MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WikiFri | 2025-04-29 16:42:26+00:00
One of my all-time favorite movie quotes about the tension between science and technology is now more than 30 years old, but it’s still relevant today. The quote comes from Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm in Steven Spielberg’s timeless classic Jurassic Park.

As chaos erupts, Malcolm blasts CEO John Hammond: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

This line feels particularly relevant. Why? It offers a compelling perspective to think about how industries—particularly the insurance sector—deal with shifting market and social dynamics, the rapid pace of technological evolution, and the challenge of discerning which emerging technologies will most effectively address these changes.

Often, companies adopt tools without fully evaluating their long-term suitability or impact.

Could verus should.

The Escalating Technology Challenge in the Insurance Industry The insurance industry isn’t dodging velociraptors, but its technology is wreaking havoc.

Let me guess … you want dashboards that promise real-time insights into every facet of your operation, automation tools that slash manual workloads and free up staff, and an ever-expanding arsenal of sophisticated systems designed to streamline processes, enhance customer experience, and keep businesses ahead of the pack with a competitive advantage.

Am I right?

But here’s the rub: The sheer speed of innovation often leaves companies tripping over their own tech, struggling to figure out what works, what’s worth keeping, and what’s just a shiny distraction masquerading as progress.

Why Technology Evolves at Lightning Speed Let’s put this into perspective: What felt like cutting-edge technology three years ago is now teetering on the edge of being an antique.

The constant tech turnover is beyond frustrating and expensive.

I’ve got a personal stash of 200 DVDs and 500 CDs sitting in a box in my garage, relics of a bygone era with no player in sight to bring them back to life.

It’s a tangible reminder that even the most celebrated tools can demand so much time, effort, and money to implement that they risk missing the window of opportunity they were meant to seize.

(Sigh.)

In the insurance industry, this slow grind of adoption forces companies to constantly chase upgrades—whether it’s to manage risk, improve operational efficiency, or simply stay afloat in an increasingly tech-driven sea of change.

For example, if you want to launch a new underwriting team to capitalize on favorable market conditions with a fresh line of business, you would need a policy admin system, a rater, a claims system, and more.

But if those take two years to roll out, the chance to maximize those conditions might slip away—leaving you with tools that are still the right fit, just not ready when it mattered most.

There’s this revolving thought in everyone’s head “If I want a competitive advantage, I need to have the latest and greatest tech — now!” But here’s the truth: It’s a lot more nuanced than that. Click the URL to learn more...
by myfonj | 2025-04-29 16:42:31+00:00
Was not sure if sensor in pitch dark would catch some other radiation and output some pixel "grain" seen from high ISO or not, but from what I tried, visually the photo seems pretty black, so the method seems to be surprisingly usable.

As for "same image as your screen resolution": screenshot sounds like the exact fitting thing here. As a challenge, tried making screenshot black using stock Samsung "Gallery" and it seems that repeated Edit - Brightness: -100 - Save as copy, then open the copy and goto back to Edit can do the trick as well, after four or so copies. (Copies, because there is no way to re-apply same effect on the same photo, apparently.)
by projektfu | 2025-04-29 16:42:36+00:00
You are referring to a different Times columnist, writing 4 years before Krugman worked for the Times.

"In 1996, columnist Thomas Friedman came up with what is known as the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, the notion that no two countries with McDonald's franchises have ever gone to war with each other. "

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-countries-war/

"So I've had this thesis for a long time and came here to Hamburger University at McDonald's headquarters to finally test it out. The thesis is this: No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other."

Friedman, Thomas L. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/08/opinion/foreign-affairs-b...
by runarberg | 2025-04-29 16:43:18+00:00
I’ve been studying Japanese for over a year now with the ultimate goal of being able to have basic conversations, and have been using the immersion method.

