MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-10 04:14:29+00:00
When did they stop being the envy of the world? Was it when every member of faculty was basically forced to sign diversity pledges?[1] Was it when students and faculty were given time off to mourn the outcome of a democratic election?[2] Or maybe it was when protesters for a conflict half a world away were allowed to intimidate students from attending classes?[3]

No, I guess it was when government funding was cut ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-statement-use-di...

[2] https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/11/07/its-just-h...

[3] https://www.timesofisrael.com/dozens-arrested-at-yale-columb...

Edit: See also this account of the last four years: https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-last-four-years-wer...

Academic freedom has been dead at US universities for a while. The murderer is not the guy who was elected in 2024.
by eru | 2025-04-10 04:15:28+00:00
> [...] but they're entirely imperatively defined rather than declarative [...]

The conceptual problem with Docker isn't imperative vs declarative. It's that Docker doesn't even try to be reproducible. Executing the same Dockerfile twice doesn't necessarily build you the same container.

(Imperative vs declarative is still an interesting problem to think about, it's just independent of reproducibility in the abstract.)
by i_v | 2025-04-10 04:15:48+00:00
I just don't think that's true. This seems like a really pessimistic take. Is it truly "globalist world domination" — implying that our corporate overlords want us to live like this? Or is it purely function and aesthetic? Capitalism puts power in the hands of consumers—sure, marketing has an influence—but also, we as consumers are the ultimate deciders. Cost, labor, and wealth. All are influences in the deciding of what we choose to buy. If what we have today is lifeless, I think it's of our own collective choosing.

To be fair though, these photos are breathtaking. Pre-industrial era Japan is a place I'd love to visit and the history of this transformation is steeped in fear, modernizing in response to Western powers (look up Matthew Perry—naval officer, not the actor lol).
by 418tpot | 2025-04-10 04:16:36+00:00
I agree the syntax isn't perfect, but in case you're actually confused there's really only 3 places where semicolons go, and I would argue that two of the places make a lot of sense— as a terminator for attribute sets, and a terminator for `let` declarations.

Unfortunately it is also used with the somewhat confusing `with` operator which I personally avoid using. For those of you who aren't familiar, it works similar to the now deprecated javascript `with` statement where `with foo; bar` will resolve to `bar` if it is in scope, otherwise it will resolve to `foo.bar`.
by kmoser | 2025-04-10 04:18:14+00:00
Everybody needs to know their threshold for walking away, whether it's going too long without getting paid, having their pay delayed too many times, or other demands like being asked to work overtime, weekends, etc.

If a company is truly making a good faith effort to pay, I try to cut them slack, especially if they level with me about why they're having a cash flow issue. This requires having insight into the people making the decisions, as well as being willing to take a leap of faith that I won't get screwed. I have a pretty good track record: I come out ahead (i.e. get paid) most of the time, and have rarely been left holding the bag.
by bpshaver | 2025-04-10 04:18:25+00:00
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?

Not at all. Many of them are doing very well and have rebounded from the hit they took when Amazon entered the scene. Not as many of them as there used to be but they're far from dead. In many cities they're thriving.

> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

Yes they do, but your premise is incorrect. Many secondhand books are undesirable, sure. Most are. But that doesn't mean there aren't millions of books out there that are valuable either for a collector or to individual buyers.

> No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller.

Ugh.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-04-10 04:18:39+00:00
Guess, your comments are getting flagged because your opinion contradicts the opinion of others. Unpopular thinking, I would say.

I reviewed your comments, and guess what, I'm opposed to that, what you think. But I'm not american and I didn't vote for a panican to start an economical war not only with the closest neighbors, but, its nothing less than the whole world! Like its 1930s again... that's stupid, if I'm able to say that.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-10 04:19:14+00:00
Ok, but then you have some kind of state intelligence, because you need intelligence for a military to operate on, and then military capability is a function of technology. Then you need some form of law, and law implies police, and conflict implies a justice system, a justice system implies a prison system.

As your society suffers due to poor social programs, the one next door that believes in public education will have a better military due to better technology, maybe they decide they need breathing space...

Your position is one you can only hold due to privilege.
by motorest | 2025-04-10 04:19:50+00:00
> No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.

I believe there is some truth to it. When you automated away some time-consuming tasks, your time and focus is shifted elsewhere. For example, washing clothes is no longer a major concern since the massification of washing machines. Software engineering also progressively shifted it's attention to higher-level concerns, and went from a point where writing/editing opcodes was the norm to a point where you can design and deploy a globally-available distributed system faster than what it takes to build a program.

