MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rtp4me | 2025-04-18 01:38:19+00:00
Interesting read, but I find it very lacking. PGSQL memory consists of lots of parts; shared_buffers, work_mem, maintenance_work_men, OS Cache size, etc. For those who are interested in a deeper Postgresql tuning tutorial, I suggest this[1] as it highlights a number of important tuning options - specifically for PGSQL 17. Once your DB has been running for a while, run the postgresql-tuner app[2] to see if you have correctly applied RAM settings[2]. The repo has been around for a long time, but I find the recommendations (especially the estimated RAM usage) really good.

[1] https://www.pgedge.com/blog/postgresql-performance-tuning

[2] https://github.com/jfcoz/postgresqltuner
by eduction | 2025-04-18 01:38:43+00:00
That’s incorrect. Only refs+dosync use stm. https://clojure.org/reference/refs

Not atoms.

From Hickey’s History of Clojure paper:

“ Taking on the design and implementation of an STM was a lot to add atop designing a programming language. In practice, the STM is rarely needed or used. It is quite common for Clojure programs to use only atoms for state, and even then only one or a handful of atoms in an entire program. But when a program needs coordinated state it really needs it, and without the STM I did not think Clojure would be fully practical.”

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321

Atoms do an atomic compare and swap. It’s not the same thing.
by defrost | 2025-04-18 01:38:53+00:00
Scalia's "American Anglo common culture" that makes him feel right at home in England is just a subset of the many cultures within central north america that have coexisted under the US flag for many generations.

It doesn't include the Chinese that brought rail to California, the multitudes of Latinos with ancestors under Viceroyalty of New Spain and elsewhere, the non Anglo Saxon Europeans that didn't ape the Anglo's after arriving at Ellis Island, etc.
by a4isms | 2025-04-18 01:39:07+00:00
The key observation for me is Sturgeon's Revelation: "90% of everything is crud."

My most impressionable years for music were the 70s and 80s. I remember fantastic music from that time... But the fact is, most of what we hear today from that era has been curated for us. We hear the 10% of the 70s and 80s hits that weren't crud. Or maybe even the 1% that was great. If we actually listen to the top twenty-five singles from any month in those two decades, 90% of them would be crud.

I think most people comparing the present to the past are comparing everything today to the 10% of yesterday that wasn't crud.
by bitwize | 2025-04-18 01:40:21+00:00
A friend of my wife's showed me a video of herself, post-stroke, reading from a Barney (purple dinosaur) book. She read with a strange accent that was more of an exaggerated Southern mixed with something completely alien. It was fascinating, and saddening, to see the precise ways in which her linguistic ability had been hit.

She's fine now, though, so no worries.
by justin66 | 2025-04-18 01:40:26+00:00
> I suspect it was the penetration of the Apple II into education and business that helped make it possible

I don't know how much it moved the needle but it was astonishing how much schools and home users - parents whose kids used the machines at school - were willing to pay for an Apple II well after it was a technically obsolete machine. It definitely helped them to some extent.

(don't get me wrong, I love those machines in my bones, but they were pretty overpriced after a while)
by Gathering6678 | 2025-04-18 01:42:14+00:00
I did not (OpenAI does not allow Chinese to pay for Plus due to politics, and I couldn't be bothered to try circumventing it), and I am curious about it because it does seem like a very difficult job.

I did try the latest Qwen though, and it was able to locate to the correct city, but it's still tens of km off (it guessed a tourist attraction in the city center instead of the actual district).
by butterisgood | 2025-04-18 01:43:16+00:00
Deforestation helps with that

A composition of catamorphic and anamorphic functions can eliminate a lot of the in-between allocations (a hylomorphism)

Basically it looks like you’re building a ton of intermediate structure then consuming it - meaning much of the in-between stuff can be eliminated.

Interesting optimizations and a little mind blowing when you see it.
by dehrmann | 2025-04-18 01:43:48+00:00
> Pachelbel's Canon in D is by no means a complex song and has stood the test of time

It was actually mostly forgotten until the 1960's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachelbel%27s_Canon#Rediscover...

