MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hinkley | 2025-04-20 18:50:48+00:00
The reason chemical fertilizers work is because they provide minerals that a plant might normally trade sugars to fungi to get. So those sugars stay in the plant making larger fruits, nuts, or legumes.

But the problem is you also get water and early/late season sugars exchanged between plants (Simard et al).

So within a generation the soil structure has collapsed, you’re at the whim of every microdrought, and you’re dealing with the Red Queen problem. But like drugs, at first it feels amazing.

> dirt

Dirt isn’t much better than hydroponics. Soil is. Conventional farming has been described by some as “hydroponics in dirt”. That’s why it’s so fertilizer dependent, just like hydro.

There are a few places in the world where there is insufficient phosphorous in the native rock to grow plants without fertilizer. But everywhere else, healthy soil fungi could mine it out of the sand in the soils. If they were left to grow instead of burned to death with herbicides and fertilizers.
My company called Bemize (bee-myz)
by osvaldovilomar | 2025-04-20 18:51:04+00:00
Hi. My name is Osvaldo. I'm designing a social media app. It'll be called Bemize.

My plan is to make all accounts verified. I'll design something called Reputation to quantify value for each user.

What are your thoughts? Is account verification for everyone a nice thing to optimize good conversations and authenticity?

Reputation will consider your follower count, your likes, your comments, time on the platform, post count.

Could this feature also play well with verified profiles?

What are your thoughts? Is this a kind of app you'd use? Any feedback would be nice. I’m trying to gather support for my pitch to investors.
by ak217 | 2025-04-20 18:51:14+00:00
Yeah, the number of statements in this essay that, if not uninformed, at least lack perspective, is pretty telling. Anyone who says the Muni is "crumbling" hasn't spent much time in other cities or in SF of a decade or two ago. SFUSD is famous for its dysfunction but anecdotally, friends with kids there say their schools are fine. And the "right-wing pressure groups" she lists are only called these names by ultra-ideologue "progressives" trying to score brownie points with their identity-driven constituencies.
by treis | 2025-04-20 18:51:39+00:00
Most people who go on Testosterone can go off it just fine. Here's a random study:

>Ever since that study, testosterone has undergone extensive clinical trials as a hormonal method of male contraception and many have found testosterone to be efficacious, reversible and safe with minimal short-term side effects

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6305868/

It's not super reliable but it's also easily testable if it's working or not.
by hannofcart | 2025-04-20 18:52:07+00:00
Sonnet 3.7 (Thinking) gave me:

:::thinking This question is playing with words and units.

A "pound of courage" refers to a metaphorical measurement of the abstract concept of courage, using the imperial weight unit "pound" (which equals 453.59 grams).

A "pound coin" refers to the physical currency of the United Kingdom, which is called a "pound" but is a unit of currency, not weight. A physical pound coin weighs about 8-9 grams (specifically, the current 12-sided pound coin weighs 8.75 grams).

So comparing them: - A pound of courage would weigh 453.59 grams (if courage had physical weight, which it doesn't since it's an abstract concept) - A pound coin weighs approximately 8.75 grams

The trick in this question is that it's comparing: 1. A specific weight of an abstract concept (pound of courage) 2. A physical coin whose name includes the word "pound" but refers to currency, not weight

Since the question asks what weighs more, and weight is a physical property, I should point out that courage is abstract and doesn't have physical weight, while a pound coin is a physical object with a measurable weight. ::: # Comparing "A Pound of Courage" vs "A Pound Coin"

This is a play on words with different meanings of "pound":

- A *pound of courage* refers to a metaphorical pound (weight unit) of an abstract concept - A *pound coin* is a physical British currency coin (which weighs about 8.75 grams)

If we're talking about physical weight: - A pound of courage doesn't have physical weight since courage is abstract - A pound coin has a definite weight of approximately 8.75 grams

If we interpreted "pound of courage" as literally one pound (453.59 grams) of something, it would weigh significantly more than the coin.

