MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by littlekey | 2025-04-30 21:53:08+00:00
Agreed, and the sad part is the gamification - while helpful for motivation - actively works against learning in other ways. Duolingo clearly doesn't want their lessons to be actually challenging because that would get in the way of the cycle of "just smash out a quick lesson to continue your streak, then get on with your day". Learners need to embrace failure and be encouraged to spend more time with the material, but the company has been steadily and purposely moving away from that over time.
by byearthithatius | 2025-04-30 21:53:48+00:00
Can you scrape all of HN by just incrementing item?id (since its sequential) and using Python web requests with IP rotation (in case there is rate limiting)?

NVM this approach of going item by item would take 460 days if the average request response time is 1 second (unless heavily parallelized, for instance 500 instances _could_ do it in a day but thats 40 million requests either way so would raise alarms).
by lotharcable | 2025-04-30 21:53:49+00:00
Gnome is a acquired taste, but it is also a lot less work to keep working then KDE or other desktop options.

There are a lot of people that bitch about it, but that is only because it is the most popular one and they think that Linux desktop is a zero sum game. They don't use Gnome most of the time and arguments tend to be parroting somebody else and probably out of date for years or just kinda made up conspiracy theories about Redhat or something.

The whole thing is pretty confused. Gnome being popular doesn't make KDE not be popular.
by vel0city | 2025-04-30 21:53:52+00:00
I don't get this though. I had a $10 toaster from Walmart I bought when I went to college. It lasted me over a decade before I gave it away, still working fine. It was a pretty crappy and basic toaster (hot spots), but it was a crappy and basic toaster the day I bought it and was a crappy and basic toaster the day I gave it away. Are you people really destroying your toasters every year or two? How?

And there are absolutely high-end expensive toasters that are waaay better than the cheap junk. But most people are going to choose the cheap junk in the end.
by kergonath | 2025-04-30 21:54:10+00:00
> it is possible that his policy of "do everything at once, without taking the time to do it right" is more reflective of his belief that whatever he tries [even just being president] will be fought

By whom? He has a subservient congress and the Supreme Court in his pocket. And he is willing to ignore anything the judiciary says anyway. Who is in a situation to hinder him right now, and in the next 2 years, in the US?
by legitster | 2025-04-30 21:54:12+00:00
The First Amendment is pretty clear on this - government can't establish religious institutions, but it can't restrict them either. The whole point of the charter programs is the schools are self organizing and apply for the charter. If they meet the requirements of the charter, denying them access solely on their religious affiliation is almost certainly an overreach. It's the same reason religious non-profits can get access to federal funding for homelessness etc.

This would also not be a novel interpretation - the US tried once but failed to amend the constitution for this very reason with the Blaine Amendment.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-30 21:54:56+00:00
The interesting question is how much energy is lost to mechanical friction for a single logic operation, and how this compares to static leakage losses in electronic circuits. It should also be noted that mechanical logic may turn out to be quite useful for specialized purposes as part of ordinary electronic devices, such as using nano-relay switches for power gating or as a kind of non-volatile memory.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-30 21:55:21+00:00
Unlike everything else like the sex changing, it’s in every book and is a plot element instead of mere “background colour”.

All of the big decisions are made by the Minds, and every time a human thinks they’re doing something of their own accord, it is implied (or explicitly stated) that they’re being manipulated by a Mind.

Several of the novels state this outright, including mentioning that Marain, the language of the culture, was explicitly designed to “guide” the thoughts of its human speakers in the “right way” as decided by the Minds that worked on its design. Handcuffs for the human mind so integrated that nobody even realises they’re shackled.

The humans aren’t prisoners, they’re pets allowed to roam “outside”, but they’re not the agents of their future in any real sense.

PS: Horrific betrayal by a highly trusted character in a position of father-like authority is a running theme in Banks’ works. The more utopian and idealistic the scenario, the greater the horror the reader can experience when that is shattered by the realisation that it was all a manipulation. The Wasp Factory, one of his earlier works, makes this the most explicit with the betrayal of the protagonist’s sexual identity by their own father, but since that book Banks has learned to make this theme less explicit and more implicit, waiting for the reader to discover it on their own and have the “Oh. Ohhhh! Oh God.” moment. Clearly many people missed it in the later Culture books…
by Tallain | 2025-04-30 21:55:36+00:00
If you go to the source of the data linked there -- cms.gov -- you'll see that this is only one side of the equation: health spending by product.

This explicitly does not include insurance costs.

Private health insurance costs are covered by "healthcare spending by major sources of funds" and reached 1.5 trillion, the same dollar amount as hospitals cost as a product group.

