MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atmavatar | 2025-04-19 04:45:25+00:00
What precisely are you measuring to conclude that Americans are wealthier than ever before?

When it comes to luxury goods, sure - things like TVs and computers are cheaper than they ever have been, both relative to wealth and even in absolute terms.

However, when you look at necessities like housing, healthcare, and I dare say education, you'll notice that all have far outpaced inflation and even wage growth.

See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

See: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/

See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/631987/percent-of-income...

See: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/18/cost-of-coll...

See: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-tim...

See: https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2018/07/24/pric...

---

As a personal anecdote - my father did much the same job I do, and yet while he was taking care of a full family of four, I can't say that I feel any better off despite being single and not regularly vacationing like I did growing up.

As far as I can tell - I'm not alone. If anything, I'm uniquely blessed relative to my peers due to my tech background. We have an entire generation putting off family building because stagnant wages coupled with high student loan debt and housing prices cause many to perceive they are hardly getting by. Nearly half of all adults live paycheck-to-paycheck.
by bch | 2025-04-19 04:46:50+00:00
And one probably wouldn’t notice, but the buffer is backed by a “recno”[0] Berkeley DB instance[1].

[0] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/doc/BerkeleyDB/ref/am_conf/logrec.ht...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB
by rzz3 | 2025-04-19 04:48:04+00:00
Thanks for the explanation, it makes a lot of sense. One thing I keep wondering though is why we can’t teach them logic at some sort of base layer. Not to anthropomorphize, but couldn’t the actual next-token prediction itself embed some sort of consultation against another (non-LLM) model that can evaluate a probability of logicality of the overall output that would be produced be selecting next-token-A vs next-token-B? I’m sure it’s obviously way more complicated than this, but still.
by kragen | 2025-04-19 04:49:29+00:00
You'd only need a few hundred grams of triethanolamine if you regenerate it several times a day (with a vent to outdoors), but there are probably some spill risks and maybe mist. Soda-lime is cheaper but requires inconveniently high temperatures to regenerate, which probably result in unwanted emissions requiring mitigation as well as too much energy use. Regular lime (without the soda) avoids the emissions but takes a month to absorb the carbon dioxide. Alkali-metal oxides, hydroxides, and peroxides like those discussed in the article are extremely compact and fast-acting but even more difficult to regenerate. Bioreactors with spirulina or chlorella have been tested successfully but require hundreds of kilograms of algae per person and are finicky, being prone to infection. I think it's eminently possible at a technical level, but at a political level, basically you can only do this kind of experimentation if you live in China.

An actually physically feasible thing you can do is to whitewash some walls. You need to apply about 7kg of whitewash per person per week, so you are going to need a lot of walls, on the order of 400 square meters of wall per person, because the whitewash is regular lime, not soda lime. (If you're daring enough to dope your whitewash with lye, maybe you can get by with less wall area, but you still need to keep applying the whitewash at 7kg per person per week.) You can make them out of plywood, sheetrock, sheet metal, old sheets, whatever whitewash will stick to. After a few months you will need to start throwing out 14kg of fully cured whitewash per person per week, or calcining it to make fresh whitewash. Try to get whitewash with as little chalk in it as possible.

At this small scale, dozens of kilograms per week, you might be able to calcine the used whitewash in a pottery kiln on your patio. Beware that electric kilns generally do not handle reducing atmospheres well. I'm not sure if carbon dioxide would be too much for them. I think it should be fine, but don't blame me if you ruin your Kanthal.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-19 04:52:18+00:00
Behavior is remarkably hard to change. Smoking kills you, but people still smoke. Remarkably people still take up smoking.

People like sugar, and the effects of that are well understood, yet we still eat it (some in more moderation than others) because, well, it tastes good.

Behavior can be a habitual. It can be hormonal or chemical. You might get a few people to change a habit - but you've got no chance with the others.

You might get one person to change, but if your product requires a group, ie social behavior, you've got no chance.

It's good that you recognize that behavior needs to change. It's good that you understand this will be the hardest part of the problem.

