MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-26 04:19:32+00:00
I did this. But they said lambdas are so cheap it doesn't even matter.

I think there's a more pervasive problem of all engineers, especially younger ones not realizing that spinning up new serverless infra is harder then firing a coroutine.

>(But also, spinning up a lambda to wait for a db request? Wat? Must be missing some more context/details)

there's this crud server that serves as an admin view for a bunch of IOT devices. Sometimes we want to run a task that doesn't block this server. So they use lambdas for those external task runners.

Except those tasks are mostly database operations. It is a crud app after all. But I'm trying to tell them that you don't need to spin up a new CPU when the database is doing all the computation. Have the server wait for the database. Don't have the server wait for a lambda that waits for the Database. If you do that you're just spinning up a CPU and telling it to wait. It's more complicated.

At my company they think doing this is normal. It's pervasive how normal people feel this type of thing is. I'm just baffled. I'm wondering maybe it's just pervasive across the board. I don't think they realized that query calls on lambdas just make the lambdas wait on the database. The abstraction is so heavy they likely aren't even thinking about how they are provisioning an entirely new CPU to wait for a database.
by rayiner | 2025-04-26 04:21:01+00:00
Arguments based on voter participation overlook that voting is a statistical sample of the population. The people who don’t vote broadly break down roughly the same way as the people who do vote. And even to the extent they don’t, it’s risky to make assumptions about how they would have voted.

If you can generalize about non-voters, it’s that they’re broadly more anti-institution than voters—which is what causes them to put less stock in the institutional practice of voting. In the U.S. in the Trump era, that has meant that non-voters or infrequent voters support Trump somewhat more strongly than regular voters.
by mrandish | 2025-04-26 04:21:34+00:00
Frankly, I'd rather that content producers and their sound mixing and mastering engineers just improve the audio levels of their dialog tracks in relation to the rest of the mix. I already have my center audio channel goosed +3db beyond the professionally calibrated academy reference levels to help with legibility. The problem is that mixes are increasing in dynamic range, so if I elevate the center channel level (where most dialog is) even more to lift the occasionally inaudible utterance, some of the rest of the center channel content is too loud in relation to the other channels.

While my high-end home theater audio system has DSP functions like dynamic compression which I can apply to smooth out the center channel, that's relying on a blanket algorithm in an attempt to fix something that's much better fixed on the mixing stage in the first place. The mixing engineers have much better tools which they can selectively apply when needed and even have the option of problematic dialog being re-looped if necessary. It's their job to get this right and they certainly have the all the tools and training to do it properly and only when, and as much, as actually necessary. Having home viewers slap some auto-mode plug-in over the entire run time of a sound mix that was painstakingly hand-mastered scene-by-scene is objectively the worst way to solve the problem.

This simply makes no sense because the entire modern signal chain is digital. There's no technical reason the gain shouldn't be correct. The fact that dialog audio levels are still a recurring problem in my properly calibrated, 11.2.4 THX-rated dedicated home theater must be that the audio engineers aren't being given the time and resources to do their job properly or are being instructed to do this as some misguided aesthetic choice (looking at you Christopher Nolan).
by slimmons | 2025-04-26 04:22:30+00:00
I don't know what laws need to change, or what needs to happen, but for the people in the southern united states, nearly every one of us would be a reasonably priced gas truck. There are no options. I had to buy a grossly overpriced F150 for double what I think it's worth because there's no other option. These fuel economy laws in the USA make no sense. While this truck is neat I guess, there's 0 use case for it for people who really need trucks in the USA.
by rustcleaner | 2025-04-26 04:23:00+00:00
>B.F. Skinner, propaganda, product/service design, operant conditioning

Poignant highlights into my illness (circa 2010):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykzkvK1XaTE&t=5062

1:24:22 Robert Maynard Hutchins on American education (few minutes).

1:28:42 Segment on Skinner.

1:33:25 Segment on video game design and psychology, Corbett.

1:40:00 Segment on gamification of reality through ubiquitus sensors and technology.

After that is more (Joe Rogan bit, Jan Irvin, etc.), whole thing is worth a watch.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-26 04:24:54+00:00
100% of voter age Americans made a decision. That includes not registering to vote or not voting.

Pretend I want a snack, I can choose between a cookie and an apple. If I dislike both then I also have the option to not get a snack. Neither is selected.

This is different from not voting because a candidate still wins.
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-26 04:25:21+00:00
I thought that {} should always initialize everything regardless of whether or not there is anything in between the braces, and that {0} should only be valid if the first member is a numeric or pointer type (but otherwise has the same effect as {} with nothing in between). I thought that would make more sense, isn't it?

