MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adolph | 2025-04-22 13:23:29+00:00
Isn't the difference between a pipeline and a method chain that a pipeline doesn't have to wait for the previous process to complete in order to send results to the next step? Grep sends lines as it finds them to sed and sed on to xargs, which acts as a sink to collect the data (an is necessary otherwise wc -l would write out a series of ones).

Given File.readlines("haystack.txt"), the entire file must be resident in memory before .grep(/needle/) is performed, which may cause unnecessary utilization. Iirc, in frameworks like Polars, the collect() chain ending method tells the compiler that the previous methods will be performed as a stream and thus not require pulling the entirety into memory in order to perform an operation on a subset of the corpus.
by grafmax | 2025-04-22 13:23:59+00:00
China’s economy has been responsible for approximately 75% of the global poverty reduction since the late 1970s [1]. It seems like we should credit socialism not capitalism with the reduction in poverty.

Today we enjoy countless benefits due to workers’ movements of the past. These benefits were fought every step of the way by the business class. It’s highly ironic to attribute all this to capitalism.

[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
by jmyeet | 2025-04-22 13:24:27+00:00
When this story first broke, my initial thought was that Elon was using this unprecedented and probably illegal access to access case data to benefit his companies and possibly others [1], most specifically for Tesla where unionization remains a threat to profits [2].

I don't know what the Russia connection is. Blue MAGA types like to contend that Trump is a Russian asset. There are definitely some weird connections going back to Trump purchasing TVs for a hotel in the 1980s [3] and some weird timings of the movements of Viktor Orban between Putin and Trump [4] but I just don't buy the Russian asset narrative.

I consider it way more likely that individual DOGE people have been compromised by foreign actors and possibly without their knowedge (eg compromised email or computers).

We're only 3 months into this. The amount of damage that is going to be done over the next 4 years is hard to comprehend.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43701222

[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-pay-vs-ford-gm-uaw-uni...

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1FHtBu5H8w&t=36s

[4]: https://www.axios.com/2024/07/12/trump-orban-meeting-mar-a-l...
by jerf | 2025-04-22 13:24:42+00:00
I think the way to look at it is that there's a lot of programs that don't need more than slices, maps, and combinations of said.

We know this is true, because dynamic scripting languages lean even more heavily into that, plus they do it with generally worse performance, and there are still many programs that those languages are perfectly suited for. Not every language has to have all the highest performance features pushed to the n'th degree.

If you sit down with a set of needs that needs that high performance stuff, that intensely needs custom data structures beyond those, and then you choose Go, the mistake isn't that Go doesn't have every last high-performance option, the mistake is, you shouldn't have chosen Go, anymore than you should sit down with those requirements and choose Perl. Though you may be able to get farther with Go, it was still the wrong choice on your part. I certainly look a bit askance at everyone who says "I'm going to write a high performance database to compete in the commercial database market!" and chooses Go... which is a surprisingly large group. That's not where this article comes from but it's where a lot of the other articles about super-optimizing Go comes from... but the real answer is, they probably shouldn't have chosen Go.

On the other hand, there's definitely always been a contingent of people out there who sit down to write a website that will get several dozen hits an hour and think they need to grab Rust and start banging out high performance async code without any framework assistance (can't afford the slowdown of abstraction, you know) with custom data structures and custom database code and "should I use mmap to access the file I'm storing all the data or should I use io_uring?" when in fact a pure-Python Django website backed to a conventional database that they forgot to even index properly would have humanly-indistinguishable performance. Engineers screw up their performance requirements analysis all over the place. It's probably one of the bigger and more consequential mistakes made by engineers that we rarely talk about here.
by _fat_santa | 2025-04-22 13:25:00+00:00
What is interesting to me is how those two things are mixing. Theoretically any one of us could own a russian domain and any one of us could get a job at NLRB (or another gov agency) but our jobs and our ownership of that domain are two entirely separate things.