I'm not optimistic- but it is possible IF (very big if) the payback to the user is high.

Good luck.
by mcdeltat | 2025-04-19 04:53:04+00:00
Perhaps. Then how do you handle the computer being confidently wrong a large proportion of the time? From my experience it's inaccurate in proportion to the significance of the task. So by the time it's writing real code it's more wrong than right. How can you turn that into something useful? I don't think the system around us is configured to handle such an unreliable agent. I don't want things in my life to be less reliable, I want them to be more reliable.

(Also if you exist in an ecosystem where being confidently wrong 70% of the time is acceptable, that's kinda suspect and I'll return to the argument of "useless jobs")
by tcoff91 | 2025-04-19 04:53:18+00:00
Now with neovim I feel like the plugin ecosystem is catching up to Emacs. Lua has unlocked the potential.

Typescript dev ex in neovim is light years ahead of what I achieved in Emacs. Neovim’s lsp integration is better than Emacs imo. Blink.cmp is so fast.

Magit is definitely far superior to anything in neovim though and so is org mode.
by anenefan | 2025-04-19 04:53:30+00:00
I'm sure using a combination makes more sense for many species.

However there's a few instances where magnetic fields would have to be doing most of the heavy lifting, for instance sea turtles. [1]

I can also point to my personal observations of our Australian green tree frogs, that having spent most of their life inside a house and having bred in the backyard pond and knowing very little outside of that immediate location, returned back to it after being removed [a] via a cloth bag and at speed in a car, half a mile away to a nice cosy creek which is also upwind of the dwelling. However they may not used any homing ability and simply been smart enough to simply follow the general direction back the road back into the first driveway ignoring the natural habitat along the way. Today I was pleased to learn I'm not alone in that observation. [2] (last paragraph in the subsection.)

[1] https://www.seaturtlestatus.org/articles/2021/6/16/how-do-se...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_green_tree_frog#Dis...

[a] a guest for a few days did not being around frogs.
by wiml | 2025-04-19 04:54:59+00:00
We have some experimental data on this, though, since jetliners and volcanoes both inject sulfur into the stratosphere. The global air traffic halt of 2001 and the aftereffects of eruptions have been heavily studied.

(It would be ironic if the world's response to fossil CO2 emission is to mandate extra high sulfur jet fuel, but nothing would surprise me)
by taurath | 2025-04-19 04:55:36+00:00
Its also chores that have an end, that you can have mastery over, that makes for only a small amount of variation compared to all of life.

Then you also know that you don't need to do things as fast as possible, you can always let things chill. Sometimes you can use it to practice not caring about everything - like "this run, I don't fish until year 2 - just farming for me."
by scubbo | 2025-04-19 04:55:43+00:00
No, the ridiculous thing is pretending that the rest of the world views technology the way that you (and many others - myself included!) think that it _should_, rather than in the way that it _does_. You may believe, with some justification, that authorities _should_ treat "running a Tor node" and "running network hardware" as equally responsible for the data transferred on them - but the fact of the matter is that they _don't_, and so caution is advisable.
by roenxi | 2025-04-19 04:56:23+00:00
We've probably reached the point where I bow out. But, on a related note, was the US even officially involved in the armed conflict in Yemen? I don't think there is such a thing as a declaration of armed conflict and my memory is the drone strikes were being kept relatively secret-squirrel. Obviously at the time everyone knew they were involved but I don't recall how official it got.
by cryptonector | 2025-04-19 04:56:41+00:00
XDR is like a four-octet aligned version of PER for a cut-down version of ASN.1. It's really neat.

XDR would not need much work to be a full-blown ER for ASN.1... But XDR is extremely inefficient as to booleans (4 bytes per!) and optional fields (since they are encoded as a 4-byte boolean followed by the value if the field is present).
by trollbridge | 2025-04-19 04:57:24+00:00
Fair enough point. However, any species (or subpopulation of a species) that reproduces below replacement level is going to die off. Long-term, that means cultures, mindsets, and so on that reproduce at or above replacement level will eventually dominate and cultures that reproduce below that level will eventually cease to exist.