My way of dealing with the fact that hardly any input is actually comprehensible is to actually translate, at leas in the beginning. I got a couple of vocabulary books and a grammar book (aimed at passing the N5 and N4 [A1 and A2 equivalent] language exams), and drilled the vocabulary and grammar with a redsheet and an anki deck. The thing is though, that I only need to translate the word/grammar concept the first couple of times I see it, after that it is much quicker (and better for remembering) to judge if how well you intuitively know the word/grammar concept from the anki deck (or if you are able to fill in the blank with a red sheet). Over time you can build up your vocabulary and grammar and the input gets gradually more comprehensible.

While drilling vocab and grammar I also listen to pod-casts, usually while walking my dog, or at the gym. It is helpful even if you don’t understand most of it. Usually—at the beginning—I am able to pick up a couple of words I know, which reinforces them, but also I get used to the pronunciation and the rhythm of the language. After a year I am able to comprehend maybe 60-70% (on a good day) of some pod-cast episodes aimed at beginners. But at the beginning it was maybe 5%.

I think what Duolingo gets wrong is that after you are introduced to the word or a grammar concept, you keep translating it. This is at best a waste of time, and at worst, prevents you from getting an intuitive understanding of the word/grammar. I think another mistake of Duolingo is the fact they spend too much time on learning a single word or grammar, repeating it too many times at the beginning. What I prefer is to dedicate some time with the word/grammar, find connections (also with the kanji spelling of it), and then move on. Most likely I will remember it after a couple of exposures that session, and if not, SRS should do the trick the following weeks.
by jerf | 2025-04-29 16:43:21+00:00
Your reply is not relevant to my reply. The original poster is asking for this functionality and appears to believe it is something other than an iterator and requires some sort of special language support. However, it is completely implementable as an iterator, in a reasonably usable manner, with no additional language support. My specific code is written only to show that fact off.

Anyone who copies and pastes it is welcome to both pieces when it breaks. Others have already alluded to possible improvements that could be made, and I already have my own analysis in a grandchild reply as to why I don't think this is a terribly pressing need or necessarily even a good idea.

The reason I provide code is that it gets past the "oh, you say it's just an iterator, but I still don't believe you, since you haven't spelled it out to the n'th degree". When code is provided, belief ceases to be an issue. It is clearly something an iterator can implement, in existing languages, with existing iterator support.

Unless you're going to claim it is somehow impossible to provide this functionality in a tested manner, you're completely changing the topic in an uninteresting direction, since it is always true that functionality generally needs testing and bits of code slammed into an HN conversation just to make a particular point probably shouldn't be copied wholesale into your production code.
by baruz | 2025-04-29 16:43:24+00:00
Not modern. Outsiders coming into the language (even for modern Greeks—the diglossia TFA mentions between spoken and written language in English existed for 1500+ years in Greek) find particles difficult to grasp, and the dictionary definitions do not really convey all the senses that the particles mean, like mathematics teaches from natural definitions of numbers progressing to Dedekind cuts. You know _Portuguese irregular verbs_, by Alexander McCall Smith, the comic novel where Dr. Professor von Igelfeld rests his reputation on a magisterial volume on the (strangely enough) Portuguese irregular verbs? Denniston’s _The Greek particles_ ultimately spans almost 700 pages after posthumous revisions (1960?). Page after page on individual particles. I think TFA satirizes that drive to squeeze every bit of meaning from the particles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewar_Denniston
by BMc2020 | 2025-04-29 16:43:31+00:00
But where do we go from here? Unlike the British parliamentary system, the U.S. has no break-the-glass off switch that lets us get rid of a deeply unpopular and delusional leader. Impeachment won’t happen, because this isn’t the Nixon era: Trump’s party is too corrupt to help save the country.

So we must begin to ask ourselves: in the 1364 days left of the Trump administration, how much damage can he do? And what can those of us who want to save the country do to minimize the damage?
by rzwitserloot | 2025-04-29 16:43:36+00:00
This is an ad hominem attack in the sense that PK has laid out the logic underlying his statement here. He is not asking that you are to trust his point based solely on his say-so.