(If you write {} with multiple values when initializing a union, then it should be an error unless all of the values are the same and all of the corresponding members (the first few if you do not explicitly specify which ones) are of the same type as each other.)
by hackandthink | 2025-04-26 04:26:51+00:00
The analysis there is not convincing.

It is obvious that Wikipedia admins communicate with each other. The fact that Aljazeera is referenced is also okay.

In fact, this is not the official Israeli narrative, it seems rather trustworthy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_co...
by Supermancho | 2025-04-26 04:27:12+00:00
Knowing how digital advertising works, it's more likely that a payload is delivered to the phone in some app or by os or by browser that has a dictionary of keywords paid for to be associated with specific ad campaigns. If the device detects that term (via sound, search, or media) it triggers a message home as an analytics to target you and your device now calls for those campaigns.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-26 04:29:50+00:00
D's ImportC feature makes it super easy to access C libraries from D code. That means D fits right in with a C ecosystem, as it's no longer necessary to attempt to translate the .h files into D.

It's not perfect, as some people cannot resist using the C preprocessor for some bizarre constructions.

I used to write those bizarre things myself in C, and was proud of my work. But one day I decided to remove them all, and the code was better.
by bjornsing | 2025-04-26 04:32:27+00:00
> Good point. Could have put a bit more work into that.

On second thought, and after looking at my cost estimates, the reason DynamoDB ends up costing about the same as S3 for this kind of use case is storage costs. DynamoDB is a lot cheaper than S3 to write to, but 5-10x more expensive to keep data stored in. So after about 16-32 months you reach break even.
by sachou | 2025-04-26 04:33:13+00:00
Yesterday was fun and crazy.

I have been working on my design tool for now more than 1 month. And yesterday when I saw that finally openAI released their latest gpt4o model for imagen called "image-1". I decided to quickly add it and launch on Product Hunt!

and voila! currently TOP #8 of the day and got first paying user.

Please give it a try (free credits available) and comment your feedbacks, it helps me so much to get it right!

Full focus on improving the product!
by Supermancho | 2025-04-26 04:34:09+00:00
If the US wanted voting to be more popular, there would be a Federal Holiday to promote it. There is no incentive when there are known costs...at least since the wild inflation of the 80s when it got prohibitive to lose a shift and the slow dissolution of union jobs. This is the result of the tyranny of indifference. Those that benefit continue to promote and benefit, those that do not, are disenfranchised. It's a common theme in history.
by Mentlo | 2025-04-26 04:34:16+00:00
I love the assumption that an ubiquitous feature used by the most scaled e-mail app in the world uses the same expensive state of the art model that the author of the blog uses.

My money would be that the gmail model is heavily distilled to reduce cost, reducing its flexibility for user-level detailed system prompts.

The problem the author tackles with is a well known one in machine learning - and nothing really new. I do agree that a world in which we allow per-user system fine-tuning of models that have a scaled utility through a large number of tasks for a single user, but that only works for apps that have a high frequency of usage. It doesn’t make sense to system prompt an app you use rarely.

And you can’t ignore costs, especially as all the commercially available API’s right now operate at cost, skewing the perception to the end-user (end-developer?) of how much it costs to run ai in a scaled setting.

I do agree with the horseless carriage thing do, it’s a neat mental model for what is likely happening.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-04-26 04:34:32+00:00
None of this has anything to do with the NYT, but you've made some other claims that seem to be warped interpretations of recent events.

> Remember when google and apple were reporting aggregate mobility data to the government to assist public health authorities assessing compliance with lockdowns?

Reporting aggregate mobility data isn't invasive monitoring by the government. The data was released publicly (https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/index.html and https://covid19.apple.com/mobility), not just to any one government, and provided no way to figure out where any particular person was.

> genuine concern for effective public health combined with a distressing measure of glee at the "justified" persecution of political enemies.

Is it not justified to enforce any law just because of the "distressing" thought that someone might take glee in the punishment of the person who broke that law? Either the law is correct public policy and enforced fairly or not. The glee or lack thereof of your political opponents has no bearing on which it is.

> "If you don't get that third booster you're KILLING GRANDMA and deserve to be FIRED."