Focusing on the positive traits of AI, having a way to follow the Socratic method with a tireless sparring partner that has an encyclopedic knowledge on everything and anything is truly brilliant. The bulk of the people in this thread should be disproportionally inclined to be self-motivated and self-taught in multiple domains, and having this sort of feature available makes worlds of difference.
by MrDrMcCoy | 2025-04-10 04:20:57+00:00
The thing with stereotypes is that, while they tend to be well enough based in fact for most people to recognize, they are no better than anything else at applying generalizations to large groups of people. Some will always be unfairly targeted by them. You personally might not have done anything to contribute to those things we are lashing out against (and if not, thank you!), but then again you personally were not targeted by these remarks. In the same way that you are possibly unfairly swept up in these assertions, it is, to a degree, unfair for you to use your wounds to deprive the rest of us of freely voicing our well-founded grievances. Problems must be recognized before they can be addressed, after all, and collectively so for anything so widely spread. It's never pleasant to be told to "just tough it out", but perfect solutions are rare when people are involved, just as how surgeons have to cut healthy flesh to remove the unhealthy.

An analogue to this would be "all cops are bastards". Sure, there are some good ones out there, but there are enough bad ones out there that the stereotype generally applies. The statement is a rallying cry for something to be done about it. The "guilty by association" bit that tends to follow is another thing entirely.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-10 04:22:08+00:00
Calling someone anti-Semitic is exactly the same thing as calling someone Russophobic, Sinophobic, or saying they have Trump Derangement Syndrome.

It's a rhetorical weapon to call people who are critical or people who have been harmed irrational. It switches the roles of abuser and victim by accusing the victim of irrational hatred towards their abuser.

The only reason that word isn't experienced the same as the other words that express an identical idea is because of the horrific history of violence against Jewish people carried out by Nazi Germany, legitimizing the word.

Times have changed and Israeli's find themselves in the position of power rather than on the receiving end of it, so they consume the legitimization of the word while abusing it in the same way all other authoritarian regimes abuse language. Worse, actual anti-semites are able to abuse the word to harm jewish people, their history, and damage the word/idea itself.

Here is a more eloquent explanation of the whole thing by Timothy Snyder: https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-and-antisemitism
by defrost | 2025-04-10 04:22:22+00:00
Most likely multiple people flagged multiple comments of yours in the past month or so (as best I recall I believe I've flagged at least one of your comments (not more than three), can't quite recall which) for being "not HN" (ie overly edgy, somewhat combative, overly stylising US | China conflict, snark, etc) .. see the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've had a chuckle or two at your comments, but HN was founded with a preference for more thoughtful comments, fewer jokes and snark, etc.

FWiW I'm currently rate limited albeit with enhanced flag powers (I swat a lot of spambot crud) .. go figure <shrug>.

After enough flags you can land in autoflagging and shadowbanning .. unless you email dang and the modteam ( hn@ycombinator.com ) and reset.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-04-10 04:22:42+00:00
> the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either

This is the existential crisis that appears imminent. What does it mean if humanity, at large, begins to offload thinking (hence decision making), to machines?

Up until now we’ve had tools. We’ve never before been able to say “what’s the right way to do X?”. Offloading reasoning to machines is a terrifying concept.
by monero-xmr | 2025-04-10 04:24:15+00:00
I would find it near impossible that someone dumping a truckload of cadmium down a sewer or into the river is caught today, even with our insane taxes and panopticon state. In fact I know someone who makes a shitload of money in “waste disposal” who is regularly dumping illegally!

However if a factory was doing it as a matter of regular business, a law could ban this practice, and then citizens could sue just like they do now.
by JohnBooty | 2025-04-10 04:25:06+00:00
It's been done and it works quite well from what I've read! I am not sure that Seiko still makes them, but you can still find some new ones for sale. Always wanted to get one of these since they're quite unique.

https://www.seikowatches.com/us-en/customerservice/knowledge...

https://www.jomashop.com/seiko-kinetic-watch-ska791.html

Unfortunately, Seiko's "Kinetic" movements don't seem to have ever been a big hit, so I don't know if it's something people actually wanted.

Ultimately I think the "problem" is that regular solar watches work so damn well, and that most quartz buyers have no interest in "unique" movements. I mean, I do, but I'm the minority. And I still never bought one...
by suraci | 2025-04-10 04:25:45+00:00
hi dang, it would be very good if you can explain the standard of determine what is "political flamewar comments"

for example, how is the parent _not_ a political flamewar comment but my comment is

i mean, there are political submissions, and there are political comments, but my replies are political flamewar comment?

how many comments are flamewar comments in 1000+ comments under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43634806

to me, it seems like a mega warfield
by porridgeraisin | 2025-04-10 04:26:01+00:00
Yeah. On the other hand, "implement boruvkas MST algorithm in cuda such that only the while(numcomponents > 1) loop runs on the CPU, and everything else runs in the gpu. Memcpy everything onto the gpu first and only transfer back the count each iteration/keep it in pinned memory"

It never gets it right, even after many reattempts in cursor. And even if it gets it right, it doesn't do the parallelization effectively enough - it's a hard problem to parallelize.
by i-am-gizm0 | 2025-04-10 04:26:48+00:00
As a university student currently taking a graduate course with a "flipped classroom" curriculum, I can confirm that many students in the class aren't watching the posted videos.

