MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-04-03 04:28:47+00:00
Right, right, I'd put MS into my Blind Spot because there has got to be a much cheaper, more reliable, more scaleable/generalizable, less prone to over-engineering/misinterpretation option for detecting trace compounds, yes? (Our noses do it, at a speed faster than n per decade!!*)

[Seems JPL are more courageous^W patient^W adaptive than MMAANG!]

Follows (p3) the actually interesting phrase: what'd they mean by that? What provoked the peer reviewers?

"It is INTERNALLY ACCEPTED by the SAM team that a signal can be assessed from a S/N of 2 and the quantification is tentatively made from any detected m/z"

On reflection on the list I gave of DARPA-likes..

[Where might our intuitions diverge?]

Couple clues for it not being simply nostalgia:

1. The right question is closer to : why do breakthroughs announced by/awarded to MAANG these past decades not pass the optimal curiosity-agency smell test? Too teleological? Cheap conspiratorial answer is that they focused on investigations too expensive for academics to disprove/replicate. Less cheap answer is SV unwittingly replicated the structural issues of pre-lost-decade Japan (shareholder-supremacy? Overoptimistic metrics?)

2. Which brings me to: cultural premiums being nolonger affordable by gradstudents/good faith middle managers across the board

(Is it related to "supervision debt"? Or "moderation-technik debt")

*Related to the information bottleneck worked upon by my undersung hero Bialek?
by ptek | 2025-04-03 04:29:01+00:00
I have a T43, slowly working on a VESA driver for NeXTSTEP 3.3 (Yes there is a driver for OpenStep 4.2).

Using Ghidra and the source that Apple released. Final set up will be, NeXTSTEP3.3, DOS6.22 (AutoCAD R12, Matlab), WinXP (For Encarta 95 and Mindmaze) and NetBSD.
by darthrupert | 2025-04-03 04:29:10+00:00
That's not the problem. The US now effectively has a system where you don't prosecute presidents for any crime. You should note that the ongoing criminal investigations against Trump were mostly cancelled when it became obvious that he'll be the next president.

If this system had been in place when Nixon did his crimes, he would've just shrugged and kept going.

You are indeed not Europe now, not even close. Well, except for Hungary and Belarus.
by bredren | 2025-04-03 04:29:21+00:00
It is. I had a meeting this past week where we discussed a novel workflow and I was able to generate an initial based on the transcription of our discussion so far, then two quick revisions based on realtime feedback.

Though, I’ve used it to generate visuals of pipelines too and find it often takes coaching similar to any output that requires very high precision.

Another bit is that gpt4o and sonnet both seem to want to put syntax breaking parentheses in and struggle to avoid continuing to do so.

Once it’s right, though it is a valuable new context artifact to include in further problem solving on a domain.
by refulgentis | 2025-04-03 04:30:28+00:00
I was watching a trial the other day and the prosecutor asks "And did you often see your nephews at your mothers house when you video called her?", and the defendant, a dentists, says "Yep, watching TV, brushing their teeth.[5 second silence] Don't forget to brush your teeth. Really important." The prosecutor smiles, laughs, and says "A little dull humor never hurt, eh?"

I'm not sure your average adult would find "don't be afraid" to be "advice", or some deeply meaningful advice that only a cynic would think was anything less than excellent.
by hinkley | 2025-04-03 04:31:22+00:00
The exuberance and self-assuredness that your plans are going to work out leads to overreach and I think the lag in accounting practices helps make that more acute.

I have had too many experiences where I thought my current employer was about to start circling the drain, and I've ended up some place that was circling faster. At a guess I'm about 50:50, which I suppose I should count as 'lucky' but has never felt that way.