The private sector required employees to vaccinate to keep their group insurance rates low and reduce disease-related work disruption. Should the government's hands be tied on keeping its own insurance rates low (and reducing cost to the public), absorbing the more expensive to insure people no longer employed in the private sector because of some public benefit that is worth the cost? That is a reasonable public policy question. Should the government's hands be tied because someone might take glee in its firing of people who don't get vaccinated? That is not a reasonable public policy question.
by cpgxiii | 2025-04-26 04:34:38+00:00
It really depends what embedded system (and display) you have.

Most "reputable" embedded system/board vendors in the x86 space are going to offer a firmware customization tool, with one of the primary uses being so that you can brand the splash screen at startup. That gets you an image as soon as the firmware brings up the display controller, which should be very fast (i.e. well under a second). YMMV for less supported embedded systems, particularly those with more complicated/proprietary display bringup.

Depending on the display in question (assuming you can control the display in use), you may have the ability to configure a splash screen in the display controller itself (the display controller vendor can certainly do this, whether or not they expose it to you is the question).

The most complicated (but also most flexible) option is to get whatever the simplest FPGA that can support a HDMI TX and a HDMI RX for the display resolution you desire. Then you build whatever splash screen you want into the FPGA firmware, and whatever boot-finished detection you want to handle the switch from internal splash image to HDMI RX. You'll get the splash screen essentially as soon as your FPGA and HDMI TX power on. If you really know what you're doing, you could even get HDCP passthrough from the embedded system to the display to work here, although you probably can ignore that.
by zmgsabst | 2025-04-26 04:34:51+00:00
I’d argue that your last paragraph has the cause-and-effect reversed:

We’re entering into a populist phase because the managerial class is incapable of addressing the problems experienced by most people — so they’re going to try dismantling the current elite systems and rebuilding them. To say that the problem is elites inability to suppress populism is to miss that the elites own chronic failures is what caused the populist surge.

Similar to populist waves circa 1900, where aristocratic systems were replaced with managerialism via populist revolts. Now, managerialism has failed so we’re again seeing the stirrings of change. At a broad scale, communism, fascism, and progressivism were all different technocratic managerial solutions to the problems and excesses of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I think it’ll be interesting to see what comes next.
by not2b | 2025-04-26 04:35:29+00:00
I'm skeptical of the claim that this change will "silently break so much existing code". For it to change the behavior of code, the first member would have to be smaller than other members, someone would have to use this construct to initialize union objects, and it would have to affect the behavior. In any case, it's standard for the Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian developers to go through all the packages and test with new GCC versions before they come out, so that issues are fixed before the new compiler is released.
by Twirrim | 2025-04-26 04:37:07+00:00
>chasing dependencies.

This aspect of configure, in particular, drives me nuts. Obviously I'd like it to be faster, but it's not the end of the world. I forget what I was trying to build the other week, but I had to make 18 separate runs of configure to find all the things I was missing. When I dug into things it looked like it could probably have done it in 2 runs, each presenting a batch of things that were missing. Instead I got stuck with "configure, install missing package" over and over again.
by arrowsmith | 2025-04-26 04:39:26+00:00
What compounding inequality? The UK's Gini coefficient has been trending downwards since the global financial crisis.

14 years of Conservative government made this country more equal, not less, because they flattened the income distribution by making everybody poorer.

The big pattern among rich people in the UK nowadays is not that they're getting richer, it's that they're leaving.
by morepedantic | 2025-04-26 04:39:31+00:00
TIL poor people can't pollute, so their market segment shouldn't be incentivized to cut pollution.

TIL that US car companies won't make smaller cars in the face of different regulations, even though they made larger cars in response to current regulations.

The only way to avoid perversions is to tax the problem directly. The market will adjust to all proxies in unintended and harmful ways.
by kcexn | 2025-04-26 04:42:15+00:00
I've just finished a PhD in (specialised) topics around computer performance. And I have a similar feeling about the stagnant state of innovation in computer and software engineering over the last 15 years or so.

The vast majority of research is funded or incentivized in some way by the big internet companies. The big internet companies have a very narrow scope of problems that they are commercially interested in. They also have so much power and money that getting people to listen to diverse ideas and opinions is incredibly difficult, both commercially and academically because everyone somehow has to cater what they do to be in line with internet company practices.

And of course, the internet companies have found ways to industrialize their core competencies of data warehousing and analytics so that every year, fewer inputs (staff, hardware, software, data) are needed to achieve the same outputs.

I think that people are experiencing a loss of independence, and creative thinking. Not a loss of passion for the craft.
by warble | 2025-04-26 04:42:39+00:00
Highway speeds are worst case scenario so maybe you're right but I doubt it.

