MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andrewflnr | 2025-04-04 19:08:14+00:00
No, "within the mantle" is definitely off the rails. It's really hot down there, way hotter than cooking temperatures. A few highly specialized microbes can survive conditions like that, but not animals. Also the pressure is high enough that rock acts like liquid. Large cavities cannot survive. I think this started to be a problem even for the Kola borehole, the walls of the hole just started squishing in.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-04-04 19:08:21+00:00
"The findings are a stark reminder that even the wealthiest Americans are not shielded from the systemic issues in the US contributing to lower life expectancy, such as economic inequality ...," lead study author Irene Papanicolas, a professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown, said in a news release.

That's a pretty funny take, that economic inequality is a systemic risk for rich people. I wonder if Dr P thinks that the stress of noblesse oblige is too much for the frail US elites (as opposed to the horrible diet endemic in the US)
by coryrc | 2025-04-04 19:08:47+00:00
They're viruses, so they work by infecting bacteria and making the bacteria create more of itself.

Antibiotics are found by isolating a compound some i.e. fungi naturally produces. We figure out how to produce the compound and don't fill people with fungi to produce it. Bacteriophages are already the analogy to the compound itself.

So we should be investing heavily in creating and distributing all variety of bacteriophage for all our common bacterial infections. 20k deaths/year from MRSA in the USA alone, 120k infections/year in USA and many of the survivors are left with life-long complications.
by nine_k | 2025-04-04 19:09:26+00:00
You can find a lot of the "showing me how to program" sentiment is common among people who learn Lisp/Clojure, Haskell, Erlang/Elixir, APL (oh, I mean, Numpy and Spark), and any other language that significantly differs from what you're used to. In the same vein, C is often a revelation for those who cut their teeth tackling JS and Python.

Indeed, Zig has interesting features that make you think in ways you won't make when using C, like an ability to offload large amount of computation to comptime code, or using different allocators at different times (super simple arena allocation per a game frame, for instance).

"A language that's not changing the way you think about programming is not worth knowing."
by low_tech_love | 2025-04-04 19:10:03+00:00
The Fountainhead is a great book, one of my favorites. Atlas Shrugged is also a very good book in a slightly different way (but it overstays its welcome). I love Ayn Rand as a writer, she was bold, energetic, smart. She could weave a fictional alternate reality like nobody else, while keeping the human characters at the very center of everything.

The problem is that for some reason she couldn’t keep it at the fictional level and started thinking maybe the fiction was a good model of reality. That kinda taints a bit the legacy, in my opinion.
by astrange | 2025-04-04 19:10:04+00:00
> I'm also not going to post an issue on apple's bug tracker that I have an intuition that my battery life is worse than it could be. That'd get deleted instantly.

Don't worry, I am literally telling you to do this. Apple is made entirely out of bug reports. It's their job to handle them.

I would say that you shouldn't put too much effort into it, simply because of burnout.
by wvenable | 2025-04-04 19:10:20+00:00
> This really seems like looking back with rose-colored glasses.

It works both ways. It's hard to look back at the time while ignoring all the paths the road has taken since then.

Microsoft has always been company that is very good at building software compared their competition at the time. Their office productivity software, for example, is what made Windows popular (Windows is useless without apps). It's easy to give more weight to their flaws because, in many ways, their successes just seem obvious now.
by glenstein | 2025-04-04 19:10:22+00:00
>Ayn Rand didn't write novels about homesteading

Galt's Gulch seems to fit that description.

>none of the characters in her books are self sufficient.

I think they were in the sense that they, within the fiction of the books, had irreplaceable economic skills that made them fortunes. They were (again just in the logic of the books), more than pulling their weight.

Doesn't mean I agree with it as a system but I can see the internal consistency in this respect at least.
by telchior | 2025-04-04 19:10:25+00:00
If you went looking in China, you'd find plenty of really stupid or bad things that happened as a result of the government's ability to easily requisition land for public use. Ruined ecosystems, displaced families, corruption, the works.

Just this wikipedia page will give you a sense of the scale of just one of those issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_evictions_in_China

But it's quite obvious that any large-scale building would result in at least some of that. There is no way to "figure out" how to avoid all harms or how to avoid at least some broken eggs in the basket. Personally I'm all for North Americans figuring out what a "greater good" is, but the idea that it'll actually happen is laughable; we can't, we won't, we'll simply fester in what we have.
by nickff | 2025-04-04 19:10:35+00:00
The problem with the 'induced demand' paradigm is that it leads to cities not investing in infrastructure, and often designing the city to be hard to enter or exit, and impossible to bypass. This is one instance where there are many examples of the 'slippery slope' coming to pass.

