MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by philjohn | 2025-04-11 21:15:14+00:00
To be fair lead pipes aren't good, but the other uses in the Roman Empire were probably the cause of far more of the issues.

Especially with hard water (of which the water in Rome is VERY hard[1] today, and if similar sources are used, it stands to reason it was very hard way back when) it forms a scale that drastically reduces the amount that leeches into the water.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-water-hardness-of...
by mattdeboard | 2025-04-11 21:15:49+00:00
Re: oral transmission , I'm operating under the (unsubstantiated) assumption at least some species of dolphins and whales, at least, are conveying "tribal" information orally between generations (locations of reliable hunting grounds, stuff like that). There's no definitive proof of this, afaik, it's just something that seems likelier than not to me.

Re: defining it broadly... The definition I've landed on thru defending my stated belief in these comments is, "Conveying information symbolically by etching it into or onto a durable medium so it can be referred to later."

But I guess an important quality of "writing" is that it's information that could otherwise be communicated with spoken language, and that the written and spoken languages are isomorphic.. maybe?

Honestly this is the first time I've put this idea out into the world for criticism so I'm still working thru these things :)
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-11 21:15:52+00:00
I tell customers that they should use LTSC for things like virtual desktops. You need stability, such as it not randomly deciding to install a 4 GB game like Minecraft for every user as a “critical update”.

Microsoft joined a meeting and told the customer that they don’t agree with my recommendations because they want to make sure all users get the “latest experiences”.

There’s your problem right there: pushing your own KPIs instead of what’s best for the customers.
by garyrob | 2025-04-11 21:16:03+00:00
As someone said above, "America's arrested rather a large number of people in recent weeks—university students, mostly—for expressing viewpoints on the I/P conflict. The current Administration is claiming, and no one's yet stopped them, that First Amendment rights don't apply to non-citizens such as international students."

America is changing. What was true before isn't necessarily true now, and may get worse, depending on election outcomes.
by fxtentacle | 2025-04-11 21:16:07+00:00
The upside is that this will actually provide lots of research funding to small companies. Think of it like the seed round from a VC, but instead of investing into new companies, they try to strategically invest into existing companies to boost future tax revenue.

It'll probably be very German, meaning overly bureaucratic. But the basic idea of financing R&D in small companies to grow them more competitive seems legit to me.

As an example of what was funded by similar German government grants, you can look at voize, which is (by now) also a YC company: https://en.voize.de/uber-uns

EDIT: Here's some German info on the 1.98 mio € research grant from early 2022 (meaning it was awarded shortly before they joined the W22 YC batch): https://www.interaktive-technologien.de/projekte/pysa
by crote | 2025-04-11 21:16:51+00:00
It's the same with mobile payment. AFAIK there isn't a single bank left in The Netherlands which has its own mobile tap-to-pay app, everyone has switched to Google Wallet.

Good for them that they want to save a few bucks on developers, but why do I have to give my payment info to the devil? It's a third party which has nothing to do with the payment itself, and the fact that some banks used to have their own tap-to-pay apps shows that it clearly isn't a technical requirement.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-11 21:17:10+00:00
There is no "scooping up", the models aren't massive archives of copied art. People either don't understand how these models work or they purposely misrepresent it (or purposely refuse to understand it).

Showing the model an picture doesn't create a copy of that picture in it's "brain". It moves a bunch of vectors around that captures an "essence" of what the image is. The next image shown from a totally different artist with a totally different style may well move around many of those same vectors again. But suffice to say, there is no copy of the picture anywhere inside of it.

This also why these models hallucinate so much, they are not drawing from a bank of copies, they are working off of a fuzzy memory.
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-11 21:17:38+00:00
That's because everything in a car is standardized into 12V, but the EV engine run on some hundreds of Volts. It would be dangerous to feed energy from the engine's battery into the rest of the car.

As a sibling said, that doesn't require that you use a lead battery. The only requirement is that it's insulated from the main one.
by wk_end | 2025-04-11 21:18:32+00:00
Looks better is subjective, but it has its advantages both for actual autocomplete - as soon as I hit the dot key my IDE can tell me the useful operations for the obejct - and also for "mental autocomplete" - I know exactly where to look to find useful operations on the particular object because they're organized "underneath" it in the conceptual hierarchy. In Lisps (or other languages/codebases that aren't structured in a non-OOP-ish way) this is often a pain point for me, especially when I'm first trying to make my way into some code/library.