The film Idiocracy is a good exhibition of this.
by thatcat | 2025-04-19 04:58:18+00:00
In iron sulfate fertilization you're only adding two nutrients (iron and sulfur). Now that nutrient is in excess in one area so metabolic uptake of all nutrients increases locally, creating a concentration gradient that reduces nutrients available elsewhere. This leads to one of the other limiting nutrients like phosphorus or nitrogen preventing growth of other life forms in another location since the concentration gradient created by the phytoplankton sucked it away. Also sulfur concentration changes metabolic pathways through epigenetic effects so there are other effects just within the phytoplankton that depend on the species that happens to be present that will determine what the exact concentration gradient would look like. The dynamic of nutrients shifting of the metabolome makes modeling and risk assessment difficult since some species are known to produce toxins which can bioaccumulate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phycotoxin
by almostgotcaught | 2025-04-19 04:59:01+00:00
There is no "coding FPGA". Verilog/VHDL are not programming languages, they are "hardware description languages" (HDL). That means when you write those languages literally what you're doing is specifying every single wire in the circuit. People that do FPGA work aren't even called programmers, they're called designers.

> High-Level Synthesis

Something that absolutely not a single professional designer uses.
by mcdeltat | 2025-04-19 04:59:58+00:00
But the complete solution fallacy is what the believers are claiming will occur, isn't it? I'm 100% with you that LLMs will make subsets of problems easier. Similar to how great progress in image recognition has been made with other ML techniques. That seems like a very reasonable take. However, that wouldn't be "revolutionary", I don't think. That's not "fire all your developers because most jobs will be replaced by AI in a few years" (a legitimate sentiment shared to me from an AI-hyped colleague).
by zX41ZdbW | 2025-04-19 05:00:00+00:00
With a more straightforward approach, the tool can be reproduced with just a few queries in ClickHouse.

1. Create a table with styles by authors:

CREATE TABLE hn_styles (name String, vec Array(UInt32)) ENGINE = MergeTree ORDER BY name

2. Calculate and insert style vectors (the insert takes 27 seconds):

INSERT INTO hn_styles WITH 128 AS vec_size, cityHash64(arrayJoin(tokens(lower(decodeHTMLComponent(extractTextFromHTML(text)))))) % vec_size AS n, arrayMap((x, i) -> i = n, range(vec_size), range(vec_size)) AS arr SELECT by, sumForEach(arr) FROM hackernews_history GROUP BY by

3. Find nearest authors (the query takes ~50 ms):

SELECT name FROM hn_styles ORDER BY cosineDistance(vec, (SELECT vec FROM hn_styles WHERE name = 'antirez')) LIMIT 25 ┌─name────────────┬─────────────────dist─┐ 1. │ antirez │ 0 │ 2. │ geertj │ 0.009644324175144714 │ 3. │ mrighele │ 0.009742538810774581 │ 4. │ LukaAl │ 0.009787061201638525 │ 5. │ adrianratnapala │ 0.010093164015005152 │ 6. │ prmph │ 0.010097599441156513 │ 7. │ teilo │ 0.010187607877663263 │ 8. │ lukesandberg │ 0.01035981357655602 │ 9. │ joshuak │ 0.010421492503861374 │ 10. │ sharikous │ 0.01043547391491162 │ 11. │ lll-o-lll │ 0.01051205287096002 │ 12. │ enriquto │ 0.010534816136353875 │ 13. │ rileymat2 │ 0.010591026237771195 │ 14. │ afiori │ 0.010655186410089112 │ 15. │ 314 │ 0.010768594792569197 │ 16. │ superice │ 0.010842615688153812 │ 17. │ cm2187 │ 0.01105111720031593 │ 18. │ jorgeleo │ 0.011159407590845771 │ 19. │ einhverfr │ 0.011296755160620009 │ 20. │ goodcanadian │ 0.011316316959489647 │ 21. │ harperlee │ 0.011317367800365297 │ 22. │ seren │ 0.011390119122640763 │ 23. │ abnry │ 0.011394133096140235 │ 24. │ PraetorianGourd │ 0.011508457949426343 │ 25. │ ufo │ 0.011538721312575051 │ └─────────────────┴──────────────────────┘
by benatkin | 2025-04-19 05:00:26+00:00
From the post

> with the help of funding from Alpha-Omega

From the site:

> funded by Microsoft, Google, and Amazon

Also it's a Linux Foundation project.