I myself am one of them, but I attribute that to the fact that this is a graduate version of an undergrad class I took two years ago (but have to take the grad version for degree requirements). Instead, I've been skimming the posted exercises and assessing myself which specific topics I need to brush up on.
by mrtksn | 2025-04-10 04:29:17+00:00
You’re joking, but it’s true. I’ve been living in Turkey on and off and I’m convinced that slow changing rules are indeed a blessing.

Unlike Europe, in Turkey rules and everything is changing all the time, you can’t count on anything to be the same the next 5 years. No one in the institutions knows how everything works, they only follow the computer instructions. You are getting a loan? its a mystery if you will be able to get the stated amount because if you are buying a house down the road the computer may ask for the energy efficiency rating and limit the amount based on that. They will say that it is to promote energy efficient buildings but that regulation will remain only for a year or two- not enough to change buildings practices but enough to limit the loans given without explicitly limiting the loans given.

It’s a horrible thing, you can’t plan anything and those with connections end up catching all the good temporary situations because the got tipped. The moment the masses start realizing the opportunity, the rules chage.

It has become a tool for giving favors to loyalists and created a lot of horrible people who got “lucky” with their investments. When the politicians feel like paying loyalists, they will change something in the law that will allow for previously non-developable land to become developable and loyalist will get tipped that they should buy the land before prices increase. It will be something non-obvious, like something about changing the category of a road or something that changes the status of the land when appealed.
by blargey | 2025-04-10 04:29:23+00:00
Aside from the quibbles over how much of government activity is useful and won't get done otherwise so we have to have less of something to have more of that stuff, there are also a good number of taxable things that most people don't like, or otherwise consider prosocial to have less of. Extreme wealth / income, pollution, alcohol/tobacco/gambling, etc.
by degamad | 2025-04-10 04:29:34+00:00
> In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need queues. Who likes waiting in lines after all? This would only be possible if the arrival rate of items in a queue was less than or equal to the departure rate and there were no variability in either. Not likely to happen in the real world.

It's not only possible if there's no variability. It's only possible if the arrival rate is always less than number of available processing slots, which can be engineered in a number of ways. (e.g. ensuring that the number of processing units is oversupplied, i.e. exceeds the maximum arrival rate + departure rate; or altering number of processing units dynamically so that utilisation never exceeds 80%.)

However, these approaches are generally not the lowest cost approaches, and so are only used when queueing is incredibly undesirable, e.g. when the cost of maintaining the queue exceeds the cost of holding the spare capacity.

One example for oversupply is airports - most airports have enough gates that incoming aircraft never have to queue, despite that meaning that many gates are empty for most of the day.

For dynamically adjusting capacity examples include listening thread pools for network applications which can spin up new waiting threads whenever the pool free count drops below a certain threshold (the threshold being decided based on the maximum arrival rate). Or a cloud service which spins up new servers whenever cpu utilisation exceeds 80%.
by the_king | 2025-04-10 04:29:43+00:00
I think Aqua v1 had two problems:

1. The models weren't ready.

2. The interactions were often strained. Not every edit/change is easy to articulate with your voice.

If 1 had been our only problem, we might have had a hit. In reality, I think optimizing model errors allowed us to ignore some fundamental awkwardness in the experience. We've tried to rectify this with v2 by putting less emphasis on streaming for every interaction and less emphasis on commands, replacing it with context.

Hopefully it can become a tool in the toolbox.
by drbommel-zensia | 2025-04-10 04:30:57+00:00
Hello everyone,

I’d like to share Zensia, an early stage open-source cryptocurrency project with a privacy-focused design and no centralized authority or pre-mine. We’re releasing Zensia under the MIT License, and we welcome critical reviews and contributions from the community.

