MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-12 00:47:43+00:00
I agree that we're all in it together, but we're not all subsidizing each other. Some states are highly dependent on Federal funds, others are not. CA for example contributes tens of billions more than it takes from the Federal government, enough to cover the entire state budget of one of the worst in that regard, Kentucky... more than 5X.

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...

I'm not sure why talking about the wisdom of living in a fire corridor or flood plain is somehow taboo, especially when the people paying are generally not the people living in those places. Even setting climate change aside it's an issue, as we see in places like coastal Florida, or communities in and around LA when fires come.

Just sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "Everyone has to live somewhere" as though the country is full to capacity is really unhelpful.
by npinsker | 2025-04-12 00:47:49+00:00
That makes sense. The juxtaposition isn't just OP, though: Blue Prince is an extremely highly-rated game by critics (https://www.metacritic.com/game/blue-prince/critic-reviews/), and will likely be one of the three highest-rated games this year, but has 80% positive reviews on Steam at time of writing, which is very low. On Steam it isn't even in the top 3 on its single day of release.

I'm not exactly sure what leads to such a dramatic disconnect. Maybe game reviewers just value different things than the general population.
by csense | 2025-04-12 00:48:16+00:00
Consider the following two statements (a) and (b):

- (a) If we don't contain AI, it will go FOOM and kill all the humans. All intelligent life on Earth will be dead forever, except precisely one survivor -- the AI.

- (b) If we don't fix our political system, the world will suffer terrible poverty and tyranny for the next thousand years.

If you truly believe (a) and (b) are both true, there's a good argument to be made that it is better to dedicate your life to fixing problem (a). Even if we're doomed for poverty and tyranny, even if the survivors have to eke out a miserable post-apocalyptic existence for hundreds of years until we again produce enough resources that the light of civilization and freedom returns -- having some hope that eventually mankind will flourish again is better than a complete extermination of humanity with no possibility of coming back.

Personally I'm skeptical (a) is true but I can't definitively refute it. Some people might say that implies I ought to assign a non-zero probability to (a), which in turn applies I ought to dedicate my life to stopping AI. But that borders on Pascal's Wager-type logic, which I don't accept. (Why Pascal's Wager is irrational is quite an interesting question, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.)
by jt2190 | 2025-04-12 00:49:17+00:00
I’ve read that cocoa processing involves drying the pods in the open air. Heavy metals in dust from nearby mines covers the surface of the pods, which are later ground up along with the cocoa.

The solution here seems simple enough: Don’t dry the pods in the open air. But the farmers don’t have a lot of extra money lying around that they can use to address this, and the market is (currently at least) still buying.
by jmpman | 2025-04-12 00:49:37+00:00
Yesterday, my high school son was sitting on the couch. Asked him what he was doing… “social studies on the partitioning of Palestine in 1948”. More spicy a topic that I was expecting. Intrigued, I asked ChatGPT a few questions about the religious populations of modern Israel throughout the centuries. Got some interesting results and asked it for some clarification on the political sensitivity of this topic. It agreed it would be challenged by many. Anyway, decided to share it with my son, and texted it to him on his iPhone from my iPhone. Normally that would be sent via iMessage, fully end to end encrypted, and yet this time, when I was sending potentially politically charged views on israel, it was sent as SMS!! Now, I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but… that got me questioning why, on any of the thousands of messages I’ve sent my son, this specific one wasn’t sent encrypted. Hmm
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-12 00:50:07+00:00
> The general continuity in Waugh’s life and writing is contempt for modernity: a turn to religion makes perfect sense in that light.

I'm christian and this describes the most troublesome converts. Both in the trouble they cause the rest of us and the trouble they experience themselves.

The thing they miss, and also maybe you, and also probably Waugh, is that religions are in one sense much older but in another much more serious and experiential sense they are modern.