This question is clever because it compares a metaphorical measurement with a physical object whose name includes the word "pound" but in a different context.
by theahura | 2025-04-20 18:53:28+00:00
I mention distribution in the post, and reasons to be skeptical of that as the primary driver (though I agree that may be the case)

Re talent, I'm not sure how big windsurf is, but aren't these teams generally quite small? $3b for a small team still seems quite high, especially since (afaik) their core area of expertise is more in UX and product than in ml research. That's not to say that UX and product aren't worth acquiring, just that the price tag is surprising if that's the primary justification.
by wiml | 2025-04-20 18:54:11+00:00
I think it's because it alters the moral context of the act that you're going to take anyway. If I pick up a piece of litter on my own initiative, that's an act of virtue. If I pick it up after a petty authority tells me to, that's an act of subservience. People get upset at the existence of PSAs because (in this view) they rob them of the ability to act virtuously. Which is not at all a small thing!

Yes, emotional maturity can help, and it also depends on perspective (whether I identify with the author of the PSA). But when the situation gets more complex than picking up litter, I think people forget that this dynamic exists and is important.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-04-20 18:54:56+00:00
What would that look like? Women complain it's unfair they have to be responsible for birth control in relationships. Now there's the ability for men to shoulder the responsibility too. Will voters, male and female, be ok with not taking the egalitarian path? Obviously governments are concerned about falling birthrates but they already have shown a willingness to continue policies that get them re-elected, even at the expense of birthrates.
by jrdres | 2025-04-20 18:55:03+00:00
Now seems to be the trend to bring TCP to retro machines from first principles.

8088 PC's already have M Brutman's "mTCP" driver. And DogCow (D. Finnigan) has been working on and off on the "Sabina" networking suite for the original 128K Macintosh on the MacGUI site: https://macgui.com/sabina/ https://macgui.com/news/article.php?t=550

Though it's a been slow going, apparently because of a day job. (Also note that the MacGUI site now requires an account to read progress posts.)
by Arainach | 2025-04-20 18:55:38+00:00
I disagree. If you were to take a snapshot of someone's knowledge and memory such that you could restore to it over and over, that person would give the same answer to the question. The same is not true for an LLM.

Heck, I can't even get LLMs to be consistent about *their own capabilities*.

Bias disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Gemini. If I ask Gemini to produce an SVG file, it will sometimes do so and sometimes say "sorry, I can't, I can only produce raster images". I cannot deterministically produce either behavior - it truly seems to vary randomly.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-04-20 18:55:40+00:00
Being allowed to focus seems to be a privilege these days.

When I started in the 90s I could work on something for weeks without much interruption. These days there is almost always some scrum master, project manager or random other manager who wants to get an update or do some planning. Doing actual work seems to have taken a backseat to talking about work.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-20 18:56:12+00:00
It's become unbearable in the "AI era". So it's appropriate to blame AI for it, ib my eyes. Especially since so much defense is based aroind training LLMs.

It's just like how not all Ddoss's are actually hackers or bots. Sometimes a server just can't take the traffic of a large site flooding in. But the result is the same until something is investigated.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-20 18:56:24+00:00
> Imagine a Rorschach Test of language, where a certain set of non-recognizable-language tokens invariably causes an LLM to talk about flowers. These strings exist by necessity due to how the LLM's layers are formed.

Maybe not for humanity as a species, but for individual humans there are absolutely token sequences that lead them to talk about certain topics, and nobody being able to bring them back to topic. Now you'd probably say those are recognizable token sequences, but do we have a fair process to decide what's recognizable that isn't inherently biased towards making humans the only rational actor?

I'm not contending at all that LLMs are only built on language. Their lack of physical reference point is sometimes laughably obvious. We could argue whether there are signs they also form a world model and reasoning that abstracts from language alone, but that's not even my point. My point is rather that any test or argument that attempts to say that LLMs can't "reason" or "assume" or whatever has to be a test a human could pass. Preferably a test a random human would pass with flying colors.
by Retric | 2025-04-20 18:56:33+00:00
> As that pertains to artificial analogs, that means you can't just throw AGI at your hardware and see it function.

