MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seabass-labrax | 2025-04-14 00:41:07+00:00
I don't see why it's a problem for a potential rail service for San Francisco and Los Angeles that there are no heavily populated areas between the two cities. There's no reason why you couldn't fill up a train with passengers at the start and travel non-stop to the destination, just as the vast majority of airlines operate.

Trains still have all their usual benefits including better passenger comfort and higher energy efficiency, and there is the option to build intermediate stations if the demand increases in the future.

I would also question the claim that overnight trains cannot be justified for business travel. If the cost is comparable to a hotel room - which is a big 'if', granted - this allows employees to be better rested and therefore work more effectively during the day.
by georgewfraser | 2025-04-14 00:41:28+00:00
I am generally a huge vertical sharding skeptic but there are special cases where it is beneficial. If you have a simple query pattern on one table that represents a big fraction of your entire workload you can put it into its own instance and it becomes much easier to monitor. It’s easy to see why vertical sharding is sometimes the right answer by inverting the decision: should we put two unrelated large applications on the same instance? Obviously not, there is no benefit and ops becomes more difficult.
by cj | 2025-04-14 00:43:20+00:00
That’s not really how it works, though. The price of your options is set based on when you join the company. If the company is already valuable by the time you join, you’re essentially buying in at the current valuation with the hope that the valuation will continue to increase.

You make money on the amount the company value increases starting the day the options were granted.

(This comment isn’t 100% technically accurate, but gets the point across in fewer words)
by anothernewdude | 2025-04-14 00:44:09+00:00
> If a language model was just a stochastic parrot, when we looked inside to see what was going on, we’d basically find a lookup table

I disagree right away. There are more sophisticated probability models than lookup tables.

> It'd be running a search for the most similar pattern in its training data and copying this.

Also untrue. Sophisticated probability models combine probabilities based on combining all the bits of context, and by fuzzing similar tokens together via compressing (i.e. you don't care what particular token is used, just that a similar one is used.)

They're parrots, just better parrots than this person can conceive of.
by minimaxir | 2025-04-14 00:44:11+00:00
In the case of MCPs, this post is indeed a quick primer. But from a coding standpoint, and despite the marketing that Agent/MCP development simplifies generative LLM workflows, it’s a long coding mess that is hard to tell if it’s even worth it. It’s still the ReAct paradigm at a low level and if you couldn’t find a case for tools then, nothing has changed other than the Agent/MCP hype making things more confusing and giving more ammunition to AI detractors.
by YZF | 2025-04-14 00:44:19+00:00
Edit window is past but I just want to make this absolutely clear that these sorts of actions are war crimes. The people responsible for these should face consequences. I'm pretty sure they're illegal (there has been a Supreme Court ruling on these practices) and also go against IDF rules.

War crimes happen during wars. The French, the Americans, the British, The Australians etc. etc. have all committed war crimes in all their wars since WW-II (and before, that concept didn't exist). In terms of accountability in those militaries it's O(0). The IDF has on many occasions put soldiers on trial for violating rules of war. It's a core value in the IDF to fight morally. And yes, in today's Israel and today's war it's not the same as it has been but relative to western armies it's within the practiced norms. Relative to Hamas whose strategy and tactics are one big war crime there's no comparison.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-14 00:44:23+00:00
> between the two cities. There's no reason why you couldn't fill up a train with passengers at the start and travel non-stop to the destination, just as the vast majority of airlines operate.

This isn't flat land. There are expansive mountain ranges that make it difficult to build and any flat land that is buildable is ALSO prime agricultural land that is worth millions.

Just to recoup the cost you end up with ticket prices comparable to a flight.

> I would also question the claim that overnight trains cannot be justified for business travel. If the cost is comparable to a hotel room - which is a big 'if', granted - this allows employees to be better rested and therefore work more effectively during the day.

Yeah no. I don't want employees to come in unshowered, and they still need a place to keep their luggage. Furthermore, plenty of people like maintaining their daily routine or spending time with their SOs. Flying a couple hours, staying at a hotel overnight, getting work done, and immediately bugging out back home is the norm.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-14 00:44:27+00:00
I think the author used the word correctly but explained the circumstances somewhat confusingly.

IIUC an entity engaged a service to register a domain on its behalf. So the entity did indeed register via the service, but it would also be correct to state that registration was carried out by the service. That service also happens to provide a link shortener. So instead of referring to the service as "company X" the author went with "link shortener".
by darod | 2025-04-14 00:46:04+00:00
One thing not pointed out in the article, but I would like to hear others perspective on, is what happens at the 4 year mark when all options are fully vested and exercisable. This is a scenario for employees that have been there long-term. Should requests be made for further option grants? Should employers think about further option grants to retain employees? What are people’s thoughts and experiences?
by fnord77 | 2025-04-14 00:46:23+00:00
> The scenario following the crash of 2008 differed entirely. In the United States, policy ambulances were on the spot immediately. Under Obama fraudulent banks and insurance companies and bankrupt automobile corporations were rescued with huge infusions of public funds never available for decent healthcare, schools, pensions, railways, roads, airports, let alone income support for the worst-off.
by dm03514 | 2025-04-14 00:47:42+00:00
I def agree that there is a pattern to most data pipelines:

- read from an input (source)

- perform some sort of processing

- write the data to some output (sink)

This may either be batch or continuous (stream). The inputs may change, the outputs may change.

