MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-05 06:38:45+00:00
> I hate "artificially low" why artificial? What makes something artificial and what makes it real?

When people have cheap access to money, they spend it. When they spend it in such a manner that it outpaces the ability of the supply side to, well, supply, the result is inflation. And that's what we saw in '21 and '22. You had someone handing out PPP loans like candy and forgiving them outright, you had stimmy checks (that weren't backed by anything real, but that's another story), you had people sitting around looking for stuff to pass lockdown with, etc.

So at that point, by definition, we're lower than the "natural" interest rate. This showed that a lot of businesses in the tech industry couldn't survive without dirt-cheap money to give them ever-increasing amounts of runway. You can't just hyper scale like Uber when borrowers expect the rate of return dictated by the now-higher "natural" interest rate.

> No data backing this up.

Besides decades of economic, social, environmental, and political events and trends, you're right. Wanna have a bottle of water from Flint, MI? I can pull one out of the cellar. 2015, a fine year.

> OC talking about media calling them 'flyover country' as if it matters / is somehow out of bounds conduct at all.

1) that's not indicative of the stuff you were charging 2) yeah, it is out-of-bounds conduct. It's an a-hole move to belittle poorer regions in your country, whether explicitly or in more tacit ways. If you do it long enough, you get where we are now. Anyone happy about that?
by usr1106 | 2025-04-05 06:38:57+00:00
I cannot confirm that. When I was younger I liked traveling to far countries like the US, Australia, New Zealand (living in Europe) To the US I would no longer travel for political reasons, and generally I try not to fly anymore when not necessary to visit relatives. So I travel by Interrail (called Eurail for those outside of Europe) and even there often with a focus on slower trains. At 60 it was the first occasion I got a senior citizen reduction in my life. Even that was a new experience :) And slower trains allow many kinds of new experiences, from the co-passengers and from the places they stop at.
by at_a_remove | 2025-04-05 06:39:22+00:00
I have always despised travel, possibly as a result of being moved around a lot as a child.

I do not care for a single facet of it. Not the planning, or the reservations, of the attaining of paperwork. Packing or parking. Checking maps to see where my terminal might be. Pre-flight fondling by total strangers. Getting on a plane. Being on a plane. Getting off of a plane. Trying to find my way to wherever it is I am supposed to go, which I know in theory but must now execute. I also have a mild handicap which can make navigating some situations more difficult than it would otherwise be for someone normal. Seeing just kind of torture the word "breakfast" has undergone to appear in the hotel at morning.

Then there is the thing itself, whatever it is you are supposed to be seeing. Chances are, you won't even be able to get close to it. Apparently, you get to look at the Mona Lisa from something of a distance, and now less than a minute. Oooh. Then you should get a laminated card that says "Some photons bounced off of the Mona Lisa and were absorbed by my retina" so you can tell everyone.

And you're trapped wherever it is until your ticket home is valid.

Even if someone else is paying for it, I just have zero interest. Unfortunately, some friends have gotten into cruises and traveling, which leads to frequent exhortation that I, too, should travel, no matter how much I demur. Being pushed for travel was also an irritant at a previous job.

They say, "Well, think of all of the strange foods and new restaurants!" I spend more time at the international markets than most and, honestly, this city has plenty of restaurants I have yet to try, so if that were a motivating factor, I hardly need a plane ticket and itinerary to partake.

The furthest I have gone is about three hundred miles to take a close friend (he had a very terrible year of one disaster after another occur to him) to a concert to cheer him up.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-05 06:41:00+00:00
I don't think the positions have reversed as much as you're thinking. Trump began this round of trade wars with a series of indefensible attacks on free trade with Canada, which is clearly good for American workers and has never been unpopular in the US. If Trump had done everything else he's doing here, but used a sensible formula and avoided pointlessly antagonizing Canada, you would see significant crossover support from the left.
by greatgib | 2025-04-05 06:43:15+00:00
Because the organization of your struct is exactly how the memory have to be organized and that might be important for you. The compiler doesn't know your intended usage so it can't rework the structure at its will.

