MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-22 18:09:32+00:00
>There are many very good arguments for tariffs and against tariffs, let's talk about them instead?

You haven’t talked about anything. You just keep “asking questions” as if the rhetorical questions are actually making a point, but when they are answered and show negative effects for the US, you just pivot to some other random question.

That or you make sweeping, utterly simplistic statements like “neither the US nor any country in the world lives only on imported goods” (yeah, no one thought they did) or “changes in policy will have widespread effects. Including good effects.” (yeah, if I cut my legs off, I’ll save a fortune on shoes. Win!). You do nothing to actually talk about how “good effects” will outweigh all the bad effects or how we will magically make up for massive imports with domestic production.

> You added nothing to the discussion.

Pot, meet kettle.
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-22 18:09:54+00:00
The issue I - and many others - have is that the long term prediction is pulled out of thin air. While other Ai researchers - serious ones such as Timnit Gebru - aren't taken in consideration - my opinion, but I guess because they're not so gloomy and probably don't have the same opinion on ceos and people in power as yud and others - I don't know how to put it, but this sphere has a strong reactionary component that you see in musk, Thiel, et Al
by igouy | 2025-04-22 18:10:06+00:00
> The biggest benefit of being a single language is massive parallelism, especially if you're process/message oriented as Smalltalk or Elixir. Most modern software, unless really pushed (e.g., game engines) still do not use all cores available.

Ummm most Smalltalks don't use all cores available, they time-slice a single OS process, aka green threads?

(Exceptions: SmalltalkMT and VisualWorks Matrix framework https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/products/foundation/mat... .)

Also iirc Erlang originally did not take advantage of multi-core cpus or multiple processors for performance. The point of the massive parallelism was "process" isolation for high availability systems.
by pron | 2025-04-22 18:10:36+00:00
A comptime variable in Zig isn't a constant whose value is computed at compile time (that would just be a Zig constant) but rather variable that's potentially mutable by comptime: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Compile-Time-Varia...

This is one of the things that allow the "comptime language" to just be Zig, as in this example: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Case-Study-print-i...
by asnyder | 2025-04-22 18:10:44+00:00
Every scientist does that at some point. I've easily crossed my fingers and hoped numerous times that code I'd written would work, especially on the first time. Even more rewarding in the superstition when the project is hard, and you're a bit daffy at the end.

It's a human thing.

Surely Feynman made jested comments before running experiments. I'm sure some digging in his wonderful books and letters will find many examples.
by highwaylights | 2025-04-22 18:10:59+00:00
Having worked with it quite a bit I'm still not sure I really understand what it is, which sounds like a bizarre sentence but:

It's Postgres, but bundled with some extensions and Postgrest. And a database UI. But hosted and it runs locally also by pulling the separate parts. Running it locally has issues though, so much so that I found it easier to run a docker compose of the separate parts from scratch and at that point just carry that through to a deployment, at which point is there still a reason to use Supabase rather than another hosted Postgres with the extensions?

It's a bit of a confusing product story.
by exceptione | 2025-04-22 18:11:31+00:00
The difference is determinism. A technical inclined person wants to build things from first principles. Assembly or a higher level language are in that nature the same.

Now, most humans are social beings and rather play social "games" with language. That is why technical people used to be called nerds, because they are the exception. Engineers by heart (those of their own choosing rather than because of economical pressure) love the technical reasoning part of their brain.

Now a stochastic model that may lie to you, or respond differently on how your word it today, is a completely different kind of work. It is in principle not engineering, but rather some kind of managing or influencing.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-04-22 18:12:25+00:00
Hmm... maybe because these notable angles are also those of which the associated trigonometric values are round(ish), and so it's about first learning those by heart ? (Like you learn the multiplication table by heart before doing multi-digit multiplications.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unit_circle_angles_colo...
by mindslight | 2025-04-22 18:12:32+00:00
Sure, that was already mentioned and I skipped mentioning it again because focusing too much on that one thing is likely to distract from the overall problem. It's not bigger, it's just different. It has also been made less attractive now that interest rates exist again (at least for the time being until Krasnov gets his hands on that lever of market manipulation)

(another one in the same vein is that when you donate an appreciated asset, you get a tax deduction of the unrealized value)
by ethn | 2025-04-22 18:12:36+00:00
We would see neither squirrels nor crows since these criticisms miss the forest for the trees. But we can address them.

