MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chasely | 2025-04-16 16:54:37+00:00
A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to get into this so I started self-studying probability theory (with measure theory) [0] as a bridge to start in on stochastic calculus [1]

I think the hardest part of self-studying anything that has some formal math foundations is knowing _what_ to pay attention to. There's so much in just the first chapter of the probability book. Is having a general understanding of set theory enough or should I actually know how to prove a function is a singular function?

That's why I often like to find a university course with lectures posted online so I can use that as a rough guideline for what's important, but I haven't quite found that yet for stochastic calculus. Would love if someone coul point me to one.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/3030976815 [1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/9811247560
by ethagknight | 2025-04-16 16:55:19+00:00
This article is very goofy. America manufactures very complicated things. Building an iPhone at scale is not complicated in the grand scheme. Building it as low cost per unit is a complicated socioeconomic question- ive seen and read enough about working conditions at Foxconn to know that the complexity rests with the government control of the laborers' lives, and the laborers' lack of relief from what Americans would decidedly call slavery.

1- Tariffs will bring some manufacturing back to the US. The before/after tariff pricing presented in the article is fiction- price points cannot simply be doubled, consumers will reject it, pricing is extremely complicated and sensitive, Apple would have already had the iPhone set at $616 if they believed that was an attainable price for the volume. Apple is among the most profitable companies in the world, in part thanks to their mastery of labor exploitation.

2- Weak industrial supply chain- we have an incredible supply chain and industry can hop right on. Trains, planes, and automobiles galore. Extremely adaptive and we have plenty of room to expand. Auto manufacturers dont seem to mind building in the US, slightly more complicated than the toys that Molson sells.

3- We dont know how to make it: some things sure, most things: yes we do. We do have some additional capacity building required but this is not some crazy challenge. The beautiful thing about it is that, for the stuff we cant make easily, we can just pay the tax and keep in motion. It becomes a simple optimization calculation.

4- effective cost of labor- this is a challenge for sure but it has significant upside implications for American labor and the American lower and middle class. Again, this is a simple optimization. He points to all the fraud in the American system and the slave-like conditions of the Chinese system as if those are things things that shouldn't be addressed / barriers to entry for US? US needs lots of improvements that should be addressed not matter what.

5- Infrastructure- I seriously doubt the electricity stats but accepting it at face value, we have endless gas and sunlight in the west, US can adapt here as well. China notably does NOT have endless gas supplies.

6- Made in America will take time- OK? I am here for it!

7- Uncertainty- I would love to see them permanent. But locking in some wins from 4 years of America-first, modernized manufacturing base will go a long way.

8- Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing- why is that something you get to declare and presume? I think Americans will love job opportunities.

9- The labor does exist, we are just paying them to not work. it's an epidemic and circular problem. A bigger current issue is that we also dont have enough jobs to put low skilled workers to work. We need more low-ish complexity but reliable jobs.

And so on...
by egorfine | 2025-04-16 16:55:20+00:00
> An API that gets out of your way

Their new API update (basil) makes me want to leave Stripe and not come back. Current Stripe API is something that is designed to get in your way as much as possible.

Yeah, I do understand the complexity, but I am paying Stripe to wrap that complexity for me, not expose more and more of it.
by adev_ | 2025-04-16 16:55:44+00:00
I have applied a subset of these techniques in a tokenizer in C++ to parse a language syntactically similar to Swift: no inline assembly, no intrinsics, no SWAR but reduce branching, cache optimization and SIMD parsing + explicit vectorization.

I get:

- ~4 MLOC/sec/core on a laptop

- ~ 8-9MLOC/sec/core on a modern AMD sever grade CPU with AVX512.

So yes, it is definitively possible.
by sabslikesobs | 2025-04-16 16:56:23+00:00
BR confuses me because when I look at blocks of BR-enabled text, I feel less mental strain. Yet the studies and counter-studies (like this article) I've seen only report on comprehension scores. It definitely feels like BR is in scam territory, but I'm really curious about what it is about it that catches me.

Maybe it's just because bold text would have the same effect; or because I usually skim while reading anyways.
by bko | 2025-04-16 16:56:29+00:00
The post claims that it's fake and racist, which is probably correct.

But could you imagine a science that isn't fake but is racist? Does something being real prevent it from being racist? For instance, if there were some connections with your skull and some characteristic, would NPR and the scientific community embrace it?

I think it's a mistake to argue that this kind of thing is both fake and racist, not because it's not fake. But I could imagine a world in which some science could be real and racist. In that case, you'd have to deny reality so it fits your world view. How could science and the laws of the universe not fit my 2025 view of race and culture??