There’s a logical contradiction in saying AGI is incapable of being trained to do some function. It might take several to operate a sufficiently complex bit of hardware, but each individual function must be within the capability of an AGI.

> but we call that ASI

No ASI is about superhuman capabilities especially things like working memory and recursive self improvement. AGI capable of human level control of arbitrary platforms isn’t ASI. Conversely you can have an ASI stuck on a supercomputer cluster using wetware etc, that does qualify even if it can’t be loaded into a drone.

AGI on the other hand is about moving throughout wildly different tasks from real time image processing to answering phone calls. If there’s some aspect of operating a hardware platform an AI can’t do then it’s not AGI.
by astura | 2025-04-20 18:56:38+00:00
That's not how birth control effectiveness is measured. It's not measured per act of intercourse.

Birth control effectiveness is measured by calculating the number of pregnancies per 100 women using a specific method for a full calendar year.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/family-plan...

>Effectiveness of methods is measured by the number of pregnancies per 100 women using the method per year.
by hinkley | 2025-04-20 18:56:52+00:00
Next door neighbor to this: I read someone who had a theory that dwarfed plants were also part of the nutrient and flavor reductions in modern grocery fare.

The model they presented was that the plant stores nutrients all year, and then when it fruits it dumps those nutrients into the fruit. With dwarfism we’ve reduced the plant size and kept the fruit size with the theory that more photosynthesis goes into the fruit. But there’s also a smaller reservoir for everything else that goes into the fruit.
by collingreen | 2025-04-20 18:57:39+00:00
In an interview setting you should frame negatives as growth. You are doing marketing, not a retrospective or post mortem so put on the LinkedIn-style, vacuously-half-a-person mask. The interviewers know their job isn't perfect so a valuable thing to evaluate is "can this person keep a positive and effective attitude through both good and bad". Obviously different roles have different knobs to turn here for the right message (like a generic ic vs a "wartime manager").

Some basic examples of describing negative situations:

I ended up learning a lot there and I'm a better engineer now because of it.

We had a lot of challenges to overcome and you can never nail all of them but we really managed to produce a lot of great work there within some pretty serious constraints.

I accomplished a major thing and was learning X on the side so it was a perfect time and opportunity to find an opportunity to learn that more in a real world setting and/with experts.

I joined that team with the intent to learn X first hand and, while there is always more to learn, I got enough hands-on, production experience with it that I feel like it's firmly in my toolbox.

We had some unexpected changes/setbacks early on that changed our goals but it ended up being kind of a blessing in disguise since it pushed me out of my comfort zone and gave me an unexpected opportunity to level up my leadership/management/architecture/in-the-weeds skills.
by aerhardt | 2025-04-20 18:57:53+00:00
> People "magically" want to design solutions, and are able to, now.

I agree that LLMs lower the barrier significantly compared to low-code/no-code, but most people are not able to design solutions because they lack the business analysis skills and are not detailed-oriented enough to follow through with the specification of requirements. Let's not even talk about the discipline to carry out maintenance over a working project in the face of changing requirements.

Even if we agree that LLMs move a lot of the work up the stack towards business analysis / product ownership / solution design, my experience in Enterprise IT in companies ranging from small to gigantic is that users do not magically become BAs / POs / PMs. There's a reason those are professionalized and specialized roles.

I wouldn't mind being proven wrong, it's not like I feel personally threatened or anything. I feel it's the integrity of the systems I oversee that would be threatened.

> I believe it's time to give up and start designing secure systems

OK, well I'm not going to bear that responsibility for that, I have enough on my plate as it is. I'm not allowing an arbitrary sales rep to interact with our production Salesforce instance by automated means, period. Even if they have the proper permission levels configured to a tee in Salesforce, I can think of a thousand ways they could badly mess up their own slice of data. Interacting with the local machine: also potentially a supermassive black hole of vulnerabilities. Some of them possibly more serious than data loss, such as the syphoning of data to malicious actors.