They are practiced by modern people, with modern patterns of thought, navigating modern problems in modern ways. The wisdom may be ancient but your life isn't, your belief isn't. You can't go home again, you can't swim in the same river twice, you can't prevent the fall, you can't put the family back together, you can't practice the religion of st anthony or even of your great grandfather. A modern person can only practice a modern christianity and this includes catholicism.

Now, I still think you are right about waugh there. He did have contempt for modernity and did probably turn to catholicism to escape it. But I don't believe he found what he was looking for, because it simply isn't there to be found.

Charles Taylor explores this problem/contradiction/experience in incredible depth in A Secular Age. I wish waugh had been able to read it but I wonder if he would have.
by dang | 2025-04-12 00:51:20+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Mechanical Watch (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38591084 - Dec 2023 (163 comments)

Mechanical Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31749299 - June 2022 (1 comment)

Mechanical Watch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533 - May 2022 (413 comments)
by atonse | 2025-04-12 00:51:25+00:00
I’ve never heard of this company but according to the video below, they’re large enough to have a huge building.

How do these economics work? I’m guessing they’re a maker of very expensive low volume products. But are there that many buyers?

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/video-vacheron-constantin-...

Same with Richard Mille. Never heard of them but they’re rich enough to sponsor the Ferrari F1 team.
by TS_Posts | 2025-04-12 00:51:45+00:00
(I work on a2a)

Thank you for the feedback? Would you consider writing up an issue on our github with some more specifics? https://github.com/google/a2a

A2A is being developed in the open with the community. You are finding some early details that we are looking into and will be addressing. We have many partners who will be contributing and want this to be a truly open, collaborative endeavor. We acknowledge this is a little different than dropping a polished '1.0' version in github on day 1. But that is intentional :)
by interroboink | 2025-04-12 00:51:58+00:00
I think one could argue that FreeBSD is more cathedral-style than Linux, and there are other examples, especially for programming languages, where the inventor(s) want to avoid it being pulled in too many directions at once (extreme example: Jai).

I don't know that it's really such a binary either/or decision, more of a spectrum of "more cathedral-y" and "more bazaar-y."
by TS_Posts | 2025-04-12 00:53:09+00:00
Hi there (I work on a2a) - reposting from above.

A2A works at a different level than MCP. We are working with partners on very specific customer problems. Customers are building individual agents in different frameworks OR are purchasing agents from multiple vendors. Those agents are isolated and do not share tools, or memory, or context.

For example, most companies have an internal directory and internal private APIs and tools. They can build an agent to help complete internal tasks. However, they also may purchase an "HR Agent" or "Travel Assistant Agent" or "Tax Preparation Agent" or "Facilities Control Agent". These agents aren't sharing their private APIs and data with each other.

It's also difficult to model these agents as structured tools. For example, a "Tax Preparation Agent" may need to evaluate many different options and ask for specific different documents and information based on an individual users needs. Modeling this as 100s of tools isn't practical. That's where we see A2A helping. Talk to an agent as an agent.

This lets a user talk to only their company agent and then have that agent work with the HR Agent or Travel Booking Agent to complete complex tasks.
by RajT88 | 2025-04-12 00:53:44+00:00
Dave Lobue and Justin Mealey should be forever shamed for the farce they put up during the hearings in Georgia.

https://www.charliekirk.com/news/georgia-data-scientist-prov...

If you check their work based on the publicly available data, you find that based on their logic there was a clear case for Trump cheating. Right wing media reporting the story, of course, did not.
by JohnMakin | 2025-04-12 00:55:38+00:00
I suspect, this is just my personal opinion, doesn’t reflect any of my former or current employers opinions, the Amazon makes a lot of money based on ad revenue. I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that they’re killing it on the online retail front.

