MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-18 20:01:14+00:00
Expanding on a point raised in the original post: I've had some thoughts as to why news-site UI/UX is so abysmal from a reader standpoint. I suspect it mostly boils down to multiple perverse incentives.

Publishers are largely motivated by revenues, whether from advertising or subscriptions, each of which carries its own distortions. The problems of advertising are well known, Ezra Klein of the New York Times has touched on the distortions subscriptions focus brings, specifically. That's increasingly close to his work as his NYT podcast is now increasingly under the paper's subscription umbrella, with current content available but archives paywalled. This strikes me as unwise and I've said as much to him via email. Even noncommercial publishers (say, BBC, PBS, NPR, Deutsche Welle, etc.) heavily cross promote other content and partners (e.g., PBS/NPR over-the-air broadcast stations). All of which distract and detract from the news content itself.

Readers ... mostly don't get news from publishers' sites directly, relying instead on various social aggregators, say, Mastodon/Fediverse, HN, TikTok, Reddit, and the like. Part of this may be the more compelling nature of those services, but I can't help thinking that the annoyances presented by publishers' sites, and their design, features, and behaviours specifically, doesn't factor in strongly. I'm not sure that a text-dense site wouldn't be appreciated, though it doesn't directly address the social-sharing aspect.

RSS seems ... largely dead. CNN does have RSS links, various at <http://rss.cnn.com/rss/> (e.g., http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition_meast.rss) and <http://edition.cnn.com/> (e.g., <http://edition.cnn.com/china>), though these are very poorly advertised if at all. Searching for RSS/Atom feeds on other sites of interest is ... frustratingly slow. The actual content provided via feeds is also often sub-par, making direct site scraping the more attractive alternative.

Aggregators of course run into copyright issues. So far this is an own-work / personal project, and past the limited lede context my page offers I'm still clicking through to the parent site. But I've had significant pause to consider further plans should I want to pursue them. I'm also well aware that I'm not helping the already abysmal advertising situation at all, on which I'll point to my proposal for a government + ISP + other entities public content syndication mechanism: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca4144...>.

(Note that "government" != "federal government". The United States, for example, has ~90,000 governmental units: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677616>.)
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-18 20:01:30+00:00
What's curious for me is how much saner this presentation is than virtually any current online news site, most of which far more resemble picture galleries (with utterly gratuitous images) than information services. The ability, as with the days of print newspapers, to glean the main gist of a story without having to click through, and then ward off cookie, paywall, TOU, nag, autoplay video/audio, dickbars, etc., etc., provides a cognitive ease that's hard to express.

From TFA.
by dawnofdusk | 2025-04-18 20:01:47+00:00
The sequence (1+1/n)^n can be seen as a natural thing to study (indeed, tautologically, because we know that e is a natural thing to study) by various viewpoints.

The important aspect however is that the compound interest interpretation of this sequence is not only unnatural but wrong, in the sense that it starts from the wrong guess that a rate r compounded n times should be something like a rate r/n. It is unnecessarily confusing to teach such young students historical mistakes: bad students won't understand the mistake and good students will be bewildered. In both cases students come away thinking of e as a sort of "mystical" thing.

If I had to teach the compound interest, one starts by considering with a yearly interest rate r, your principal grows after m years by (1+r)^m. Now, can we find an equivalent monthly interest rate r2? To do so, we must solve (1+r2)^12 = (1+r), which requires logarithms, at which point you note immediately that r2 =/= r/12, which is perhaps unexpected. Now, it might be natural to ask what about for continuous compounding? Then, we study (1+f(n))^n as n goes to infinity, where f(n) is some function of n. We know it should decrease for large n, and the binomial expansion lets us guess (for integer n) that it should be f(n) = c/n for some constant c. Now, we are ready to compute the value of this limit.

