MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IshKebab | 2025-04-22 20:34:40+00:00
Is it really necessary to restate the advantages of rewriting in Rust in every such project? Compared to Ruby programs Rust programs are faster, more robust, more maintainable, and easier to install. That's pretty much the same for any Rust rewrite (e.g. uv).

It would be interesting to know if there are other goals though, e.g. UX improvements.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-22 20:35:12+00:00
> As you say you're directing a huge volume of traffic so it makes no difference exactly when a user downloads a byte. It all gets smeared out.

Homebrew's traffic pattern is not a uniform distribution. Package updates go out, and users download those packages in structured ways: there are spikes for MDM-managed Homebrew installations, spikes for cronjobs and CI/CD systems, spikes at 9AM on different coasts when developers sign into their machines, etc.

(How much this matters is also not uniform: it matters somewhat less for GitHub Packages - they should have a hefty CDN - and it matters somewhat more for Casks, which tend to be large DMGs hosted on individual servers.)
by ssl-3 | 2025-04-22 20:35:35+00:00
Ye olde XT I had topped out with 640KB of RAM, a 20 megabyte and 15 megabyte MFM drives (ST-225, ST-419), two power supplies (the big full-height 15-meg drive needed extra time to spin up), one 16550 serial port card, no mouse, a SoundBlaster 1.5, a clock card, and a 2 megabyte EMS expansion card (with 72 individual DIP chips on it)....with a 10MHz 8088.

Weird times.

Eventually, someone donated a board with an AMD 386SX-33, which I immediately overclocked to 40MHz. Things became a lot different after that.
by felixnm | 2025-04-22 20:35:39+00:00
I've only seen this at one place - a Japanese restaurant in Boulder, CO. Each table has a small red button with a weighted base, right next to the soy sauce and cube of extra gari.

You press the button, a server appears a few seconds later. Need to order, press the button. Need water, press the button. Need the check, press the button. Need for them to pick up credit card, press the button. I love it; it's like a flight attendant call button and I never have to wait for anything.
by biomcgary | 2025-04-22 20:35:49+00:00
I was paid to get a PhD in Biology, albeit just enough to live on. Most people in PhD programs are, either through being a TA (teacher's assistant) or RA (research assistant). The real financial cost is the opportunity cost of 5-6 years of your life.

Whether or not broad support for training scientists holds up during and after the current administration remains to be seen.
by tharne | 2025-04-22 20:36:25+00:00
> Eh. I'd argue while some of the objects have improved - I'm not sure my life has improved because of them.

This is exactly right. So many "improvements" are cool or interesting, but either provide no meaningful improvement to one's life (e.g. streaming vs. VHS) or actually detract from our lives on balance, e.g. smartphones.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-04-22 20:37:31+00:00
A weather site that shows yesterday's weather: https://weather.bingo/901846663/41061/threeday/f

A (Windows-only) very fast disk-space analysis tool. https://github.com/jasonthorsness/jt-canhasfreespace

both I think I am the only user, but both I keep using :P
by daxfohl | 2025-04-22 20:38:06+00:00
Here's a summary of my layman's understanding, which could be wrong.

To my understanding there's nothing special about it except once you get to quantum field theory, and specifically spin-2 particles, which are the ones that hypothetically carry gravity (i.e. gravitons). (They're hypothetically gravitons because mathematically they result in conservation of the "stress-energy tensor", which is the same thing that Einstein's field equations give. And this isn't coincidence; it's because both are second-order field theories preserving Lorentz transforms aka special relativity). But notably if you only get through non-relativistic quantum mechanics, there's nothing special that happens at Planck length.

Planck length becomes special in QFT because at Planck length, the feedback (my force on you affects your force on me affects my force on you etc) of the quantum field mathematically explodes in something called "UV divergence". Notably, this also happens for other force carriers, not just gravitons, but a mathematical trick called Renormalization fixes that. Renormalization is based on shady techniques like assuming the sum of all whole numbers is -1/12. (IIUC this is a fairly straightforward pure mathematical result from complex analysis, required to ensure consistency of Fourier transforms for infinite sequences, known as analytic continuation / Riemann zeta function. Of course it makes no sense that nature should behave that way, but one day some physicists thought "let's try this weird math" and it matched experiments). However that technique only works for lower-spin fields (E&M, weak, strong) because the feedback is linear, hence sum(1+2+3+...). But in spin-2 fields the feedback is (quadratic? exponential?), and the same trick still gives an infinite result.

Ultimately one could say this is the only thing standing in the way of a complete theory of quantum gravity. If we could get the math for gravitons not to blow up at tiny scales, we'd be done (experimental verification notwithstanding). String theory is one attempt: "Let's say there are no point particles, only strings, and this problem goes away". Other approaches exist too. But ultimately right now, there's no way to say for sure whether sub-Planck exists, doesn't exist, exists in some ways but not in others, or whether all of physics is wrong and we have to start over.