What's interesting here is how these two things are seemingly mixing. At this point I have two pet theories:

- One of the DOGE staffers is a Russian agent: This one I'm putting in the camp of "highly highly unlikely" but still possible given those login attempts from Russia.

- The more likely theory is this is just some braindead attempt to "own the libs". If we look back 6-8 years to when all the Trump Russia stuff came out and turned into a nothingburger. This could be some idea like: "Yo I've got this VM in Russia, let's own the libs and make them thin the Russians are invading again!"

- It could also be completley innocouous. Like right now I have a Mullvad VPN setup on my machine that points to Algeria. Ubuntu will auto start this VPN at login. What if one of DOGE staffers just happened to have a VPN running with an exit in Russia when they tried logging in.
by mikeyouse | 2025-04-22 13:25:02+00:00
Unfortunately close to a new lawsuit where a H1B employee at Tesla reported a serious safety issue and Musk allegedly threatened to deport her entire team..

> About a decade ago, engineer Cristina Balan called out a safety concern about a design flaw on a Tesla vehicle. Shortly after, Balan says she was forced to resign. Now, she's explaining the leverage Tesla allegedly used to get her signature.

> At Tesla CEO Elon Musk's own request, Balan went straight to the top to solve a problem in 2014, which involved floor mats in the Model S curling near the pedals, affecting braking. But instead of being granted a meeting with Musk, "HR and the legal department had another plan for me," Balan said in an interview with Times Radio over the weekend.

> "They told me that if I'm not resigning on the spot, they will deport my entire team…because the entire interior team was backing me up," said Balan, who is from Romania and has said many of her team members were waiting on green card applications. "And their plan—Tesla's plan and legal department plan—was to convince the entire team and myself to close the internal investigation that we opened in the company to fix a serious safety issue." Notably, Tesla has been among the leading employers of H-1B visa holders, who perform work in specialty occupations.

https://www.chron.com/culture/article/tesla-engineer-deporta...
by wpietri | 2025-04-22 13:25:22+00:00
If you really subscribed to POSIWID, you wouldn't be making arguments like "That's probably not the goal", as that's nonsensical from the POSIWID perspective.

The nominal goal of the code could well be bots at the same time the POSIWID purpose is about the exec impressing his superiors and the developers feeling smart and indulging their pet technical interests. Similarly, the nominal goal of the abuse reporting system would include spam, even if the POSIWID analysis would show that the true current purpose is to say they're doing something while keeping costs low.

So again, I don't think you have a lot of understanding of how large companies work. Whereas I, among other things, ran an anti-abuse engineering team at Twitter back in the day, so I'm reasonably familiar with the dynamics.
by vinceguidry | 2025-04-22 13:26:37+00:00
Sure, Apple won't stop you. But the defaults matter. If you're writing a shell script and you want it to run on MacOS, you need to target the ancient version it's actually shipping, or you have to tell your whole team to install a later version. If your servers are running Linux then you'll be dealing with platform inconsistencies all day long. Ask me how I know.
by franciscojarceo | 2025-04-22 13:26:54+00:00
Hey folks!

I recently gave a talk with the Milvus Community showing a demo of how to transform PDFs with Feast using Docling for RAG.

The tutorial is available here: https://github.com/feast-dev/feast/tree/master/examples/rag-...

And the video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPPtr9Q6_qE

The goal with having a feature store transform and retrieve your data for RAG is that (1) we make it easy to configure vector retrieval with just a boolean in the code declaration and (2) you can use existing tooling that data scientists / ml engineers are already familiar with.

I'd love any feedback or ideas on how we could make things better or easier. The Feast maintainers have quite a lot in the pipeline (batch transformations, support for Ray, computer vision and more).