> This is irrelevant for AI, because people throw more hardware at bigger problems

GAI is a fixed problem which is Solomonoff Induction. Further Amdahl's law is a limitation on neither software nor a super computer.

Both inference and training rely on parallelization, LLM inference has multiple serialization points per layer. Vegh et al 2019 quantifies how Amdahl's law limits success in neural networks[1]. He further states:

"A general misconception (introduced by successors of Amdahl) is to assume that Amdahl’s law is valid for software only". It would apply to a neural network as it does equally to the problem of self-driving cars.

> These two sentences contradict each other

There is no contradiction only a misunderstanding of what "eviscerates" means and even with that incorrect definition resulting in your threshold test, it still remains applicable.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6458202/

Further reading on Amdahl's law w.r.t LLM:

2. https://medium.com/@TitanML/harmonizing-multi-gpus-efficient...

3. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~sinclair/papers/spati-iiswc23-tot...
by MisterBastahrd | 2025-04-22 18:13:12+00:00
Honestly, if you're going to be a member of a church and you fully believe that the dude is holding the seat of the founder of the faith, the least you could do is actually have enough of an attention span to fully hear him out. It isn't his fault that people decided to do what people do. He explained himself and people chose not to listen.
by ilrwbwrkhv | 2025-04-22 18:13:14+00:00
yeah this was actually a horrible book because it gives the vibe of greater discovery on how these work but as usual with most of these things it badly hides either by choice or by stupidity the real way these network effects came into being.

So for example, Uber and Airbnb started by breaking laws and helping people make money. If you are okay breaking laws, you can get many networks started.

PayPal grew by bribing people with money.

LinkedIn grew with massive amounts of spam, maybe the spammiest company in history of tech.

Clubhouse tried to be cool for a while with a few Silicon Valley famous names, but is dead.

Slack grew because the founder was very famous and could seed a large amount of initial customers based on his profile.

I can go on and on.

Out of these reddit might be the only one that actually broke the cold start problem with some light levels of seeding and pretending to be different users and also digg collapsing.

I actually hate these kind of books written by VCs who are purposely hiding the truth about a lot of these businesses.
by yoniploni | 2025-04-22 18:13:28+00:00
Nice app! The interface is smooth and attractive and shows a lot of good interconnected information about the characters, their components, and the words they’re used in.

Suggestions after a short time exploring the app:

1. More clearly convey when character components/radicals are “meaning” or “sound” components (or both, or neither). The best resource for this I know of is the etymological dictionary from Outlier Linguistics (which you can get as a Pleco add-on). The mnemonic “stories” you provide associating each character with its components do help generate mental images to aid memorization, but they may also cause a false implicit understanding that all character components are “meaning” components and/or a false implicit understanding of character etymologies. For instance, the story for 讲 (jiǎng) notes the meaning of component 井 (jǐng), when this component actually serves as a sound component and not a meaning component in this character.

2. Include all common meanings and pronunciations for characters with multiple different meanings/pronunciations on the “learning” page (or you could create multiple different learning pages). Each character “learning” page seems to cover only a single meaning and pronunciation. For example, basic characters 着, 待, 当, 了 have multiple common pronunciations and meanings. Another example: the learning page for character 壳 shows pronunciation qiào, when alternate pronunciation ké is more common.

3. Note which characters and words from the HSK 2.0 and 3.0 levels are not (yet) included in the app’s vocabulary. It seems only 910 characters and 2000 words composed of these characters are included in the app, even though HSK levels 1-6 are identified. From some quick searching, it seems HSK 2.0 levels 1-6 include 5000 words with 2663 unique characters; HSK 3.0 levels 1-6 include 5456 words with 1800 unique characters (and obviously many more words and characters for HSK 3.0 levels 7-9).