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf
by anonymars | 2025-04-30 21:55:56+00:00
I think this is too simple. The right wing was on the rise in most of the rest of the developed world too, until Trump scared everyone straight. What factors led people to think this brand of politics is a good way forward? Simple media? Social media? Propaganda? Foreign propaganda?

Personally I think it's a mix, but inequality is a big factor. Quoting Roosevelt:

"But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then Fascism and Communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land."
by rambo_b92 | 2025-04-30 21:56:10+00:00
I'm exploring an idea: Digital Sunset – a gentle app that syncs your iPhone + Mac to help you unplug before bed.

It sends bedtime alerts, plays relaxing scenes, and tracks your streaks.

Not built yet — just testing if this is something people want. I'm considering building this and would love feedback. Does syncing bedtime reminders + relaxing content across your devices sound helpful or overkill?
by mulmen | 2025-04-30 21:56:35+00:00
Your claims just don’t align with my experiences, anecdotes, or information.

My mayor hired his niece to run a department. My cousin hired my nephews at a school district. I worked at a hospital where the IT director and the network admin were married. My dad worked at a family owned car dealership that’s in the third generation of ownership. I don’t think any of those cases were corrupt.

Meanwhile “the bureaucracy” in the form of OIG has an excellent track record of eliminating waste. The mayor of my hometown has personally visited each department to ensure they are operating responsibly and uncovered and eliminated widespread waste.

I just don’t see what you’re seeing.
by daniel_iversen | 2025-04-30 21:57:35+00:00
This is interesting! Does anyone know how China’s reliance on chips from intel and amd is in the non-AI space (so regular consumer and server loads)? I’m wondering how it was 10 and 5 years ago, now, and how we predict in the next couple of years. Surely if they’re not mostly using their own chips they will very soon right?
by SupremumLimit | 2025-04-30 21:57:56+00:00
It is a serious mistake to think that technology can remove bureaucracy. Indeed, technology by its nature makes bureaucracy a lot more rigid. Bureaucracy is about homogenising processes and erasing individual differences, and software reinforces these properties because it allows even less human input or deviation from the process. (That isn't true of all software, just software that is intended to somehow deal with large numbers of people uniformly.)
by foxglacier | 2025-04-30 21:58:00+00:00
It seems like Harvard and those other universities might have been pushing the boundaries. Was the discrimination required or just allowed? The court for Grutter seemed to say it was "required" and for Bakke a "compelling state interest", but I might not understand the meaning of that properly. There are universities that don't discriminate (UC?) and they somehow get away with it. If you were running Harvard and trying your best to comply with the law, would you feel it's legally safer to discriminate or to not discriminate? The answer to that points to whether they were operating in bad faith or not.

Title VI seems to clearly say "don't discriminate" but again I might not understand how exceptions are allowed.
by lotharcable | 2025-04-30 21:58:39+00:00
C++ is definitely a drawback for a long time. Not because it is 'bloated', but because of how ABI changes were handled. It is all history now.

Nowadays the major problem with KDE is that by the time it is stable a new QT major version gets released and along with that it essentially gets a major rewrite, which takes years to stabilize and once it does a new QT version is released, etc etc etc.
by unfunco | 2025-04-30 21:58:52+00:00
I cancelled my JetBrains license a few days ago after I was required to agree to new terms and conditions, they expended no effort and took zero time to explain the changes, what has changed and why, I was shown a ridiculously long legal document and asked to agree or get fucked. There was no feedback option when cancelling the subscription, they clearly don't care.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-30 21:59:13+00:00
Not an expert, but would this count as molecular scale :)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_clock

(This version can be done at home with halides imho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_clock_reaction)

To your question: I suppose all you need is for the halide moieties (Br) in your gates to also couple to the halide ions (Br clock?). The experiment you link was conducted at 7K for the benefit of being able to observe it with STM?
by int_19h | 2025-04-30 21:59:25+00:00
Nope, it was entirely due to the prompt they used. It was very long and basically tried to cover all the various corner cases they thought up... and it ended up being too complicated and self-contradictory in real world use.

Kind of like that episode in Robocop where the OCP committee rewrites his original four directives with several hundred: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr1lgfqygio
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-04-30 22:00:06+00:00
Real estate is local. Hard to conclude much from a single (desirable) area.

Scroll down to the two tables at the bottom in this link to compare metro areas:

https://www.realtor.com/research/march-2025-data/

Sure, NYC metro is up 10%, but the median price ($780k) is still far from LA/Orange County (an eye-watering $1.2 M median) and San Jose/Sunnyvale at $1.4 M.

Cleveland and Buffalo are at ~$250k median though...and they are technically "coastal" cities :)
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-30 22:00:23+00:00
The main uses of the em-dash (set closed as separators of parts of sentences, with different semantics when single or paired) can be substituted in English with an en-dash set open. This is not ambiguous with the use of en-dash set closed for ranges, because of spacing. There are a few less common uses that an en-dash doesn’t substitute for, though.
by LastTrain | 2025-04-30 22:00:26+00:00
>On a price per square foot basis, home prices have been remarkably stable since 1960s.