For example, you might take the block of memory and data and send it to another system that will decode it. Or you can take the block of memory and store it in a file or in a hardware device where it means something in this specific order.
by anal_reactor | 2025-04-05 06:43:25+00:00
Step 1: manufacture a crisis

Step 2: become an emergency dictator "for the duration of the crisis"

Step 3: make sure the crisis never goes away, but it's not so bad that people would revolt

It's basically dictatorship 101. In this case the US happens to be the center of global economy, so a crisis in the US also causes a crisis elsewhere, but that's an irrelevant side effect. The only question is whether Americans will realize what's going on before it's too late.
by mleroy | 2025-04-05 06:43:57+00:00
The Rust Belt's just one part of the story, not the whole US economy. Globalization actually created tons of wealth for the USA, but that money hasn't been spread around fairly. It's all piled up in coastal cities and with rich folks while factory towns got left behind. Cutting off global trade wouldn't fix anything - it would tank the overall economy while only helping a few powerful players pulling the strings. The real problem isn't trade deals; it's that the USA never properly invested the profits back into the communities that got hit hardest.
by dmitrygr | 2025-04-05 06:44:18+00:00
It would be no challenge at all then. And no fun. There are plenty much faster chips with USB built-in

Hell, allwinner v3s is hand solderable and has built in RAM and will happily boot Linux natively

Rp2350 would also be an excellent choice. It has a very good QSPI ram interface with cache built-in and usb support.
by apgwoz | 2025-04-05 06:45:15+00:00
How is it not related?

Because Python is “strong typed” vs “weak typed” for Tcl?

$ tclsh8.6 % expr 1 + 2 3 % expr 3 + “hey there” invalid bareword “hey” in expression “1 + hey there”; should be “$hey” or “{hey}” or “hey(…)” or …

vs.

$ python3.11 >>> 1 + 2 3 >>> 1 + “hey there” Traceback (most recent call last): File “<stdin>”, line 1, in <module> TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: ‘int’ and ‘str’

I don’t really see a difference. Both checked types at runtime. Clearly Tcl can check types at runtime, even though it represents everything as a string. Whether all commands do so is another story. But, not all functions in Python check types before trying to do things that don’t make sense, either. So…
by vaughan | 2025-04-05 06:45:15+00:00
It’s very hard to do tags in the physical world. You need to stick different colored post-its to things and do a full table scan (with your eyes) any time you want to process all docs of one tag. Or you cluster things together depending on similar colors.

Hierarchy is easy in the physical world.

But what is crazy is since the dawn of computing we can store data however we want and project it however we want…and yet we still use hierarchy for file storage…like we still just have a filing cabinet of manilla folders.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-04-05 06:45:23+00:00
> People aren’t able to save because their money is spent on housing and energy

----

> Housing and energy could both be dirt cheap and the money would still go to rich people.

----

So the working class is being forced to give the wealthy all of their money. On prices set by the wealthy and coupled with policies encouraged by the wealth. And if the wealthy just stopped being so greedy and took a small hit, everything would be fine. And the wealthy aren't the problem?
by mandmandam | 2025-04-05 06:46:15+00:00
It sounds like you rationalize that work a lot... But there's a whole lot of self-contradiction and logic abuse going on.

* "Pharma is super evil. Finance is super evil." But also, "nothing is purely good or bad, we all just make different tradeoffs." You see it, right? No?

* Tech "wasn't perceived as evil" when you made your career choice? After 2008? Buddy. And what happened to it all just being tradeoffs?

* "If you work for a fossil fuel company, are you equally unethical?" - this is what's known in the field as the false equivalence fallacy, if you remember that one. Also, yes, if you work for one of the companies which have used advertising to spread climate change FUD for 50 years, then I personally consider you ethically sus.

* "Basically everything interesting is caused and driven by lots of complicated stuff" - appeal to complexity.

* "our society is messed up for a bunch of reasons, of which advertising is one of the least dodgy" So you acknowledge it's one of the reasons... Until, at least, you again claim there's "weak evidence that it does much".

* "people find it easy to blame societal problems on external influences" - Oh, the critics are oversimplifying? Are there no sophisticated critiques out there based on psychological research that might identify specific harmful mechanisms? You studied this shit, so I know you must have at least heard of them.

* "I, with a PhD in psychology... don't understand why so many tech people hate advertising" - Idk man, feels like someone with a PhD in psych should be able to understand that just fine. Really dunno what you're missing there.

Taken together, these contradictions suggest to me that there's a lot of post-hoc rationalization going on. There are more consistent ethical frameworks out there than 'shit is complicated' and 'well, nothing is pure evil or pure good anyway'. They might not be super popular right now, especially in tech, finance, fossil fuels, advertising, pharma, etc - but they're out there.

A lot of psych research connects to that old quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". Cognitive dissonance? Moral disengagement? Motivated reasoning? The bias blind spot? ... Idk man, I'm not a psych PhD.
by hmcq6 | 2025-04-05 06:47:39+00:00
I don't love the way they came up with these numbers. Although it's possible I'm being overly skeptical.

The recording device turns on randomly and captures bursts and then a computer counts how many words were spoken and they estimate the total days count based on that. It amounts to about an hour of recording per day spread out over 17 hours.

I cant see the full paper but from what I can see they don't describe identifying who the speaker is in each recording, so does that mean any word the microphone picks up is attributed to the wearer?