I personally think that sql and duckdb are well positioned to do this. SQL is declarative, standardized and has decades worth of mature implementations.

The “source” can be modeled as a table.

The “sink” can also be modeled as a table.

What does a custom dsl provide over sql?

I have a side project called Sqlflow which is attempting to do something similar/

https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow

It’s not a DSL but the pipeline is standardized using the source, process, sink stages. Right now the process is pure sql but the source and sink are declarative. SQL has so much prior art, linters and a huge ecosystem with many practitioners.
by Rendello | 2025-04-14 00:47:54+00:00
I had a longer comment but it was too all over the place. For me, ultimately, I think Math Academy has really helped me. That being said, I put a lot of time and effort into it, and I imagine it would be difficult for people with a lot of commitments. I sometimes reach for supplementary materials, sometimes get ChatGPT to re-explain something, but mostly I manage.

I think the article gives the impression that MA is like Duolingo, but it's not. There's no flashy animations, sound effects, or mascots, the interface is spartan like Hacker News. It can't be (effectively) done in five minutes a day. It requires total concentration and a lot of time commitment.
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-14 00:47:57+00:00
First, dilution should only be happening at funding events, not every time a new senior staff person is hired, and second the dilution should affect everyone equally— founders, execs, angels, VCs.

It's super unfair to give an employee "x shares" that turn out on exit to be shares of a fixed pie that is different from the one the investors have their shares in.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-14 00:48:22+00:00
How is it beside the point? Legal might initially advise against cloud storage but if you come back to them with one that's encrypted on the client side that likely changes things.

Compensation could be of the form "we get a cheaper rate from Google" or even "this is the only form in which the service is offered" or perhaps "we aren't big enough to qualify for the fully airgapped offering".
by YZF | 2025-04-14 00:48:37+00:00
Just as an example: Israel's minister of defense is Israel Katz. Katz stands for "Cohen Tzedek". Israel traces his paternal lineage all the way back to priests that served in the temple in Jerusalem during the days of King David. There is no other way to assume the name Cohen or any of the variation of priest family names. Similar for Levy. There is no way to convert and assume that name. The lineage of Jewish priests also has DNA evidence that they are all related.

His family was forced off their land and prevented by force from returning through the ages.

It so happens to be Passover now. Do you know how many time each Jewish person mentions returning to Jerusalem during the Seder every year?

His right to live in his ancestral homeland, just like the right of native in Canada or Australia or the US, never expires. The only way to settle his claim is through mutual agreement, like treaties in Canada.
by sgustard | 2025-04-14 00:49:06+00:00
The majority of comments here seem to argue the ideal equity share for employees is zero, since it probably won't be worth anything. That seems like an even more founder friendly viewpoint, no? Mass inequality of ownership is how we end up normalizing the corrupt billionaire class. I agree with you we need an industry desire for better ownership terms, but instead I see people arguing employees should just take a salary, look the other way, and let owners hoard all the spoils.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-14 00:49:51+00:00
Philosophers have been arguing a parallel point for centuries. Does intelligence require some sort of (ostensibly human-ish) qualia or does “if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck” apply?

I think it's better to look at large language models in the context of Wittgenstein. Humans are more than next token predictors because we participate in “language games” through which we experimentally build up a mental model for what each word means. LLMs learn to “rule follow” via a huge corpus of human text but there’s no actual intelligence there (in a Wittgensteinian analysis) because there’s no “participation” beyond RLHF (in which humans are playing the language games for the machine). There’s a lot to unpack there but that’s the gist of my opinion.

Until we get some rigorous definitions for intelligence or at least break it up into many different facets, I think pie in the sky philosophy is the best we can work with.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-14 00:49:53+00:00
Yep, but that does not need to be justified by a HSR expansion.

You could justify a San Benito County expansion as part of a Caltrain electrification and expansion project for a fraction of the cost and headaches.

And do the same for San Joaquin County to the Bay+Sacramento, San Bernardino County to LA, and Imperial Valley to San Diego.

In fact, this is what the CA government has been doing after treating the HSR as de facto moribund.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-14 00:51:10+00:00
> because others have more resources and could build this in no time

You are getting bad advice.