The important part is that in studying compound interest one needs certain analytical tools, such as logarithms and asymptotic analysis, beforehand. It does not make much sense, as you say, to skip over all the intermediate steps and introduce the constant e as the solution to some unmotivated and unnatural formula relating to compound interest, but this is indeed what American schools do. In my experience, very few American high school students understand or remember (if they were ever taught it) the identity a^x = e^(x * ln a), and the concept of exponentiation is generally not well understood.
by phtrivier | 2025-04-18 20:01:51+00:00
I sincerely dread that by the time jblow releases jai, people will just have moved on to zig or rust, and that it will just become irrelevant.

I'm sure jblow is having the same fears, and I hope to be wrong.

Still, it's fun to be remembering the first few videos about "hey, I have those ideas for a language". Great that he could afford to work on it.

Sometimes, mandalas are what we need.
by jmholla | 2025-04-18 20:02:07+00:00
Perhaps not directly, but from the article:

> AMP required allowing any AMP CDN to cache your pages. Visitors might be served your page from a Google domain instead of your own, or the ad tech and other scripts on your site might be incapable of running on your AMP site (handily, it seemed, for Google, who might prefer you to use their ad tech instead).
by robroyce | 2025-04-18 20:03:09+00:00
I tested the early access version and the core idea is solid. Instead of relying on ICL or RAG, queries are translated into a DSL that returns the answer directly. I expect this approach to become the standard for NL Q&A moving forward. The workflow still needs refinement and a few steps are manual, but that can all be solved with a bit of engineering work.
by sparacha | 2025-04-18 20:03:20+00:00
build MCP servers that get plugged into different apps like Claude desktop. But what if you want to go from FastAPI functions and build your own agentic app - added bonus have common tool calls be blazing fast.

Just updated https://github.com/katanemo/archgw (the AI-native proxy server for agents) that can directly plug into your MCP tools and FastAPI functions so that you can ship an exceptionally high-quality agentic app. The proxy is designed to handle multi-turn, progressively ask users clarifying questions as required by input parameters of your functions, and accurately extract information from prompts to trigger downstream function calls - added bonus get built-in W3C tracing for all inbound and outbound request, gaudrails, etc.

Early days for the project. But would love contributors and if you like what you see please don't forget to the project too.
by 9dev | 2025-04-18 20:03:27+00:00
I respectfully disagree. If we replace all idealism with realism in the way we think about our political system, there is nothing left to do other than burying our heads in the sand. I firmly believe that people must participate in democracy, and that involves fighting for your convictions.

It's not your fault how things are, but doing nothing and expecting things to get better on their own isn't going to work either.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-18 20:03:36+00:00
> the Rhineland "Session", which begins in November, is somewhat awkwardly interrupted by Christmas and ends with Carnival

Wait, tell me more about this? I've never heard of it but this sounds much more similar to what is practiced by eastern christians. Where there is also a 40 day fast before christmas, then the twelve day feast ending with epiphany/theophany. And in those branches lent itself is preceded by a 3-week period of increasingly strict fast. So in some years depending on when easter lands you can start fasting again very shortly after christmas ends but is still understood as a completely separate thing.

I don't know anything about the rhineland one but I could see how this could eventually mutate into one super long fast with a break for christmas, but also maybe isn't seen that way by the people doing it.
by sophacles | 2025-04-18 20:03:46+00:00
> But a corporation should exist to provide goods and services to end users and a return to shareholders.

What a naive and utterly incorrect statement. A corporation is a peice of paper that separates ownership from liability. Attached to that peice of paper are some special tax rules, rules about structuring ownership and governance (particularly important when there are multiple owners) and so on.