I think its enough to say it's racist and we shouldn't pursue this field of research because of it's morally reprehensible. Consider something like the science behind creating human-animal chimeras. Even if it were real it would still be morally reprehensible.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-16 16:56:34+00:00
Which was huge in the era when CPUs didn't underclock themselves at idle to save power and coolers looked like this: https://www.newegg.com/cooler-master-air-cooler-series-a73/p...

Some coolers today still look like that but they're on chips drawing 35W or so while idling at <2W.
by geye1234 | 2025-04-16 16:56:39+00:00
I mean, it's hard to know where to start. The sibling poster gave a practical example about leaving your house. Another might be: "what happens when I burn hydrogen in oxygen? Will it produce water, ammonia or a chocolate bunny?". Chemistry rather than simple quantity is our object here, so you can't know with the certainty of math. You can't know with absolute certainty that hydrogen won't suddenly change its properties today and give you ammonia or chocolate. Would you therefore answer "I don't know"?

Another problem is that your position appears to be self-refuting. Your proposition is that "Everything I know, I know with the certainty of math, or not at all". Which of the two does this statement itself fall into? If it's with the certainty of math, why do you make an exception for this non-mathematical proposition, and how do you justify it, and how do you deal with the ensuing infinite vicious regress? If not at all, obviously it means nothing.

You also need to know with certainty that "something exists". This is true even if the objects of your thought are mere mental images, because even then, mental images exist.

Quite a few other problems but these initially spring to mind.
by pvg | 2025-04-16 16:56:52+00:00
На земле сидел андроид, опустивши голову.

От чего тоскует робот? От апгрейда нового.

Ой да ты кака система! Как с тобой управиться?

О тебе ничё не знаем... Только нам всё нравится...
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-04-16 16:56:58+00:00
Yes, there's ways of getting rid of dictatorships, but they tend to be unusual/extreme such as mass protests or revolts.

I did just see a news alert that the judge in the "deportation" (kidnapping) case is considering contempt of court for the Trump administration - will that work?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/16/trump-deport...
by Suppafly | 2025-04-16 16:57:02+00:00
>That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world.

Sure, but we don't manufacture the things that are typically made in 3rd world countries and the lead time to build that infrastructure is years, and generally would result in us moving down the tech tree ladder from being a consumer economy to a manufacturing economy with all of the negatives associated with that.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-16 16:58:13+00:00
Another interesting cultural development here is that the scope of parental responsibility has started to extend into what is conventionally considered adulthood, obligating parents to pay for their child’s post-secondary education. By contrast, children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age. This privileges those who invest in financial instruments in lieu of having children, since the instruments will (at least in theory) provide the investor with the resources necessary to hire help in their old age.
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-16 16:58:21+00:00
> KDE's Global Menu works with apps built with other toolkits than QT

Their own wiki page says it does not: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_I...

"Global Menu is not supported for non-Qt apps"

But either way, I still disagree with your comment that "all GUI apps on macOS and KDE (Wayland) have searchable menus", because this requires a menu system that is exported via a specific DBus protocol (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75215820/how-to-implemen...), meaning it requires support from the application itself (possibly via some toolkit it uses), which IMO is demonstrably not "all apps".
by timacles | 2025-04-16 16:59:27+00:00
Trump was given the power by some invisible forces who have been working for decades to develop plans to destroy the US.

Trump is simultaneously a blunt force tool to destroy our institutions while also being a political wizard that always know exactly how to spin things and is completely impervious to pressure and stress.

I think those background forces know after trump there will not be anyone like him. Which is exactly why everything is being destroyed at such a rapid pace. Their opportunity is short and they are maximizing it. Things will look very different post trump
by imglorp | 2025-04-16 17:00:08+00:00
It's also fundamental tech and a research pipeline supporting new ones.

There are numerous examples of whole competencies were transferred to a foreign partner, leaving only sales and marketing in the US. TV's for example, gone by 2000, leaving only a swirl of patent walls to further prevent them from coming back. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2014/10/22/america...

And research? DEC WRL, Bell Labs, Xerox Parc ... Which corp has the gumption to fund any of that again? They'd rather pad the current quarter than invest in the next.
by m463 | 2025-04-16 17:00:26+00:00
The noctua cpu fans are quieter and as good as liquid cooling because of the pump.

That said, I think liquid cooling has reached critical mass. AIOs are commonplace.