Your charge rate acceptance number is surprising to me, I've never seen anything like this in my years of experience designing EV batteries. Preconditioning helps extreme fast charging but isn't necessary for 1-2 C charges at all unless it's very cold out.

There's some caveats to this depending on the exact chemistry but if anything the newer semi solid state NMC cells are even less dependent on this and can charge down to -20C.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-26 04:44:27+00:00
I haven't. I would imagine Timothy Snyder is an avid fan of, if not a major historian of, Hannah Arendt and I probably got that through Snyder. I had actually not heard of her specifically yet.

https://history.yale.edu/news/timothy-snyder-has-been-awarde...

Apparently Snyder received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

He quotes her here: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/04/preparing-for-an...

After the Reichstag fire, political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote that “I was no longer of the opinion that one can simply be a bystander.” Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-26 04:44:38+00:00
> It doesn't say it had to be a judicial warrant, it says warrant or process.

Lol: by that logic, Steve who lives in a van down by the river can scribble himself a napkin that says "warrant" on it. After all, "It doesn't say it had to be a judicial warrant, it says warrant or process", and Steve who lives in a van down by the river has a process and a warrant.

> I don't even know if you're actually law enforcement" is not an excuse for ignoring law enforcement

Maybe, maybe not. "You never presented me with a valid warrant" is, though, and a judge would know better than cops what a valid warrant is.
by sgc | 2025-04-26 04:45:28+00:00
That an enormous sample size. Statistically a complete participation should be very close, so the burden of proof lies with those who claim it would be different. Regardless of whether Trump would have won or not, that is a clear indication of evenly split public sentiment. So we still get to justly reap the fruits of our collective choices. There is no exoneration by whimsically dreaming of improbable alternatives.

I don't think it is was that hard to vote. That is a straw man to avoid facing the hard truth of American apathy. Now next election, perhaps we can have a conversation on that point. Things a trending rather poorly right now.
by LexiMax | 2025-04-26 04:46:43+00:00
> I am often disturbed that people might actually think cost:revenue is tight enough that they should defend a behemoth about callously gating access to it.

I think it's more likely that they imagine themselves in Microsoft's shoes. After all, it's a very popular editor and the mechanism of vendor lock-in is clever - give away the editor under the noble banner of open source, while jealously gate access to the plugin ecosystem that makes the editor as useful as it is.

So no, I don't think they earnestly believe that the egress costs are anything more than pocket change. But it's almost certainly what they would argue if they were in Microsoft's position.
by kcexn | 2025-04-26 04:47:21+00:00
The problem with FOSSland is that it is increasingly driven by commercial interests, not by volunteers.

I don't know the last time I encountered a used (not random hobby projects) FOSS project that wasn't funded and supported by a company (with exceptions maybe only in the GNU software suite, but even then lots of authors there are making submissions using company email addresses).

I think it's totally acceptable to not make open-source contributions to those projects unless someone is paying you to.
by bjornsing | 2025-04-26 04:47:26+00:00
> if you multiplied everything - hyperparameters, initialized weights, training data, etc in a network by 10^6 things will still work more or less the same since the upper range is hardly used (with the possible exception of some small number of special functions)

I doubt that very much. Thing is that inputs are multiplied with weights and added together in a neural network layer, and then the output becomes the input of the next layer in a cycle that can repeat up to a hundred times or more. When you get to the final output layer that 10^6 factor has been applied so many times that it has snowballed to a 10^600 factor.
by Animats | 2025-04-26 04:48:09+00:00
The US is falling way behind in electric vehicles. If BYD could sell in the US, the US auto industry would be crushed.[1]

What went wrong is that 1) Tesla never made a low-end vehicle, despite announcements, and 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags. The only US electric vehicle with comparable prices in electric and gasoline versions is the Ford Transit.

BYD says that their strategy for now is to dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry. Worry about the left-behind countries later.

BYD did it by 1) getting lithium-iron batteries to be cheaper, safer, and faster-charging, although heavier than lithium-ion, 2) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train, and 3) building really big auto plants in China.

Next step is to get solid state batteries into volume production, and build a new factory bigger than San Francisco.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BYD_Auto_vehicles
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-26 04:48:41+00:00
Voter suppression is the act of limiting the pool of voters. That includes putting large swaths of the population behind bars or flagged as non eligible to voting, putting barriers to voter registration etc.

It can never be 0 and every country will have a minimum requirement, but the degree to which it is done in the US is far ahead of most western country.

Gerrymandering has an effect on the criteria for voter eligibility, the voting rules in the state etc. It's not direct but who's in power has a sizeable effect on who will have an easier time voting.