MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-11 21:59:46+00:00
Someone explain to me why I should prefer Erlang/BEAM/Elixir over something like Akka.NET?

With the latter I get a huge ecosystem of packages and wide compatibility with platforms and tooling and also a robust and scalable actor model.

Learning Erlang or any related language meanwhile feels like learning Tolkien’s Elvish for the purposes of international trade.
by mthiim | 2025-04-11 21:59:47+00:00
To me it was only when we got to radioactive decay in physics it clicked to me why the particular "e" was special and useful. Background: exp(x) was introduced as the inverse to log(x), defined as the area under 1/x etc. It was already in 1st high school year (before integrals had been introduced!). We showed how you could express other bases as e^(ax) but you could have done that with any other base, so nothing special about e. In calculus we later learned that exp'(x) = exp(x). This made it clear it was special - but not why it was useful.

The clear usefulness appeared in the case of radioactive decay. We first learned about half-life, and clearly you can write the decay function as N(t) = N0 * 0.5^(at) with 1/a being the half-life. But we then learned that the decay values in the data book are often not the half-life but this special "k" that you put in a decay equation that has e as the: N(t) = N0 * e^(-kx). My reaction was: why did they pick e here? Why not just use 0.5 as base and the book would list the half-life? But then we got to the kicker: we learned the formula: Activity = -k*N, meaning that the activity (decays/time-unit) is proportional to the amount of material with k being the proportionality constant. We hadn't learned of differential equations yet and I was confused about what k was, having first seen it in the decay equation and now in the activity equation which were seemingly very different... how on earth could the same number work in both capacities. And I read a bit ahead in the math book and it all made sense. And then I understood it was because of e as the base that the constant k got this property - which it would only get in that particular base. So this showed to me how e was special, allowing the same constant to serve in these two capacities.
by cortesoft | 2025-04-11 22:00:24+00:00
That is exactly the point they are trying to make... that you enjoyed it BECAUSE you thought of it as a delicacy and not as peasant food.

I think the point is a little overwrought, really... while our expectation is part of what makes it taste good, it doesn't completely change what we think... there are a lot of foods that are considered delicacies that a lot of people don't like.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-04-11 22:00:33+00:00
You claim the dems could have picked a hundred other candidates than Hillary that could have easily defeated Trump. That is some grade A revisionist history.

If you recall, the Republicans had a very large field (15?) candidates initially, and Trump was seen even by Republicans as an entertaining but embarrassing candidate. Yet Trump beat every one of those well-financed, established GOP candidates.
by goatlover | 2025-04-11 22:00:42+00:00
The Trump administrating is currently defying a Supreme Court ruling. We'll see if they continue to do so or start complying with Judge Xini's orders on taking steps to bring Mr. Garcia back to the US.

Then you have Alina Habba threatening to investigate the New Jersey Governor, Trump signing executive orders to investigate two of his first term officials who criticized him for lying about the 2020 election.

Regarding the article, one has to wonder where the line is. When would the Founding Fathers have agreed the line was crossed into tyranny?
by n4r9 | 2025-04-11 22:01:04+00:00
In Dune there are female characters with their own desires and designs on the world, who go out and take what they want. There is profound loss, and personal transformation. There is coming to terms with intensely sad or painful circumstances. There is overcoming doubt, building resilience, and taking responsibility and control of one's destiny. These things were not really explored in what I've read of Heinlein.
by adrianhon | 2025-04-11 22:01:19+00:00
OP here: I can see how that would be frustrating and I do touch on that in my piece. It’s not my job to convince you that you should like it, but I would say that the mystery and atmosphere and sense of discovery is what pulled me through the first hours where I wasn’t sure what was going on. If those things don’t chime with you, it can be a slog. What I’ve told other people is that it’s better not to view the game as a race but more a place to explore.
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-11 22:01:57+00:00
Russia doesn’t just put people in jail for speaking against the government. They weaponise the generational fear of being disappeared by the government. This is not close to what happens in America where you can post anything anywhere and if Facebook deletes it you can always make your own website about it. If you did this in Russia you go to jail. Even if you say things like “it is sad Ukrainian children die in children’s day in Russia” you go to jail. I don’t think you can compare modern USA with modern Russia in this way. USA does plenty of other things that are bad like jailing so many people for petty crimes without pushing much on speech. USA has its own problems and all these comparisons only hide them.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-11 22:02:10+00:00
Thanks for the information. FWIW, I think this is total bullshit and fascism, but your comments aren't telling the whole story.

The most important thing to point out is that "the judges" in this case was actually a single immigration judge. Immigration judges belong to the executive branch, not the judiciary. I agree this law that says that the Secretary of State can essentially just deport anyone they want can't be squared with the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and due process. But that wasn't really this immigration judge's determination to make, i.e. questioning the constitutionality of the law that Rubio is using to deport Khalil. There is a separate case going on in federal court that should address that topic.