Any notion of how they should be run is just a random person's opinion, unless you happen to have some percentage of ownership - then you get that percentage say in how things are run. Although I will say any sort of mechanistic opinion on corporate interactions is a broken one - fundamentally there are people doing things to fulfill an inter-corporate agreement, and some of those people will find ways to be shady or lazy or otherwise not live up to the agreement. The inter-personal relationships are very important, as they help the people running one corporation gauge how likely the other corporation will live up to it's end of the agreement.
by siliconwitch | 2025-04-18 20:04:09+00:00
The way the scripting engine is designed is such that it’s not really a problem to iterate in the field. If your code has an error, simply adjust and restart the script. Sure if you have the device hooked up to motors which could break things then of course you might want to do that in a controlled environment, but for applications like sensing that’s seldom a problem. The benefit you gain here is a very fast iteration cycle where you can easily test against real conditions, rather than in a lab where it might be hard to validate things. No need for heavy firmware testing, rolling out OTA updates, or worrying about bricking devices

In general I agree with you for complex projects, but these are typically where you can afford to have 2-3 engineers spend a year developing a specialised solution. Building infrastructure to safely roll out updates, managing data plans, handling compromised devices. All of this becomes a massive amount of work before you’re actually solving a problem for your business

The target audience isn’t necessarily engineering companies, but rather those that might have a few tech generalists. Their goal simply being to add some kind of sensing that might transform their product or service
by diggernet | 2025-04-18 20:04:13+00:00
Capable of printing to-scale? No. But I've printed a fair number of USGS 7.5min quads on a standard Brother laser printer. I print them double-sided, with the top half of the map on one side and the bottom half on the other[1]. They fit that way at about 1/2 scale, which is still eminently usable. Perfect for day hikes and other light recreation. And guaranteed not to break when you sit on it in a Ziploc in a back pocket.

Sure, use your phone with offline maps as your primary, but a printed backup map doesn't require anything special or expensive.

[1] With an overlap strip that is printed on both sides, thanks to plakativ[2].

[2] https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/plakativ
by ncruces | 2025-04-18 20:04:25+00:00
A PR is a significant investment from me. I'd have to figure out where something like this is supposed to fit, how the build infra works, etc.

One of the nice things about Go is how much that's a solved issue out of the box, compared to almost everything else; certainly compared to C.

Pinging them in an issue: https://github.com/WebAssembly/wasi-libc/issues/580
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-18 20:04:41+00:00
I'd just say that I find it very frustrating that the argument for "one side" is how insane "the other side" is, because then that pretends that reasonable solutions (and not what I would call "compromises") don't exist, because you're only looking at the extremes.

Yes, I think it's nuts to replace "DEI hires" with DUI hires and pretend that is "merit based", and I think the US has become a pretty full-blown kakistocracy (my new favorite word) right now.

But while I agree with the purported goals of DEI, I often saw it go "off the rails" in practice, and lead to a cottage industry of pseudoscience-based "DEI consultants". I'll show my hand: when it comes to DEI, I absolutely get behind the "I" part of it - everyone should feel welcome and included at work. When it comes to the "D" part, while I support outreach to cast as wide a net as possible when it comes to things like hiring, too often I saw this devolve into soft quotas and semi-performative hand wringing when some job distribution didn't exactly match the wider population distribution. The "E" part I think was frankly insane and just "equality of outcome" over "equality of opportunity" with window dressing - and yes, I've heard how backers framed the equity part, but in practice I always saw it looking for excuses as to why people who got ahead were privileged and why people who didn't were marginalized, regardless of the individual's actual circumstances.
by echelon | 2025-04-18 20:05:02+00:00
This looks similar to the classic "enterprise support" and "distribution" lifestyle business play, which is incredibly sustainable and benefits both the software community as well as the maintainers. From their website:

Support [1] page:

> Please contact us at business@defold.se for more information on how we can help you publish great games made with Defold.

About [2] page:

> Product development, marketing, support and sales - Refold AB is owned by members of the Defold team and is contracted to perform most of the day to day work on the Defold product.

Open [3] page:

> Q: Is there still going to be a roadmap for Defold?

> A: The Defold Foundation has decided to no longer share a public roadmap at the beginning of each year.

Status [4] page:

> Defold will never change into a subscription model, request royalty payments, introduce licensing fees or in other ways charge for access to the main (emphasis added) product.