A quick addendum: Planck energy is approximately the chemical energy in a tank of gas. Planck mass is about that of an amoeba (so an antimatter bomb made out of an amoeba would explode like a tank of gas (Hiroshima was 0.6 grams of mass), a photon with that energy would have a Planck-length wavelength, and an amoeba-mass black hole is Planck-length). Given there's nothing overly special about Planck energy or mass, my money is on there being nothing special about Planck length either.

Hopefully at least some of the above is correct.
by kccqzy | 2025-04-22 20:38:13+00:00
A lot of Python's complexity like descriptors and metaclasses and the so-called cooperative multiple inheritance come from an era where object orientation is gospel and yet people keep finding limitations to what can be accomplished in an OO paradigm and therefore they patch up the language to support ever more complicated use cases.

I have a feeling that if metaclasses and descriptors were to be proposed today it would be laughed out of the PEP process completely.
by pmags | 2025-04-22 20:38:25+00:00
This is a nice commentary on a paper that examines the process of pig domestication during the early neolithic period, as human populations in Europe shifted from hunter-gatherer focused societies to farming.

The paper referenced:

J.A.M. Erven, V. Mattiangeli, M. Dreshaj, V.E. Mullin, C. Rossi, K.G. Daly, I. Jackson, M. Parker Pearson, D.G. Bradley, L.A.F. Frantz, O. Madsen, D. Raemaekers, & C. Çakirlar,

Archaeogenomic insights into commensalism and regional variation in pig management in Neolithic northwest Europe, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (12) e2410235122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2410235122 (2025).
by hackingonempty | 2025-04-22 20:38:27+00:00
I think you are misinformed as BitTorrent, for instance, is much more reliable than https alone. The reward scheme is built in already: the client uploads while it's downloading and installing and prioritizes the clients it is downloading from. At worst, the reliability and performance are the same as the web seed.

Generating additional metadata at bottle build time doesn't appear to be much of a technical challenge either.
by mrob | 2025-04-22 20:38:33+00:00
I'm confident that microfiber cloths are responsible for 0% (rounded to the nearest whole percentage) of oceanic microplastics. But it's possible that all clothing and fabrics combined are responsible for a significant fraction of microplastic pollution. If this is the case, then the government should do its duty in regulating externalities and mandate exhaust filters in washing machines.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-22 20:38:39+00:00
It took me a few days to become a smoker, and a few weeks to get to the point of not wanting to smoke again (some decades later).

It took me a week or so to start having a healthier breakfast and it become part of my routine, and I've been trying to have healthier lunches for years now (and still regularly fail, normally because at lunchtimes I'm tired, stressed and yearning for comfort foods like sandwiches and snack bars).

I think anyone who believed exactly 21 days was the magic number for all habits, for all people, was grossly naive.

But what I do find is that after 21 days it's no longer novel, it's just what you do, if somebody asks you what you do about X, you no longer say "I'm trying this new thing around X, and...", you tell them your new habit. Identifying that habit as part of who you are is key to it being sticky. For some people, and for some habits, that might be true after a week, or it might take a year, but it's an important step, and if you want that habit to stick you should get to it as fast as you can.
by peterhadlaw | 2025-04-22 20:39:01+00:00
To find someone minding their own business in the middle of nature/nowhere and then harass them out of said place is oppressive. I'm opposed to said authority. Just leave people alone. Yes I understand the tragedy of the commons and whatever, I don't think a dude chilling and minding his own business/liberty is _that_.

So I'm arguing to leave people more alone, which is more anti-authority.
by ForceBru | 2025-04-22 20:39:05+00:00
The article specifically points out that these polynomials only work well on specific intervals (emphasis copied from the article):

"The second source of their bad reputation is misunderstanding of Weierstrass’ approximation theorem. It’s usually cited as “polynomials can approximate arbitrary continuous functions”. But that’s not entrely true. They can approximate arbitrary continuous functions in an interval. This means that when using polynomial features, the data must be normalized to lie in an interval. It can be done using min-max scaling, computing empirical quantiles, or passing the feature through a sigmoid. But we should avoid the use of polynomials on raw un-normalized features."

As I understand it, one of the main ideas of this series of posts is that normalizing features to very specific intervals is important when fitting polynomials. I don't think this "went completely uncommented".
by QuercusMax | 2025-04-22 20:39:14+00:00
As an experienced homebrewer, I don't think knowing about making beer makes it any clearer to me. Why do I need to install Docker from a Cask? Oh, it's because on Mac, a Cask is actually a Mac package (DMG or PKG or something). It's just arbitrary beer-flavored terminology.