Interesting. Python's a big community, and there's some disagreement here over whether this would be better done in pure python. I think it's good that there's a rust/cloud contingent in python land but hope pure python remains popular.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-19 05:01:03+00:00
> Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist.

What health and safety reason requires a 3% processing fee for credit card payments? Why is it unsafe for the proprietor to live in a room in the same structure as a restaurant in some areas, but not in other places that have different zoning?

The only thing that comes close to a health and safety issue is requiring a licensed electrician, and that's still a racket because they make it infeasible for you to get the license yourself even if you're willing to learn the material.

> I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.

In the absence of these rules, you start a restaurant out of your home and do the work yourself and the capital you need to start out is predominantly the things you already need in order to have food and shelter. These regulations add hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional capital costs for the purpose of constraining supply so landlords and contractors and banks can extract more money.
by cryptonector | 2025-04-19 05:01:12+00:00
Would you rather they reinvent the wheel badly? Thjat's what ProtocolBuffers is: badly reinvented ASN.1/DER!

PB is:

- TLV (tag-length-value), like DER - you have to explicitly list the tags in the IDL as if it was ASN.1 in 1984 (but actually, worse, because even back then tags were not always required in ASN.1, only for diambiguation) - it's super similar to DER, yet not not the same - PB was created in part because ASN.1 had so little open source tooling, but PB had none until they wrote it so they could just have written the ASN.1 tooling they'd wished they had

smh
by voxic11 | 2025-04-19 05:01:15+00:00
They can't do 2. Or at least it would make the confession inadmissible evidence. The case law for this goes back more than a century. The general rule is that the police cannot promise you anything in return for a confession.

> Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532 (1897), was a United States Supreme Court case that ruled that an alleged confession to a crime, in order to be admissible, must not be obtained by threats or violence, nor by any direct or implied promises, however slight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_v._United_States

The ruling was later applied to the states as well in Malloy v. Hogan

> The Court held that the Fifth Amendment's exception from compulsory self-incrimination is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment against abridgement by a state. When determining if state officers properly obtained a confession, one must focus on whether the statements were made freely and voluntarily without any direct or implied promises or improper influence.

https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/110

The "you will get X years instead of Y years" has repeatedly been found to make testimony inadmissible. You might be confusing it with plea bargains which are legal but don't involve the police and are actually binding agreements. The prosecutor cannot lie to you about what you will receive in return for your cooperation.
by saqrais | 2025-04-19 05:02:23+00:00
This is taken from the book as it is:

Prerequisites This book assumes that you have some experience programming in Python and are familiar with the fundamentals of machine learning. The focus will be on building a strong intuition rather than deriving mathematical equations. As such, illustrations combined with hands-on examples will drive the examples and learning through this book. This book assumes no prior knowledge of popular deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow nor any prior knowledge of generative modeling. If you are not familiar with Python, a great place to start is Learn Python, where you will find many tutorials on the basics of the language. To further ease the learning process, we made all the code available on Google Colab, a platform where you can run all of the code without the need to install anything locally.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-04-19 05:02:50+00:00
> I am told that in Visual Studio 2008, you could debug line by line, and it was smooth. Like there was zero lag. Then Microsoft rewrite VS from c++ into c# and it became much slower

Not exactly a surprise? Microsoft made a choice to move to C# and the code was slower? Says precious little about software in general and much more about the constraints of modern development.