With 5,258 hours or 657 workdays worth of recordings I wouldn't be surprised if they cut this corner given that even at $15/hour they would be spending more than $80k on just the transcription.

So, is it possible falling asleep with the tv on skews the results?

What about being a generally quiet person and living with a yapper?

And more abstractly, is asking "Do you want fries with that" making conversation or are they just doing their job? Should that really count? (no shade, I just don't think our customer service voice is a reflection of our true self)
by DrFalkyn | 2025-04-05 06:48:01+00:00
“Amplification” has to be one the most misunderstood concepts In electronics

No signal is really “boosted” by some weird process. What happens is a very powerful DC signal (i.e constant) is selectively allowed through, being mediated by the input signal. The “volume knob” on a power amp works by ATTENUATING that constant DC signal prior to “amplification”
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-04-05 06:48:32+00:00
> there is nothing that recharges you more than first class tickets somewhere beautiful and getting pampered in a resort

From first-hand experience, 100% this absolutely. The most relaxed I have ever felt in my life (and with a decrease in my resting heart rate to prove it, thanks Apple Watch) was a nice flight and a week at a high-end all-inclusive with just myself and a spa and pool day every day.

And I totally agree with the realization one can come to about how similar we all are after experiencing what others may call “different” cultures.

Granted I still have the travel itch all the time, it’s difficult to scratch that itch with obligations at home, but you do what you can, and take the passport stamps as they come!
by kazinator | 2025-04-05 06:48:53+00:00
Here I would posit that even our ear canals distort a bit, particularly when things get loud. It possibly helps us zero in on pitch.

> I'd bet (without evidence) it's used on most tracks today.

The Aphex Aural Exciter supposedly adds harmonics related to the signal by generating distortion in a certain way. That's been around since the 70s.
by eagleislandsong | 2025-04-05 06:49:26+00:00
Since your comment is comparing the US with China, maybe a bit of "whataboutism" is warranted here.

> stealing IP

Edward Snowden's leaks reveal that the US engages in wide-scale economic espionage. Additionally, the US also uses extra-territorial means of coercion to acquire cutting-edge technology -- see e.g. the Alstom case.

> manipulating currency

For many decades the US has been able to print money like a madman while the rest of the world absorbs the costs by virtue of the USD being the primary reserve currency globally. The US is also not above strong-arming its allies into appreciating their own currencies to boost American exports -- see the Plaza Accord, which partly contributed to Japan's subsequent Lost Decades.

> paying their people terrible wages

China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty in the last 20 years. In the US wages have remained stagnant for the working class over the same period, if not longer. Frustration among the working class -- which is entirely justified and understandable, by the way -- is probably one of the reasons why Trump was re-elected.

> crapping all over the environment

Chinese cities today are mostly clean and quiet, increasingly powered by renewable energy with more and more electric vehicles driven on the roads. The Chinese are also undertaking massive greening projects, such as the Great Green Wall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China) On a per-capita basis the Chinese emit far less carbon dioxide than Americans do.

The US, especially when compared to almost any other developed country, is in no moral position to be sanctimonious about environmental issues.

Don't blame other countries -- China or not -- for America's own catastrophic, chronic failure in leadership and subpar policymaking, especially when America has enjoyed so many entrenched advantages for so many decades (and still does).
by bluetomcat | 2025-04-05 06:51:20+00:00
The idea of “traveling the world” when young is a very recent, very privileged and very Western perspective.

Growing up in post-communist Bulgaria during the 1990s and 2000s, I had never been abroad with my family as a child. At an age of 18 years, I started working from home as a PHP programmer for a guy from Switzerland I found online. When he invited me to his place in Basel for a 2-week visit, to me it felt like flying in space. I was valuing every second of my stay there like I am on another planet.
by gU9x3u8XmQNG | 2025-04-05 06:51:44+00:00
I never said they want to.

But as many responses to your comments; there’s a portion of the population who are not invested in the markets this way.

There’s clearly a very different perspective for some, and as per my original reply; it seems many more are worried (rightfully so) about assets others cannot even begin to comprehend - let alone invest day to day, or “spare”, money into.
by dockerd | 2025-04-05 06:51:56+00:00
Your experience with travel resonates. It opens one's perspective early on, but then it kind of gets dull over time. And after a while, travel is mostly an avenue to have good memories with friends and family, relax, indulge in local cuisines/culture, and enjoy the beautiful nature.

And the topic of whether wanting to travel will motivate one to make more money is a topic for a different thread altogether. It's probably difficult to bring that drive if one doesn't have it.