4. Include a quiz to determine exactly which characters the user already knows, rather than just having the user estimate the number of characters.
by nyrikki | 2025-04-22 18:13:30+00:00
While I am to old to say what is taught today, this is exactly the map vs territory issue I mentioned in my other comment.

It is all there in what you would have been taught, but hidden because we tend to avoid the hay in the haystack problems and focus on the needles, because we don't have access to the hay.

As an example that can cause huge arguments, if for analysis you used Rudin, go look for an equally binary operator in that book, as every construction of the reals is a measure zero set, it is actually impossible to prove the equality of two real numbers. ZFC uses constructablity, Spivik uses Cauchy sequences etc...

If you look at the paper[1], about the equivalence of PAC/VC dimensionality it is all there, framing learning as a decision problem, set shattering etc.

Richardson's theorm, especially with more recent papers is another lens.

With the idea that all models are wrong, but some are useful, it does seem that curriculums tend to leave these concepts to postgraduate classes, often hiding them or ignoring them, in descriptive complexity theory they should have been front and center IMHO.

Assuming something is computable or learnable is important for finding pathological cases that are useful, don't confuse the map with the territory.

We have enough examples to know the neuronic model is wrong, but the proposed models we have found aren't useful yet, and with what this post provided shows that may always hold.

Physics and other fields make similar assumptions, like physics assumptions that laplacian determinism is true, despite counterexamples.

Gödel, Rice, Turing. etc... may be proven wrong some day, but right now Halt ~= open frame ~= symbol grounding ~= system identification in the general case is the safe bet.

But that doesn't help get work done, or possibly find new math that changes that.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/76359.76371
by cess11 | 2025-04-22 18:14:37+00:00
In 1994 there was very little competition in scripting and LPC/Pike/moo and the like cribbed ideas that are still not mainstream or became mainstream much later. It's the same year Python got to 1.0 and they didn't get real traction until 2005-2010 sometime.

At the time the alternatives were stuff like Tcl and Awk and Perl 5, which were relatively clunky, incompetent or slower. Perl won for web, though Pike had Roxen and could have, and if that had happened we would likely have gotten a more Smalltalk-like Internet than the PHP Internet we got.

Pike is fun, it will likely compile just fine on your odd computers if you have any and it has some characteristics that are uncommon like easy hot upgrades for long lived systems and modules as data.
by ramraj07 | 2025-04-22 18:15:01+00:00
As a biologist with a tech background (but actual biotechnology majors) - please we have enough tech bros who think they're biology's saviors. They'll just come in fascinated by some technological problem, call it the only blocker to solving aids and cancer and take away a billion dollars in funding over decades and show nothing of actual consequence. Like the entire protein folding field. It's a tool. Not the solution. Even today there was this hyperbolic piece on NBC about how this Harvard scientist working on microscopy image processing is being deported and now we are not going to cure cancer.

I feel bad for them, but I can assure you, as someone who did the research in the exact same field, they're curing nothing and are more likely to make cures slower by sucking away funding from more pertinent projects.

Also relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1831/
by dvt | 2025-04-22 18:15:15+00:00
> F ⊢ (Prov_F(“s”) → s) → s

This is called "Löb’s hypothesis" and it's an incredible piece of logical machinery[1]. If you truly understand it, it's pretty mind-blowing that it's actually a logically sound statement. It's one of my favorite ways to prove Gödel's Second Theorem of Incompleteness.