> If you want to feel the difference, try highly optimised software against a popular one. For eg: linux vs windows, windows explorer vs filepilot, zed vs vscode.

This reasoning is bonkers. Compare vastly different software with a vastly different design center to something only in the same vague class of systems?

If the question is "Is software getting worse or better?", doesn't it make more sense to compare newer software to the same old software? Again -- do you remember what Windows and Linux and MacOS were like in 90s? Do you not believe they have improved?
by cryptonector | 2025-04-19 05:04:31+00:00
First of all you should never need a canonical representation. If you think you do, you're almost certainly wrong. In particular you should not design protocols so that you have to re-encode things in order to validate signatures.

So then you don't need DER or anything like it.

Second, ASN.1 is fantastic. You should at least study it a bit before you pick something else.

Third, pick something you have good tooling for. I don't care if it's ASN.1, XDR, DCE RPC / MSRPC, JSON, CBOR, etc. Just make sure you have good tooling. And don't pick XML unless you really need it to interop with things that are already using XML.

EDIT: I generally don't care about downvotes, but in this case I do. Which part of the above was objectionable? Point 1, 2, or 3? My negativity as to XML for protocols? XML for docs is alright.
by jmward01 | 2025-04-19 05:04:32+00:00
The point was the other parts of the plane. No lines moving all that gas around and the pumps and the plumbing in and around the engine and the bleed air piping and the and the and the.... There are a lot of potential places to shave weight when you go electric. An aircraft optimized for electric will be massively different if done right.
by keeda | 2025-04-19 05:06:02+00:00
I think coziness is an underrated aspect of gaming, maybe because gaming is commonly depicted as fast-paced and frenetic. In fact, coziness was also an underrated reason that World of Warcraft was very popular. Unless you were in a top raiding guild or PvP, most gameplay matched at least one of the aspects listed in TFA; some flavor of "tidying up" and "community" all the while not being too challenging.

A couple of other aspects of coziness were those of exploration and social interaction, glossed over in the article but a big part of MMOs. Exploration and solo questing were almost meditative in nature. You could mix and match socialization, questing and exploration to find your preferred flavor of coziness.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-19 05:06:57+00:00
This is a great comment, and I agree with it. Everything that I hear from experts on weight loss: Cardio exercise is not a major component. Most people are clueless about how few calories that cardio exercise burns. A 5km run burns about 300 calories. People would be shocked to see how little food is it, compared to the amount of effort to run 5km!

Since you said you went through three weight loss cycles (bravo, it is hard to do!), is exercise an important part of the effort? Example: Did you ever try cardio vs weight training? It seems like weight training is the more likely of the two to change body composition (more muscle, same or less fat). And higher muscle weight almost always leads to higher resting calorie burn rate.

Last thing that almost no one is talking about in this discussion: Once you start doing exercise, something changes in your brain. I cannot precisely explain it, but a huge number of men experience a drop is depressing thoughts after starting regular exercise. My guess: Exercise helps to de-stress which has all kinds of other positive impacts in your life.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-19 05:08:21+00:00
Since whether you have a case or not depends entirely on the specifics of your options (or shares or whatever), it's impossible to give you legal advice beyond "get a lawyer".

Presumably when you were an employee you understood that these equity-pay structures were basically a lottery. And no, it would seem you didn't hit it. Like any lottery there's an element of unfairness built in.

Personally I wouldn't bother. I think if you do the math in time, money for lawyer, likelihood of success, you'll find that walking away is your simplest, cheapest, outcome.

You made your first mistake working for valueless equity. Learn from that - write it off as education. And hey, who knows, maybe they will IPO sometime...
by litoE | 2025-04-19 05:09:12+00:00
Up to now I have been using elvis exclusively, rather than vim, both on Windows and Linux - I never saw the need to switch, since elvis does everything I need. I just retired it last month, when I upgraded some systems to the latest release of Debian Bookworm and the elvis graphic interface started crashing the whole X windows manager. I have the source code, but I don't have the patience to recompile and debug it.