P.S. You forgot to post the Gokarna June '22 pics in your photo album. It took me a minute to realize it was you only after reading that you moved to Goa and seeing your Goa flat pic.
by usr1106 | 2025-04-05 06:52:08+00:00
I don't want to be online on my phone, except when I decide that I want to browse the Web because I have spare time or need some information. SMS is perfect when I want someone to reach me in a timely manner.

Well, luckily I live in country where SMS spam is not an issue. If I look at the inbox of our IoT-like devices in the US, my approach to communication might be less feasible.
by riffraff | 2025-04-05 06:52:45+00:00
The author misses a key difference: Orbán's regime is predicated on

* EU letting it go untouched for years: the amount of funding the EU sunk in Hungary is crazy compared to their GDP. If the government can skim 80% of it and still the economy is growing, people will think the government is doing fine.

* "effective populism" E.g. setting very low income and corporate taxes, a ton of "bonuses", price freeze on groceries etc. Mostly unsound stuff, but effective for shifting public opinion.

* lack of a credible opposition. Yes, the media is controlled by the state. Yes elections are gerrymandered. But the same opposition leaders who have lost elections multiple times are still there. It's not an accident that as soon as a new charismatic opposition leader popped up it went to 30%.

The US does not have the first thing, doesn't seem to be doing the second and, well the third is up to the opposition.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-05 06:54:09+00:00
They seem absurd to people using their common sense. Trump is not normal, this is his 5th grade understanding of how tariffs work. All these people saying "we should live through the pain". But why? This is inflicted not some outside market crash, it is deliberate destruction of the economy, I can't figure out any other reason that because of Russian kompromat on Trump.
by fmap | 2025-04-05 06:54:32+00:00
I'm personally very excited about the progress in interactive theorem proving. Before the current crop of deep learning heuristics there was no generally useful higher-order automated theorem proving system. Automated theorem proving could prove individual statements based on existing lemmas, but that only works in extremely restricted settings (propositional or first-order logic). The problem is that in order to apply a statement of the form "for all functions with this list of properties, ..." you need to come up with a function that's related to what you're trying to prove. This is equivalent to coming up with new lemmas and definitions, which is the actually challenging part of doing mathematics or verification.

There has finally been progress here, which is why you see high-profile publications from, e.g., Deepmind about solving IMO problems in Lean. This is exciting, because if you're working in a system like Coq or Lean your progress is monotone. Everything you prove actually follows from the definitions you put in. This is in stark contrast to, e.g., using LLMs for programming, where you end up with a tower of bugs and half-working code if you don't constantly supervise the output.

---

But well, the degree of excitement is my own bias. From other people I spoke to recently: - Risk-assessment diagnostics in medicine. There are a bunch of tests that are expensive and complex to run and need a specialist to evaluate. Deep learning is increasingly used to make it possible to do risk assessments with cheaper automated tests for a large population and have specialists focus on actual high-risk cases. Progress is slow for various reasons, but it has a lot of potential. - Weather forecasting uses a sparse set of inputs: atmospheric data from planes, weather baloons, measurements at ground stations, etc. This data is then aggregated with relatively stupid models to get the initial conditions to run a weather simulation. Deep learning is improving this part, but while there has been some encouraging initial progress this needs to be better integrated with existing simulations (purely deep learning based approaches are apparently a lot worse at predicting extreme weather events). Those simulations are expensive, they're running on some of the largest supercomputers in the world, which is why progress is slow.
by fsiefken | 2025-04-05 06:56:03+00:00
An alternative one-handed keyboard design I like is the half keyboard by Edgar Matias. Personally I am not sure which one is better for typing half-dvorak or half-qwerty.

http://edgarmatias.com/papers/hci96/ https://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/1257-half-qwerty-one-...
by schobi | 2025-04-05 06:56:28+00:00
This is an interesting idea, but I'm sceptical of the advantages.

"there is more Co2" is valid for cars burning fuel. But as soon as you recuperate (even in a hybrid) you might only have a fraction of the losses any more. Adjusting the speed more aggressively is possible, without breaking, with little loss. I totally agree that stop-and-go is annoying, but looking into the future, Co2 should not be a reason for the vehicles in 5-10 years when the research can be rolled out.

Is "slamming the brakes" still happening? Around here you have dynamic speed limit signs on the highway. In high traffic everybody then goes a little slower, but smoothly.

I suspect that if a road is loaded beyond max throughput, this method will also fail, even harder. Let me explain: I remember a graph from communications theory. With improving error correcting codes in transmission, you can get a clean signal for even worse channel conditions. But once it fails you will not have a signal any more. The better the code, the steeper the cutoff. Whereas without in FM radio, the degrade in user experience is also gradual.

So the analogy goes like this: I would expect that you could possibly load the road with another 10% more vehicles. But if one day you have 15% more, the blockage will be even worse than before. Could be worth simulating throughput for various loading situations.