there have been many e-commerce players that have come in to the gap there and specialize in these “niche” products or services that deliver fast as Amazon and it isn’t hard to do so if you’re willing to invest. i would not personally be surprised if amazon saw long term growth loss in their e-commerce sector, especially given the competetion from other retailers that have adjusted - like walmart and target.
by halayli | 2025-04-12 00:55:47+00:00
I totally understand the contention around this topic but you're altering the keypoint of what the article is about. Why remove one country name and keep the other? The article is not about Meta, but how their platform is being manipulated by one country against the other. Your edit shows a strong evidence you're not taking a partisan position and have a preference. I am not sure you should be editing contenious posts when you don't hold a partisan position. Your edit is in the same realm as what the post is talking about. I understand moderation is tricky, but this goes way beyond moderation.
by theteapot | 2025-04-12 00:55:53+00:00
I think general consensus is against you. Fedora packaging policy [1]:

> Packages including libraries should exclude static libs as far as possible (eg by configuring with --disable-static). Static libraries should only be included in exceptional circumstances. Applications linking against libraries should as far as possible link against shared libraries not static versions.

[1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/
by bch | 2025-04-12 00:57:40+00:00
Just yesterday i saw this quote from Brian Eno -

Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.

I pondered it a bit and arrived at "learning is losing innocence", from the point of view of somebody who mulls over Enos process. I think that sort of ties-in with this article.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-12 00:57:43+00:00
Hobby soldering is still putting lead into the environment, and not with any necessary justification. Lead-free solder works fine. Lead solder is a bit easier, but not enough to matter. I do know as a hobbyist myself who has lived through the transition and know all about both the old and new worlds.

The problem isn't vaporizing, or the first consumers direct exposure. The problem is taking a pound of lead and distrubuting it all over the environment in the form of spatter, shavings, assembled pcbs, connections, etc. Probably less than half of the solder winds up in a product or project, and that is just a short delay on it's trip to the envirnment when the project is discarded. 100% of it ends there, and not in a nice solid lump but practically aresolized.

It's the same as just taking that same pound of lead and directly grinding it into a fine powder and just sprinkling it everywhere, where it becomes part of the soil more or less and leeches into everything and can't be removed.

And 100,000 or a million or many millions of other people all doing the same thing, every day, for generations. Yess millions. There are 300million just in the US alone, and there are more than one person in every 300 that solders at least some times.
by dang | 2025-04-12 00:59:50+00:00
> this goes way beyond moderation

I'm sorry, but that's not true—quite the opposite.

If you guys had any idea how next-to-impossible it is to host substantive discussions about a topic like this, you should recognize that you're getting what you want (frontpage attention for this story) instead of complaining about a secondary detail (the title edit).

A title edit like that is not making a statement about the underlying story, and certainly not trying to suppress any aspect of it. The article is one click away for people to read and make up their own minds about. This thread is filled with comments about the detail that I took out of the title; no one is missing it.

Rather, what I did was bog standard HN moderation, the sort of thing we've done thousands of times on hundreds of topics over 15+ years, purely for the purpose of supporting a substantive discussion of the article that you (I don't mean you personally, but the set of commenters who have been complaining about this) want to be discussed in the first place. From my point of view, that amounts to demanding 100% instead of saying yes to the 90% that you're getting in this case. That's not a realistic assessment of the tradeoffs with a thread like this.

Edit: I'm sorry if that sounded tetchy—I certainly understand the feeling you're expressing and why it feels that way.
by perihelions | 2025-04-12 01:00:16+00:00
There's also a neat one about the process of making mechanical watches,

https://watchesbysjx.com/2017/05/portrait-masahiro-kikuno-ja... ("Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14610110 (108 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011880 (98 comments)
by strken | 2025-04-12 01:00:38+00:00
I don't think you're wrong, but I think you may have misread the original post, which pointed out that Chrome was better than Firefox for years. You agree that Chrome had a huge performance advantage in 2008 and that this advantage persisted until Firefox released either JaegerMonkey, in 2011, or IonMonkey, in 2013; it's not clear which you're writing about. You also agree that Chrome had a stability and security advantage due to isolating each tab in its own process, which Firefox also didn't get for years.