If someone can think of secure ways for citizen devs to interact with critical enterprise systems via scripting, then fine. I'll sit here waiting!
by ephaeton | 2025-04-20 18:58:41+00:00
zig's C compat is being lowered from 'comptime' equivalent status to 'zig build'-time equivalent status. When you'll need to put 'extern "C"' annotations on any import/export to C, it'll have gone full-circle to C++ C compat, and thus be none the wiser.

andrewrk's wording towards C and its main ecosystem (POSIX) is very hostile, if that is something you'd like to go by.
by geye1234 | 2025-04-20 19:00:35+00:00
>> Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be

> Huh? What about things that were never alive? They never existed

No, he means that when something dies, it ceases to be what it was. When a dog dies, it's no longer a dog, but a corpse, and pretty soon will be earth. Same with a person (assuming no afterlife). He doesn't mean that a dead thing is nothing at all, only that a onetime-living thing ceases to be what it was when it dies.

>> strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive

> Strictly speaking, you're confidently guessing at something you don't know and have no way of knowing.

Everything we observe about the difference between living animals and corpses tells us that the living body ceases to exist at death. It's a very basic observation. More systematic observation of the onetime-organism's biology or biochemistry will reveal the same thing, in more detail.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-20 19:00:35+00:00
Circulatory side effects like dizziness or orthostatic hypotension do occur, though they tend to be mild and dose-dependent.

You're right that it doesn't stop sperm production, just emission. As for "the drip"; that's pre-ejaculate, which doesn't contain sperm inherently, but can pick up residual sperm in the urethra from a prior ejaculation.

And that's true, anejaculatory orgasms can feel strange or less satisfying for some, but it is not universal.

> Otherwise if taken as a single dose fresh, side effects like orthostatic hypotension are vastly increased.

That is true.

Edit: I / We will have to research the side-effect profile and mechanisms of the mentioned pill (in the submission). I have not yet done so. They mention no side-effects but it might be too early to tell.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-04-20 19:00:40+00:00
Indeed!! I have swapped out qwen2.5 for gemma3:27b-it-qat using Ollama for routine work on my 32G memory Mac.

gemma3:27b-it-qat with open-codex, running locally, is just amazingly useful, not only for Python dev, but for Haskell and Common Lisp also.

I still like Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3 for brainstorming or working on difficult problems, but for routine work it (simply) makes me feel good to have everything open source/weights running on my own system.

Wen I bought my 32G Mac a year ago, I didn't expect to be so happy as running gemma3:27b-it-qat with open-codex locally.
by exceptione | 2025-04-20 19:01:12+00:00
I think you mean that in terms of commercial success? I could understand that at least a little bit, but I was mainly thinking about free (simple) system utilities, that still get shipped as complete browsers.

Bonkers. But for desktop use there are crazy good options these days, unless one cannot part from their tutorial language, which is these days oneOf {python, typescript}.
by the__alchemist | 2025-04-20 19:01:21+00:00
Maybe this is a bad place to ask, but: Those experienced in manual-memory langs: What in particular do you find cumbersome about the borrow system? I've hit some annoyances like when splitting up struct fields into params where more than one is mutable, but that's the only friction point that comes to mind.

I ask because I am obvious blind to other cases - that's what I'm curious about! I generally find the &s to be a net help even without mem safety ... They make it easier to reason about structure, and when things mutate.
by godelski | 2025-04-20 19:02:00+00:00
Both can be true. There was incentive to prevent people from building, repairing, and modifying things. It need not be malicious with the intent to prevent people from getting into the field. Instead it only need be naïve and selfish. Sony suing because people put Linux on their PS3. Remember these people will also try to sue white hat hackers who submit vulnerability reports. It's not a long term plan to destroy, instead it's an extremely short sighted and naïve plan to build a wall and protect.