The right approach is: "This argument is dubious / incorrect / however you might want to refer to 'wrong' because X" where X could be "there's this and that proof that there -are- deals being made" or "Here is proof the Japanese DID drop bowling balls" or even a more esoteric "I don't think grousing about one-party rule and the death of US democracy is reasonable; these concerns are overblown", which feels more like a slugfest between 2 'vibes' which seems kinda silly, but, by all means, share your opinion here.

But, "Paul Krugman said it therefore what the fuck who cares?" is a logical fallacy and it should have no place here on HN.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-04-29 16:44:50+00:00
> Halide [1] pioneered (AFAIK) the concept of separating algorithm from implementation at the language level.

you don't need to go all the way to Halide to do what the article is claiming isn't possible - you can do it just by including a "micro-kernel" in your library and have the code branch to that impl (depending on something at runtime) instead of whatever the C code compiled down to. this is done every single day in every single GPU lib (famously cublas ships with hundreds/thousands of these of such ukernels for gemms depending on shapes).
by 93po | 2025-04-29 16:44:55+00:00
Unfortunately, but maybe fortunately, democracy isn't about what's right. It's about representing people. It's unfortunate when so many believe and perpetuate things that are harmful and terrible, and it's unfortunate when our democracy then ultimately represents those things, too.

I would prefer benevolent dictator myself, as long as they were aligned with my values. But that being an unreasonable ask, I will take imperfect democracy over no representation at all.
by specialist | 2025-04-29 16:45:04+00:00
Sharing this episode without vouching for its accuracy.

How Record Breaking Perovskites Are Here NOW [2024-12-17] Undecided with Matt Ferrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEgkTnkNhRs

(I feel like Matt Ferrell does solid reporting and analysis, but I'm still undecided. Any one know otherwise?)

My noob takeaway, from Ferrell and others, is that solar cells will continue to improve (per cost-learning curve) for the foreseeable future. It's no longer the bottleneck.

We now need to focus on the current bottlenecks. Like policy, building codes, installation costs, inverters, coercing utilities and their regulators into accelerating grid improvements (to accommodate new generation, storage, and customers), etc.

Lastly, per Jenny Chase (Bloomberg NEF), we urgently need to double down on renewable competitors to solar, like wind and advanced geothermal. To keep those tech stacks in the running (cost of capital, ROI). So they remain commercially available for use cases not addressed by solar. Lest they be left behind and therefore more likely to stay on fossil carbon.
by gokhan | 2025-04-29 16:45:13+00:00
> I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs

Can't disagree more (on LLMs. NFTs are of course rubbish). I'm using them with all kinds of coding tasks with good success, and it's getting better every week. Also created a lot of documents using them, describing APIs, architecture, processes and many more.

Lately working on creating an MCP for an internal mid-sized API of a task management suite that manages a couple hundred people. I wasn't sure about the promise of AI handling your own data until starting this project, now I'm pretty sure it will handle most of the personal computing tasks in the future.
by incomingpain | 2025-04-29 16:45:33+00:00
>Gavin Newsom did that when he realized he was done with electoral politics and was ready to turn to a money making post-politics career. Even as an attack dog (which he was very effective at when he was trying) he has almost zero support from Democrats outside of CA, and he’s termed out next year. He didn't realize the (fictious) problem with Democratic politics you are talking about, he started preparing for a career change.

Yes certainly he might be exiting politics. Hard for me to predict. He's certainly still a front runner, though obviously kamala is far leading. Which would be a shockingly bad decision for the democrats. Not that im saying gavin would be better.

>AOC’s district voted 65-33 for Harris while re-electing her 69-30. >And she's now seen in polling as the most significant Democratic leader and is running (with Sen. Sanders) a massive nationwide campaign against the GOP.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/17/trump-aoc-vo...

This was a veil lifting for her for sure. I certainly cant say she gets it now but that was the portal for her to understand. Still puts her ahead of other democrats.

AOC would likely be a worse choice compared to kamala.

>Bill Maher has never been a Democrat, he’s been a very vocal independent that has jumped on almost every right-wing hate campaign since post-9/11 Islamophobia.

I guess i would concede he's never been a democrat politician.