Lots of things that other big corps can build because they have more resources. But guess what? They don't. Because big companies have their blind spots, they have their roadmaps, they have their product teams that are focused on the things that generate revenue, they're slow to move and slow to innovate.

Lots of small startups end up getting acquired by larger entities because the small startup can pivot faster, adapt more quickly to shifting tech, and simply move faster. As a small startup, though, you need to be able to do at least one thing 100x better than the rest of the field.

Startup I'm at right now started with a calendar scheduling web app -- anyone would argue that space is oversaturated. Yet it did one thing that was absolutely unique and is thriving.

Keep at it and figure out what it is that you can do 100x better. It just needs to be one killer feature that solves a real pain point. Don't worry about larger corps and competitors; they won't care about your feature until you're far enough along that they're feeling churn.
by paxys | 2025-04-14 00:52:05+00:00
Exactly. If I'm joining a 30 person startup it's not because of the size of the paycheck. Any larger company will obvioulsy be able to easily beat the offer. I want a significant amount of equity. I want to see the cap table. I want to see details about funding rounds, finances, available runway. I want to see MRR/ARR, recently closed deals. If founders dance around these questions and say "equity is not imporant, see how much we are paying you" then I'm walking out the door.
by NegativeK | 2025-04-14 00:52:46+00:00
I used to think that the up voting mechanic was the future of the internet.

Now I think that it's a perverse incentive that requires very heavy handed moderation to not suck (AKA more free labor), and that time decaying posts can discourage quality, in-depth discussions.

Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.
by nopinsight | 2025-04-14 00:53:08+00:00
My request:

“Could you explain this sentence concisely?

For the skeptics: Scoring just 10% or so in Math-Perturb-Hard below the original MATH Level 5 (hardest) dataset seems in line with or actually better than most people would do.”

Gemini 2.5 Pro:

“The sentence argues that even if a model's score drops by about 10% on the "Math-Perturb-Hard" dataset compared to the original "MATH Level 5" (hardest) dataset, this is actually a reasonable, perhaps even good, outcome. It suggests this performance decrease is likely similar to or better than how most humans would perform when facing such modified, difficult math problems.”
by Sunspark | 2025-04-14 00:53:14+00:00
I can't give you a non-speculative answer because in truth, my coding is from the Pascal era.

The way I look at it in terms of cheaper is that you don't need to be as careful, less need to worry about memory leaks which lead to exploits, etc. I.e. you don't have to track every little thing yourself.

Starting to make inroads with larger projects now.. Firefox's audio subsystem is in Rust, while Chromium's is C++ (w/ tools to help detect leaks).
by 0_____0 | 2025-04-14 00:53:15+00:00
IMO:

The US suffers from the notion of exceptionalism spawned from its position of massive advantage after WWII, as well as a deep seated aversion to mass transit that was borne out of the backlash against desegregation.

I'm probably missing many smaller factors, but I'd be interested to know if someone thinks that I've incorrectly identified those two as major factors.
by jeffbee | 2025-04-14 00:53:20+00:00
The proposed CAHSR business plan calls for 2 peak hourly trains plus 2 additional trains per day stopping nowhere between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. 2 of these are suggested to be actual non-stop SF to LA Union Station, even though bypassing San Jose is pretty crazy. But anyway you are right: it's no problem at all.

There are also plenty of population centers between SF and LA which is why trains are going to stop in Fresno and Bakersfield (combined pop: 2.2 million). Also Palmdale. If Palmdale is nowhere then Brightline West is also a train to nowhere.

Alephnerd is making the same mistake that many nerds have made. They are arguing about the existing passenger, while the point of the project is to serve the next ten million Californians.
by chuckadams | 2025-04-14 00:56:23+00:00
I never got people’s objections to the parentheses when the bottom of most js/ts files is a soup of three different flavors of closing bracket. Even more “fun” in languages like PHP that make you sprinkle ceremonial semicolons into some parts to satisfy the compiler. Hunting for the right brace is tedious, whereas in a lisp I just bounce on close paren til the open paren highlight is where I want it.
by pridkett | 2025-04-14 00:58:59+00:00
I’ve had a couple of the original, the prime, extend, and now the Flex 4K. They’ve all been terrific devices. The extend was a little wonky because transcoding goes wonky on bad signals, but generally great.

They’re all a huge improvement over older cards like the pcHDTV or the really old Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 that I fought with for Freevo and MythTV so long ago. The switch to Channels was a huge quality of life improvement too.
by ryao | 2025-04-14 00:59:04+00:00
At a glance, the code is compatible with all C standards ever published. You are too fixated on learning the latest. The latest is largely just a superset of the earlier standards and the new features are often obscure things you are unlikely to need or want to use.