You're replying to a post which claimed that Chrome was better than Firefox for years, with a rebuttal that claims Chrome was better than Firefox for years, but then Firefox improved. That doesn't change anything! Those early years from 2008 onward were critical for early adoption and gave Chrome inertia which it was able to ride to market dominance. I don't think any of your posts, while correct, have addressed that initial argument.
by elcritch | 2025-04-12 01:01:23+00:00
Elixir never performs all to well in microbenchmarks. Yet in every application I've seen Elixir/Erlang projects compared to more standard Node, Python, or even C# projects and the Elixir one generally has way better performance and feels much faster even under load.

Personally I think much of it is due to async being predominant in Node and python. Async seems much harder than actor or even threading for debugging performance issues. Sure it feels easier to do async at first. But async leads to small bloat adding up and makes it very difficult to debug and track down. It makes profiling harder, etc.

In BEAM, every actor has its own queue. It's trivial to inspect and analyze performance blockages. Async by contrast puts everything into one giant processing queue. Plus every function call in async gets extra overhead added. It all adds up.
by lerno | 2025-04-12 01:03:00+00:00
A stack allocator is an allocator that aside from allocate, has a push and a pop function. Image an arena allocator (aka bump allocator), where ”push” stores the current start of free memory, and ”pop” resets to this point, erasing all allocations between push and pop. This is a stack allocator.

It is similar to the function stack, but push and pop can be arbitrarily granular, as opposed to only happening at entry/exit.
by instagib | 2025-04-12 01:03:05+00:00
Through a well-structured setup, I have successfully obtained local models that provide reliable sources for their data per line, ensuring the validity of each response. However, as the complexity of prompts increases, it becomes necessary to utilize larger models. This approach reduces the context window available to the model.

Draft models, when appropriately configured and supported by model quantizations, can also be beneficial. It is worth noting that some models may encounter quantization issues, as discussed in a Reddit thread.

I have yet to explore a multi-model playground where models engage in dialogue and exchange messages until a consensus is reached. There are several videos available that demonstrate this concept, which could serve as an alternative approach.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-12 01:03:33+00:00
Sure, Windows 2000 was definitely great in a lot of ways, but Server 2003/R2 either extended on all of those (e.g. greatly improving AD and its management) or added on it's own big firsts such as x64 support - all without really introducing any of the types of downfall people hate the more modern versions for.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-04-12 01:05:28+00:00
“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Hmmm. Not sure that holds water in current society. For example, here are 2 people talking about AI for 35 seconds each. Both have Juris Doctorate degrees.

https://youtu.be/3NnCb-fhuy4?feature=shared
by muzani | 2025-04-12 01:06:36+00:00
A bit off topic, but I wrote a guide to do this on Herok for anyone curious: https://smuzani.medium.com/setting-up-a-mobile-backend-serve...

I'm not sure if it's still valid but it's not too hard, and still much easier to maintain than dealing with AWS. I have basic AWS proficiency, but it's still good to have Heroku to not think about it.
by drob518 | 2025-04-12 01:07:31+00:00
Been programming in Lisp for a while. The parents disappear very quickly. One trick to accelerate it is to use a good editor with structural editing (e.g., paredit in Emacs or something similar). All you editing is done on balanced expressions. When you type “(“, the editor automatically inserts “)” with your cursor right in between. If you try to delete a “)”, the editor ignores you until you delete everything inside and the “(“. Basically, you start editing at the expression level, not so much at the character or even line level. You just notice the indentation/shape of the code, but you never spend time counting parentheses or trying to balance anything. Everything is balanced all the time and you just write code.
by smcin | 2025-04-12 01:07:42+00:00
He's *not* a permanent resident; he's on "withholding of removal" status since 2019 [*]. It's not splitting hairs to discuss that, but you're right that the govt is (deliberately) pursuing a "camel's-nose-under-the-tent" approach first on a small class of people where Congress and INA haven't defined a direct clear path to PR or becoming a citizen, unlike a GC would since both his wife and child are US citizens.

