / Archive storage classes (e.g. due to a bucket lifecycle policy), you were not billed for retrieval fees when reading those files through the BQ external table.

This was a billing bug that was already mentioned in 2020 on StackOverflow.

But the bug has been fixed on February 21, 2025. So we are now billed for that. We started seeing 10.000 $ of retrieval fees due to that. I did a deep dive and found this.

The fact that some of our DBT projects were re-creating the external tables daily was not helping...
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-10 11:27:40+00:00
> maybe the 90s was a different time

Yes. There was a great need for anyone with IT knowledge, and the demand was far greater than the available labour.

I remember in 98 I got a job in a (financial) brokerage, and the required skills were:

show up on time don't leave before stock exchange closed wear a clean shirt be a nice to customers (all were affluent) know how to use conditional formatting in Excel know how to connect a PC to multiple screens know how to place different spreadsheets/windows in those different screens

I knew/could do 'more' than that but hey, money was OK, work was 15mins walking distance
by Someone | 2025-04-10 11:28:55+00:00
FTA: “At the 54% tariff rate, the $1,599 cost of the top-end iPhone 16 Pro Max in the United States would have surged to $2,300, calculations based on projections by Rosenblatt Securities show.”

Is that correct? I would think the 54% would be applied not to the sales price in the USA but to the ‘price’ of the imported ‘raw’ material.

With, in this case, Apple ‘buying’ from Apple, I know that’s hard to calculate, but Apple must internally have some way to do that.
by zokier | 2025-04-10 11:29:18+00:00
> just the syntax becomes unreadable rather quickly. I’m sure you could build a nicer regular-expression syntax in Haskell.

Of course regular expressions are really more of a category of expressions, and the traditional kleene star notation is only one of many options; regular expressions do not somehow inherently need to use that specific syntax.

Pomsky and VerbalExpressions are just some examples of alternative syntaxes for regex. Apparently there is even a port of VerbalExpressions for Haskell:

https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/HaskellVerbalExpression...
by satellite2 | 2025-04-10 11:29:50+00:00
While I agree on the direction I don't think the specific argument completely holds.

The countries in this situation in 2008 where European countries that forfeited their central banks. Having relatively recently switched to the Euro made this situation relatively novel and those governments not used to not have access to this last resort tool. There was also a lack of legislation at the European level to give the central bank authority to intervene. And culturally some countries where much more scared by their recent history by the inflation risk. Which led to push backs and delays in the face or urgency. It's now probably roughly sorted at the EU level.

The USA don't have and never had this issue. The position of the FED is very clear: it will never let the US govt default. So the only risk for US bond holders is inflation (and price if they want to exit early).
by Lex-2008 | 2025-04-10 11:31:36+00:00
I like your comparison with self-built storage, but comparing $20/TB/month with other CLOUD offerings, we see:

* hetzner storage box starts from $4/month for 1TB, and then goes down to $2.4/TB/month if you rent a 10TB box.

* mega starts from €10/month for 2TB, and goes down to €2/TB/month if you get a 16TB plan

* backblaze costs (starts from?) $6/TB/month

I was looking for a cheap cloud storage recently, so have a a list of these numbers :)

Moreover, these are not even the cheapest one. The cheapest one I found had prices starting from $6.5 for 5TB, going down to $0.64/TB/month for plans starting with 25TB (called uloz, but I haven't tested them yet).

Also, looking at lowendbox you can find a VPS in Canada with 2TB storage for $5/month and run whatever you want there.

How all that compares to $20/TB/month?!

Please feel free to correct me if i'm comparing apples to oranges, though. But I can't believe all of these offers are scam or so-called "promotional" offers which cost companies more than you pay for it.
by pydry | 2025-04-10 11:32:50+00:00
Submarine life is inherently miserable. Anything the military can do to make their life less miserable does wonders for morale which leads to a better functioning sub.

They military also spends a lot on making sure that they are very well fed - as much as they can be under the circumstances:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a147643...
by hirenj | 2025-04-10 11:33:34+00:00
My innate immune system is here for chewing gum and binding viral glycans, and I’m all out of specific lectins.