If we want people to take mass transit, we should make it better, instead of making everything else terrible.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-04 19:10:45+00:00
> i'm just able to actually read and comprehend what i'm reading rather than perform hype:

The evidence of that is lacking.

> so the article is about cuda-core, not whatever you think it's about

cuda.core (a relatively new, rapidly developing, library whose entire API is experimental) is one of several things (NVMath is another) mentioned in the article, but the newer and as yet unreleased piece mentioned in the article and the GTC announcement, and a key part of the “Native Python” in the headline, is the CuTile model [0]:

“The new programming model, called CuTile interface, is being developed first for Pythonic CUDA with an extension for C++ CUDA coming later.”

> this is bullshit/hype about Python's new JIT

No, as is is fairly explicit in the next line after the one you quote, it is about the Nvidia CUDA Python toolchain using in-process compilation rather than relying on shelling out to out-of-process command-line compilers for CUDA code.

[0] The article only has fairly vague qualitative description of what CuTile is, but (without having to watch the whole talk from GTC), one could look at this tweet for a preview of what the Python code using the model is expected to look like when it is released: https://x.com/blelbach/status/1902113767066103949?t=uihk0M8V...
by TheGRS | 2025-04-04 19:10:57+00:00
Yea, well I would consider it that in the sense that it seems like a mix of his personal interests, history, and promotion of stuff he cares about (his biography and foundation and various projects he's on). Its a unique site because he has the cash to hire people who put a great UX experience on top of it all. I think that's the main difference.

Not that he's unique in this, but I do really appreciate his book lists. I usually grab a few books during the year based on his recommendations.
by dowager_dan99 | 2025-04-04 19:11:12+00:00
Pretty strong disagree with your take (though seems like you end with "this is a bad path with no viable alternatives"?). Laying out the breadboards and wiring this has frustrations but that's part of the experience. Same with the design choices; one of the most valuable things my most-digital of minds learned was that you can never escape the analog world completely. I don't think you should be looking for cheap and efficient in this realm, but what I did to source everything was make a big ali express order about 3 months before I planned to tackle this (over a Christmas/winter break), sometimes ordering the same part from multiple suppliers, and then forgot about it, until the packages started to trickle in. You probably already have a lot of the basics, so you can do this for < $200 pretty easily. Meanwhile I completed the NAND to Tetris project, which was very complimentary. I didn't find any parts particularly hard to source and have more basic gates than all ever use.
by lliamander | 2025-04-04 19:11:50+00:00
No.

We don't make our own clothes because:

1. The regulatory burden on manufacturing is much higher here than foreign countries

2. Those foreign countries have a deliberate policy of maintaining a trade surplus in order to improve their own industrial capacity at the expense of our own

I would absolutely expect that even in a more level trade environment there would still be some foreign manufacturing of clothes. But what we are seeing is not the happy accident of the free market, but the result of very deliberate government policy.
by mppm | 2025-04-04 19:12:44+00:00
Long-term -- yes; short and medium-term -- not necessarily. For example, during and after Covid, Germany had a very severe antibiotics shortage. I think it is still ongoing to some extent. On one hand, it seems ridiculous to suggest that Germany is incapable of producing all the antibiotics it needs. On the other hand, ramping up production that has been offshored is not that easy, and is a lot more expensive initially. Same thing with the chip shortage -- these weren't even close to leading-edge chips, but trying to ramp up production domestically would likely cost 10x or more. Same with Russian gas, or any number of other things. Supply chain crunches can do a lot of damage even for individual products. If they were to happen simultaneously across multiple industries, the effect could be truly disastrous.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-04-04 19:13:50+00:00
Given they're a merchant of records, cost of compliance increased, mainly thanks to europe (that seems to have as a mission to ruin working people' lives as much as possible).

Stripe + Lemon Squeezy was a competitor.

Paddle is a competitor (which I use precisely to avoid having to deal with worldwide regulations) and they charge around 5%.

Gumroad also gives you a marketplace so there's some extra value.

I pay 25% for another marketplace, so 13% is not that crazy if they can bring you traffic.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-04 19:13:53+00:00
>what boot sequence (or use case) involves UEFI > NT6 > GRUB > linux.

Good example of a nonideal approach, but I would settle for that since at least it's better than how UEFI has developed so far.

I think the "default" sequence for new (naturally Windows-preinstalled) PC's is simply UEFI > NT6 bootloader > Windows.

On mainstream PC's like this, for users to include Linux if they want to (without disturbing Windows) it should be a straightforward option to install Linux to its own partition, and end up with UEFI > NT6 bootloader > Windows or Linux. Your choice by paying attention to the built-in NT6 bootmenu upon power up, whenever you don't want to boot automatically to the default OS.