He was granted "withholding of removal" status in 2019, which protected him from deportation to El Salvador (for fear of gang violence/extortion, which is why he came to the US).

The current DOJ acknowledges that at the time (2019) the "[first Trump admin] government did not appeal that decision [to grant withholding of removal], so it is final". It also seems like they never previously made any allegation that he was a gang member, and that they don't have any solid proof now that he is (other than supposedly one informant who incorrectly claimed Garcia lived in NY, so basically no credible evidence whatsoever).

By jumping the gun on deporting Garcia without due process, the current admin seems to unwittingly be forcing the issue to the Supreme Court very soon. (UPDATE: SC has just ruled unanimously 9-0 that the admin must try to release Garcia.) Looks like the SC's going to be very busy this May-June.

[*] Withholding-of-removal is a pretty rare status, rarely granted by court (>99% rejection rate), much rarer than Green Card, and applicants have to demonstrate credible fear. [0] This procedure is defined in INA § 208 (INA = Immigration and Nationality Act) [1]

As of 12/2024 there were over 100,000 individuals (from Cuba, China, Venezuela, Mauritania, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.) with orders of removal remaining free in the US due to various special interest statuses, including withholding of removal, according to a report from FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform). [2]

(Does anyone have stats on what historically happened to people in withholding-of-removal (what % became citizens, what % got GC, what % voluntarily left, what % got deported, what % moved to a different status etc.)?)

[0]: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/reference-materials/ic/chapter-...

[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/laws-and-policy/legislation/immigratio...

[2]: https://www.fairus.org/news/executive/new-data-show-over-100...

[3]: https://time.com/7276642/kilmar-albrego-garcia-error-deporta...
by dharmab | 2025-04-12 01:08:09+00:00
To give you an idea of margins:

- A real Rolex dive watch costs $5k-15k.

- A similar Swiss-made dive watch from a less famous brand costs $2k-4k.

- A similar Japanese-made dive watch from a famous brand costs $500-1000.

- A Chinese-made replica/fake Rolex, mechanically identical to a real one, and only distinguishable by an expert under high magnification, costs about $400-800.

- There are some low-volume watches that are sold for 4-6 figure sums to repeat buyers. Richard Mille in particular has done one-offs for celebrities in the range of 7-8 figures.

As you can imagine you don't need a high volume with margins that large.
by anigbrowl | 2025-04-12 01:08:09+00:00
I certainly did. I saw this late and read the comments before reading the article, which I often do to save myself time if it turns out there's some glaring evidentiary or logical hole in a politically themed news story. I took the headline at face value and got 3/4 of the way down the page before discovering the direct involvement of a state actor. I absolutely expected to read a story about Meta execs doing this exclusively on their own initiative.

Posting this not to argue about your decision but to describe the impression I formed from reading the title.
by unoti | 2025-04-12 01:08:32+00:00
I came here looking for information about why Ericsson stopped using Erlang, and for more information about Joe's firing.

The short answer seems to be that they pivoted to Java for new projects, which marginalized Erlang. Then Joe and colleagues formed Bluetail in 1998. They were bought by Nortel. Nortel was a telecom giant forming about a third of the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange. In 2000 Nortel's stock reached $125 per share, but by 2002 the stock had gone down to less than $1. This was all part of the dot com crash, and Nortel was hit particularly hard because of the dot com bubble burst corresponding with a big downturn in telecom spending.

It seems safe to look at Joe's layoff as more of a "his unit was the first to slip beneath the waves on a sinking ship" situation, as they laid off 60,000 employees or more than two thirds of their workforce. The layoff was not a sign that he may not have been pulling his weight. It was part of a big move of desperation not to be taken as a sign of the ineffectiveness of that business unit.