Fish-tailing is a common flame-out mode for startups. VCs are partly to blame. They don't like to discourage you in case you come up with a miracle, but neither do they want to put good money and time after bad if it turns out you're going to be a break-even play or a loss.
by toast0 | 2025-04-03 04:32:33+00:00
I no longer compute on a couch, but if you like trackballs, I don't see why you wouldn't like trackballs while sitting on a couch. I used to be able to find somewhere to set it, and it was better than using the trackpad.

But if you like trackpads, you might like them more than trackballs. And if you dislike trackballs, you might dislike them more than trackpads.

Trackballs never disappeared, although they're not mainstream anymore; you used to be able to get a trackball to clip to the side of your laptop, or get a laptop with a built in trackball... But times have changed.
by interroboink | 2025-04-03 04:32:33+00:00
Having run some hardware for about 20 years (recently deceased), the problem that eventually happens is that newer OSes drop support for old hardware. If you hit some weird bug on your setup on a new OS release, there won't be anyone to help you fix it[1]. So then you're stuck on an old OS. In time, that means you can't run the latest userland software either, which relies on more modern OS features (eg: your Firefox will get increasingly out-of-date). That means the set of things you can do will eventually narrow and narrow.

If you're only running programs that you have full control of, and can compile/fix locally, or where receiving security fixes &etc. don't matter, then you're good. But things are a bit more interconnected, these days.

I do still enjoy running my hardware into the ground rather than tossing out perfectly good components every few years though (:

[1] In my case, the boot loader stopped working for my hardware on FreeBSD 11.4
by foolswisdom | 2025-04-03 04:33:46+00:00
> Fed started raising rates in Apr 2022, at which point leaders started freaking out because they know what higher rates mean, and by Jun 2022 the Fed was raising them in 0.75% increments, which was unheard of in modern economics.

You're basically making the case that it happened fast, and went up high, but everyone who paid attention to interest rates understood it was only a matter of time till it had to at least revert back to pre-covid rates (whether you think that's 1.5 or 2.3 or something, depending on how you measure), and that obviously there would need to be real layoffs after.

The excuse is really saying "it turned out more extreme than we thought", but was the behavior take responsible assuming non-extreme rate changes?
by throwaway0665 | 2025-04-03 04:34:10+00:00
I got an x220 jumping onto the hype but it was too small and too slow to use. Even though I'd maxed out the RAM, replaced the solder paste and was running a lightweight i3 environment.

I've only ever personally owned second hand Thinkpads and they're so great. But you should get the newest, reasonably priced one you can. There are so many affordable T480s/T470s out there or even the newer T14 models. They're still very serviceable and many still allow expansion with unsoldered RAM.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-03 04:34:28+00:00
> the national debt is still increasing, although the administration is counting on tariff funds to supplement revenue

Not the debt, the deficit. The debt is the card balance. The deficit are new swipes. Nothing in the current policy package is about deficit (let alone debt) reduction.

(Valid on trade deficits. I guess we can run trade surpluses if we give up dollar hegemony. That, of course, means no more deficits.)
by rukuu001 | 2025-04-03 04:34:47+00:00
A good discussion. I've personally thought of political adherence similar to football teams. Fans are fans. That's it.

Escaping that tribalism or fandom is important, but you need to hold fast to your own sense of morality along the way.

Applying your own sense of right/wrong to political arguments and policies is a useful way to cut through the noise and distraction that accompanies political discourse.
by rayiner | 2025-04-03 04:34:57+00:00
Okay, that's a nice econ textbook hypo that explains the trade deficit with Bangladesh. But why do we have huge structural deficits with the EU, Japan, China, etc? Those are big, diversified economies. You'd think those factors would average out.