Thanks a ton!
by grewsome | 2025-04-22 13:27:39+00:00
Tcl doesn't have fewer features, it packs in a lot, probably because of its maturity, to a similar level as other mature scripting languages (OO, coroutines, event loop, slave interps, etc, etc). But it's poor when you want something to run quick, or if you want to carefully manage memory because you have a lot of data. Also there is no typing, and for large code bases that is detrimental. But by using two languages you can get the best of both worlds. But then you need to program competently in two languages, and that takes a surprising amount of experience, and the hand saw and hammer analogy isn't accurate in this case.
by bhouston | 2025-04-22 13:28:13+00:00
My biggest reason is flexibility in machine configuration. I found a lot of flexibility in bringing my own machine to the table. I can set any mix of HDD or SSD or Nvme or ram in my machines. With synology or any other premade box I am stuck in a specific config.

For example my current TrueNAS at home has 128GB of Ram, 32TB of NVMe (live data) and 72TB of HDD (archive data) with significant cpu and gpu (well compared to synology box, I am running a Ryzen 5700G) and 10G networking.

It didn’t start out here but because TrueNAS works with your own hardware I can evolve myself incrementally as hardware costs and needs change.

It is a beast of a machine and it is no work to maintain - TrueNAS makes it an appliance.

I’ve written up previously on my home setup here: https://benhouston3d.com/blog/home-network-lessons
by quickthrowman | 2025-04-22 13:28:14+00:00
This is a great post which describes how most commercial boilers are controlled. I’m looking at a sequence of operations for a boiler project I did recently and the hot water supply setpoint for -20F outdoor air is 145F and for +45F the hot water supply setpoint is 120F.

Most home boilers lack an outdoor air reference temp sensor but all commercial boilers have them.

Also, condensing boilers are amazing, the size difference alone vs an old tube boiler is wild, very small in comparison.
by zmgsabst | 2025-04-22 13:28:18+00:00
As a PSYOP, it’s great:

- create account

- attempt to access whatever records, don’t worry about succeeding

- wait for US news to cause fragmentation

Undermining US unity is an objective of Russian influence, as we’ve seen from the spectrum of advocacy groups they funded ads for.

- - - - -

There’s also the suspicious timing that this happened just as the US was engaged with Russia to negotiate peace in Ukraine — and that this embarrasses the regime doing so and encourages a feud with Russia. (As an indication that it may not be so simple.)

Spying is complicated.
by adolph | 2025-04-22 13:28:24+00:00
> A pilot has already demonstrated the technological breakthrough producing the explosives in small nodes. This technology would remove the need for a large-scale explosive factory. The new propellant formulation and associated manufacturing process have been demonstrated across a wide range of products from small arms to large calibre munitions.

Imagine if it could be scaled down enough so a person could carry it around, just give them feedstock and the processor creates propellant.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-04-22 13:28:30+00:00
>With weed, there's no another way

Based on what, your personal experience talking to stoners in college? Plenty of people smoke socially, and among people who smoke cannabis, only a small fraction "lock themselves into apartments and smoke weed all day". In fact, that fraction is much smaller than the fraction of people who drink alcohol who lock themselves in their apartments drinking all day. And I don't know if you've spent any time with those people, but they all have cognitive issues too. As do people who do speed all day. As do people who do heroin all day.

Cannabis can be a wonderful social drug, as can amphetamine or cocaine, and I'm sure even opioids, though I don't touch those because I have significant genetic risk for opioid addiction.

I don't think judging a drug by its most addicted users is fair. Especially since you're doing that for weed, and then comparing that to the most reasonable alcohol users.

All that being said, I absolutely agree that cannabis is not good for you in large quantities. It's absolutely bad for cognitive ability, working memory, and long term memory when used chronically. But the only people I've met who would disagree with that are cannabis addicts, and usually young ones at that(the older ones tend to figure it out unless they stay stoned for their entire lives, which does happen). Most people I talk to are well aware of these things. And at least from my own experience, these effects will generally pass once you cut down.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-22 13:28:41+00:00
This is what intentionality is about. No intentionality, no truth.