Dont matter to me.

What matters to me is that the democrats are throwing elections and trump has full power to come after my country. No thanks. Can the democrats do what's needed to not lose the elections. Thanks.
by petertodd | 2025-04-29 16:45:52+00:00
> Generators are not in sync with the grid though. And that's the hardest part.

I know. What's interesting re: Ukraine is because there are so many generators there are more options to getting power sufficiently restored for normal life than just rushing to restore the entire grid.

> Thus if you started it you are committed to run for X hours.

I'm skeptical this is the main reason. While fast starting a diesel generator is hard on it, there are other, slower, ways to start big diesel generators with minimal impact on lifespan. The blackouts in Ukraine are almost all on a schedule, so big buildings with dedicated staff and expensive generators can and do startup their generators in advance (I've personally heard this happen on occasion - big generators spooling up multiple minutes in advance of the scheduled blackout).

Also, it makes sense to turn on generators in advance anyway: gives you a chance to diagnose any issues.
by phil21 | 2025-04-29 16:46:03+00:00
China is already producing top-tier parts at the current set wages. Wages are unlikely to increase as quality of production goes up - it's already world class.

That's the argument as I see it at least. I tend to mostly agree, with some carve-outs for highly specialized industry and general "social" differences in how business is typically done.

At this point, if you need basic manufacturing - China seems unbeatable on both price and quality for the vast majority of items. Not to mention lead times and iteration speed.
by krick | 2025-04-29 16:46:10+00:00
Some of the most annoying, that's for sure. I uninstalled it when it started to uglify the icon on my desktop when I neglect daily exercise. I mean, it's totally fine if it's just me, but since it was an impulsive action on my part, I would be curious to see if I wasn't one of the many. I wouldn't be fond of my company's PR department if they lose customers over stupid jokes.

That said, after spending too much time on DuoLingo, I should have dropped it anyway. First off, one should be honest to himself and admit that it is a game, not a language study material. Which is ok, but still, I would really like to have an app that is a bit less of a game and a little more of a interactive textbook (I don't know one). Second, honestly, most of the course materials are surprisingly low quality. They kept adding all these gimmicks, animations, icon uglifying, etc., yet the core content was barely worked on. After a couple of years you start really wondering what are they spending money on. I mean, literally, do they even have paid staff working on some less popular languages, or it's just community?
by thibran | 2025-04-29 16:46:52+00:00
After Firefox Mobile, killing Thunderbird and a sharp decline in market share, Mozilla finally starts to build what it's users want. Selling it as gigantic success is very American.

In the end vertical tabs are nice and I hope I like the new tab groups too (the previous official tab group addon got killed by Mozilla and 'destroyed' my workflows at the time).

Let's see, maybe Mozilla is on the path to something great yet again by being more innovative.
by conductr | 2025-04-29 16:46:53+00:00
I think HF technically tells you no refunds or that there's a restocking fee policy when you buy it so I don't think it would work. As a consumer, I'm used to companies like that making an exception when something goes overly wrong like what happened to me. It's not like I used it and it failed, I couldn't even assemble it. I spoke to the manager and he insisted he didn't even have the authority to wave the fees. It would require some regional VP or greater and I'd have to wait for him to return a message, and he hinted that he never approves it and it would all be a waste of time. I just gave up as I was in the middle of my project and just needed to get back to it. I stopped shopping here after that though.
by junon | 2025-04-29 16:47:08+00:00
Thanks for the link. I'm aware of curl's position on this but I haven't seen my own viewpoint so succinctly echoed in writing before; I'll definitely keep this on hand for future conversations!

Also interesting recommendations, I haven't heard of them either. One problem, having not tried any of these, is that if the "loud" mechanism (e.g. npm's audit tool) doesn't also check and reconcile, then it really doesn't do much good.