As a bit of a digression:

The ML languages, as with most things, get this (mostly) right, in that by convention types are encapsulated in modules that know how to operate on them - although I can't help but think there ought to be more than convention enforcing that, at the language level.

There is the problem that it's unclear - if you can Frobnicate a Foo and a Baz together to make a Bar, is that an operation on Foos, on Bazes, or on Bars? Or maybe you want a separate Frobnicator to do it? (Pure) OOP languages force you to make an arbitrary choice, Lisp and co. just kind of shrug, the ML languages let you take your take your pick, for better or worse.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-11 21:18:56+00:00
An interesting counter-example is the Museum of Us in Balboa Park, San Diego. They have on display a Mexican mummy (if memory serves, naturally dessicated by a desert burial) that was smuggled across the border from Mexico to the US. At some point, the museum got in touch with Mexican authorities and agreed to repatriation. However, the museum they've worked with in Mexico doesn't really have use for the exhibit, so it's on indefinite loan to the Museum of Us with full understanding that this is a generous privilege provided by the museum in Mexico and the people of the nation.

... All in all, a quite excellent win-win negotiation to mutually-agreeable conclusion, it seems.
by fergal_reid | 2025-04-11 21:18:56+00:00
Yes we're familiar with the terminology and framing of gofai. Fwiw I read (most of) the 3rd edition of Russell and Norvig in my undergrad days.

However, the point we're trying to make here is at a higher level of abstraction.

Basically most demos of agents you see these days don't prioritize reliability. Even a Copilot use case is quite a bit less demanding than a really frustrated user trying to get a refund or locate a missing order.

I'm not sure putting that in the language of pomdps is going to improve things for the reader, rather than just make us look more well read.

But your feedback is noted!
by herf | 2025-04-11 21:19:18+00:00
This is a really hard problem. Just consider that there are ~150 Muslims for every Jew worldwide. In the USA it's the reverse - 2:1 in favor of Jews, concentrated in particular geographic areas.

Imagine what it means to get ranking right here - if you let just 1% of the international population into the USA ranking system, you have a majority in favor of Palestine, and of course these ideas will spread in communities without a lot of people who can represent Jewish history. It's clear to me why this happens, but fixing in an algorithmic but fair way is also extremely difficult.
by qsort | 2025-04-11 21:19:20+00:00
> This has nothing to do with e and is satified by 2^x or any a^x, so this wouldn't work for introducing e in particular.

You need to impose f'(0) = 1. (If you want to be really technical, also at least some regularity condition, I'll be honest, I don't remember what's the minimal one, let's say continuity)

> Same for this

I did say up to a constant.
by itfourall | 2025-04-11 21:19:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been building an open-source project called NetStruct – a browser-based tool for planning and visualizing network infrastructure. It lets you drag and drop network devices onto a canvas, connect them, manage multiple pages (projects), and store everything locally in JSON.

A recent bug caused all device icons to disappear – that’s now fixed and everything should display correctly again!

Features:

Multi-page support with tab navigation

Drag & drop devices like routers, switches, firewalls

Device categories with image previews

Right-click context menus per device

LeaderLine-based connections with auto-load

Online/offline status highlighting (green/red border)

JSON-based save/load system

Fully customizable and open-source

Would love your feedback, bug reports, or contributions.

Live demo / GitHub: [insert your link here] Tech stack: PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, LeaderLine.js

Thanks from the Austrian Alps – Creator of NetStruct
by MPSFounder | 2025-04-11 21:19:43+00:00
I am not a bot. In fact I welcome ideas to take them down. I am just not owned by Israel and do not disseminate their propaganda, and I frankly reject their influence on our politics. I see them as enemies of the United States, because their morals are very much not aligned with ours as far as I am concerned. Your other comments opposing blocking Israel tells me you are Israeli. I understand you could be victim of their propaganda too (visit the Ghaza strip. I am sure the IDF will provide you protection. Or fly a drone over it to see the famine Israel is responsible for). I would urge you to oppose your gov interfering in American politics. We do not take lightly to foreign interference :)
by timewizard | 2025-04-11 21:19:50+00:00
> and have seen how they gain traffic to that site.

And how has that been?

> but I'm genuinely curious how this would be an improvement over the current situation where SSA publishes to their various web sites.

I didn't claim it would be an improvement. I claimed that it wouldn't actually make much difference. In particular invoking the "age" of the audience and imputing an inability to read anything other than these blogs is a red herring.

