MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TriangleEdge | 2025-04-13 15:41:48+00:00
I live in Seattle now, am married, and have an infant. I find Seattle not friendly towards families at all. The going rate for a daycare here is 3.5k per month for an infant. My wife and I are both ~7%ers? individually and we can barely afford our home (a tall skinny townhouse with no yard) and the cost of 1 baby. Having a family is hard here... Also, I don't find Seattle safe for infants and toddlers, or anybody really..

What big tech wants are people who are willing to give up everything for the dream of making money, and that's what they got.

Edit: Our life is pretty good in any case. I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning).
by mikrl | 2025-04-13 15:42:29+00:00
The UK is not Canada though. You have the House of Lords, we have a Senate. We are a (con)federation, and that adds a whole new political overlay that the UK doesn’t have.

The executive power of our PM relative to the body politik is much higher. We don’t have a tradition of backbench rebellion, and the PMO often wields more power than the cabinet.
by Biganon | 2025-04-13 15:42:34+00:00
I'm in Switzerland, and both Neon (Hypothekarbank Lenzburg) and Zak (Banque CLER) work perfectly fine.

Google Wallet does not work, therefore I cannot use my phone to pay wirelessly with my Neon card, which is a shame.

The only apps I had trouble with were Twint (had to install it with F-Droid, as Play kept telling me it was not compatible with my device), and... the McDonald's app (which forces me to move my fat ass to one of their kiosks to order my food instead of doing it from the table).
by legel | 2025-04-13 15:43:00+00:00
Very cool!

The training objective is clever.

The 50+ filters at Ecodash.ai for 90,000 plants came from a custom RAG model on top of 800,000 raw web pages. Because LLM’s are expensive, chunking and semantic search for figuring out what to feed into the LLM for inference is a key part of the pipeline nobody talks about. I think what I did was: run all text through the cheapest OpenAI embeddings API… then, I recall that nearest neighbor vector search wasn’t enough to catch all relevant information, for a given query to be answered by an LLM. So, I remember generating a large number of diverse queries, which mean the same thing (e.g. “plant prefers full sun”, “plant thrives in direct sunlight”, “… requires at least 6 hours of light per day”, …) and then doing nearest neighbor vector search on all queries, and using the statistics to choose what to semantically feed into RAG.
by MrJohz | 2025-04-13 15:43:32+00:00
The Date example is possibly an even better example of why dependencies that get hard problems right are so important. If Python's datetime library is bad, Date is truly terrible. Every time I have used it I have regretted it long term (including when using it in combination with date-fns in the hope that that makes it usable). And in the end, trying to keep things simple with Date has caused more technical debt than using a sensible dependency.

Some problems simply require using the right tools. They aren't necessarily hard, but they will be if you try to hammer a nail in with a screwdriver. The Date API, and to a certain extent Python's datetime module, are screwdrivers for a nail-shaped problem.

The rest of your example seem to have more to do with bad dependency practices than using dependencies in the first place. If you are going to include a dependency, think about it, consider whether it's worth it, document that decision, and then consistently use that dependency. Just because you've seen projects use dependencies poorly doesn't mean dependents are bad by themselves.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-13 15:43:34+00:00
I'm a big fan of PKD and also Blade Runner. You've got a point about the film being so very different, but I think it's subsequent success (it wasn't that successful at the time) justifies the approach to the subject matter.

However I do wish that Mercerism (the religion in the book) was included in the film. Maybe someone should attempt to film a more literal adaptation.

Edit: thinking about the difference between the novel and the film makes me think of The Shining and I'm very much in the Kubrick camp - the film being a work of art by itself and so doesn't have to follow the source material.

However, I also really like A Scanner Darkly which is arguably the closest PKD adaptation.
by sollewitt | 2025-04-13 15:43:37+00:00
"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'it belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'it belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'it belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well."
by dexwiz | 2025-04-13 15:44:51+00:00
This is not about investment, it's about extortion. Bend the knee, or be destroyed. No US business sector can exist without foreign imports. It's a perfect lever to extract fealty from the corporate sector. They sell tariffs as all sort of things to different groups, sometimes out right lies (it's a tax on foreigners). But in the end it's only about control and power.
by codethief | 2025-04-13 15:45:04+00:00
Not sure my search engine skills are any better but here are a few links:

From 2 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/comments/126nd51/comment... -> Sounds like Curve (without Google Pay) wasn't officially supported in Europe and didn't work for most people.

However, this seems to have changed a couple days ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/curve/comments/17txz6u/comment/mkwl...

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/443-gpay-alternatives-for-g...