Germany is a big, rich economy. How do they manage to run large trade surpluses? They seem to do this quite deliberately. So why is it a bad idea to try and make our economy more like Germany’s? Japan has a large trade surplus. The EU as a whole is basically evenly balanced, tending towards a small surplus. Are our Reaganite overlords smarter than the guys who run those countries?
by GauntletWizard | 2025-04-03 04:34:59+00:00
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by hackinthebochs | 2025-04-03 04:36:31+00:00
This is a fundamental difference with how people on the (American) left and people on the right view politics. Those on the right frequently vote based on a single or a few issues, ignoring the rest of the platform that may be unpalatable. While those on the left frequently view voting as an endorsement of the whole person. Any unwanted policy tends to be a turn off. It's why you say "you don't get to absolve yourself of support for kicking puppies" while the right does just that. You would be better served understanding the values and motivations of your opposition rather than projecting your values onto them and judging them based on a strawman.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-04-03 04:38:06+00:00
Back in the day, I heard all sorts of great things about how durable Thinkpads were, I bought one with my hard earned money in ~2004 when doing contact web development work. It was my least reliable laptop I've ever had.

My Vaio notebooks always lasted quite a bit longer. Eventually got a macbook and haven't gone back, but yeah, the one Thinkpad I owned was the least reliable computing device I've bought in the ~40 years of my lifetime.
by salawat | 2025-04-03 04:38:15+00:00
Seems but isn't due to the way taxation/jurisdiction/licensure works. Where you are doing your work from and where the benefactor of that work are make a big difference. Example: Doctors can't telehealth over State lines. Lawyers likewise. Employers aren't supposed to allow migrant workers to work from across state lines from their address of record.

A great deal of draconian control is actually implemented through employment and licensure law, and as with most things in real life, come bundled with a surprising amount of detail. Part of why I've become particularly dissatisfied with the U.S. as of late, as so much of it is predicated on actually keeping you locked into one geographical location.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-04-03 04:39:22+00:00
Keeping secrets from the public is a good way to lose the public trust which they’ll need to stay in power. Otherwise their replacements will have their own secret reasons to be deporting people.

I’ve already resigned myself to the reality that freedom of speech no longer exists and hasn’t existed for some time. I think only the times when we thought we had freedom of speech was when information was very tightly controlled and the few cranks in the periphery were not a threat to government legitimacy. An increasingly weak and illegitimate government cannot afford to allow free speech.
by YZF | 2025-04-03 04:40:07+00:00
Brexit is a good example. I think many people just can't extrapolate/predict the results of their actions and understand the policy (assuming politicians are even honest about it in the first place). For most objective smart people Brexit seemed terrible (hey lemme reinforce my ego a little) but expecting your average person to be able to understand that is tough. Also there is a parallel universe somewhere where Brexit maybe has a positive outcome. These things aren't fully deterministic. Similarly people always seem to buy the immigration crime and jobs schtick. And it's also not false that if you open your borders to a stream of people it is likely to change what your country looks like. There's a reason most countries don't have completely open borders and give everyone citizenship the day they set their foot past the border.

What's so bad in America? You'll be surprised how many people have hard lives in America. A lot. And I think when it's bad there, it's really bad.
by cyberjerkXX | 2025-04-03 04:40:45+00:00
I have friends all over the political spectrum. I've read political philosophy ranging from Hegel, Marx, Foucault, Butler, Crenshaw, Gentile, Locke, Rawls, Friedman, Mises, Rand, ect.. I find myself actively engaging in political discussion frequently with these friends. The only friend I've stopped talking over politics were black block during the antifa riots. I viewed his actions as ultimately misguided and dangerous. I ultimately forgave him and now we are friends who actively debate policy in good faith.

It's easy to spot political tribalism - just reference the comments here. They ultimately misrepresent, and have never tried to understand, their opposition's political position. It's kind of sad because it allows them to be manipulated by propaganda and political powers much like my antifa friend.
by skydhash | 2025-04-03 04:40:47+00:00
Code isn't an output, it's just the final form of requirements. The software engineer job is just going from the informal talk about the feature to the formal nature of code that implements it. Yes, you can have an experienced person that broadly strokes the direction and have another less experienced programmer implements it, but there's no clear demarcation for the separation of role.