This article has more info: https://archive.vn/D890d
by the__alchemist | 2025-04-11 22:02:13+00:00
What is the intended distinguisher between this and WGPU for graphics? I didn't realize that was a goal; have seen it mostly discussed in context of CUDA. There doesn't have to be, but I'm curious, as the CUDA/GPGPU side of the ecosystem is less developed, while catching up to WGPU may be a tall order. From a skim of its main page, it seems like it may also focus on writing shaders in rust.

Tangent; What is the intended distinguishes between Rust-CUDA, and Cudarc? Rust shaders with shared data structures I'm guessing is the big one. That would be great! There of course doesn't have to be. More tools to choose from, and that encourages progress from each other.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-04-11 22:02:27+00:00
Lots of companies build/buy/sell cheap phones and presumably put some work into getting Android up on the hardware.

I think maybe that's where Purism went wrong. They tried to go pure from the get-go. But think it would be better to get a profitable product out first, and then invest in opening components, one by one.

I don't need a perfect device. Rather hardware getting better every year. Then I could upgrade, and they'd make more money.
by ernst_klim | 2025-04-11 22:02:43+00:00
That's all good and well, but the very time you would try to start selling your tinkering, or, God forbid, hire somebody - that's where the hell begins.

Being a self-employed is a living hell in Germany, as well as receiving any money outside of employment. Esp. if money are small (but > than hobby money, 500 euro iirc) and don't justify the hurdle of dealing with Finanzamt, tax pre-payment, possible regulations with upfront Formulars etc.
by Alupis | 2025-04-11 22:03:07+00:00
If you've been around for a while, and are willing to take off the rose-colored-glasses momentarily, you will realize it is not unprecedented.

Some of us have been howling about these issues for decades.

Who were the primary benefactors of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act? What about the CHIPS Act? Follow the money and you will be completely god smacked at the insanity that's being going on right under people's noses.

The riot is quelled by drawling people into their camps... left or right, red or blue, us vs. them.
by qgin | 2025-04-11 22:03:23+00:00
I probably have a higher P(doom) than most, but I also feel that it’s important to remember that we don’t even have close to enough information to predict what’s going to happen with any level of certainty. The scenarios I can imagine are not the best, but I also acknowledge that the real future will most likely be a scenario that I can’t possibly imagine from here.
by watwut | 2025-04-11 22:03:24+00:00
To be fair, the companies are victims there. It is not so much he corrupted them as he extorted them. Those are two different things.

It does matter. There is long standing tradition of blaming what conservatives and their leadership do to everyone else. And euphemism away what they do by using softer words (corrupt when it was extortion) while using harsher words on those who fought him and lost (the company you call corrupt sued Trump and this is retaliation). That is part of the problem.
by onecommentman | 2025-04-11 22:03:37+00:00
The phrase “super-high-tech ministry” doesn’t sound like the correctly nuanced translation of Super-Hightech-Ministeriums. In English, it begs the question whether they are really serious — why isn’t it “super-duper-high-tech” or “ultra-high-tech” or “hyper-high-tech”? Calling something “super-X” in English sounds a little marketingspeak-clumsy and opens you up to these jibes.
by markus_zhang | 2025-04-11 22:03:58+00:00
Somehow I feel this is the data modelling tool but looks like it can also modify source data? What is the use case of modifying the source data? I'd prefer to keep everything as is and do transformation afterwards to clean up.

I'd also recommend brushing up the doc. There is not a lot of things there (but we already reach v2?) and the Flowcathon seems to be the first thing a developer needs but it needs an account.
by imiric | 2025-04-11 22:04:11+00:00
This looks really good. Kudos to the authors!

It's great seeing a rise of web stacks that embrace small libraries and native web technologies, and reject mega monolithic frameworks. It's about time the industry moved away from the React/Vue/npm insanity.

I'm also intrigued by Nue, but Datastar fits nicely in a full stack solution. The choice of SSE is brilliant. It's great tech that's generally underutilized.
by travisgriggs | 2025-04-11 22:04:44+00:00
To me, Erlang/Elixir’s power is not necessarily the Actor model implementation, the matching from prolog, immutability, behaviors, etc, but Joes desire to demonstrate you could do more with less.

It is a well thought out and trued system of computation that has a consistency rarely witnessed in other languages, much less the “web”. It is not perfect. But it is pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, I find the appreciation and uptake for what simplicity empowers in the software world pretty under appreciated. Complexity allows people to become specialists, managers to have big teams and lots of meetings, experts to stay experts.