Key points:

Privacy & Cryptography Zensia integrates a zero-knowledge proof layer (zkSNARK-based) to allow confidential transactions while preserving verifiability. Our aim is to ensure fungibility and user privacy without sacrificing scalability or security. Consensus Mechanics Zensia uses a hybrid approach: an initial short Proof-of-Work “fair launch” window to distribute the stake widely, followed by a long-term Proof-of-Stake model (BFT-style) for energy efficiency and fast finality. We invite scrutiny of our staking logic and block validation flow—particularly regarding potential centralization or game-theory exploits. Governance All protocol changes are proposed and evaluated openly via on-chain signaling and community discussion (GitHub + public forums). There is no foundation or core team with override privileges. We rely on community-driven development: if you spot improvements or security vulnerabilities, please open an issue or pull request. Open Collaboration The Zensia repository (source code + specs) is here: https://github.com/drbommel/zensia (Please note: the repository is brand new) We are particularly interested in participation and further development We are especially interested in in-depth reviews of the cryptographic routines

Why announce here? We believe in the cypherpunk principle of open scrutiny. Zensia is not backed by VCs or corporations; it’s purely a community experiment in fair-launch tokenomics and robust privacy. If you find any design flaws or improvements, we’d appreciate your expertise.

How to Participate:

Read README.md, Preprint docs/research/preprint and feasibility report docs/research/feasibility_report on Github Review or fork the code on GitHub. Propose protocol changes if you see possible pitfalls (issues or PRs welcome). If there’s interest, feel free to discuss https://github.com/drbommel/zensia/discussions/1 Disclosure: Zensia is still in early development. We don’t promise financial returns or brand endorsements; we simply hope to foster a resilient, censorship-resistant payment and contract platform driven by open collaboration.

Thanks for reading—and we look forward to your feedback. If you have cryptographic expertise, your input on our ZK privacy layer is especially appreciated.

Best regards, The (Unofficial) Zensia Contributors
by kristopolous | 2025-04-10 04:31:23+00:00
I build things I cannot find.

Every project I do is an assertion that I don't believe the thing I make exists.

I have been unable to find a streaming forward only markdown renderer for the terminal nor have I been able to find any suitable library that I could build one with.

So I've taken on the ambitious effort of building my own parser and renderer and go through all the grueling testing that entails
by picafrost | 2025-04-10 04:31:52+00:00
It's true that Europe has its own problems. There are problems everywhere, at every level, from small towns to continents to the planet as a whole. This post is about the erratic actions of the current US administration. My comment is a small reflection about political trends in the US. What does Europe have to do with this?

It does not accomplish much when you try to redirect people with what-aboutisms. Mostly it just betrays your own biases and politics.
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-04-10 04:32:52+00:00
The problem with CSP is that it's fixing the effect, not the cause.

It is also made in a way that it is optional (never break the web mentality), so what happens in practice is the same as with CORS: allow all, because web devs don't understand what to do, and don't have time to read the RFC.

For example: try getting a web page to run that uses a web assembly binary _and_ an external JS library. Come back after 2 weeks of debugging and let me know what your experience was like, and why you eventually gave up on it.
by jmcintire1 | 2025-04-10 04:33:43+00:00
Imo it is a question of right tool for the right job, adjusted for differences between people. For me, the use case that made our product click was prompting Cursor while coding. Then I wanted to use it whenever I talked to chatgpt -- it's much faster to talk and then read, and repeat.

Voice is great for whenever the limiting factor to thought is speed of typing.
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-10 04:34:55+00:00
> And China has shown that agreement with them has no value

Unfortunately they still have much more value than agreements with the US and Trump specifically. Which Canada and Mexico found out the hard way.

Of course the probability that Trump actually forgot that he was the one who no signed USMCA and none of his “advisors” dared to tell him is not insignificant..
by Aloisius | 2025-04-10 04:35:31+00:00
It's a staged photograph by Kimbei Kusakabe (or Baron Raimund von Stillfried, they sold each other's works a lot and Kusakabe worked for Stillfried at one point) of hikyaku (express couriers) created to sate Western desire for souvenirs of "real" Japan.

They had long since disappeared by the time the photographs were taken, replaced with uniformed men on bicycles. In the past though, they ran express mail in relays with a partner who carried a torch.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-10 04:36:00+00:00
https://snyder.substack.com/p/antisemitism-and-antisemitism

But why was Columbia put first? It is in New York. More than twenty percent of its undergraduate students are Jewish. No matter the experiences or attitudes of these students, their university suddenly losing four hundred million dollars is unlikely to improve their education and life chances. Columbia students can speak for themselves. My guess is that Columbia was selected as the symbolic first target less because of the presence of antisemitism than because of the presence of Jews.

And I think that this is something that actual American antisemites will immediately have grasped. The city of New York is coded for antisemites as Jewish. The antisemites in America, seeing Columbia and New York punished, will see Jews being punished -- and they will be pleased by this. The same goes for universities as a whole. Universities are often understood by antisemites to be Jewish. The attempt to bring universities to heel will be met by antisemites with approval.

If that sounds wild, 4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled. Including musk, and Trump's first chief strategist Bannon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E9pXCuJnbc&t=10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw&t=18s