The people that open the issues and don't generally know what CVSS is, are not otherwise checking these databases first (oftentimes not even checking for duplicate issues, to begin with). Unless I can revoke a CVE or at least put in a correction, it will remain broken. Simple as that.
by m3047 | 2025-04-29 16:47:10+00:00
Debugging co-routines / threading is a pain in any language. I'm a big believer in observability anyway so this isn't a leap. Nor is it the first time I did this very thing, but last time I had implemented a console and it was a console command. This is in a product written in Python which implements a DNS gateway for Redis:

# dig @sophia.m3047 coroutines.redis.sophia.m3047 txt +short "write_control:1" "get:3" "statistics_report:1" "process_pending_queue:1"

The implementing code (not including turning it into a DNS response) is surprisingly simple: https://github.com/m3047/rkvdns/blob/f6fba9523a83aa5125378bb...
by titzer | 2025-04-29 16:47:10+00:00
No amount of measuring and squeezing--not even years of it--is a subsitute for high-level thinking. And vice versa.

Imagine: function F() { for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) { A(); B(); C(); } }

If we profile this code, we might find out, e.g. B takes the majority of the time--let's say 90%. So you spend hours, days, weeks, making B 2X faster. Great. Now you removed 45% of execution time. But the loop in the outer function F is just a few instructions, it is not "hot"--it won't show up in profiles except for ones that capture stacks.

If you're just stuck in the weeds optimizing hot functions that show up in profiles, it's possible to completely overlook F. That loop might be completely redundant, causing 10X the workload by repeatedly computing A, B, and C, which may don't need to be recomputed.

There are bazillions of examples like this. Say you find out that a function is super, super hot. But it's just a simple function. There are calls to it all over the code. You can't make it any faster. Instead you need to figure out how to not call it at all, e.g. by caching or rethinking the whole algorithm.

> How could measuring be a substitute for thinking/analyzing/predicting/forming a plan?

This happens more than you think. Understanding how the system works in enough detail and also at a high level to formulate a plan is in short supply. Jumping in and hacking in things, like a cache or something, is surprisingly common.
by jbverschoor | 2025-04-29 16:47:27+00:00
2% of that already goes to stripe or whatever you use. after a year it's 15%. It also gives your both a distribution and marketing channel.

It was good enough for netflix etc.

*I* don't want applications to be able to update itself. Look at malware zoom for example.

It's funny that people don't like telemetry, but at the same time they're ok with regular software update checks + installs.
by neogodless | 2025-04-29 16:47:28+00:00
As others said, it will be built into Firefox, and is already part of the mid-April release, but apparently not yet enabled. When I updated to 137.0.2, it opened the following page:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups

> Starting in Firefox version 137, you can use tab groups to manage open tabs in Firefox by grouping them together and labelling them. All users should expect to see the feature by May 6, 2025.
by jameskilton | 2025-04-29 16:47:30+00:00
Donald Trump is one of, if not the, most known and understood candidate for POTUS in a long time. Nothing that he's doing is surprising, first of all because we have his first term and second of all he told us what he would do!

It is truly astounding how many people voted for the man and now sit back dumbfounded as Trump does exactly what he said he would do.
by klevertree | 2025-04-29 16:47:40+00:00
Reports like this on the dangers of DEHP is exactly why I started work on NeutraOat (https://neutraoat.com/), a modified oat fiber supplement designed to trap plasticizers in your gut before they can get into your bloodstream. The idea is to give people an easy, safe way to avoid absorbing plasticizers that you've ingested.

Link above has a form to sign up for the mailing list. I also have a Substack post summarizing what we know about the dangers of plasticizers (https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/the-evidence-on-plasticize...) .
by SCAQTony | 2025-04-29 16:48:03+00:00
I investigated Musk’s legal brief against OpenAI. It mentions “nonprofit” 111 times but never explains how the structure would help humanity. Also, a contract was never signed to solidify any agreement as such.

Meanwhile, Musk’s role in the collapse of USAID has already been linked to tens of thousands of preventable deaths. It also includes a motive for why Musk need OpenAI to be a nonprofit.

Full breakdown here — no paywall, full bibliography: https://tomdeplume.substack.com/p/the-nonprofit-myth-how-elo...