Can anyone find a version without Paillard's changes? Knowing the history, I suspect they have more to do with the song's popularity than the original composition.
by maujun | 2025-04-18 01:43:54+00:00
I like the idea.

With money, we can value emotions. Since everybody has some money, everybody's emotions (outside of children) will have positive value.

Relating to my original example:

I, as a provider of PII, feel scared about my information being sold. If Google has a $100/year option to stop my PII from being spread, I would consider buying it.

However, I predict now some people feel angry. They feel Google should not be allowed to do this. They won't pay Google to stop, they will go to the govt.

Considering this problem, I wonder what is the next step we would need to do to ensure a world of positive emotions and money.

> Otherwise what’s stopping, e.g. nihlists, from valuing your emotions at zero or a negative value?

Well, I think a lot of people value my emotions negatively, especially angry people and corporations. In particular, corporations like to take money and make it time consuming for me to get a refund.

As for people, I am at peace because I cannot change my skin color, face, or personality, but I can adjust my goals to be smaller/non-overlapping.
by unaindz | 2025-04-18 01:46:02+00:00
She didn't only lose her inner voice but the capacity to communicate and understand language properly. She also lost a lot of other, harder to detect, stuff. She also writes that she was capable of complex thought, just in a different way. There are people naturally without an inner speech who can think just as well.

The Calm she speaks about is something else, it may be similar to animals or it may not but I doubt it was only caused by her loss of speech.
by mcdeltat | 2025-04-18 01:47:35+00:00
It's interesting how you talk about dishwashers stopping you cooking, because I found a bit of the opposite.

First reason is hand washing gives you a much faster iteration cycle on clean dishes. If I'm cooking I don't really want to wait 3 hours to get a pot back.

Second reason is (in my experience so far) dishwashers suck for any significant quantity/intensity of cooking. Ceramics, sure. But big pots? Don't fit in the dishwasher. And cooked-on food? It doesn't come off (despite people repeatedly claiming that if you "just use the dishwasher correctly" it will remove all food, I've never experienced that).

Third reason is a bunch of things that can't go in dishwashers, e.g. wood.

So in the end, the most time consuming things to wash need to be done by hand anyway. The rest is a small enough amount that it doesn't take very long to wash. And of course the dishwasher costs more to run. Once I factor all this in, hand washing isn't that terrible of an option.
by j_bum | 2025-04-18 01:48:38+00:00
Destin from Smarter Every Day (YouTube) has a wonderful video demonstrating this effect [0]. I’d recommend watching the whole thing, but you can see how much of an effect it has starting around the 6:00 mark.

[0] https://youtu.be/kUfF2MTnqAw?si=LRDtSJSy7jiTIpzy
by Barrin92 | 2025-04-18 01:48:42+00:00
Already exists in a lot of places. German national IDs for like 10 years or something like that have an eID feature. It's basically just a public/private key signing scheme. The government and a bunch of other trusted public providers are able to issue identities, you can sign transactions with them or verify your age to commercial service providers, or transfer some data if that's required with your consent. (https://www.personalausweisportal.de/Webs/PA/EN/citizens/ele...)

Estonia and South Korea I think also have similar features on their IDs, it's already a solved problem.
by dehrmann | 2025-04-18 01:49:55+00:00
> dyad

Correct, though you'll much more commonly hear about triads, as in major and minor triads, and you'll hear "power chord" more often than "dyad," even though it's one specific dyad.

> if you hear a pitch against a second pitch that's double/quadruple/etc. the frequency of the first, your ear marks this interval as special.

Some of that is that the higher octaves reinforce existing overtones, so the higher note is already there in a sense.
by hirvi74 | 2025-04-18 01:50:09+00:00
> A small part of the brain that gives consciousness.

Not to get too tangental, but it was common thought at one time to think the brain is the center of consciousness. However, I have come across new data [1] that has convinced me that consciousness is entirely a full-body experience. According to the definition of some, consciousness might not even be a binary state, but rather a property of our universe like heat.