Looks like this works by apparently binding complex N-glycans on the viral envelope. I can’t imagine this is particularly specific, but the good news is that in the mucosa, you should see relatively few N-glycans, so I guess it will hit the right stuff?
by callamdelaney | 2025-04-10 11:33:48+00:00
Between 2019 and 2023 28.8% [0] of students admitted to Oxford were of ethnic minority background. Cambridge admitted 34% [1] ethnic minority students in 2023. That means you're roughly twice as likely to be admitted to a top university as a minority student.

It's possible that some percentage of this is because of better academic achievement, though in that case it's confusing that Oxbridge are looking to remove exams due to underperformance of students of ethnic minority background in tests [2] - which would support my view that it is easier to study at these institutions if you aren't white. but it's also possible that the education system is systematically 'letting down' white boys, which is a view supported by an education committee report (and countless others) in 2021. [3]

- 31 white pilots were let go / held back / paid off so that the RAF could prioritise diversity hires [4], [5].

- Police roles only open to BME candidates [6] - there are countless other examples of this, various government departments have used 'positive action' racism clauses in the same way.

You're just regurgitating what Labour talking heads are saying. You probably didn't even realise that it's legal to be racist against white people. Perhaps you should read more of the news, so you can understand what's really going on.

[0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/admissions-stat...

[1] https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/file...

[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/oxford-cambridge-move-away-tradit...

[3] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com...

[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66060490

[5] https://news.sky.com/story/raf-recruiters-were-advised-again...

[6] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/09/west-yorkshire-p...
by the_third_wave | 2025-04-10 11:34:01+00:00
Here's a more advanced - and 'ancient' (2000) - version of this idea: Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound [1].

I ran this for a number of months back in the day, it made my living room sound like a jungle. Running the same setup nowadays would probably make it sound like the gates of hell given the increase in network traffic.

You can still find it at Sourceforge but it will need some work or maybe a VM running an older Linux distribution:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/peep/

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
by zoudong376 | 2025-04-10 11:35:44+00:00
DeepCoder: Revolutionizing AI-Powered Code Generation from DeepSeek-R1-Distilled-Qwen-14B using distributed reinforcement learning (RL).It offers a powerful open-source model, known as the DeepCoder-14B-Preview, which is fine-tuned for coding tasks and achieves a remarkable 60.6% Pass@1 accuracy on LiveCodeBench.
by fidotron | 2025-04-10 11:36:03+00:00
In small towns or villages once you have a couple of them the general pace of everything around them tanks, partly because they can get away with far less revenue per sq metre due to the difference in taxation and reliance on volunteers. As others have mentioned the alternative might well be nothing there at all, which would be worse, but it has converted the central section of whole villages into feeling like they are in fact the outer buildings of nearby old people's homes.

Aesthetically they are, at best, a sort of British twist on the cheapest Ikea stylings which can be OK in small quantities but when they become everything it is depressing.
by amai | 2025-04-10 11:36:48+00:00
Water fluoridation is considered very common in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Chile and Australia where over 50% of the population drinks fluoridated water.

Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Scotland, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_countr...

Make your own conclusions.
by antonvs | 2025-04-10 11:37:07+00:00
Presumably you're not objecting to the word "parser".

What name would you use for "combinator"? It's a pretty simple word, based on the root "combine".

The common sense concept here is functions whose results depends only on their arguments, which makes them well-suited for being used in "combination" with other combinators, as in `f . g` or `f(g(x))`. That's called function composition, which can be defined as the act of combining functions.

It's a term that has existed in logic for over a century, from before computers existed.

It seems to me that no amount of renaming of terms will fix people's lack of curiosity or lack of desire to learn or understand. That's on them.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-04-10 11:37:57+00:00
See for example

https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1463

In general, if NaN1 and NaN2 are different (there are 23 bits in a NaN that can be set to an arbitrary value, the NaN payload) then combining them isn’t deterministic. NaN1 + NaN2 might produce NaN1 or NaN2 depending on the processor model, instructions etc. IEEE754 only says that the result must be one of the two input NaNs (or at least it did last time I checked the standard.)

In practice, NaN payloads are seldomly used so it doesn’t matter much. NaN canonicalization involves transforming all NaNs to specific NaN values, and AFAIK it’s expensive because technically you need to check for NaN all the time.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-10 11:39:09+00:00
Alternatively, let's throw out our outmoded ideas and all get excited for an AI-based future in which professors let AI grade the essays student generate with AI.