The real output is the shipped project, and sometimes your own code is only a tiny part of it.
by jjani | 2025-04-03 04:40:48+00:00
At the risk of sounding very arrogant, I've found this incredibly obvious even when I was just 18 years old. Decades have passed, plenty of my beliefs have changed, but this one hasn't.

The chance that one "ideology", whether it's liberalism, conservatism, anarchism , fascism or any-ism is always the right answer to every single societal question, is 0. It's comparable to the idea of exactly 1 of the (tens of) thousands of religions being the true one, correct in everything, with all of the others being wrong.

And this extends to politics. Where I'm from, the political landscape is very different from the US, with at least 5+ different parties that support different policies in various ways. At the same time, it's similar - there isn't a single one that approaches things on a case-by-case basis, each of them being ideology-based.

> So I don’t think being a centrist implies one is not tribal, rather that the degree to which your beliefs on a variety of issues align with the “default” of a group implies how tribal you are.

Absolutely, "centrism" is an ideology in itself. This is also why the usage of the word "moderate" in the article and by PG is very unfortunate. That word too comes with a whole lot of baggage, and saying that independent thought leads to one being "moderate" in the way that most people think of that word, is straight up wrong. We need a different word, but I'm not great at coining those. "pragmatic" is the best one I can come up with. I can feel a "pragmatism is an ideology!" coming, but "the ideology of not looking at things from an ideological perspective" is entirely different from anything else. I'm sure the bright minds here can give better words.

> In other words, a politically thoughtful and independent person probably has a basket of opinions that don’t fit into neat left or right, liberal or conservative, etc. categories.

Very much so. And as the article points out, this is unfortunately a very lonely experience, so it's completely logical that most don't opt for this, instead choosing the warmth of a dogmatic community.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-03 04:40:50+00:00
I emigrated to the US as a fiancée. It was not necessarily easy or cheap (I'm agreeing with you) and I came from a "low visa fraud risk country" (Australia). Some of the challenges faced:

It probably cost around $30,000 all up. Every visit to a consular office or USCIS cost about $100 in biometrics alone (each time). Fees for applying, fees for adjustments.

My partner and I had an issue where I was supporting her (she was in school). The system is not set up for that, and expects the US citizen to be financially supporting their prospective spouse. I realize that there are challenges around our situation in terms of providing a financial benefit to a USC that could be construed as paying for a visa.

I was interviewing for jobs in the US from Australia as my move date got closer (after the visa was approved). Siemens nearly torpedoed things when they wanted to start a H-1B or other visa app for me even after being repeatedly told I didn't need one.

My fiancees family ended up having to sponsor me, signing declarations of financial responsibility, that they could be made to repay any government benefit I claimed within the first 10 years of living here (tied to that previous issue).

Some of the evidentiary requirements (bona fide relationship) were reasonable and actually quite clever (separated, and asked questions like who usually does dishes, or takes out trash, and what day is trash day for that matter, and beyond) and others were onerous (I had to pay BoA an exorbitant amount to get all bank statements for 3 years, copied and notarized).

In the end, ironically we determined I would have been "adjusted" to a unconditional LPR more quickly, and more cheaply, if I had come here on a visa waiver, promising not to get married, and just got married and said "oops, my bad, can I be converted anyway?" than actually doing it the right way.
by tyushk | 2025-04-03 04:41:17+00:00
I run NixOS on a coreboot-ed T420 and I absolutely love everything on the outside, but it really shows its age when compared to the display on my Macbook or it comes to running heavier software ie. rust-analyzer, Chrome, or Nix builds.

If Lenovo were to release a modern T420-like, with identical chassis, battery system and similar IO port variety, but a modern display, modern internals (replaceable SSD! soldered RAM at least has a case for performance) and a modern camera, cash would evaporate out of my wallet.

I remember there was a person [1] modding T60/T61s into "T700"s with 11th gen Intel chips. Unfortunately it looks like the project's been quiet since 2022. Hopefully there'll be more who try.