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/475-wallet-google-pay/105

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/curve-pay-available-as-a...

This is in line with an interview with the CEO of Curve from last month, https://paymentsconsulting.com/qa-with-shachar-bialick-at-cu...

> We are launching Curve Pay in beta for Android soon and plan to release it on iOS thereafter. This will allow customers to use Curve as their default wallet, just like Apple Pay or Google Pay.

…and with various German news sites reporting that Curve Pay is now available in Germany (and likely other parts of the EEA).
by alganet | 2025-04-13 15:45:31+00:00
Part of the energy is transformed into heat as the planet mass is deformed. In the same way an unbalanced wheel tire heats up faster. This is the internal friction part.

Part of it is transfered to the mass being orbited. In the same way a wobbling wheel makes the road vibrate a little bit. This is the gravitational part.

It's not a perfect metaphor, but it should be enough to visualize what happens.
by gruez | 2025-04-13 15:45:33+00:00
>EPA’s guidance used to state that one gallon of petroleum can contaminate up to one million gallons of water.

That doesn't answer my question. How did you get the "$1 billion USD" figure? It's unclear how you go from "one gallon of petroleum can contaminate up to one million gallons of water" to "Estimates for initial cleaning and restoring would be $1 billion USD".

Moreover, if that's "up to" amount, then surely it only applies to the worst case, like if you dumped the oil directly into a river/ocean? The picture in the article shows there's no source of water nearby. That's not to say that it can't affect groundwater or whatever, but blindly applying "one gallon of petroleum can contaminate up to one million gallons of water" makes no sense.
by energy123 | 2025-04-13 15:47:07+00:00
That's a strawman. What I was doing was pointing out the appeal to the aesthetics of work and associated buzzwords ("capital"), noting the absence of any actual economy policy that will deliver tangible benefits to existing people. It's the same old populist shtick that we've seen in countless fascist and communist regimes where certain modes of work are fetishized and life is regimented around that prescription by a central authority, in the pursuit of a subjective notion of pure work. The giveaway is the attempted justification of an economic policy in service of a nebulous "cultural" impact.
by ariebovenberg | 2025-04-13 15:47:35+00:00
Author here. To summarize the long discussion in the issue:

1. I _love_ pure Python packages. Not everybody should be forced to use Rust. I want installing pure-Python to be as easy as possible

2. Having separate names on PyPi (with or without extras) creates confusion for libraries depending on whenever: should they depend on whenever-py or whenever-rust? If one “overwrites” the other, this adds confusion.

3. Most users expect to “pip install whenever” and start using the “fast” version

For me, points (3) and (2) weigh heavy enough to make (1) slightly more cumbersome.

But: Maybe I’ve missed something. Have a read in the above issue or add your 2 cents.

edit: formatting
by kamranjon | 2025-04-13 15:47:51+00:00
Interesting! I worked previously for a company that did automatic generation of short video clips from long videos. I fine-tuned a t5 model by taking many Wikipedia articles and removing the new line characters and training it to insert them.

The idea was that paragraphs are naturally how we segment distinct thoughts in text, and would translate well to segmenting long video clips. It actually worked pretty well! It was able to predict the paragraph breaks in many texts that it wasn’t trained on at all.

The problems at the time were around context length and dialog style formatting.

I wanted to try and approach the problem in a less brute force way by maybe using sentence embedding and calculating the probability of a sentence being a “paragraph ending” sentence - which would likely result in a much smaller model.

Anyway this is really cool! I’m excited to dive in further to what you’ve done!
Ask HN: Does acceptance of Wikipedia as reliable source foreshadow same for AI?
by bookofjoe | 2025-04-13 15:48:01+00:00
When Wikipedia started it was denounced as an unacceptable reference source compared to standards like Encyclopedia Britannica. Now its information is regularly cited here, generally without dispute. The output/product of AI/LLM is denounced here as hallucination-prone and unacceptable for reference. Will that too pass just as Wikipedia's early days engendered fierce debate as to its suitability?
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-13 15:48:08+00:00
It’s actually the opposite. A lot of benefits programs are punitive to marriage wrt household income. I know many older couples who stay unmarried because one of them would lose their healthcare or cash transfer benefit, for example.

For making healthcare decisions, durable power attorney and a medical proxy should be sufficient for unmarried couples. Not an attorney, talk to one if this is a need you have to validate your authority posture. The best time to have a plan is before you need it.
by paulcole | 2025-04-13 15:48:31+00:00
> You might as well say US people fucking love washing machines or knives and forks.

Yeah, you’re getting it.