I think it would be (uh) cool to have a extra huge external reservoir and fan (think motorcycle or car radiator plus maybe a tank) that could be nearly silent and cool the cpu and gpu.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-16 17:00:47+00:00
> Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

The best financial years Puerto Rico had ended when the tax incentives to be there went away. It's a real shame. Puerto Rico was #1 in production, above the US and Japan. You could buy something made in Puerto Rico and you knew it was a high quality product. Its much harder to gain back that level of quality once you've effectively killed such a culture, I can only imagine the detriment in Japan if they lost their work culture and how much harder it would be for them to regain it.
by barbazoo | 2025-04-16 17:01:04+00:00
The importance we assign the "bottom line" is totally made up, it doesn't absolve you from basic decency when dealing with other animals. If it affecting the bottom line is what stakeholders are concerned about, and they'd rather see other animals physically and psychologically suffer, then to me that signals a mental health issue that should be addressed. Why are those people so greedy, why have they lost their connection to the environment and other beings?
by toast0 | 2025-04-16 17:01:10+00:00
I maintained email servers as part of my job; mainly just getting inbound customer service emails, sending some auto-responses, and forwarding into a queue system. If I were working full time, I'd be getting at least $200k salary, probably ~ $300k employer cost with employer paid tax and insurance. Assuming the mail servers don't cost anything, $20k is ~ 6.6% of that, which is a little less than 11 hours a month. I could see mail taking that much time, especially if you look into reports of missing email. If you price in equipment, the hours available to tend the servers is even less.
by noahjstreet | 2025-04-16 17:01:25+00:00
GPT doesn’t need coffee breaks. Or meetings. Or to “circle back later.” Just published a piece arguing that LLMs aren’t your copilots—they’re your replacements.

Middle-tier roles like project managers, consultants, and info relayers are on the chopping block. It’s not about blue-collar automation anymore. It’s white-collar synthesis that's being devoured.

Read here: https://medium.com/@street.noah/ai-is-just-another-middle-ma...

Would love to hear counterpoints, especially from folks in ops, product, or consulting.
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-16 17:01:36+00:00
Yes, the K-mart in my town had one when they opened the store in the 1970s. I think they removed the cafe some time in 1980s? The store itself closed about 6-8 years ago, sat vacant until about two years ago and was finally torn down.

Remember blue-light specials? They had a little cart with a flashing blue light that they would roll around the store and have short-term unadvertised sale prices on things.
by beeforpork | 2025-04-16 17:01:56+00:00
Are you trolling?

Biological sex is not binary. There are (at least) three criteria to be considered:

(1) cromosomes. females are XX, males are XY. But other combinations exist: XXY, XXX, XXXY, etc. There is no universal agreement of how those combinations should be best matched to the binary system.

(2) phenotype. females have a vulva, a vagina, and ovaries, males have a scrotum, a penis, and testicles. But some people have no, or half, or a large, or small of one or another. Furthermore, the phenotype might not match with the chromosomes: one example is an XY chromosome type while the person has a vulva, vagina, and internal testicles. There is no universal agreement of how those people should best be classified to the binary system -- the best is probably to recognise that they are non-binary.

(3) hormone level. females have a typical level of hormons and males have different levels. But this is not universally clear-cut. This is one of the most frequent reasons for dispute at sport events when otherwise very obvious women have hormone levels that are 'too male'. Again, no universal agreement of what to do here: ignore the hormone levels in these cases? But why? Usually, they match. But not always.

There are also male outliers that have hormone levels that are higher than for males. These males might also be excluded from sports competitions for the same reason, despite being on the right side of the binary scale, but they are too far on that side. Again -- there is no agreement whether this is still the normal male category or maybe non-binary.

And this is just the biological sex. For gender and identification, there is more. If it wasn't so serious, it would be funny how some governments define sex as binary by reducing it to biological sex or maybe assigned sex -- it is really like making a law that pi is 3.

But note that the judges here made it clear that it is not their place to make a judgement on this complex topics.
by imroot | 2025-04-16 17:02:02+00:00
What overhead?

Just about every web server these days supports ACME -- some natively, some via scripts, and you can set up your own internal CA using something like step-ca that speaks ACME if you don't want your certs going out to the transparency log.

The last few companies I've worked at had no http behind the scenes -- everything, including service-to-service communications was handled via https. It's a hard requirement for just about everything financial, healthcare, and sensitive these days.
by baq | 2025-04-16 17:02:05+00:00
Your question is akin to asking ‘how do I make the tail to wag the dog?’

Your budget should be allocated for say 80% confidence (which the tool helpfully provides behind a switch) and your stakeholders must be on board with this. It shouldn’t be too hard to do since everyone has some experience with missed engineering deadlines. (Bezos would probably say 70% or even less.)
by isoprophlex | 2025-04-16 17:02:36+00:00
Excellent video, thanks for that.

I thought this remark in the comments was pretty interesting:

> Something that helps identify Vaporwave is the natural vibrato that occurs from using tape cassettes etc. I often wonder if vibrato, as an effect, gains it's ability to evoke emotion through a psychological connection with the natural vibrato of a person's wavering voice while near to crying. If so wouldn't that be a potential factor in this kind of music's popularity?
by BoorishBears | 2025-04-16 17:02:49+00:00
It's not a good thing: if it was a good thing Steam would have done it at launch.