No different than the Windows registry, which apparently uses a honeybee / hive metaphor because some Windows dev hated bees and their teammates liked trolling them.
by harmmonica | 2025-04-22 20:39:17+00:00
I was eager to see how the other models performed vs Model Y (thanks for breaking that out!). There has been quite a lot of rationalizing that any softness in Tesla's vehicle sales would be the result of the Model Y redesign. I think we now know that's not true or at least only minimally true based on the numbers you cite.

For that reason I think this being a canary is not quite accurate because there's literally no other company with as much self-inflicted brand damage. What will be interesting to see is the delta between Tesla's poor performance and the other mega caps because you'll able to somewhat infer how much of the damage to Tesla is due to the brand/Elon issues (i.e., if Tesla is down 20% on revenue/earnings and the others are down less, on average, then that gap could be a backhand way to quantify the brand damage).

Of course all that said there is quite a significant amount of brand damage to go around for every well-known American company at the moment due to guilt by association. International sales will be very interesting to see with Apple, imo, likely being the most high-profile casualty of "don't buy US" (other than Tesla, I mean).

edit: added qualification about Tesla at very end
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-22 20:39:30+00:00
Just go read the original announcements of homebrew. They expend at length about how Macport was wrong for shipping its own tool chain and homebrew was somehow superior for reusing the one shipped with MacOS (guess how it turned out). The fact that most packages completely broke if installed outside of /usr/local (itself a non sensical default) was just cherry on the cake. And let’s not talk about how everything broke if you didn’t update often enough so much so that there somehow is a command to try to bring things back to sanity.

Homebrew is by far the worst package manager I have ever used. I’m still sour it somehow dragged away packagers from solutions which were better in every way by being promoted as the "default" solution.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-22 20:39:38+00:00
What is "this way"? I didn't see anything really shocking here. PIP workers and those fired are no longer eligible for internal transfer or rehire within 2 years.

Makes sense at face value, lots of fish in the sea and all that.

AI conversational training tools make sense too. Many managers are too conflict adverse to even give negative feedback, let alone confront people for not doing their job.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-04-22 20:39:52+00:00
that sounds nice and neat to say, but it doesn't really bear weight when you insert that into the world we actually live in. who is "we" in this? i'm not DuPont dumping chemicals in a river. i'm not mining for rare earth minerals. i'm not nestle trying to privatize water. so i'm not that "we".
by cryptonector | 2025-04-22 20:39:54+00:00
> The line of transmission is so long and convoluted that there are literally more than a half dozen different people who could have plausibly made the story up.

Ditto for The Iliad and The Odysee, yet Troy existed. That's the thing about oral traditions. They are like a telephone game where the story changes a bit with each retelling, so they are not trustworthy, but societies that engaged in epic storytelling did try to keep true to them word-for-word, and that's why some of them are epic poems: to help memorize them. So it's entirely possible that one of the people involved in this story just made it up, but it's also as likely that it was a story they passed down as well as they could, and possibly actually true.

This is not strong evidence for Atlantis being made up. Neither is the fact that Plato made up things like the allegory of the cave: we generally know when he's doing that.

The fact is that we can't find any actual evidence of Atlantis anywhere other than in tenuous ancient writings. A lot like it was for Troy. But since Atlantis supposedly goes back much longer, we might never find any of it, and so it might as well be made up, and that is a safe conclusion.

Those who say it existed nowadays tend to believe that it was in the "eye of the Sahara", in present day Mauritius, and was destroyed in a flood related to an impact event on the North American ice sheet around 11,900 years ago that caused the Younger-Dryas. That idea has the unfortunate / convenient feature that there is literally nothing there and nothing will ever be found there given the scale of the supposed cataclysm. There are huge debris fields off the coast of Western Africa where one could -presumably- find bits of Atlantis, though good luck finding anything obviously man-made in those debris fields, let alone anything that would be highly suggestive of Atlantis. If that theory is true then we'll never prove that Atlantis existed by finding it.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-22 20:40:08+00:00
Well, just to play the devil's advocate a bit, this is definitely a crazy idea but it might have some logic to it:

1) taxing consumptions instead of income has the advantage of being much harder to evade. It puts an end to tricks like living off loans or even simply detracting expenses- you cannot detract anything if you're not taxed at all;

2) only taxing imported goods means that anything that benefits the local economy can be purchased tax-free; while imports from abroad become, say, twice as expensive as before. However, you also have a much higher disposable income and, at least at the beginning, no other option.