[1] https://www.xyte.ch/t700-crowdfunding/
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-03 04:41:21+00:00
It's not uncommon for people who decide they have "discovered" the "real political spectrum" by simply adding a new axis to the traditional left-right spectrum to coincidentally idealize one pole on that new axis, viewing all variation on the left-right axis as indicative of distraction from what is important.

Asserting that people varying on the left-right spectrum also cluster around the anti-ideal pole of the idealized axis while everyone closer to the ideal pole clusters around the left-right center is not as common, but reflects the same cognitive bias, though it is particularly amusing when that axis independent thought (ideal) vs. groupthink (anti-ideal), such that freethinkers are asserted to by ideological uniform even outside of the shared commit to "free" thought, while sheepish adherents of groupthink are more ideologically diverse.

(And, yes, that graph is deadly serious -- as well as, IMO, hilariously wrong [0] -- and fairly central to the theme of the post.)

It's even more funny that this "free thinker" is decrying tribalist groupthink, asserting (as already discussed) that free thought exists only in an extremely narrow band in the center of the left-right axis, and talking about how they can't talk politics with anyone outside their group and are "desperate for like-minded folk". The lack of self-awareness is...palpable.

It's even more funny that all the ideas he embraces and purports to have trouble finding people he agrees with are the standard doctrines of the rationalist/EA/longermist faction that is so popular in the tech/AI space (and the conceit of being uniquely free thinking is also common to the faction.)

[0] Actual free thinkers are, IME, distributed widely -- not necessarily evenly, but certainly not clustered in one spot -- across both the left-right axis and a number of other political axes [1][2], such as the authoritarian-libertarian axis, so both the distribution shown and the assertion that the "real" political spectrum is two dimensional with only freethought vs. groupthink added to the classic left-right axis are incorrect.

[1] For a number of reasons, including both differences in life experiences and thus perceived probabilities on various factual propositions, but also on fundamental values which life experiences may impact, but not in a deductive manner, because you can't reason to "ought" from "is".

[2] Free thinkers do differ from groupthinkers in that their positions in the multidimensional space of political values are likely not to fall into the clusters of established tribes, but to have some views typical of one tribe while other others fall out of that tribes typical space (and possibly even into the space of an opposing tribe.) But there are enough different tribes
by __d | 2025-04-03 04:41:25+00:00
In general, you can’t.

You could work for a company that open sources your work. You can consult. A very few people can make enough to live off from donations or support contracts.

But … ultimately I think it’s the wrong approach. Open Source isn’t a business, it’s a community commons. You contribute to the commons and use what others have contributed. Making it about money just means it’s now about the money, not doing something you enjoy as a member of a community.
by em-bee | 2025-04-03 04:41:37+00:00
i think this is a key point, and this is why this problem will remain until we make some drastic changes.

to look at a completely different example: the internet was designed on good faith. year after year more things have been put into place to protect against those not operating in good faith. proof of work against AI bots is just the latest example.

what is really needed is a change in education. we need to teach the next generation that operating in good faith is absolutely essential for the future of mankind. we can no longer assume that good faith is the default. it isn't any more.
by petersellers | 2025-04-03 04:41:48+00:00
I don't have friends for the sake of "having friends". I choose the people I want to hang out with because I enjoy their company and like/respect them. Being around them makes me happy.

Similarly, people I dislike (rude or mean people, for example) make me unhappy when I'm around them. Cutting them out of my life is a net benefit there too, because I'm happier without them.
by rendaw | 2025-04-03 04:42:19+00:00
It's also a security risk though, as in someone could take it over and push a bad update at any time... I have a few extensions installed but I'm terrified of adding more, even though there are parts of my browsing experience that could be significantly improved.

I really wish there were a middle ground, like an external extension manager where you could opt into updates, with reproducible builds, changelogs, etc.