The main exceptions that you actually would want to use would be the ability to declare variables anywhere in a block and use single line // comments from C++ in C99. Most C programmers do not even know about most of the things added in newer C standards beyond those and perhaps a handful of others.
by airstrike | 2025-04-14 00:59:21+00:00
In the form of loans. Far from a perfect program, but from Wikipedia:

> On December 19, 2014, the U.S. Treasury sold its remaining holdings of Ally Financial, essentially ending the program. Through the Treasury, the US Government actually booked $15.3 billion in profit, as it earned $441.7 billion on the $426.4 billion invested.[2][3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
by missedthecue | 2025-04-14 01:00:23+00:00
It's worth noting that at least in China, you must go through security checks before boarding bullet trains which include ID verification, X-rays of passenger and their luggage, and some liquid checks (staff may ask you to take a sip of your drink to confirm it's safe). Depending on the time of day, it is a bit quicker.

The main time saver is that the train stations are much more central. Say you you need to leave your office in Beijing's financial district and meet a client at their office in Shanghai's financial district. The station in Bejing will be 6km from your office vs the airport (30km), and you'll get off the train 9km from your client (instead of 45km at the airport).
by yongjik | 2025-04-14 01:00:44+00:00
> This isn't flat land. There are expansive mountain ranges that make it difficult to build and any flat land that is buildable is ALSO prime agricultural land that is worth millions.

Japan's Shinkansen started service in 1964, and the country is known for its mountains and earthquakes. Hell, forget Japan, California's mountain ranges somehow didn't stop America from building I-5, I-10, I-80, and what not, back in the 80s.

"Prime agricultural land" is non sequitur - those lands are sold by acres.
by 6510 | 2025-04-14 01:00:44+00:00
There are so many parameters that it is impossible to figure out. They should probably load all params into a virtual model and have an AI try out everything.

Besides the obvious investments making tickets more expensive a different example would be if you accelerate faster you need more rails maintenance.

You can also leave carts behind and pick them up at stops so that people who need it have all the time to get in and out. If you do that (like with many options) it gets marvelously complicated really fast.

Even if you try fit an intercity (that doesn't stop everywhere) it will have to be at the right place at the right time to pass the other train(s)

You can also not make it fast and make the trip more enjoyable. You can just stop for 30 min or an hour at each station and have stores and museums at the station bring in more revenue than tickets.

If I had to guess the most successful trick for the US would be to have people bring their car on the train.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-14 01:00:52+00:00
On the contrary, demands that aren't founded in reality are often easier to satisfy, because pure rhetoric can shift the narrative much more easily than it can shift reality. Going back to Denmark again, if you pulled out charts and tried to track the objective quantity of immigration, you'd have a hard time identifying any policy shift. But as you say, immigration restrictionists were never looking at these charts in the first place. What matters politically is that the center-left PM goes around talking about how mass migration can be dangerous and the preservation of Danish culture is valuable.
by Retric | 2025-04-14 01:00:59+00:00
> If you mean they are both supporting Israel

I have been talking about the propaganda from each sides of the current conflict in Palestine. I thought this make that clear “in this conflict so it’s really interesting to see how each side is using propaganda” but I may have misunderstood what you meant by supporting Israel.

> This isn't then your previous comment that the results are similar.

To be clear I’m noticing similar goals combined with something (diminishing returns?) yield similar results. Hell, it could also be a form follows function kind of thing, I’m noticing the results not doing a research paper.

> what goals

When I say they have similar goals I mean they are both trying to sway public option to support their agenda.

There’s a bunch of different kinds of kind of propaganda. If one side was doing a call to action for their supporters like “Buy war bonds!” then I presume the results wouldn’t seem so similar.
by donnachangstein | 2025-04-14 01:02:03+00:00
What's ironic is this thread is full of comments agreeing that Reddit sucks because the voting/karma system is flawed and shadow banning is toxic and deranged yet all those very features and policies exist here. In fact, HN is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for shadow banning as an early adopter of the practice. (Yes I agree it sucks but that's not the point of my comment.)

So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.

Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?
by addaon | 2025-04-14 01:02:10+00:00
> If you include the time spent arriving early, going through security, etc, it probably comes out about even.

Yeah, but that only lasts until someone figures out a clever way to use a train as a weapon, in which case you get to add the same security time to the front of the trip -- or even longer, since we've actually managed to get the airport security time down a bit over the past two decades. It would seem optimistic to try to scale usage of rail without accounting for the (time, safety, etc) costs that come with increased usage of rail...
by rtkwe | 2025-04-14 01:02:15+00:00
One large problem is passenger rail is a second class citizen on US rail, legally it’s supposed to be given priority but ultimately it’s all on private rail and enforcement is non existent so it’ll get delayed for things caused by cargo. I had an Amtrak journey that had to sit and wait for an hour or two to let the tracks cool after a particularly heavy cargo train had gone by.