[1] Found this video on this site, and I found it to be a fascinating discussion if you have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s
by maebert | 2025-04-18 01:50:34+00:00
i am a (former) neuroscientist and breathwork facilitator (mostly conscious connected breath) — AMA.

the effect of decreased co2 concentration on vasoconstrictions (and also alkalosis-induced tetany, ie your muscles cramping, which happens a lot during breathwork) are well known [1], but i've never seen them quantified in such a clear way. It's cool to see mainstream science give it a closer look!

[1] for anyone interested, I wrote an explainer here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RuDv_E9osM1CCFWZMywMru9J...
by chneu | 2025-04-18 01:50:47+00:00
Back when flat rates originally came out I don't think they had an actual weight limit.

A buddy of mine used to cast and paint figurines. Well, someone ordered a bunch of lead ones and they used a flat rate to ship it. The box weighed something like 80lbs. It was basically just a block of lead

It's probably coincidence but a few months later a weight limit was placed on flat rate boxes. It's still crazy high. We always thought the timing was funny.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-18 01:51:14+00:00
Did the kid actually have to acquire US citizenship via naturalization or did it just take 2 years to prove that they were a citizen? Those two cases are really different.

Even if you don’t have confirmation and proof that you are a citizen (eg by having a US passport), you are still bound by rules if you happen to be a citizen anyways (eg you have to file/pay US taxes). So a lot of kids find out later in life that they are actually natural born US citizens and have been evading US taxes illegally.
by leonidasv | 2025-04-18 01:51:16+00:00
The assistant is limited to a 32k context window (consisting of up to 7+1 messages) and usage quotas varies depending on model pricing[0].

Although I'm a Kagi user, I don't see much value in it, especially now that virtually all LLM UIs have native web search support.

[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html
by m463 | 2025-04-18 01:51:23+00:00
don't listen to the others.

yes. I think if you find yourself dropping to sed/grep/awk/find too much, switch to python.

The language itself imho seems more readable. Strings, lists and hashes seem better especially when you choke on quoting.

And the python standard library makes a huge difference when you grow above "simple". I love argparse for readable arguments with help. os.path lets you manipulate paths and filenames in a readable and robust way. you can read and write json, csv and more. datetime lets you manipulate dates and times.
by ValveFan6969 | 2025-04-18 01:51:29+00:00
I'm a philosopher, not a medical professional. But I can tell you that philosophy and deep breathing are inextricably linked. Breathing deeply in of itself is a philosophical exercise, one that centers and grounds oneself in the here and now of the universe that surrounds you, and the universe that lies deep within you. It's a cosmic balance between the metaphysical and the empirical. As a philosopher, one must be able to breathe deeply, so one can breathe in, hold, and spew out the deepest and most esoteric pearls of knowledge unto the masses.
by snapetom | 2025-04-18 01:53:10+00:00
I don't know how many arguments I've had with how many partners I've had about this.

It's a dishwasher, not a dish re-washer.

My wife and her family are all freakin' religious wash first, then put it in the dishwasher. My father in law snapped at me about this once. I'm going to send this to him.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-18 01:54:03+00:00
> I was confused too... but in the US, the terms coconut tree, palm tree and coconut palm are used interchangeably.

You're still confused. Coconut tree and palm tree aren't interchangeable; to be a coconut tree, the tree has to grow coconuts. All palm trees count as "palm trees", whether they grow coconuts or not. The prototypical palm tree grows dates.
by breadwinner | 2025-04-18 01:55:01+00:00
Excerpts:

“The judge, the prosecutor, the sheriff and the jail are basically all throwing their hands up and saying, ‘ICE told us to hold him, so we’re going to keep holding him,’ even though no one disagrees with the fact that he’s a citizen. So they’re right now unlawfully holding a US citizen. They’ve dismissed the underlying criminal charges, so the only reason they’re holding him is because ICE sent a piece of paper over that says, ‘Please hold this person for us. We’ll come pick him up later,’” Greer said.
by shippage | 2025-04-18 01:55:39+00:00
I posted a few days ago about my own experiences with aphasia as a teen. The term author came up with, "The Quiet," resonates with me. My own experience was also quiet, but not as peaceful as hers.