Nobody will say they love washing machines but they clearly do. We see it in their actions. Same as with cars. Everything they do tells us that they love cars. They drive comically short distances. They spend money they barely have to buy them.
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-13 15:49:23+00:00
An EPIC scene from "The Congress" (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMI8HWhqEc

The Congress (2013) Scan Scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8

HN thread about "Bruce Willis Sells Deepfake Likeness Rights So His 'Twin' Can Star in Movies" and The Congress discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33044479

>According to director Ari Folman, some elements of the film were inspired by the science fiction novel The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem in that similarly to Lem's Ijon Tichy, the actress is split between delusional and real mental states. Later, at the official website of the film, in an interview, Folman says that the idea to put Lem's work to film came to him during his film school. He describes how he reconsidered Lem's allegory of communist dictatorship into a more current setting, namely, the dictatorship in the entertainment business, and expresses his belief that he preserved the spirit of the book despite going far away from it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36209861

>People who haven't used psychedelics don't tend to get or appreciate The Congress as much as those who have.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34953477

>I just watched The Congress -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film) -- and WOW, it was excellent.
by zokier | 2025-04-13 15:49:30+00:00
> Terminal text editors are also lighter due to the fact that the terminal is providing all of the windowing fuss for them and that terminals are light applications in and of themselves due to not having to do much that is extremely novel or intensive on a CPU

I think this is a common fallacy. Fundamentally adding an tty layer in the middle does not make lighter solution, so in almost all cases terminal application+terminal emulator is inherently heavier than equivalent application talking directly to display server.
by andrewrn | 2025-04-13 15:49:50+00:00
Thank you SO much! The configurable easy/medium/hard windowing is such a damn good idea! It's immediately intuitive to me and is way less arbitrary and more pure than what I've got going on now.

I'm replying a little late so I'm not sure you'll see this, but I do wonder about dropping the clicking of factors. Others have pointed out that since multiplication is commutative its mathematically meaningless to click factors. But to me, when I make these estimations on paper, determining factors in a certain order in my head is critical to get the dimensional "path" to the answer units, so to speak. Having the chain pre-made for the user would take some fun out for me, I think. I could be alone on that though. I'll have to think about this a bit.

I guess as I am writing this its giving me clarity... when done on paper, factor ordering/pathing serves (me, at least) as a proxy for getting the correct set of factors, even if their order is mathematically irrelevant. So there's got to be a way to implement this in the game. I made this project bc I want to get good at this kind of estimation in a practical sense, so it seems like matching the on-paper thinking structure might make be good?

On another note, I am a little horrified at how much stuff slipped by me on this mvp, like that bad domain in the copy+paste text. Thanks for pointing it out :|

Thanks again!
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-13 15:50:11+00:00
“should” is massively overstating things here.

For starters, it’s not a UNIX thing. It’s really more a Linux thing. Some Unixes have also adopted it but not enough for someone to argue that someone “should” be using it in reply to an article about Unix more generally.

Secondly, XDG stems from managing desktop applications. Granted there’s no reason it can’t nor shouldn’t be used for CLI tools too. But equally there isn’t any reason why someone needs to use it. And on headless platforms, it makes zero sense to enforce XDG over any other Unix standard.

Lastly, XDG is surprising complicated. Your example of symlinks et al demonstrates just how much additional work you’re doing just to follow XDG here. If you CLI tool doesn’t spew dozens of config files in $HOME then your recommendation isn’t any better than the one in the article.

I really want to like XDG but like many things that originated from Linux, it’s far from an elegant solution to a simple problem and barely supported outside of Linux too. So I can’t blame anyone for deciding not to bother with it for their own personal software on their personal systems.
by fullshark | 2025-04-13 15:50:37+00:00
His base resents these workers, in part because the urban centers of America have thrived in the past 20 years from global capitalism and PMC workers have enjoyed the benefits, while the exurbs have been demolished, but also because they dominate the culture in ways the base finds annoying.

At its root though I think this is class war masquerading as culture war.
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-04-13 15:50:50+00:00
I'll share what worked for me. I did a masters thesis on computational fluid dynamics.

Go to google scholar and find the 'seminal' works in your field, for example say you want to know about aerodynamics, basically every course starts with Anderson's textbook, it has almost 10k citations.

Find the books and papers with tonnes of citations. Those are likely the top books and top people in the field.

Also look for literature reviews and if you search for universities and do 'filetype:pdf' in google, you can find lecture notes and reading lists. Those are all good starting points.

As soon as you know what your topic is, start making it a habit to read research papers, take notes in the margins, highlight stuff. Read papers every week. I was lucky to have a long train ride where I had no phone service for a solid 60mins per day, so I read papers on the train almost every day.