Erlang was being developed in a period where companies were trying to implement software solutions with smaller headcounts, limited horsepower, etc. A multi decade outpouring of cash into the domain has made the value of “less will mean more for all of us in good ways” less of an attractor.
by m463 | 2025-04-11 22:04:48+00:00
> Is this about software or is it about you?

about and not about

Kids nowadays are suprisingly proficient and using phones and computers.

...because they just click "AGREE" to every popup. They sign up. They give away their phone number or their one email address or they do the subscription, then cancel it later (or forget). They enter their credit card because they don't have any money to take anyway.
by metalman | 2025-04-11 22:04:54+00:00
I am a metal worker, and a foodie, living on a farm, and have experience and contacts in varios parts of the food industry, and have never come across lead, in any food relate items. As to alloying with lead, it has been used historicaly to make steal easier to machine "free machining steel" , but has no part in high strength or tool steels, and the steels used in grinding machines are going to be food grade..... even the grease in the bearings is food grade silcone grease....got some in the shop.... Good stainless wears for ever, so it is always used, at least here in Canada. So back to the lead and heavy metals, and how they are intentionaly added as "flavor enhansers" and coulorants, and basicaly how crazy people are and will do anything to steal a buck, but of course, not before passing it.right! personaly I eat only food, I make from individual single ingredients, prepared at home. The most complex food I buy is cheese, and very rarely icecream, thats it.And even then, there are things that just seem WRONG, like some grapes, that had an impossible "floral" aftertaste that lingered for hours......and now wont rot, sitting on top of the fridge. I could go on at some length, about all of the fraud in food, but Food is cheap, and there is no way to impliment a system with continious checks and investigations, that would guarantee quality and purity, without quardrupling the price, and perversly, increasing the incentive, to cheat.
by cortesoft | 2025-04-11 22:05:00+00:00
I think lobster tasting good is mostly about the amount of butter used.

Really, though, a lot of it has to do with food preservation technology - lobster only tastes good fresh, and goes bad very quickly (which is why you will often see them alive in tanks at the grocery store, and they are often cooked alive). Before we had the tech to either keep them alive before cooking or refrigerate immediately, they didn't taste very good.
by watwut | 2025-04-11 22:05:19+00:00
It was republicans who focused on trans, relentlessly and for months super actively. And it helped to win them election, outrage and anger sells votes. It was effective to make voters vote for them.

Besides, the parties are not symmetrical. This is not both sides issue, this is literally republicans causing all the damage issue while democrats are blamed for not stopping it. The "both parties are to blame" when what is happening is literally republicans doing it massive harm intentionally is what caused this situation.
by pansa2 | 2025-04-11 22:05:35+00:00
> Five years is a very long time in technology.

But it's not a long time in the OP's field of science. Unfortunately despite a strong preference for Python in the scientific community, the language's design team seem to ignore that community's needs entirely, in favour of the needs of large technology companies.

I was hopeful that in the transition from a BDFL-based governance system to a Steering Council, we would see a larger variety of experience and opinions designing the language. Instead, I don't think there has ever been a single scientist, finance worker etc on the Steering Council - it's always software developers, almost always employees of large software companies.
by ang_cire | 2025-04-11 22:05:43+00:00
Ah yes, the very dishonest and propagandistic Associated Press:

> Israeli strikes on Gaza kill 32, mostly women and children (Apr 6)

[1] https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-new...

> An Israeli strike hit near a charity kitchen in Gaza as Palestinians gathered for food (Apr 7)

[2] https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-new...

> Palestinian teenager who died in Israeli prison showed signs of starvation, medical report says (Apr 6)

> Starvation was likely the leading cause of death for a Palestinian teenager who died in an Israeli prison, according to an Israeli doctor who observed the autopsy.

[3] https://apnews.com/article/autopsy-palestinian-deaths-israel...

Or how about Business Insider?

> Israel's 'Where's Daddy?' AI system helps target suspected Hamas militants when they're at home with their families, report says

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-ai-system-wheres-dadd...

The Georgetown Security Studies Review?

> The Dehumanization of ISR: Israel’s Use of Artificial Intelligence In Warfare

> “At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” B. said, an anonymous IDF soldier. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one—we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”

[5] https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2025/01/09/the-d...

Is there any news source apart from Netanyahu himself that you would accept as true for showing that the IDF was not taking measures not to kill women and children in Gaza?
by PollardsRho | 2025-04-11 22:06:18+00:00
The compound-interest intro to e (the value of 1 dollar compounded continuously for a year at 100% interest), to me, has several useful advantages over different introductions that are more mathematically rich:

- It's elementary to the point that you can introduce it whenever you want.

- It automatically gives a sense of scale: larger than 2, but not by a lot.

