MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ElevenLathe | 2025-04-08 21:01:22+00:00
The biggest ones by far is the lack of a carbon tax and, as a sibling comment notes, not having to pay for the health effects of their product. If you factor in the likely costs of climate-induced deaths, the total costs will be almost certainly be more than the total value of all fossil fuels ever extracted. The lack of these costs is therefore the ultimate subsidy in that the entire global industry, and in a sense all human civilization as currently constituted, is premised on keeping these costs unaccounted for. Presumably this is the kind of thing you mean by "specious" though.

Still there are lots of carve outs for the way extraction equipment and other capital costs are accounted for in tax law that are effectively direct subsidies to the oil industry. These won't end the practice of fossil energy use like ending the big ones would, but any little bit helps. Would also be nice to stop leasing out government land to do this incredibly destructive thing with it -- at least make drillers own the land or lease it from a private owner.
by aardvark179 | 2025-04-08 21:02:11+00:00
Books were produced before computers, and with very good typesetting. One difference between websites and books is that theee is a feedback loop with books where somebody ia at looking at the layout and either adjusting the spacing subtly, or even editing the text to avoid problems. Sometimes this is just to ensure that left justified text isn’t too ragged on the right edge, sometimes it’s to avoid river of space rubbing through a paragraph, and sometimes it’s editing or typesetting to avoid orphans.

But text on a page is set for a set layout, and that’s where the web really differs.
by qmqrqi | 2025-04-08 21:02:37+00:00
Location: Lithuania (EU) Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Europe Technologies: Linux, Python, Digital Ocean, MATLAB, LabVIEW Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KUqIhBD49ftE6rQ2FYkLAdBL-Kc7DyCvLrKG-ZjNEJY/edit?usp=sharing Email: crogers5109@gmail.com

Greetings. I'm an experimental physicist with a varied career in engineering seeking to apply my experience to software projects. Some examples: I've completed a laser pulse optimization program utilizing a genetic algorithm developed with a combination of Mathematica and LabVIEW. Also, I've simulated magnetic fields for MRI machines and satellites developed using python, Elmer FEM and MATLAB. Furthermore, I have experience with object recognition projects for robotics applications and have implemented control algorithms for optics hardware.
by iAMkenough | 2025-04-08 21:02:54+00:00
I like the first link as fair analysis, but you clearly inserted your own bias (which ChatGPT framed its responses around) by asking leading questions in the second link.

For instance, it responded: "it tries to delegitimize the IRS program by associating it with political actors assumed to have bad motives."

Scott Bessent is inherently associated with the IRS and its programs in his official capacity. If he has bad motives, I didn't say it.
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-08 21:04:03+00:00
It probably has to do with not being American, but at least here in italy it's completely fine to drink water and only that on a regular day. I do give that there's probably more variety, I know some people having preferences for certain bottled waters over others

(I'll gladly drink whatever water I find, but I'm not a fan of the plastic taste of some bottled waters and definitely a hater of refrigerator-cold water)

From my holidays in the US I recall shops, even small ones, having lots of drinks. Like, shelves and shelves of any alcohol free drink (and some abv ones) one could imagine. Here I go to my neighborhood small supermarket and there's coke, lemonade, Fanta, tonic water, a few local products such as spuma and that's it
Show HN: SkySearch – realtime browser-based semantic search of Bluesky jetstream
by rectalogic | 2025-04-08 21:04:05+00:00
Browser-based app that subscribes to the BlueSky Jetstream [1] and displays new posts that are semantically similar to a given query.

It spawns a bunch of Web Workers to compute embeddings for every post using MediaPipe Text Embedder [2], then compares cosine similarity to the embedding computed for some query text. It displays any posts that are semantically similar enough to the query, based on a similarity range slider the user controls.

It seems to work well on a MacBook Pro M2. On an iPhone 12 it can't keep up. A warning toast will popup if your device is falling behind.