I’m not sure that’s true, in fact I’m quite sure it’s not, but I’m willing to change my mind if you have a good source. In particular, home sizes have shrunk since 00 and prices have surely not gone down so it could only be true prior to then if at all.
by hajile | 2025-04-30 22:00:39+00:00
Get a list of all democrats in office then highlight the ones who changed party. The number that switched were a small minority. Wikipedia lists less than 70 and most of those were state rather than federal. Compared to the thousands of state and federal seats, it’s minimal.

So-called civil rights pioneers like Lyndon Johnson were raging racist who saw the civil rights act as cheap lip service to get black votes for decades to come.

You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level.

As someone who has lived in the south (my family is not from the south), I’ll tell you that the Republicans were correct. The clan controlled the local counties (most important offices) and nobody would stop them from disappearing people or burning them out of their homes regardless of that the federal government said.

What changed was the people. Each generation has grown more tolerant. That finally broke the clan control and the millennial generation in the South is overwhelmingly not racist.

Unfortunately, the recent moves away from MLK-style equality to the radical Marxist-style equity (equity except for people who happen to be born white as they see it — very similar to Russian discrimination against children of formerly Middle/upper class people like engineers) seem to be pushing gen Z back toward racial supremacy (this seems true across the whole country).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_party_switchers_in_the...

The most interesting question is why republicans and democrats supposedly swapped parties in the 1960s, but the black vote shifted in the 1930s. The answer seems pretty clear. Black unemployment was through the roof and the New Deal promised jobs, so they broke with the part of Lincoln because they were forced to. As things stabilized, there was a risk of them switching back and once again creating a Republican supermajority which is what spawned support for a federal civil rights act by the racist democrats.
by team_pyrefly | 2025-04-30 22:00:39+00:00
We go into it a bit more here: https://pyrefly.org/en/docs/pyrefly-faq/ The short answer is that the scale of the Python projects we work on is huge. Pyre is the only checker that can scale for our needs today. To bring modern features like type inference and better IDE integration, a full rewrite needed to happen. We are not done just yet, but have been using our massive codebases to test the performance and flexibility of the checker. Thanks for the question!
by cheekyfleek | 2025-04-30 22:00:52+00:00
I figured the multiple people per ip would be an issue, was wondering if that might be at play here. I thought you said it was already at 3-4/s and I doubted it based on some of what I'm seeing. 10/s tracks a little better.

As to what you should change, I can't say. It's in the wild now lol.
by godelski | 2025-04-30 22:01:20+00:00
> I've been having difficulty attempting to locate a simple fitness function that reliably proxies natural language string similarity

Welcome to the curse of dimensionality. The underlying principle there is that as dimensionality increases the ability to distinguish the nearest point from the furthest diminishes. It really becomes difficult even in dimensions we'd consider low by ML standards (e.g. 10-D).

But I think you need to also recognize that you used correct wording that suggests the difficulty. "reliably *proxies* natural language". "Proxy" is the correct word here. It is actually true for any measure. There is no measure that is perfectly aligned with the abstractions we are trying to measure. Even with something as mundane as distance. This naturally leads to Goodhart's Law and is why you must recognize that measures are guides, not answers and not "proof".

And the example you discuss is commonly called "Reward Hacking" or "overfitting". It's the same concept (along with Goodhart's Law) but just used in different domains. Your cost/loss function still represents a "reward". This is part of why it is so important to develop a good test set, but even that is ill-defined. Your test set shouldn't just be disjoint from your training, but there should be a certain distance between data. Even if curse of dimensionality didn't throw a wrench into this situation, there is no definition for what that distance should be. Too small and it might as well be training data. Preferentially you want to maximize it, but that limits the data that can exist in training. The balance is difficult to strike.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-30 22:01:31+00:00
Well what was described is pretty much the standard.

To put a little context, and this is a bit speculation on my part but seems to conform based on conversations I've had from people who have lived at that time.

This kind of policy at institutions started right after Sputnik. There was a sudden surge in demand for mathematics and engineers, and they couldn't find enough people so they threw money at the problem. The unfortunate side effect was that its a problem that money can't solve, and so when you can't find anyone that meets the rigorous standards, you must lower standards. This seems to have happened in math education around that time the effects of which did not become visible until much later, and it eventually snowballed to most of academia.

The effect has been that most math teachers, excluding a few professors that buck the norm which are the exception, started teaching by rote following what is known today as a lying to children paradigm.

This is a pedagogical approach that is the opposite of the paradigm that was taught prior which was a first-principled approach (based in the greeks and rome).