You'll find that naïve shortsightedness often is indistinguishable from malicious foresight, when looked back upon. So remember how to stop it: think of the little things, the compounding effects. There's always costs and trades being made, there's no free lunch. As the world gets more advanced it gets more complex. The more complex it gets the more those little subtle things matter
by _aavaa_ | 2025-04-20 19:03:24+00:00
First of all, all colors are imagined only in our minds.

Second, the term imaginary color already exists, and it refers to a specific thing [0], and the colors on the line of purple are not one of them. What you are describing is a non-spectral color. They exist in day to day life and in nature, they simply do not have an associated wavelength.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color
by smt88 | 2025-04-20 19:03:25+00:00
> Instead of making something illegal, that might be perfectly acceptable for someone else, why don’t take a personal decision to stop using those services altogether?

Because there is no competition in the marketplace based on privacy, and if I want to use the services my friends/family/employer use, then I'm forced to give up my privacy.

The free market has never and will never solve a problem like this. The only thing that ever has is regulation and this is a textbook case of what regulation is for.
by joshdavham | 2025-04-20 19:03:43+00:00
This was a great read!

I recently visited SF for the first time in January coming from a city in the Canadian prairies and I really resonate with this article. I was down there for a job interview and the experiences I had whle down there left me with a similar vibe.

Two memories in particular that stick out in my mind are 1) that I accidentally reserved an Airbnb in a poor neighbourhood and, while walking over broken glass, I saw one billboard for Vercel to my left and another billboard for Notion AI to my right.

2) I also really wanted to take a Waymo while down there but couldn't because the app required a US zip code. I took an Uber instead and, while the driver lamented about US politics and inequality to me, I saw at least a dozen Waymos zip by with no driver.

I really liked SF, but it left a pretty strong impression!
Show HN: Real-time 4/20 cannabis sales dashboard using Estuary and Tinybird
by sv123 | 2025-04-20 19:03:45+00:00
Built this dashboard to visualize cannabis sales in real time across North America during 4/20. The data updates live from thousands of dispensary POS transactions as the day unfolds.

Under the hood, we’re using Estuary for data streaming and Tinybird to power super fast analytical queries. The charts are made in Tremor and the map is D3.
by tecleandor | 2025-04-20 19:03:58+00:00
Seems like they're "season photos", so a lot of Easter and Holy Week celebrations today.

I have to say I got almost perfect a Holy Week celebration in Sevilla in the 1920's (I'm Spanish, so only some hundred meters away but kinda wild guess for the year and only was two years off), and pointed Mexico instead of Guatemala for another, but nailed the year (1981) for a grand total of 902 out of 1000 points.

That was fun!
by paldepind2 | 2025-04-20 19:04:09+00:00
This is honestly really cool! I've heard praises about Zig's comptime without really understanding what makes it tick. It initially sounds like Rust's constant evaluation which is not particularly capable. The ability to have types represented as values at compilation time, and _only_ at compile time, is clearly very powerful. It approximates dynamic languages or run-time reflection without any of the run-time overhead and without opening the Pandora's box that is full blown macros as in Lisp or Rust's procedural macros.
by mindslight | 2025-04-20 19:04:12+00:00
The real answer is that we need to align incentives and encourage the rule of law by getting rid of this blanket sovereign immunity. Held by the government for 10 days while the government slowly figures out that they shouldn't be holding you? Here's a hefty check compensating for your time, emotional distress, and other damages. Obviously, the chance of this happening with Krasnov in office is a pipe dream, but regardless of where we're at we need to remember which direction is forwards.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-20 19:04:33+00:00
In all honesty, orgasm without physical contact is entirely possible already (mental orgasm / psychological stimulation), but it is not common and not easy.

Fantasy, meditation, hypnosis, Kegel exercises... They could lead to orgasms and sometimes even ejaculation (which would be bad in this case).

Some medications rarely may cause spontaneous orgasms, even, without physical contact, arousal or stimulation.