FAQ [5] page:

> Q: What kind of user tracking are you doing?

> A: We log anonymous usage data from our websites and the Defold editor in order to improve our services and product.

They're using a lot of SaaS typical for startup/business growth. Their forums are Discourse [6], they're running a bunch of analytics, SendInBlue for campaigns, etc. That in and of itself doesn't imply anything, but they do seem to be very mindful of their community's health and growth.

There are some very dedicated people at the wheel. It looks like they've carved out enough leeway for commercial and support offerings to sustain themselves and keep others from stealing it like Amazon and others have done to other open source projects in the past, all the while building a cool community-powered open game engine.

[1] https://defold.com/support/

[2] https://defold.com/about/

[3] https://defold.com/open/

[4] https://defold.com/status/

[5] https://defold.com/faq/faq/

[6] https://forum.defold.com/ ; Discourse is $100/mo or more for custom domains
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-18 20:05:35+00:00
Having priorities is not an act of hypocrisy, this is not "just one more" it's not even a drop in the ocean. It's just a PR stunt that annoyed some people, or perhaps more accurately, was used to generate engagement. It isn't a significant environmental issue, and never will be, because it's a failure that's kept limping along by one billionaire's personal wealth.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-18 20:06:14+00:00
> HIPAA or other rules

Sure, sure, rules, yeah.

But there are plenty of reasons that are as numerous as reasons to build a walled garden.

If they’re storing your records, then they control the audit trail. They detect every time you, or someone, visited that site, logged in, viewed pages, downloaded or viewed a document, changed settings, updated profile, added contact info, deleted contact info.

They control the expiration and retention periods. They control the file formats. They control the uptime and the downtime. They control the horizontal and the vertical. Oh wait, that’s on T.V.

There will be increasing gauntlets to run and obstacles and hurdles to the consumer getting our hands on documents and information. Until we really need that proprietary online viewer to open the file at all. Or at least their mobile app. Or you could pay fees for records access. It costs them to store it all, does it not?
by phtrivier | 2025-04-18 20:07:01+00:00
If you feel this article is smug and condescending, don't start watching the language designer's stream too soon.

The least you can say is that he is _opinionated_. Even his friend Casey Muratori is "friendly" in comparison, at least trying to publish courses to elevate us masses of unworthy typescript coders to the higher planes of programming.

Jblow just want you to feel dumb for not programming right. He's unforgiving, Socrate's style.

The worst thing is : he might be right, most of the time.

We would not know, cause we find him infuriating, and, to be honest, we're just too dumb.
by jltsiren | 2025-04-18 20:07:29+00:00
You need to look at the bigger picture.

The English word "east", and the equivalent words in most European languages, ultimately mean something related to the dawn or sunrise. There is plenty of evidence for various Indo-European dawn goddesses with names linguists generally consider related to Eostre.

Dawn goddesses were generally part of an older layer of mythology that became less relevant over time. They were often replaced with other deities that inherited some of their aspects, or they gained new aspects while keeping the name.

We know that both Old English and Old High German had one of the spring months named after something related to the east and/or dawn. We know that European agricultural societies tended to have spring festivals. We know that as Christinanity spread, it absorbed pagan festivals and pagan traditions, and sometimes even kept the names. Such as something similar to "Yule" instead of "Christmas" or "Navidad".

Maybe Anglo-Saxons never had a goddess specifically called Eostre, and maybe their spring festivals were not specifically about worshipping a particular god. But some European languages chose to use a Germanic name for the Paschal season, and that name seems to be connected to some pagan spring festivals. Whose names are ultimately related to a dawn goddess their distant ancestors worshipped.
by siliconwitch | 2025-04-18 20:07:55+00:00
It’s a massive rabbit hole! Thankfully LTE Cat-M1 that we use is much simpler than full blown LTE, but even still, the most iteration we’ve had to do is around the antenna system. Huge number of frequencies and bandwidths to support and much of the information is quite difficult to track down. Thankfully with the help of the SoC maker, antenna maker and SIM provider, we’ve just about managed to figure it all out
by qingcharles | 2025-04-18 20:08:37+00:00
The jails and prisons are all shifting to a system where they will frank your mail with the correct postage and take it off your commissary to avoid people owning stamps.