[1] https://categorified.net/FreshmanSeminar2014/Lobs-Theorem.pd...
by slicktux | 2025-04-22 18:15:32+00:00
I think the whole teaching the history of computers is a big failure at an attempt to Segway into computer organization and architecture. Nonetheless, I get what is happening. If it’s a pure Computer programming class then the goal maybe to have them understand the “basics”…like what is the hard drive vs RAM (memory allocation) or what is a transistor (Boolean logic) and what is a punch card (mnemonics and abstractions of those mnemonics to what is now just a computer programming language).
by ilrwbwrkhv | 2025-04-22 18:15:40+00:00
What I mean is that, you know, we tried all of these things back in the day. Like putting your business logic in a database was something that was tried. It's not that the first time that these ideas have shown up. And they were basically tried and tested and found faulty. But now there's this whole new generation of sub-bar developers. And they are being fooled into thinking that all of this works because they just want to get their hands dirty. I guess when normies flood the scene the wolves make a killing.
by entaloneralie | 2025-04-22 18:16:01+00:00
Related: Origami-Constructible Numbers[1] & Folding Primes[2]

[1] https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~jking/papers/origami.pdf

[2] https://www.pythabacus.com/Origami%20Fractions/folding.htm
by TSiege | 2025-04-22 18:16:21+00:00
Experienced backend dev here who also uses Hasura for work at a successful small business. I think it's great at getting a prototype to production and solves real business problems that a solo dev could do by himself. As engineer #2 it's a mess, and it doesn't seem like a viable long term strategy.

I've only worked with Hasura, but I can say it's an insecure nightmare that forces anti-patterns. Your entire schema is exposed. Business logic gets pushed into your front end because where else do you run it unless you make an API wrapper. Likewise you can't easily customize your API without building an API on top of your API. You're doing weird extra network hops if you have other services that need the data but can't safely access it directly. You're pushed into fake open source where you can't always run the software independently. Who knows what will happen when the VC backers demand returns or the company deems the version you're on as not worth it to maintain compared to their radically different but more lucrative next version.

I think the people who write this off as "backend engineers feel threatened" aren't taking the time to understand the arguments they're hearing
by iamthemonster | 2025-04-22 18:17:12+00:00
Yep I've had experience with offshoring engineering to low cost centres where nobody in the entire staff has ever set foot on an operating oil / gas facility.

It pushes all the actual decision-making, risk management and design back onto the client, until a scope of work is written that spells out everything in such excruciating detail that the low cost centre just need to copy paste it.

The O&G industry has been on a warpath on cost since 2015, and quality has gone the way of Boeing. There will be plenty more Deepwater Horizons to come.
by BoorishBears | 2025-04-22 18:17:48+00:00
Not really a confusing story: it's a PaaS that wants to beat fears of becoming another Parse (https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/parse-shutdown-what-it-...)

Realistically 99% of the users would still be screwed if they ever shut down, regardless of if it's open (see: Parse)... but it gives people a some confidence to hear they're building on a platform that they could (strictly in theory) spin up their own instance of should a similar rug pull ever occur
by FloatArtifact | 2025-04-22 18:18:22+00:00
According to the Bethesda FAQ, it looks like modding is not supported. It feeds into my suspicion that Unreal 5 is difficult to mod especially adding new content/mechanics without official support from developers. A real shame.

https://help.bethesda.net/#en/answer/69672

Well, we'll see what the community can do, but it'll be limited without official support.
by klabb3 | 2025-04-22 18:18:28+00:00
If that were the cause it’d apply universally. But the point is that she can use her phone to a much higher degree of independence, despite fat finger issues, much smaller screen real estate, and lack of hover effects, double clicks and right clicks. I always find new apps and figuring things out, but struggling to explore and learn on the computer.

To add on top of that, the double click navigation isn’t even consistent on the same platform. In the sidebar on desktop you have single click navigation even on the same type of entity (directories). Look at the younger gens who only used phones. They struggle too.
by _zoltan_ | 2025-04-22 18:18:43+00:00
there is no need to this tedious, boring phase which you miss, especially since it still requires a significant of coding effort (eg to stitch a backend to figma).

you can vibe code a fully working UI+backend that requires way less effort so why bother with planning and iterating on the UI separately at all?

anybody who actually knows what they are doing gets 10x from these tools plus they enable non-coders to bring ideas to the market and do it fast.
by gameman144 | 2025-04-22 18:19:01+00:00
> When the topic at hand is one group wanting to exercise power over another group, there can never be a resolution.