[1] https://docs.bsky.app/blog/jetstream

[2] https://ai.google.dev/edge/mediapipe/solutions/text/text_emb...
by nineplay | 2025-04-08 21:04:06+00:00
I don't entirely disagree but my kid was with me and I feel like I need someone now to reassure her that blending doesn't magically remove vitamins from food.

( I asked her if blending tomatoes for sauce removed the nutritional value but that's different for reasons that no one understands. )

I'm with you. Eat a variety of food and as close to the natural source as possible. If you think that orange juice and mountain dew are the same because of sugar content than you've lost the plot.
by haswell | 2025-04-08 21:04:08+00:00
> Just because you perceive as such doesn't mean I meant it as that.

Fully agree, nor was it my intent to imply otherwise. But once uttered, we can't control how other people interpret our words. I see clarifying these differences in interpretation and gaining a shared understanding as the primary purpose of a thread like this.

> Earth is never a stable place. Ecosystems are a constant rise and collapse of dietary chains, continents aren't standing still, and cataclysms are a dime a dozen. Organisms causing mass extinctions are also nothing new under the Sun. Albeit, we do hold a speed run record I believe.

Again, agree. And yet, despite that instability, life on earth has rebounded or remained abundant up to this point given large enough timescales. What is different now is that we have some control over what may be the next major cataclysm. Whether or not we figure out how to collectively exert that control is another question entirely.

All I'm saying I that I hope we're not spending time trying to terraform mars while our own planet dies. If we can make mars habitable, we can rectify the situation here barring cosmic scale events that doom earth entirely.
by Telemakhos | 2025-04-08 21:04:10+00:00
The old linotype machines had visual indicators of minimum and maximum line width, and the operator would make a judgement call with each line. Spacers would then automatically justify the letters. It was all mechanical and amazing.

See http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2014/01/two-spaces-old-typist... for many details.
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-08 21:04:54+00:00
> TBH I'm very surprised Yann Le Cun is still there. He looks to me like a free thinker and an independent person. I don't think he buys into the Trump agenda and US nationalistic anti-Europe speech like Zuck does. He may be giving Zuck the benefit of the doubt, and probably is grateful that Zuck gave him a chance when nobody else did.

Zuck doesn't buy it, either. He just knows what's good for business right now.

In an example of the worst person you know making a great point, Josh Hawley said "What really struck me is that they can read an election return." [0].

Though it's worth remembering, it's very difficult to accumulate the volume of data necessary to do the current kind of AI training while sticking to the strictest interpretations of EU privacy law. Social media companies aren't just feeding the user data into marketing algorithms, they're feeding them into AI models. If you're a leading researcher in that field - Like Le Cun - and the current state-of-the-art means getting as much data as possible, you might not appreciate the regulatory environment of the EU.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/02/27/nx-s1-5302712/senator-josh-ha...
by 9dev | 2025-04-08 21:05:03+00:00
Ah, the good old "you’re not allowed to criticise open source projects, because they’re open source!"

Observable is cool when you want to build data notebooks. Observable is obnoxious if you want to add a D3 pie chart to your Vue application and have to untangle calls to D3’s API from reactive cell values, which look like ordinary JavaScript, but are not, and will cause compilation and runtime errors when copied.

The problem is that D3 resources mix D3 documentation with demos of D3 itself, and demos of Observable, into a single, inseparable combination. Nobody would complain were those three things separate resources; alas, they’re not.

Every time someone raises this issue, they are shot down by people like you, with the same nonsensical argument—just because the maintainers write cool demos in a fringe datavis DSL, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s helpful for the 99% use case of rendering charts in normal apps.
by klauserc | 2025-04-08 21:05:15+00:00
Yes, all the time. For reference-level information, I don't trust AI summaries. If I need to know facts, I cannot have even the possibility of a lying auto-complete machine between me and the facts.

Exploratory/introductory/surface-level queries are the ones that get handed to auto-complete.

I like how Kagi lets me control whether AI should be involved by adding or omitting a question mark from my search query. Best of both worlds.
by vunderba | 2025-04-08 21:05:22+00:00
Given that the norm before remote work was literally face to face interviews and being seen on a daily basis in an office, I buy the "privacy excuse" for about 5 seconds.