With exactly the same workflow as you used to be able to with BIOS. I know there are subsurface differences, but always hold out hope that maybe someone will be advanced enough to handle this much abstraction ;)

This deficiency was not a factor before UEFI struck, since the NT6 bootloader would start Linux under BIOS with no problem. Still will, and Grub will still start Windows, working smoother than ever even in UEFI. NT5 bootloader was even good enough, and you can probably go back to NT3.

>Windows supports setting a one time boot using a UEFI BootNext NVRAM variable, directly boots shim.efi, doesn't involve bootmgr.efi

Even better than that, both Windows and Linux are complete enough as an OS, that if either of their bootloaders are properly installed & configured, then no NVRAM variables need to be depended on whatsoever. Those variables are functionally just a shortcut or fallback which can compensate for lingering defects.

Plus I never thought Grub was required, I always prefer Syslinux.

No matter what, there's not supposed to be any need for a shim.
by teamonkey | 2025-04-04 19:14:09+00:00
In British English there are specific meanings. “Firing” is a general term for getting rid of staff. “Sacking” is getting rid of staff because they have done something wrong.

“Group” can be used when talking about a large organisation as a whole, rather than a smaller component or subsidiary.

So the FT is explicitly drawing attention to the argument that the people were fired because of something they did (attempting to unionise) and that that decision was made or sanctioned by Apple at the top level (not some regional CEO or middle manager).
by leptons | 2025-04-04 19:14:42+00:00
> If Republicans want to pass any actual tax cuts, that's another opportunity. I didn't claim Democrats have absolute power, but they do have some.

No, they really don't have the power you think they do.

The Republicans don't need 60 votes in the Senate to pass tax cuts. They only need a simple majority, which they have.

>"Democrats, as the minority party, don’t have the votes to stop the GOP plan."

https://apnews.com/article/senate-budget-tax-cuts-spending-g...

You're crying that Democrats won't do anything, when they do not have the power to stop this. You're in need of some education about how the government works.
by irf1 | 2025-04-04 19:14:58+00:00
I run a bounties platform (https://algora.io) and I've seen people who create bounties try to use some AI like Devin to solve them (@seveibar livestreamed trying it) just for fun and in all cases AI failed to solve the bounties.

A Rust project that rewarded 300+ bounties ($37k) is now building an AI coding agent with the aim to solve bounties on Algora - it's an interesting benchmark I guess.

Curious myself what the next years might look like, but from everything I've seen so far we're definitely not there yet.
by wvenable | 2025-04-04 19:15:03+00:00
> Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone

At the time Mac OS didn't have memory protection -- Netscape would make your whole computer go BOOM at regular intervals.

IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape.

I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes.

That's just the way things were.
by scelerat | 2025-04-04 19:15:08+00:00
I find myself spending so much time correcting bad -- or perhaps, more appropriately, misguided -- code that I constantly wonder if I'm saving time. I think I am, but a much higher percentage of my time is doing hard work of evaluating and thinking about things rather than mentally easy things the AI is good at, but what used to give me a little bit of a break.

Sometimes I liken the promise of AI to my experience with stereoscopic images (I have never been able to perceive them) -- I know there's something there but I frequently don't get it.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-04 19:15:14+00:00
Mountain View, California looks like this:

https://www.commercialcafe.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites...

It is home to (or adjacent to the home of) the most valuable companies in the world.

The reason it doesn’t look like Shenzhen is because 1) Americans invest a huge portion of their life savings into their homes which means 2) preventing that asset from depreciating is important and 3) scarcity is the easiest way to accomplish that and 4) homeowners have disproportionate political power to do so.

As long as these (by national standards) mediocre houses keep appreciating, homeowners will fight change.
by jonfw | 2025-04-04 19:15:31+00:00
To be clear on my intentions- the OP said that conservatives wanted to eliminate critical thought. I assumed this was related to the elimination of DOE. My questions intended to dissect why exactly he thought that the DOE was responsible for critical thought.

I am not a fan of the DOE- I think that the relationship between standardized tests and funding mean that schools prioritize skill development and memorization more than they prioritize critical thought / reasoning.

I am not sure where your line of criticism comes from- it doesn't seem like we're understanding each other
by nickff | 2025-04-04 19:16:25+00:00
If Foxconn workers had either average or worse-than-average mental health (in their country), this outcome appears to be positively impacted by their employer. This seems like a reasonable assumption, unless you have some countervailing information.

Calling out unspoken assumptions can be useful, but it's not a refutation unless the assumptions are unreasonable or demonstrably wrong.
by cubefox | 2025-04-04 19:16:30+00:00
I have read parts of it years ago. As far as I remember, this is very theoretical (lots of statistical learning theory, including some IMHO mistaken treatment of Vapnik's theory of structural risk minimization), with strong focus on theory and basicasically zero focus on applications. Which would be completely outdated by now anyway, as the book is from 2014, an eternity in AI.