My stroke was a thief of thought; language fell apart, washed away, leaving me unable to read, write, or even conceive of words. Talking was something beyond me, to the point that I didn't notice when people were moving their mouths while speaking.

For about 3 weeks after my stroke, it seemed everyone was giving me the silent treatment, and I was worried I'd done something terribly wrong to the point nobody would even talk to me, yet I couldn't put any words together to ask them why they were so angry with me. Somehow, I also sensed that something was terribly wrong with me, but I couldn't quite grasp what it was; any time I tried, it slipped through my fingers like fog.

Yet, it was still very quiet, and that left me much more focused on sensations and immediate experiences than before or after. Apparently, I would stare at a tree, or at the snow as it fell. Simply existing. Feeling connected to the world in a new way, part of it, instead of separate from it. Maybe this was ultimate mindfulness, but it didn't feel that way. When I practice mindfulness now, there's still a sense of I-ness that wasn't present back then. All there was existence and connection along with a vague unease, knowing something was wrong.

Much later, they told me I only spoke 5 words after the stroke, all of them so-called "automatic" words like yes, no, and what.

For...reasons...my parents never took me to see a doctor about it, so I had to relearn how to read, write, speak, and listen on my own. Without words, I had to figure out other ways of thinking that didn't involve an internal monologue. Within weeks, I was already building up a new way of thinking to allow myself to understand what was happening in a way that didn't involve language, yet was still expressive enough to describe my experiences internally just as well as language had allowed. To this day, my natural mode of thinking involves no monologue, no words, no images at all.

I do remember what it was like to think in words all the time when I was younger, an unending flow that had carved a deep canyon in my mental landscape. But now that river is little more than a nearly dried up trickle and the canyon lies empty...except when I put words together to communicate with others.

Word-ing is now a very intentional activity for me, laying words like bricks, together with the mortar of understanding to build my own Tower of Babel, translating back and forth between my new way of thinking and the words I need to communicate with others. I've been told I have a very deliberate way of speaking in person, as though I'm carefully choosing each word, and this is why.

I sometimes wonder what my life would be like now if I'd never had the stroke, never lost my language. I suppose I'll never know.
by SenHeng | 2025-04-18 01:55:52+00:00
I've actually written a couple of my own JS SSGs in the past 10 years. My first one started off as a couple of scripts strung together with Gulp, then moving to Wintersmith, then another of one the x-smith ones. Never doing that again.

Re-writing my current blog in Astro. [0]

Yes, it is more complex but that also means it has more features, features that I don't have to code or maintain myself. Simple features like rendering markdown to html. Or syntax highlighting. Or figuring out which markdown files to render where.

[0]: https://senhongo.com/blog/rebuilding-this-blog-in-astro
by unaindz | 2025-04-18 01:56:22+00:00
That is not something you diagnose and I doubt it's very important at all, just a different way of thinking. Words are just a way to communicate ideas but having the complete context of your own mind you don't need them, you can just think of the ideas directly instead of translating to words.

I myself have an inner monologue like 80% of the time and the times that I don't thinking seems faster. The downside is being harder to translate into words if I need to explain the idea to others.
by cjohnson318 | 2025-04-18 01:59:45+00:00
Listing the "most frequent chord" is a weird analysis, I'm more interested in the "most frequent key", or a transition matrix from one key to another, e.g., if I'm in F, what's the chance I go a fifth up to C, or a fourth down to Bb. Just telling me G is a popular chord doesn't do much.
by YZF | 2025-04-18 01:59:49+00:00
I went to some workshop in the US circa 1990 and I ended up with a bunch of books that I didn't want to carry with me. So I put them in a box and (surface) mailed them home. It was heavy, international, and cost very little IIRC. I think this doesn't work any more? Parcels have become very expensive.
by spiderfarmer | 2025-04-18 02:00:26+00:00
It’s misleading to equate support for birth control, abortion, or genetic testing with support for eugenics. Eugenics, historically, refers to coercive or state-enforced policies aimed at “improving” the gene pool, often through forced sterilization, selective breeding, or even genocide.