An LLM doesn't deal with propositions, and it is propositions that are the subjects of truth claims. LLMs produce strings of characters that, when interpreted by a human reader, can look like propositions and result in propositions in the human mind, and it is those propositions that have intentionality and truth value. But what the LLMs produce are not the direct expression of propositional content, only the recombination of a large number of expressions of propositional content authored by many human authors.

People are projecting subjective convention onto the objective. The objective truth about LLMs is far poorer in substance than the conventional readings we give to what LLMs generate. There is a good deal of superstition and magical thinking that surrounds LLMs.
by arunabha | 2025-04-22 13:29:06+00:00
At this point, the number of probable explanations for antics DOGE in particular and the administration in general are close to zero.

One somewhat far fetched(till recently) explanation floated for the all out war on institutions waged by the Trump administration is that the goal is to destroy the last remaining entity in this country that is capable of standing up to corporations. The idea seemed laughable just a couple of months back. The fact that it seems very probable now shows just how bad the situation is.

At what point will Congress act? Or will they simply sit by as the country is destroyed from the inside?
by ZenThereWere0 | 2025-04-22 13:29:08+00:00
Thank you for the dosbox-x suggestion. I am running Ubuntu on a newer laptop and did not have any luck getting Age of Empires to work in a virtual machine because of issues with DirectX on modern hardware. The game would render so slowly as to be unplayable.

I installed dosbox-x out of curiosity, then saw you could load Windows 9x on top of it. I chose the recommended Win98SE. It took a bit of tweaking to get the drivers loaded for 256 color display and the sound card, but I was just able to play the game. Because DosBox emulates the machine (I think this is it, anyway.), there are no issues with DirectX rendering. I was able to play through the Ascent of Egypt learning campaign for the first time since 2009 or so.

Maybe next I'll try to loading up a version of BASIC. I'd have to rewind back to 2000 or so for using Visual Basic in high school computer lab.

Thanks again, getting to play AoE without having to buy an XP-era laptop, was a real treat.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-04-22 13:29:20+00:00
For me it’s not complicated when to use AI. If the task is something where having fluency will make me significantly more productive and nimble in the future, then I’ll go the old gym way.

It’s like communicating in a foreign language- you can do it with AI, but if it’s an essential element of your job then you’re going to invest the time to learn it so it becomes part of you.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-22 13:30:14+00:00
The debt isn’t real, it could be forgiven. If moral hazard wins, those who can will continue to leave the country, those who can’t will pay this tax, diminishing economic output, and less people will go to college in the future.

If we’re going to keep speed running the decline of the US, it’s a fine strategy. The people making these choices will be long dead by the time the consequences arrive.
by eru | 2025-04-22 13:32:04+00:00
Who says that the judgement will be of the form 'you were nicer back then, you get better treatment now'. What if it was the opposite? Or what if it was something totally orthogonal?

Pascal's Wager only works if the only god conceivable is one that wants you to believe in her. Instead of one that eg rewards honest atheists, or that just likes left-handers.
by mtillman | 2025-04-22 13:32:13+00:00
Serenity is an amazing accomplishment. It’s odd to me though because I always hated the windows interface, even 3.11. It seems a lot of modern Linux desktops (I know serenity isn’t Linux) try to emulate the feel of modern windows but it ends up looking like a meh version of an already bad interface imo. I still prefer the look of enlightenment or motif+4dwm.
by sam_goody | 2025-04-22 13:32:31+00:00
I use uptimekuma (self hosted) and am very happy - it can text, or just about anything else - as long as you set it up.

Also Tianji[1], self-hosted in the same space.

Of course, these require setup and have to be hosted somewhere. Either another server or deployed to Heroku (Sealos, Render, etc), since they obviously cannot be deployed on the server you wish to monitor!

[1]: https://tianji.msgbyte.com/
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-22 13:32:54+00:00
You're misreading what I've written and being intentionally obtuse.