I don't think many people will want to read it today. As far as I know, mathematical theories like SLT have been of little use for the invention of transformers or for explaining why neural networks don't overfit despite large VC dimension.

Edit: I think the title "From theory to machine learning" sums up what was wrong with this theory-first approach. Basically, people with interest in math but with no interest in software engineering got interested in ML and invented various abstract "learning theories", e.g. statistical learning theory (SLT). Which had very little to do with what you can do in practice. Meanwhile, engineers ignored those theories and got their hands dirty on actual neural network implementations while trying to figure out how their performance can be improved, which led to things like CNNs and later transformers.

I remember Vapnik (the V in VC dimension) complaining in the preface to one of his books about the prevalent (alleged) extremism of focussing on practice only while ignoring all those beautiful math theories. As far as I know, it has now turned out that these theories just were far too weak to explain the actual complexity of approaches that do work in practice. It has clearly turned out that machine learning is a branch of engineering, not a branch of mathematics or theoretical computer science.

The title of this book encapsulates the mistaken hope that first people will learn those abstract learning theories, they get inspired, and promptly invent new algorithms. But that's not what happened. SLT is barely able to model supervised learning, let alone reinforcement learning or self-supervised learning. As I mentioned, they can't even explain why neural networks are robust to overfitting. Other learning theories (like computational/algorithmic learning theory, or fantasy stuff like Solomonoff induction / Kolmogorov complexity) are even more detached from reality.
by bgentry | 2025-04-04 19:16:47+00:00
Developer of River here ( https://riverqueue.com ). I'm curious if you ran into actual performance limitations based on specific testing and use cases, or if it's more of a hypothetical concern. Modern Postgres running on modern hardware and with well-written software can handle many thousands or tens of thousands of jobs per second (even without partitioning), albeit that depends on your workload, your tuning / autovacuum settings, and your job retention time.
by necovek | 2025-04-04 19:16:56+00:00
Ok, I guess you shouldn't complain that you really got exactly what you wanted.

However, your writing style implied that the result was somehow better because you were otherwise an experienced engineer.

Even your clarification in the post sits right below your statement how your experience made this very smooth, with no explanation that you were going to be happy with bad code as long as it works.
by throw0101c | 2025-04-04 19:16:59+00:00
> Adequate clothing is actually a very important in war. Frostbite, sunburn, heat exhaustion, cuts and scrapes (which can lead to infection), trench foot, etc. are all conditions that can be mitigated through clothing.

Which is why all US military clothing is mandated to be domestically produced (Berry Amendment).

But how much industrial capacity do you want to take up making clothing? Or do you want to concentrate your finite workforce in perhaps being able to produce (say) artillery shells or cruise missiles?

Which is another ironic/sad part of Trump and Ukraine: a large portion of the US money 'sent' to UA actually went to the American military industrial complex. Helping UA was actually helping the US in being better prepared from a military supply chain POV.

Similarly, by alienating NATO allies, they're now less inclined to purchase US military gear, and so there will be lower economies of scale for fighters and missiles and such.

The icebreaker agreement (ICE Pact) would have caused investment in US shipyards:

* https://canadiandefencereview.com/davie-will-soon-establish-...

* https://gcaptain.com/polar-icebreakers-may-be-key-to-jumpsta...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_Pact
by freedomben | 2025-04-04 19:17:06+00:00
This is a great point, and really meshes with my experience as well. We've had some great salespeople but deficiencies in the product (mainly lack of certain enterprisey features) made it very hard to sell. They worked their asses off and closed almost no deals. And our product was good and really close to what the market wanted. Contrast that with most startups which not only have to convince you to open your wallet but also to do so for a solution to a problem you don't currently have (or at least, don't know you have).

If you have an excellent sense for products then the model might work, but I've seen some of the smartest people I've ever met walk right into a wall, even when doing everything they can to reach/verify the fit. It's an incredibly hard problem
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-04-04 19:17:28+00:00
The US doesn't have an equivalent to VAT. Sales taxes at are at the level of states and cities. VAT would be in effect a federal sales tax, which the US doesn't have.

Since different states had widely varying sales taxes (ranging from 0% to 8%), for people living close to state lines, it sometimes makes sense to buy items just across the line to avoid sales tax. Although some business/individuals would get in trouble for deliberately evading sales taxes, as you are technically supposed to report on taxes.

This created a problem with online retailers, who were essentially avoiding sales taxes. Legislation in the mid 2010s changed that, the law is somewhat complicated but generally the sales tax is collected where the business "resides", which could be multiple jurisdictions. If there is any "office" in a state, all purchases originating from within that state have to pay that states sales taxes.