I actually agree here, but only insofar as a resolution needs to be the ideal for both parties: a resolution could totally be rules and doctrine that both sides find partially objectionable, but the best feasible option.

I do want to point out that your point about one group exercising power over another is almost always where these disagreements arise: each party thinks that they've identified an unjust exertion of power that should be prevented.
by highwaylights | 2025-04-22 18:19:10+00:00
I like PostgREST for some of it's use cases (views mostly), but the issue I have with it is that I don't often want a user to have direct access to the database, even if it's limited to their own data.

Mike can edit his name and his bio. He could edit some karma metric that he's got view access to but no write access to. That's fine, I can introduce an RLS policy to control this. Now Mike wants to edit his e-mail.

Now I need to send a confirmation e-mail to make sure the e-mail is valid, but at this point I can't protect the integrity of the database with RLS because the e-mail/receipt/confirm loop lives outside the database entirely. I can attach webhooks for this and use pg_net, but I could quickly have a lot of triggers firing webhooks inside my database and now most of my business logic is trapped in SQL and is at the mercy of how far pg_net will scale the increasing amount of triggers on a growing database.

Even for simple CRUD apps, there's so much else happening outside of the database that makes this get really gnarly really fast.
by Aloisius | 2025-04-22 18:19:12+00:00
It's in all the news articles from the time. The loans were forgivable if they used them for payroll and didn't fire anyone for a certain period.

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/26/821457551/whats-inside-the-se...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/business/coronavirus-stim...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/small-businesses-face-nightm...
by maevesentner | 2025-04-22 18:21:11+00:00
Telnyx just released their Local MCP Server, a fully open-source server that lets you run Telnyx APIs directly on your machine. It gives developers local access to their full-stack solution including voice calls, SMS/MMS, phone number management, and AI assistant control without relying on a cloud endpoint.

It’s compatible with Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any other MCP client. If you’re building with OpenAI Agents or working in local-first environments, this is a great way to bring communications into your stack with minimal latency and full control.

GitHub: https://github.com/team-telnyx/telnyx-mcp-server

Features: - Make and manage phone calls (TTS, DTMF, transfer, etc.) - Send and receive SMS/MMS - Create and manage AI assistants using our public APIs - Buy and configure phone numbers - Works entirely offline once configured (aside from API calls)

It’s built in Python, uses `uvx` for package management, and is dead simple to run locally or with tools like Claude.

Telnyx is currently looking for feedback, contributors, and beta testers.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-22 18:22:23+00:00
It's not because "nerd stuff that's beneath them" but because to a significant portion of the middle management class, the bullshit IS reality. The bullshit is how they get their job, how they function day to day, how they explain themselves to others, how they THINK about themselves etc.

It's much the same as the people who get books ghostwritten and say "I wrote a book". It doesn't matter if you understand someone else wrote it, if you say that in your head or out loud enough, your brain will treat it as reality and you will think it to be reality, and that will effect future thinking and feeling.

It doesn't matter if you are playing a character. Play it convincingly enough and it WILL bleed into your reality.
by Liftyee | 2025-04-22 18:22:45+00:00
If you want low power, try the nRF52 series of chips (e.g. nRF52840). Much less power hungry than the ESP32 with a comparable ARM core. Only Bluetooth though - no WiFi. nRF52840 sensors can run for months on a single CR2032 coin cell, and the power consumption while running is lower too.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-22 18:22:50+00:00
Actually-rich people pay little or no income tax.

Most of what they pay is capital gains, and usually the long-term rate (15% or 20%, depends), which is lower than all but the lowest two (0%, 12%) of seven brackets applied to people who actually work for a living.

Plus they don't pay FICA on that, which is another ~7.5% for W2 and ~15% for contract workers.

Also, they often manage to avoid even paying the long-term capital gains rate.