I once sued because the jail was selling Forever stamps at 49c but Congress had reduced the price to 47c. The government's argument was that they had purchased 10,000 of them at 49c, so selling them at 49c was legal as they weren't "ripping anyone off." The appellate courts did not agree with that argument.

Also, funny thing in jails, the sticky leftover gutter parts of the stamp books had value because they could be used to repair torn things like books, photos and magazines.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-18 20:09:53+00:00
It apparently doesn't in one of the areas of which I have a high level interest. The ATF is constantly changing their mind on what a machine gun is, and if it is one, it is a strict liability crime.

Not long ago a guy was put in jail for creating business-card sized metal sheets with the image of a 'lightning link' (machinegun conversion device) on it. Not the actual device, just a picture of it etched <0.001" into the metal. Clearly just art, and even when the ATF cut it out they could not get it function as a machine gun. They gave it to an actual machinist, and even after a day he could not get it to function as a machine gun. They could only get it to do anything by literally jamming it into the gun and making it do hammer follow, which every AR-15 can do with the parts already in it.

Up until the guy was convicted I don't think anyone had any idea a picture of a machine gun on a metal card was a machine gun. They even convicted the guy advertising it, who never as far as I know actually distributed one.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-18 20:11:09+00:00
> The materials aren't available. Why do you think that is?

To begin with, they often are. A lot of school libraries actually have test prep materials available. They don't all have them because libraries are locally administered and each locality gets to make its own choices, but if that's the case in your locality then you can direct your complaints to the town council rather than the federal government.

> Ah, and that means we can ignore poor kids who don't fall into this pattern, as well as poor kids who live too far away from libraries?

This is the thing where perfect is impossible. If you live in an urban area, having a library within walking distance is feasible because there are enough people there to justify it. If you live in a rural area, it isn't. What do you propose to do about it?

> You're ignoring that this is only part of the equation, as the tutoring etc. is also missing. There must be special programs for the disadvantaged to level the playing field here, but that's what anti-DEI advocates also complain about!

Rich people will pay for things that aren't scalable. If your parents make $20M/year, they can spend $1M/year on their kid. If you spent $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US, the cost would be $74 Trillion, which exceeds the US GDP. And there is a threshold past which additional spending has diminishing returns. Again, the goal is to get as close to measuring merit as feasible; "closer than now" is possible but perfection isn't.
by vel0city | 2025-04-18 20:11:22+00:00
In Christian ideology, his suffering and death was the suffering and death we were all supposed to have. He took that suffering and death so we don't have to, the "perfect lamb".

Looking at just that suffering on that one day is missing the context for everything else after, at least according to Christian ideology.

Also, an important part of the completion of previous prophecies for those looking at the older books. Jesus wouldn't have been the savior if those things didn't happen to him, according to the texts.
by grandempire | 2025-04-18 20:11:36+00:00
dei programs in academia and corporations aren’t limited to breaking ties at the end of hiring. But I can consider the possibility in good faith.

I think giving someone who might normally not have the chance is a good tie breaker. I’m opposed to a policy that dictates that must be determined by skin color/gender/religion. If the individuals involved in the hiring felt that was the right tie breaker based on their knowledge of their community, I’m not opposed to that.
by dec0dedab0de | 2025-04-18 20:13:17+00:00
I always thought the selling point of Pure Python was that you might be running on some esoteric implementation of python, or hardware that the library maintainer didn't include binaries for.

I mean, I am glad wheels exist, they make things a lot easier for a lot of people. I just believed in the dream of targeting the language for maximum compatibility and hoping a better implementation would eventually run it faster.