> Perhaps you can explain why they should post stuff to X instead of either the CMS tied to the www site or the blog?

So that they can downsize the communication staff from 700 people down to 50.

> After all "Literally anyone can copy that to whatever platform they want" so putting pushing things like that to various social media platforms has already been going on for a while.

Precisely. So why is defending the previous mechanism so important? Is the goal to inform the public or to have a nice CMS with tons of blogs in it? It's a nice feather in your cap but as a tax payer you can understand questioning it's ultimate value, can you not?

> What advantage are you seeing to have them switch from their current CMSs to x?

Less staff. It's hard for me to understand why 700 people were needed to maintain a blog that gets updated once a week.

If you want to be concerned with something you should have really paid more attention to how they're changing phone support and engaging in "anti-fraud" there. I think the lede has been intentionally buried with this outrage bait. These are _press releases_. It's the smallest part of the change and one that's likely to have minimal impact to outcomes.
by kube-system | 2025-04-11 21:20:05+00:00
Probably under several laws. But I know one: Government officials (of which, Musk is now one) cannot block or limit speech they agree with, particularly when petitioning the government, which is explicitly protected under the 1st amendment.

https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/government-use-of-so...

If Musk wants to run an official government communication channel, he will have to follow the laws that apply to communication with the government, of which there are many.
by rrr_oh_man | 2025-04-11 21:20:26+00:00
The problem is not the bureaucracy.

Nobody's stopping a local mid-market manufacturer from automating workflows. Or hindering a utility company from offering a better service process.

The problem is corporate leadership.

German companies tend to be run by people who are inflexible, uninspired, and cheap. Maybe it's in the culture. Compare this to Austria, where there's a cultural flair for the dramatic (and therefore an eagerness to stand out, even if it's weird) or Switzerland where enterprises, public or private, are not afraid to place big bets.
by dtkav | 2025-04-11 21:20:52+00:00
Thanks - it still feels hidden under the heading "Free or paid?".. what an unnecessarily confusing heading.

IMO you should add it to the top of the page. You don't need to explain to people why you charge money. Don't be afraid to state your offering - you are running a business.

I get that you want to charge different people different amounts of money, but maybe test whether they are actually turned off my $2/month, or if they still make it far enough through the funnel to get whatever regional discount helps them over the line.

A good comp might be Tessie [0] -- They are loved by users even though the Tesla app can do a lot of the same things for free.

[0] https://tessie.com/pricing
by ein0p | 2025-04-11 21:21:04+00:00
I don't even think it's the cost. The actual formerly labor-intensive work is mostly done by robots now (save for e.g. the garment industry which is still only very partially automated). It's just that anything in the physical world takes time and effort. As software engineers we're used to quick iteration cycles in everything. It might not seem to you that they are "quick", but compared to the physical world they are. I was first exposed to this when I worked for a "mostly hardware" company that also designs chips. They were going to introduce some features into the chips that I needed on the software side, and when asked about the timeline they said "3-4 years". Not a typo. That's how it is in hardware. I have no reason to believe that the timelines are substantially shorter in large scale high tech manufacturing - it's just the nature of the thing. You fuck something up, you can't just patch it, you have to re-do it, and that takes time and $$$.

Be all of that as it may, we still _have_ to revitalize the "real" segment of our industry, no matter the cost.
by maujun | 2025-04-11 21:21:12+00:00
This may be one reason employees have different titles. The other reason I can think of is why owners aren't usually called employees.

Some believe we eliminated the need for this school of thought through the DevOps revolution of the 2010s. Dev and Ops became one, married in the form of one man with one job in one company in one world. That was when history and current became one, and the many problems became zero.
by moffkalast | 2025-04-11 21:21:27+00:00
The horrible boilerplate and complexity is why people don't use it. Getting even simple usage examples seems to be a tall order for some use cases and LLMs are hopeless in trying to help with it.

P2P connections are also often blocked by ISPs for whatever reason, making it impossible to use without a fallback TURN server which defeats the entire purpose of the thing if you wanted to do scalable multiplayer without the server infrastructure. You're left sending over the whole stream with double the latency and have to eat all the bandwidth.
by maeil | 2025-04-11 21:21:35+00:00
And this is exactly this what has got us here. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You know the Larry Ellison lawnmower one, right? That's what you're doing with the GOP, and really, with voters. Actions have consequences. Both in 2016, and 2024, if the Dems wanted to win, they could've. If they wanted to stop Trump, they could've. They didn't. They had the power and intelligence to do so. Whether people vote or not vote is a consequence of the last 20 years of history. It's a few billion parameter model. Given the parameters, the outcome is set. The Dems for decades provided inputs to these parameters that were always going to lead to this outcome.