You are given flawed models upfront, which you must learn some things, and unlearn other things you previously learned to unconscious competence with little guidance. This includes all the elements and structure of real torture (from the 1950s), and the process is repeated over and over sieving only the most compliant or blind people forward, and inducing PTSD in the creative, brilliant, and genius. The process destroys minds, steals economic benefit of intelligence, and selects for average.

Torture is known to reduce, often permanently, the capability for rational thought.

It follows the now refuted ideology of gnosticism. Intuitive understanding is eschewed, and you only become useful the closer you progress to gnosis (mastery), and informally, only the masters decide who gets to progress (through clever gimmicks, deceit, and orchestrated structural failure, that takes advantage of the drive to do less work, government funded work trends towards the least common denominator of production which often becomes negative).

You now have more pHd's, but fewer people who actually met the 1960s definition of a pHd.

There are exceptions because this is a spectrum, but this has been the trend for the majority for decades, and the issues described are known issues with any centralized hierarchy. It hasn't been strictly knowledge-based since at least the late 60s. You see a sharp degradation of published material in education across all subjects starting in the 70s.
by npc_anon | 2025-04-30 22:01:33+00:00
States with a low sales tax tend to have high property taxes.

Apparently the New Hampshire median home price is 487K. With a property tax of 1.89% that's 9.2K/yr or $767 per month.

EU property taxes are a fraction of that: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/real-property-taxes-eu...

Overall, Europeans do pay higher taxes but Americans really overlook how much property tax they pay, and how this closes the gap significantly.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-30 22:02:22+00:00
It's interesting because that list you provide ("Parent getting called to school 3-4x a week" etc.) is a good summary of my household growing up. Me, my sister, and my father are neurodivergent and on the spectrum.

But we are people that others would not consider to be in the 25% RFK is referring to. Yet, at some point in our lives we were. Growing up I was less verbal than I am now, and I was often paired to play with other autistic kids who were totally non verbal and died early because of their autism. So I'm well aware of the extent of the spectrum.

So I agree with this:

> It is a disservice to all of those people to act as if the spectrum does not have a far range of activities.

However I find it is RFK and not the poster you are replying to who fails to recognize autism as a spectrum. Indeed, if you read the transcript of his speech he does not refer to autism as a spectrum until the end, when a reporter frames it in those terms as part of a question. Instead, he very clearly keeps referring to autism as a binary of "profound" versus I suppose "regular" autism, which is not at all how autistic people experience autism.

What RFK does is juxtapose debilitative autistic behavior (nonverbal) with very normal autistic behavior (toe walking) and he lumps it into a category he calls "profound autism" which is not recognized as a category of autism, nor is it precise or descriptive enough to have a clear meaning. I'm already in an argument with another poster about that, I don't want to open up another front on that issue, you can read my thoughts about that in my comment history.

> Its not RFK's words

For me, it is his words. I've read the transcript free of any media filtering and the actual words he uses are causing real damage to the autistic community.

> snipe hunt and that funding can just go towards creating spaces and education that allow for a range of interaction and social styles after September. But to ignore both sides of the experience is disingenuous

You frame their concerns as a "snipe hunt" -- the opposite of genuine; yet characterize refusing to entertain them as being disingenuous and a slap in the face of autistic people. I don't understand, wouldn't dragging autistic people into a farcical excuse to prove some nonsense about the food system be far more damaging to autistic people and their families? Why can't we just not do the snipe hunt and use the money right now for creating spaces and education?

> lazy characterizations that get slung around in all emotional spaces, he is mostly a careful speaker, especially compared to the norms now.

I think this is a lazy characterization because you don't support it with any evidence. In my post history I highlight several examples from the transcript in which RFK is not careful with his language, and instead paints autistic people with a broad brush and engages in strange conspiracy theorizing in his official capacity as HHS director. Again, this is free from any media bias as it is the direct transcript from this press conference.
by netsharc | 2025-04-30 22:02:39+00:00
Reality loses elections? What a surprise! How many politicians have so far sold bullshit lies like greatness again, which the desperate voters keep buying? Freaking planet has double the people (4 extra billions) compared to the 1970's and effects of burning the resources are now more and more apparent, but oh hey, that politician promises a return the prosperity of those times when you didn't even need condoms to fuck, do I want to face reality or do I want to vote for fake hope?
by cycomanic | 2025-04-30 22:02:58+00:00
But's usually not the argument being made, the complains (same in this case) are often about the salaries of the people doing the actual work. Sure I understand the complains about multi-million salaries for the CEOs of some non-for-profit (on the other hand I have the same complains about the ridiculous salaries of CEOs of for-profits), but if that's the nuance, it doesn't come out in the complains.