The level of trust is simply too low - if being seen for a few hours over a web camera is that much of a dealbreaker for a candidate, there's plenty of candidates to take their place.
by philjohn | 2025-04-08 21:05:41+00:00
It's 100% PSC (their "Performance Culture")

You're not encouraged per se to ship half-baked features, but if you don't have enough "impact" at the end of the half (for mid cycle checkin) or year (for full PSC cycle) then you're going to get "Below Expectations" and then "Meets Most" (or worse) and with the current environment a swift offboarding.

When I was there (working in integrity) our group of staff+ engineers opined how it led to perverse incentives - and whilst you can work there and do great work, and get good ratings, I saw too many examples of "optimizing for PSC" (otherwise known as PSC hacking).
by taeric | 2025-04-08 21:05:59+00:00
You aren't wrong; but I stand by my claim. For one, plenty of things are actually difficult optimization problems that people don't give any passing thought to.

But, more importantly, the amount of cycles that would be needed to text-wrap most websites is effectively zero. Most websites are simply not typesetting the volumes of text that would be needed for this to be a concern.

Happy to be shown I'm flat wrong on that. What sites are you envisioning this will take a lot of time for?
by antonkar | 2025-04-08 21:06:46+00:00
Yes, their worst fear is people figuring out that an AI chatbot is a strict librarian that spits out quotes but doesn't let you enter the library (the AI model itself). Because with 3D game-like UIs people can enter the library and see all their stolen personal photos (if they were ever online), all kind of monsters. It'll be all over YouTube.

Imagine this but you remove the noise and can walk like in an art gallery (it's a diffusion model but LLMs can be loosely converted into 3D maps with objects, too): https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/07/generative-ai-sp...
by 9283409232 | 2025-04-08 21:06:56+00:00
This article actually has a very appropriate link to another piece they wrote about Trump's executive order trying to seize control of elections. The insinuation of the parent poster being that there will be no more fair elections. I'm inclined to agree with them.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trum...
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-04-08 21:06:58+00:00
GPT is completely useless for most of my daily searches. Searching for specific content on a site? I can just put in site:domain.com keywords and get useful results without having to read useless overview paragraphs about the site in question.

Image searches without having to describe every minute detail of what I'm looking for?

Bah, even some searches that are basically looking for wikipedia/historical lookups....so much easier UI in Google Search than chatgpt's endless paragraphs with unclear sources etc.

For some things Google's AI results are helpful too, if not to just narrow down the results to certain sources.

There's no chat interface helping any of this
by bawolff | 2025-04-08 21:08:28+00:00
As an aside, wikimedia is switching all their chart support from vega to echarts.

I'm not an expert on either, but my impression is that vega tries to do literally everything using a custom json syntax which can get confusing and unwieldly. Echarts is a bit more straightforward at least for the simple case.

Vega has a questionable security track record which is concerning if you let untrusted users define graphs.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-08 21:08:30+00:00
Yeah I take this as bad news, as a user. I dread the inevitable enshittification. Hopefully open source UX over Wireguard is close-enough to as good by the time they drive me away that losing them isn't too painful.

Took a project I'd been putting off and putting off because I knew it'd eat half a Saturday, and made it a 20-minute affair from signup to having everything done, including adding some devices to the network that I wouldn't even have bothered to try adding on my own.
by Fantasy_ | 2025-04-08 21:08:42+00:00
Location: Accra

Remote: Willing to work remotely.

Willing to relocate: No (for now)

Technologies: JavaScript, Typescript, Golang, SQL, NoSQL, HTML/CSS, TypeScript, ReactJS with Vite, Nextjs and a bit of Rust/kotlin/Docker.

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NMUHqcKMafQSXBhIiSYoMYJbZVs...

Email: rocket_1@tutanota.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richibara/

Software engineer with 1y+ year of experience in developing full-stack applications. I'm looking for a role that will allow me to improve my skills while also contributing to the development of something great (Even an intern role will do). If you feel like giving me a chance, get in touch
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-04-08 21:08:52+00:00
Sweden and Germany have phantograph-powered semi-electric trucks [1] that would make this less of a factor. The trucks do the bulk of their driving off grid power with batteries for exits/lastmile components of the drive.