Just think of the time everybody will save! Instead of wasting effort learning or teaching, we'll be free to spend our time doing... uh... something! Generative AI will clearly be a real 10x or even 100x multiplier! We'll spiral into cultural and intellectual oblivion so much faster than we ever thought possible!
by gorbypark | 2025-04-10 11:39:15+00:00
Comfortable is of course subjective, but my current go to for "fancy" shoes is Meermin. For about the price of a pair of higher end Nike or Adidas shoes that are just foam glued to fabric, you can get a pair of "traditionally made" Goodyear welted leather shoes. Meermin, for example, still does some manufacturing steps in China. As far as I know they sew together the leather pieces in China and then ship them to Spain for lasting / final assembly / polishing.

It goes to show how the big athletic shoe companies are taking the piss. Of course they have middlemen and retailers and whatnot who need to take their cut, but if I can buy a pair of nice leather shoes, made from leather from UK/French/Italian tanneries, with about a million steps done by a human, for the same price as some glued together foam and fabric...something is wrong.
by 112233 | 2025-04-10 11:40:38+00:00
This comedy is a good comedy while I am goofing around with "make a story". However, this wordpuker tech is positioned at solving strategic problems, writing software and (something equally serious). It has no mechanism to build a world model "in head" while it generinates. chess pieces teleport on board. people hug through doors. any exercise is a body horror.

do you think this tech deals with invariants in software algorithms any better?

I mean, haha but not funny.
by rdsubhas | 2025-04-10 11:41:31+00:00
Compared to every other developed democracy in the planet, the US is politically unstable with its two party democracy.

Trump is just a product of this right-vs-left volatile maximalism, represented as woke-vs-maga, which is fully on-track to get worse. Try guessing who will be the next woke maximalist and maga maximalist candidate, and what Executive Orders it leads to, which the US is pretty much ruled by at this stage.

Good luck with flip-flopping maga and woke Executive law as a country.
by Zvez | 2025-04-10 11:41:53+00:00
calling everything 'for AI' is the new standard

>if you're reading from, like, big Parquet files, that probably means lots of random reads

and it also usually means that you shouldn't use s3 in the first place for workloads like this. Because they are usually very inefficient comparing to distributed fs. Unless you have some prefetch/cache layer, you will get both bad timings and higher costs
by rgoulter | 2025-04-10 11:42:40+00:00
> I honestly wonder why there are such divergent opinions between say git and Nix?

Nix is:

1. difficult & different, where similar-ish tools are straightforward & familiar, (e.g. cloud-init, ansible, vs NixOS; or devcontainers using Dockerfiles, vs nix shells).

2. demands a significant amount of understanding, even for tasks which you'd expect to be easy.

e.g.: git is difficult, but you can get by with rote memorizing 5 commands (& copy-pasting the repo if you mess up). Emacs is difficult, but you're not required to use it. Haskell can be difficult to work with, etc.

I'd say that running `direnv allow` & using nix that someone else has written is unlikely to be difficult. But, having to write your own Nix code can be quite high friction.

> It also seems that Nix's model is less clean

I think nixpkgs is cluttered with organic mess of inconsistent designs.. but I think there's also friction where Nix's ideal package is built with `./configure && make && make install`, and many packages aren't quite that clean.
by yladiz | 2025-04-10 11:42:45+00:00
> And, if you've made this side project I'm talking about, like I have, is it really worth $5,000/month to generate the most basic-bitch lasagna recipe you're not even gonna actually cook anyway? We both know the answer is "no."

Maybe this article has a good point later on, since it starts mentioning the energy cost of running an LLM, but after seeing this kind of writing a couple times I just clicked away. We’re not in like 2012 anymore, you can make your point in an acerbic way without being “edgy”.
by K0balt | 2025-04-10 11:43:07+00:00
This technique is still in common use here in the Dominican Republic, among honda cub street racers. It’s interesting that the most vibrant motorcycle racing scene is with motorcycles that were never meant to go fast and lack the frame stiffness or suspension to safely go above 50mph. I think the challenge of overcoming these limitations is what makes it compelling to the young riders and would-be-engineers that typically make up the illegal racing scene.