Steam only got traction because they were curating. There were loads of places you could dump games: people were installing Steam because games they cared about were on Steam. And getting on Steam in the early years was a guaranteed boost in distribution because they were hand picking quality games.

Somehow they managed to drastically reduce the value proposition twice (first with Greenlight, then with Direct) and keep the same cut, while the value-adds like Steamworks have gotten commoditized (see EGS)
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-16 17:02:56+00:00
> minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers.

I hear from all the much more senior devs about how they learned OOP in company training after years of C, or how their employers would give bonuses for finished projects, and that sort of thing. I always seem to join the ship when the money train and training train leaves the boat.

I think R&D for tax reasons needs to be changed, we had so many tech advancements used to this day from Bell Labs. Now only Microsoft, Google, Apple etc can afford to do R&D and so all the innovation is essentially only worth while to them if they can profit from it.

Granted I do think if you build something innovative you should be able to monetize it, but it takes investing a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money.
by Jon_Lowtek | 2025-04-16 17:04:03+00:00
> And if you directly want a piece of the investment from the children, as people got in the old days, well then go fuck yourself you greedy selfish bastard

consider the following: if your children don't care about you, the societal structure of capitalism may not be the primary reason.

To put it in words close to finance: it is not an early cash investment in daycare and food, but lifelong kin work, that is rewarded with emotional bonds and long term dividends.

Living together in multi-generational homes facilitates kin work, there i agree, but it is not a strictly necessary requirement.

There are also other effects at work, especially psychological. Many adults don't grasp that their elders have increased demands, because they are used to see them in a providing role. They understand it on a abstract and logical level, it is so obvious and well known, but to truly understand it on a personal level is far more difficult. In the same way people growing older often try to stay in this providing role as long as possible, as they for many years defined themselves through it.

There comes a time in life when easter invitations switch direction. If you live together on a farm, this changes gradually.
by visarga | 2025-04-16 17:04:10+00:00
The idea is to use the LLM as a word smith, it doesn't conceptualize novel ideas from itself, that is your job. I would normally chat the topic until it gets it, and after that I ask it to write it up as an article.

Here is a feed I collected over time: https://old.reddit.com/r/VisargaPersonal/ I'm just using this subreddit as a blog.
by barbazoo | 2025-04-16 17:04:12+00:00
Morally I don't think people have the right to place the bottom line above animal welfare so I wouldn't expect them to participate in that "game". I would expect them to pack up and say, nope, that's not how I will treat animals so this is not a business I want to be in. If the business is only feasible if you treat animals badly, then it shouldn't be a business in my opinion.
by sabslikesobs | 2025-04-16 17:04:17+00:00
"The Laundry Files" is one of Charles Stross's (the author of this article) fun series, although it's more a kind of urban (bureaucratic) fantasy than sci-fi.

I'm surprised he doesn't touch on AI at all in this article. To me, AI companies heavily depend on the implications that the "AI" moniker (as well as "learning", "neural network," etc.) carries from many years of human-like reasoning machines appearing in science fiction, and I think there would be much less momentum if they were called something else.
by duxup | 2025-04-16 17:04:29+00:00
We'll see how quickly the courts catch on to the fact that his administration has zero intent on keeping their word even if they agreed to do something.

I think the courts assume that both parties do what they say they'll do / are honest participants in the process. But that does advantage those who are happy to use the process to just do what they want in the meantime.

Of course what consequences could there be? SCOTUS already decided that the POTUS is immune if it is an "official act". They did what they could to enable this kind of behavior. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, not sure how they forgot about that one.
by lolinder | 2025-04-16 17:04:43+00:00
> everyone will be so used to certificates changing all the time, and no certificate pinning anymore, so the day were China, a company or whoever serve you a fake certificate, you will be less able to notice it

I'm a computing professional in the tiny slice of internet users that actually understands what a cert is, and I never look at a cert by hand unless it's one of my own that I'm troubleshooting. I'm sure there are some out there who do (you?), but they're a minority within a minority—the rest of us just rely on the automated systems to do a better job at security than we ever could.

At a certain point it is correct for systems engineers to design around keeping the average-case user more secure even if it means removing a tiny slice of security from the already-very-secure power users.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-16 17:05:02+00:00
A team I was on onetime had some French workers and one of them was very helpful, but every sentence had him struggling to think of at least one English word or phrase and he did this weird guttural clearing throat uh-uh-uh-uh-uh sound, like a car backfiring or a lawnmower starting up, instead using an actual filler word or something like "how you say..?"