[1]: https://www.carsguide.com.au/oversteer/phantograph-scania-tr...

Tom Scott video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
by Modified3019 | 2025-04-08 21:09:12+00:00
IMO an example of a good use case for an LLM, which would be otherwise very hard to search for, is clarifying vague technical concepts.

Just yesterday I was trying to remember the name of a vague concept I’d forgotten, with my overall question being:

“Is there a technical term in biology for the equilibrium that occurs between plant species producing defensive toxins, and toxin resistance in the insect species that feed on those plants, whereby the plant species never has enough evolutionary pressure to increase it’s toxin load enough to kill off the insect that is adapting to it”

After fruitless searching around because I didn’t have the right things to look for, putting the above in ChatGPT gave an instant reply of exactly what I was looking for:

“Yes, the phenomenon you're describing is often referred to as evolutionary arms race or coevolutionary arms race.”
by dijksterhuis | 2025-04-08 21:10:05+00:00
I've really wanted to write a clickbait blog post article to post on HN [0] with the title "Hackers don't use LLMs". You've pretty succinctly summarised how I feel about the subject with your last paragraph.

[0]: not that I write blog post articles anyway, it's just a fantasy day dream thing that's been running through my head
by quantified | 2025-04-08 21:11:40+00:00
It'll be polarizing. As a huge red flag that some employers will look for to hire and other would avoid. I'd shun them, but others won't.

As a hiring manager, know your team and your company. If you have to ask the question, you probably don't want them, unless you are willing to churn your team over to his ideological mates. If your organization was "dark, gothic Maga" then you wouldn't be asking.
by jwilber | 2025-04-08 21:11:44+00:00
"You can use as many italics as you want but I don’t think it’s a wildly bold claim and your counter example is simply silly."

I don't understand the relevance of any of this, but I think I've done a fair job outlining my points above. Let me give my best summary: the execution environment used by a library's (example) documentation is independent from learning the API of the library itself. I agree that newcomers to JavaScript may find plenty of confusion there, and I'm sure a decent chunk of D3's users may be new to web-programming in general, but it's not the job of D3 maintainers to account for that.

I actually think our back-and-forth is a perfect example of why open-source is so painful to work on.

D3 is one of the best documented libraries out there is. There are multiple books, hundreds of hours of youtube videos, and most importantly, dedicated maintainers (Mike Bostock, Philippe Riviere, etc.) who've poured hours into additional sources of documentation and are very responsive on GitHub issues.

The unfortunate outcome here is that users have come to expect this sort of high-quality support and documentation (again with the italics, who does this guy think he is???). Every D3 submodule has standard api documentation, sure, but thats expected of all libraries these days. However, the additional example documentation (again, nobody got paid to make this material) for the most recent releases has been migrated from bl.ocks.org (a now defunct open-source service users didn't pay for it) to Observable Notebooks. Now, Observable is a VC-backed business, yes, but the documentation is still completely free. In this thread, you mention you don't like this, so in at least one online conversation where D3 comes up, you actively advocate against using it out of principle! (Couldn't resist!).

Of course this is just my viewpoint on what has transpired, and I'm likely articulating it in a more-inflammatory-than-reality manner. But I'd prefer to have D3 documentation in the form of free, interactive Observable Notebooks rather than to have no documentation at all. Even more so if it helps out the authors of the open-source library.

As a tip for those who have difficulties going from the reactive Observable model to vanilla js -> you can always just take an observable notebook and ask AI to convert it to a set of vanilla files for you.

PS - Sorry for the novel, at an airport!
by Slow_Hand | 2025-04-08 21:11:50+00:00
I'm surprised to see how many people still put music on for focused work like studying. It does not work for me at all. I'm a lifelong musician and I get way too keyed-in to the background music if I'm reading, writing, listening, or supposed to be concentrating on text.