At this point you should know who the key people are and what they are interested in, in your field and topic. For my topic I figured out there are like 20 key researchers in the field, find the ones who are regularly publishing still (last 10 years or so) and read all of their stuff.

You should be forming the 'lay of the land' now and finding patterns in where the gaps are, what future work and next steps are the researchers writing about.

Work with your supervisor to discuss what you learned and narrow down the topic.

So that is the INPUT part of the process covered.

Let's talk about the OUTPUT next.

When I was putting my thesis together, I really didn't want to have to write it all at the end or in the last few months. So my method was to imagine each chapter or so, was a paper of it's own, that built on each other.

As you read you should be putting your literature review together anyway which could be a whole chapter of a thesis. Then the other pieces - introduction, proofs, calculations, experimental design, testing, results, conclusion.

If you start writing bits of it as soon as you get your topic you'll have lots of writing done by the time it comes to publishing, and the challenge is more about editing it down and making it cohesive. Obviously you kind of do the work then write the results, and from there form your intro and abstract to review what you did, and the conclusions to discuss next steps and how to build on your research.

This approach scales from a single paper to a book, and it's mostly about being curious of the current state of the art in your field, building a habit for reading other papers, and figuring out where the gaps could be.

As an undergrad, you're not really expected to contribute new science, so it's fine to pick an existing method and paper and only change a little bit of it, your supervisor will have a better idea of where the bar is set on this point, and what you're expected to accomplish.
by account-5 | 2025-04-13 15:50:51+00:00
I never read any of the books, didn't actually know they were originally a book. I grew up with the TV show though. Hated it. I've never watched TV or film for the feels. Tv and film for me is escapism, I don't want to be depressed or have to think. I'm assuming this is why I never liked the moomins.
by chermi | 2025-04-13 15:51:20+00:00
We know entropy != Complexity(1). There's still no satisfactory answer for what complexity is, and the problem is only getting worse I think as more people decide to use the term however they wish. I'm partial to kolmogorov(2).

You're train of thought re. compressibility vs. organization is very in line with kolmogorov's.

1.https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/97804295028... 2.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
by raverbashing | 2025-04-13 15:52:08+00:00
> a library either slowly deteriorates or breaks just as easily as a self-written one

Yes, I agree with this

> The self-written one is maintained by 1 person, the other is used by 100+ people who could jump in a collaborate on its fixing.

Libraries that have 100 people collaborating on it are very few

Most likely you'll have to vendor it and fix whatever issues you have.

Even worse when it's a dependency of a dependency and you also use it, so, let's say a dependency of yours bumps the version but this breaks your code. (Not sure this breaks only in python or in js as well, but it's possibly that it does)
by nradov | 2025-04-13 15:52:48+00:00
There's hardly any place which is really "friendly" towards professional families with infants. For safety reasons, daycare centers have to maintain staffing ratios so it's always going to be extremely expensive (unless you're poor enough to qualify for subsidies).

As for safety, for some reason those big tech employees keep voting for progressive politicians whose failed policies have ruined their cities. I guess voters are getting what they want?
by cootsnuck | 2025-04-13 15:53:34+00:00
Yea, I just ended up trying out their Gemini stuff in Sheets and Slides. In Sheets it's pretty cool to have it just directly insert formulas for me. In Slides it's...okay...it was useful for me to rush to get a presentation done. But I can tell it's pretty bad compared to literally anyone who has enough time to just create a decent presentation. But I can also tell it will get better at least.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-13 15:53:38+00:00
Cogent summary. The article mentions Eco's "armageddon complex" concept, but another important one is syncretism: contemporary fascist movements don't have an internally consistent set of worldviews, but instead a swirling syncresis of reactionary positions that fight for prominence within the larger movement. These positions contradict each other, but are unified in being (1) reactionary, and (2) tied to an armageddon, rapture, or other "great event" that shifts the tide away from secular humanism.
by vunderba | 2025-04-13 15:54:25+00:00
I'm making the assumption that "taking notes" is distinct from commenting one's code.

If it's related to a long-term contract, I'll create a company-specific Obsidian vault which I'll later sync to a org-wide Notion database.

If it's personal I usually add any relevant documentation/diagrams to the repo itself under a docs folder.
by megaman821 | 2025-04-13 15:54:41+00:00
No, what if the tariffs go away before you are done building your widget factory. Now you have widgets that are too expensive to sell to anyone.

If they want anyone to believe that the tariffs will remain in effect long enough to make a profit, they will need to pass a bill. Ideally, a bill that ratchets tariffs up over a long enough period of time to actually build the capacity in the US of the thing you want to tariff.