I didn't say the heart plays a role in intelligence. I simply allowed for the possibility for the sake of argument. The central claim is that no one (here, Francis and his writers) who uses the word "heart" colloquially is making the claim that the heart-as-organ is the seat of intelligence or what have you.

You're committing a vulgar equivocation fallacy that the average person with common sense would recognize. I have a difficult time believing you don't understand something so obvious.
by rashunain | 2025-04-22 13:33:16+00:00
Daily current affairs updates are available in Hindi, including news headlines, GK questions, and answers. Overall, the hindi current affairs of 22 April 2025 covers a range of topics, including national and international news, sports, education, and daily current affairs quizzes. It is essential to stay updated with the latest news and developments to remain informed and prepared for competitive exams and other challenges.
by DanielHB | 2025-04-22 13:33:38+00:00
> 1. Enforce some level of code complexity. Best practice is 40 lines per function and no more than 4 parameters per function. Epic probably shouldn’t shoot for that, but a 100 line limit and 6 parameters per function would already be a huge improvement.

If I were to enforce some kind of arbitrary code complexity threshold for functions I would put a cap on the limit of possible of branching combinations based on parameters within the code. Like around 16 (branching combinations are exponential).

For example a function with 20 parameters but only one if statement is fine. A function with 5 parameters but several nested if statements is not.
by p_v_doom | 2025-04-22 13:34:39+00:00
Most of the greater conditions that people experience today have been the result of markedly pro-social discoveries and forces in medicine, agriculture etc. Likewise the rights and comforts we have are largely driven by a) colonization that makes those of us in the West more comfy b) violent labor movements and revolutions in the 20th cnetury, that means we get stuff like free healthcare, education and the like in more civilized places of the world. There are no such countries with no innovation/enterpreneurship, its just countries with more material capabilities to enable these, and countries with less, and a big reason for this discrepancy is point a above.

None of this has much to do with economic growth, economic growth is an artificial construct on top of the material reality, used to justify a specific way of viewing the economy and the way things are structured.
by jstummbillig | 2025-04-22 13:34:42+00:00
I think this fails to recognize how many more important problems there are in the world, and that the writing of code was not meant to be one of them, but only came into existence to solve them.

Of course, that does not have to be true now. You can certainly do this for personal satisfaction.

But the argument in this article is a bit confused. The step that lies behind "coding" is not of lesser difficulty, on the contrary. Instead of worrying about coding, we can instead worry about the bigger picture, and all the beautiful thinking, contemplating and deadlock it entails.

Only now, we are one step closer to solving a real problem.
by 9rx | 2025-04-22 13:35:05+00:00
> Building new houses reduces the cost of used houses!

You're not wrong if you live in a house inside a vacuum, but, again, in the real world, if people are already struggling with the used price, who is going to pay even more to build new?

As surprising as it may be, houses won't magically materialize on the back of hopes and dreams. They require intense amounts of real labour to build and labour isn't going to show up if you aren't throwing copious amounts of money constantly in their face. If nobody wants to pay that labour the unfathomable amounts of money they require, a house is not getting built.

> Strange but true!

Not particularly strange, but cars are now stuck in the same situation, with the price of new cars having become prohibitively expensive and used cars are failing to come back down even as supply chains are no longer bottlenecked. In fact, the assembly plant near me just closed citing weak demand, so it seems there is even excess capacity. Much like houses, cars don't magically materialize either. They need willing buyers. But if you have no willing buyers...
by eru | 2025-04-22 13:35:14+00:00
> I’m totally against the anthropomorphization of LLMs. These are tools, not sentient beings. Treat them as such.

Have you heard people talk about their cars? Humans love anthropomorphizing, and you can't beat it out of them.

> LLMs trying to simulate human behavior is like the equivalent of skeuomorphism in UI design.

You say that like it's a bad thing.