For what it's worth, I was being a bit provocative. As it's not the Dems who got us Trump - it's the Dems and the Reps who got us Trump.
by sunshine-o | 2025-04-11 21:21:37+00:00
> A new ministry for research, technology, and aerospace will be formed, and the education portfolio will be taken over by the current ministry for family, seniors, women, and youth.

So I guess Germany is one of those countries which reorganize their government on a brainstorming board by just throwing up concepts. And then it takes years for all the bureaucracy to move around and get back to work.

> Germany needs a new alignment of defense policy and research policy, but “we do not yet know how to do this,”

I learned in middle school that you were once really good at it. There is also a consensus it got quickly out of control and destroyed Europe.

All of this sound more like an Onion or Babylon Bee piece...
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2025-04-11 21:21:41+00:00
You're claiming this, but average German internet speed has but recently surpassed Latvia's, easily beats Paraguay and the Philippines and is closing in on Montenegro and Barbados.

The recent rapid improvements even diminished Romania's lead to less than 250%.

Of course this is only up to the Telekom speedtest server, beyond that nearly all of Germany's 50-100Tbps get funneled through 362Gbps of interconnections onto the open internet.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-11 21:21:45+00:00
> People either don't understand how these models work or they purposely misrepresent it (or purposely refuse to understand it).

Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a) not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and legislators around the world.

FWIW, I agree with your perspective on training, but I also accept that artists have legitimate moral grounds to complain and try to fight it - so I don't really like to argue about this with them; my pet peeve is on the LLM side of things, where the loudest arguments come from people who are envious and feel entitled, even though they have no personal stake in this.
by coderholic | 2025-04-11 21:21:49+00:00
IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote (Anywhere) | Fulltime / Partime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles over 100 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used. We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of over 40 people, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, TransUnion, DataDog, DemandBase, and many more.

- Data Engineer - https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/careers/68?source=aWQ9Mjg%3D

> We're looking to add an awesome data engineer to our data team. You'll work on improving our data pipelines, creating new data sets, optimizing queries, and helping us cement our position as an industry leader.

> You should be a SQL expert, and familiar with Google BigQuery, including performance and cost optimization.

> You should also be familiar with geospatial queries and data (eg. geometries, geohash, h3, OSM etc).

We're always on the look out to strong software or data engineers with an internet measuremenet / analysis background to join our team too. Any questions about the roles or IPinfo feel free to reach out to me directly at ben@ipinfo.io
by timewizard | 2025-04-11 21:22:05+00:00
How does this implicates broadcast press releases?

I can see posts. You seem to have agreed to this.

Then you say there are additional features which are not available. I'm asking how those additional features are relevant to the problem? They don't seem relevant to the problem.

You also can't send DMs when logged in. Does this impact press releases from the SSA in some way? I get that it's not _fully featured_ but is that actually required for this _particular use case_?

Open incognito mode and go here: https://x.com/socialsecurity?lang=en

What exactly is not working for you?
by tristor | 2025-04-11 21:23:01+00:00
> It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched.

This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.

> It could handle more tabs.

This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.

> It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser.

This is definitely a win for Chrome and something we eventually saw Firefox adopt, but many many years later.

> Memory usage was lower.

This was a combination of factors, but heavily related to the improved JS performance due to V8. A big piece was also that XUL was a pig.

Thanks for pointing out some specific things, but while they affect specific perceptions, underneath the covers most of this had to do with the combination of improved JS performance in Chrome + a heavy reliance on JS for web.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-04-11 21:23:21+00:00
Traditional roguelike is the term I see on Reddit and Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Traditional+Roguelike

Traditional roguelikes seem cool in theory, but I like co-op for most of my PvE content, and like most turn-based games, no co-op to be had there.
by nixpulvis | 2025-04-11 21:23:22+00:00
It's worth having a webmaster for public organizations.

If it's too hard to manage a simple website that serves the needs that X is filling, we need to address it in the web developer community. You shouldn't need a team of React experts to tell people it's a snow day, or post updates to changing SSA policy.

X is a commercial product which can become inaccessible based on login status, no? Do we really expect people to have to log in to view public information.