The problem with eugenics is exactly that it denies individual autonomy and human rights in favor of a supposedly “better” population.

Support for modern reproductive healthcare is not equal to support for eugenics as it rejects coercion in favor of personal agency.
by kazinator | 2025-04-18 02:00:34+00:00
Here is a way we could hear a 0.0023 difference in pitch: via beats.

Suppoise we sample a precise 10,000.00 kHz analog signal (sinusoid) and speed up the sampled signal by 0.0023 percent. It will have a frequency of 10,000.23 Hz.

The f2 - f2 difference between them is 0.23 Hz, which means if they are mixed together, we will hear beats at 0.46 Hz: a little slower than once in every two seconds.

So in this contrived way, where we have the original source and the digitized one side by side, we can obtain an audible effect correlating to the steps in resolution of the sampling method.

I'm guessing Deadmau5 might have set up an experiment along these lines.

Musicians tend to be oblivious to something like 5 cent errors in the intonations of their instruments, in the lower registers. E.g. world renowned guitarists play on axes that have no nut compensation, without which you can't even get close to accurate intontation.
by pyrale | 2025-04-18 02:01:38+00:00
If we're to compare Google's situation to that of finance companies on other markets, even a small part of what Google did would result in a significant part of their execs and maybe a few tech staff wearing orange jumpsuits for these companies. Given the nature of Google's transgression and the way they've been robbing their own customers, they'd deserve it.

There's a case to be made that on top of google being broken up, the market should be heavily regulated in order to restore trust for market participants.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-18 02:01:43+00:00
> As a microbiologist I'm aware that what looks clean can have leftover residue. How are you measuring cleanliness out of a dishwasher? I'm guessing by eye, the same way you're measuring hand-washed dish cleanliness.

So how are you measuring, if not by eyeballing it? Can you swab it and check for microbes? Did you?
by shalmanese | 2025-04-18 02:01:54+00:00
Whatever my private opinion of the idea, that they're pursuing it means they believe it. It's about getting whatever information fast enough to evaluate whether it truly is a bad idea or not.

Startups are contrarian, many of the most successful ones are the ones "experts" are convinced are bad. I think in terms of the retrospective, assume we're at the point where the startup has shut down and the post-mortem is done and the reason was because it was a bad idea, how do we get there as fast as possible so there's time to pivot.
by lolinder | 2025-04-18 02:01:57+00:00
> There's other ad companies, there is no other way to get an app on iOS.

There is no other way to get an ad on sites that use Google Ads, just as there's no other way to get an app on iOS. These seem to be perfectly parallel to me: in either case you can pay a company to get access to their user base or you can choose to not pay that company to get access to their users. But if you make that choice, in either case you're locked out of a large market.

I agree with you that there's a strong argument to be made that the cases should have been decided the same way, but I also think they made the right call with Apple, so that leaves me reevaluating my gut instinct on this one.
by mgdev | 2025-04-18 02:01:57+00:00
Whatever Claude Code is doing in the client/prompting is making much better use of 3.7 than any other client I'm using that also uses 3.7. This is especially true for when you bump up against context limits; it can successfully resume with a context reset about 90% of the time. MCP Commander [0] was built almost 100% using Claude Code and pretty light intervention. I immediately felt the difference in friction when using Codex.

I also spent a couple hours picking apart Codex with the goal of adding Sonnet 3.7 support (almost there). The actual agent loop they're using is very simple. Not to say that's a bad thing, but they're offloading all planning and workflow execution to the agent itself. That's probably the right end state to shoot for long-term, but given the current state of these models I've had much better success offloading task tracking to some other thing - even if that thing is just a markdown checklist. (I wrote about my experience [1] building AI Agents last year.)

[0]: https://mcpcommander.com/

[1]: https://mg.dev/lessons-learned-building-ai-agents/