- At least to me, it confers some sense of importance. You can get the sense that this number e has some deep connection to infinity and infinitesimal change and deserves further study even if you haven't seen calculus before.

- It directly suggests a way of calculating e, which "the base of the exponential function with derivative equal to itself" doesn't suggest as cleanly.

I don't know of any calculus course that relies on this definition for much: that's not its purpose. The goal is just to give students a fairly natural introduction to the constant before you show that e^x and ln x have their own unique properties that will be more useful for further manipulation.
by biker142541 | 2025-04-11 22:06:19+00:00
100% this. To echo another poster below, it's really important to read the Supreme Court's own words here.

>"The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene. " From https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf

I suspect that is one of the main reasons behind the order. It's very obvious that citizen vs legal resident matters very little here, if due process is not given.
by nikkwong | 2025-04-11 22:06:22+00:00
While this may be part of the story, it's certainly not the full picture. We know that the CCP is actively manipulating the algorithm on Tiktok to further their agenda on multiple other geopolitical issues—something we have ample evidence for. I don't know if there is a smoking gun on this one topic in particular, but the CCP's goal has always been to divide the American audience; and we know that older Americans skew pro-Israel whilst younger Americans are more oriented towards being pro-Palestinian. If someone looked in the right places, they would more likely than not find evidence of algorithm manipulation to favor a Palestinian bend.
by throwanem | 2025-04-11 22:06:45+00:00
> These things were not really explored in what I've read of Heinlein.

I don't know how much further you expect me to need to boil down "read more" and still be able to take you seriously. How do you expect that, when you haven't even bothered trying to justify how you chose those four novels to represent forty years?

I see that 'seriously' very much describes how you like to regard yourself. You've insisted most thoroughly others must regard you likewise, regardless of what you show yourself anywhere near capable of actually rewarding or indeed even appreciating. Do you have a favorable impression of your efforts thus far? Have they had the results that you hoped?

We would now be having a different conversation if you had said anything to suggest to me it would be worth my trouble to continue in the attempt. I'd have enjoyed that conversation, I think; as most days here, I had hopes of learning something new. You've felt the need to spend the day doing this instead. If you don't like how that's working out, whom fairly may you blame?
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-11 22:06:50+00:00
Because communicating changes to people as a group means less support needed one on one when people miss the communication, when changes are made, etc. This is like business 101 of how companies get more efficient.

"Less communications with customers, pushing the impact of changes onto support staff" is about the dumbest efficiency push anyone can make. Why do we now have to explain/defend the concept of why businesses make press release and that press releases are actual a useful thing? What is going on in this country?
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-11 22:07:06+00:00
BTW here is the final report from the law firm who conducted the investigation: https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/site...

A second topic which the Scientific Panel examined was Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s management and oversight of his scientific laboratories. Because multiple members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over the years appear to have manipulated research data and/or fallen short of accepted scientific practices, resulting in at least five publications in prominent journals now requiring retraction or correction, the culture of the labs in which this conduct occurred was considered. The Scientific Panel has concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne created a laboratory culture with many positive attributes, but the unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices from different people, at different times, and in labs at different institutions, suggests that there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management.
by voxl | 2025-04-11 22:07:16+00:00
There are so many things wrong with your comment, lets list a few:

1. False equivalence: Elon Musk's interaction with the federal government is unprecedented and comparing it to lobbying of companies is hysterically bad faith.

2. Appeal to hypocrisy: whether or not someone cares about Cheney or others profiting or doing bad things in government, that has no impact on the argument against Musk.

3. Ad hominem: yes, yes, only the likes of reddit, except here we are, not on reddit.

4. Tone policing: the content of ones argument is completely irrelevant to how emotional the present it or how emotionally they feel about it. They may thump their chests as much as they like.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-04-11 22:07:31+00:00
Here is the thing: netflix and spotify are not in the "my X collection" business. They sell subscriptions to content and the apps reflect that. I am 100% in your/OPs boat but i would expect (niche and /or open source) apps to pop up that just make my collections of my content from other sources nice and the way nerds like us want. We have a right under EU data portability laws to do exactly that BUT companies break the laws to prohibit users taking control of their data. The only reason this is not changing is that we are not organised and there is no funded organisation suing the crap out of these companies until the final instance to give us our data.
by mxfh | 2025-04-11 22:09:03+00:00
The path generation is pretty nonsensical though, nothing here follows the terrain, they are only good as some sort of blurry guides.

The formatting of the MRGS coords is horrible.

Just give the easting and northing is blocks please like 1234 5678.

Feels like 90 of the time is wasted on parsing this and making sure your in the right square kilometer.

Also the waypoint could give you there ID when getting near them, so you could just assign them to the waypoint number, having to type seems overkill.