It's most difficult when I have to read or write. When I do either, the auditory part of my mind with my "inner voice" is occupied, and I cannot multi-task. A long time ago I stopped kidding myself about my ability to multi-task.

I have music on constantly around the house when doing other tasks, but always pause playback when reading or writing.
by robocat | 2025-04-08 21:12:03+00:00
To add, Levine's latest missive says:

Peter Navarro writes: The US cumulative trade deficits in goods from 1976 — the year chronic deficits began — to 2024 have transferred over $20tn of American wealth into foreign hands. That’s more than 60 per cent of US GDP in 2024. Foreign interests have taken over vast swaths of US farmland, housing, tech companies..." and: [Foreigners] pump "so much money into the U.S. economy that it fuels economic vulnerabilities and crises." There is too much foreign demand to own our tech companies, so we have to reduce it, by making the tech companies’ stocks worth less.
by danudey | 2025-04-08 21:12:12+00:00
It boggles my mind that people still think Elon is some sort of luminary when every time he talks about something new he makes it painfully obvious that he's at best uninformed and at worst willfully ignorant.

He doesn't understand default timestamps in COBOL, he doesn't understand magnetic tape backup, he paid someone to boost his PoE2 character but didn't bother to learn anything about it before sitting down to get it deleted. He obviously believes the hype about how he's an infallible super-genius even though he's constantly provided with evidence to the contrary, and instead of embarking on any sort of inward-looking self-improvement journey he just doubles down on whatever cringe dipshit idea he comes up with next.
by palmotea | 2025-04-08 21:12:14+00:00
Once upon a time, a Chinese-made advanced technology (like a smartphone) would not just have been a pure fantasy, but a laughable joke.

Remember that scene is Back to the Future where the 50s Doc Brown scoffs at the Japanese components of the time machine?

There are a lot of vested interests that will fight for the offshore status quo, because their profits depend on it. Nothing else matters to them.
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-08 21:12:30+00:00
The ones ignorant enough to vote for Trump again are also ignorant enough to blame Biden for another two years.

In four years, if inflation and tariffs make the cost of living higher, then I think that Republican candidates will have problems, but in the midterm I think they can spin enough bullshit to keep the easily-distracted still voting for them. They just have to say "woke trigger the libs China beautiful clean coal Biden bad men in women's sports" and it's over.
by paulcole | 2025-04-08 21:14:19+00:00
I mean the reason I blew you off is that you didn't answer any of my questions.

I see this often and if you've convinced yourself that you have no control in this situation you should find a different situation. Or you should realize that you can do different things and have some control of your situation. Up to you.

> they sure as hell won't like it

What will they do if they don't like it? Does your company fire people often?

> Can we refuse to comply?

What specifically would happen if you refuse to comply?

> they simply can't do otherwise

They can't? What would happen if they did do otherwise?

Overall, someone not liking you at work is not a real consequence if it makes you happier. Plenty of people you've met in life don't like you and it doesn't bother you that much does it?
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-08 21:14:47+00:00
Yeah, perhaps I was a bit unfair, it's just that the problems that have gotten good results never seem to be the ones I need! C'est la vie, I suppose. (In particular, I've been working with recognizing small formal languages from samples, which has usually NP-hard, but has a surprising number of solvable cases. But my impression is that most modern work has gone into various forms of probabilistic grammars, which aren't really what I'm looking for.)

Sometimes it's also helpful to look into approximation algorithms, e.g., a good LLL implementation can work wonders for certain problems. But heaven forbid someone obtains an inapproximability result for your problem, then you're really in trouble.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-08 21:16:42+00:00
They point to the reason in the intro but don't make it explicit: it's because this is at the intersection of computing with a much older tradition, typesetting.

There's no "correct" way to typeset a document, there wouldn't even be a consensus among typesetters on what the implementation specifics look like. Rather than turn the spec committee into a decades-long ecumenical council of typographers they just left the specifics up to each individual "shop" as it always has been. Except now instead of printers it's the browser vendors needing to make the final call.