So the gist of it would be: we levy the same amount of money as before by taxing exclusively consumptions, and we exempt from taxation all domestically produced goods because it's still money reinvested in the economy.
by blueyes | 2025-04-22 20:40:29+00:00
B.J. Fogg makes this point in his book Tiny Habits. And his point *is* that you can form a habit in much less than 21 days, let alone 66.

This whole question revolves around the effort/reward ratio of a behavior. When people talk about ~21 days, they're talking about doing a hard thing until it's second nature and seems easy.

But there are other ways to make something seem easy, and there is another component in the ratio: reward. That is, even if effort stays the same, you can wire a habit by making the behavior more rewarding. (This is why people are able to get addicted to a substance after one dose -- because they can't forget the state they entered ... and it was so easy to get there.)

So the takeaway here is the you can wire habits by decreasing the amount of effort to do something that you think is good for you -- eg if you want to hydrate more, place a glass near the sink so you drink water when you get out of bed in the morning -- *and* by increasing the reward. The whole trick is getting the ratio right.

Cliche Silicon Valley example. I did an ice plunge, and it gave me a day long plunger's high. I didn't need to plunge for 21 days to get the habit. I started doing it 3 times a week after that, because I knew what I had to do to feel good.

This actually gets to something Huberman calls "duration-path-outcome". Getting clarity on what you have to do (path); how long it will take (duration); and what the payoff is (outcome), can do wonders for motivation. Confusion kills action (and for that matter, all deals, since habits are just deals we make with ourselves). If you can get clarity, reduce the effort, and increase the amount of reward and your confidence in it, I think you can get to new habits really quickly.

Fwiw, I wrote a little bit about forming habits here: https://vonnik.substack.com/p/state-changes-work-and-presenc...
by apavlo | 2025-04-22 20:40:49+00:00
> It's quite amazing how a db like this shows that all of those row-based dbs are doing something wrong

They're not "doing something wrong". They are designed differently for different target workloads.

Row-based -> OLTP -> "Fetch the entire records from order table where user_id = XYZ"

Column-based -> OLAP -> "Compute the total amount of orders from the order table grouped by month/year"
by masswerk | 2025-04-22 20:41:02+00:00
Please, see "No – Atlantis Has Not Been Discovered in North Africa" by Steven Novella (2018):

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/no-atlantis-has-not-been...

BTW, there's still the problem of claiming that (a) Plato's account is a true and faithful transcript of an actual conversation, and that (b) all the various accounts reproduced in this rather complex game of telephone are faithful, as well. If, on the other hand, we conceded that neither the conversation nor the various narrator(s) were real, but rather a figure of speech and and a rhetorical vehicle, it's kind of difficult to claim at the same time unconditional veracity for the narrative conveyed by this. Maybe, the mode of introduction and framing already gives it away?

(Moreover, there was no broader tradition before this, it just popped up with the dialogs. So it should be difficult to claim that Plato just stated the obvious in another context. How comes that this knowledge should have come down to Plato exclusively, by this complex line of famous men, via a complex chain of witnesses, without any of them having been attributed for anything alike before or after this?)
by fakedang | 2025-04-22 20:41:11+00:00
Serious business is when you need to maintain uptime and stability. Not just me, but a lot of folks on the Supabase reddit have complained often about the insane downtimes that we've experienced at times with the platform. I would 100% use it for prototypes and MVPs, but for production? Neither me nor a lot of others would touch it with a pole, even though I'm sure your experience might be different.
by devnen | 2025-04-22 20:41:19+00:00
This is really impressive work and the dialogue quality is fantastic.

For anyone wanting a quick way to spin this up locally with a web UI and API access, I put together a FastAPI server wrapper around the model: https://github.com/devnen/Dia-TTS-Server

The setup is just a standard pip install -r requirements.txt (works on Linux/Windows). It pulls the model from HF automatically – defaulting to the faster BF16 safetensors (ttj/dia-1.6b-safetensors), but that's configurable in the .env. You get an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint (/v1/audio/speech) for easy integration, plus a custom one (/tts) to control all the Dia parameters. The web UI gives you a simple way to type text, adjust sliders, and test voice cloning. It'll use your CUDA GPU if you have one configured, otherwise, it runs on the CPU.

Might be a useful starting point or testing tool for someone. Feedback is welcome!
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-22 20:42:10+00:00
Most of the Cascades have no quota permits, you just need a basic pass that anyone can buy. The quota permits are for exceedingly popular areas like the Enchantments mountain range, and even then usually only for overnight camping.

I’ve backpacked into several parts of the Cascades without a special permit, because none were required, and never been hassled by a ranger. Most of it is National Forest; more restrictions than BLM land but you are generally allowed to camp as long as you follow the local rules.
by m463 | 2025-04-22 20:42:38+00:00
Exact opposite experience. EVs are not maintenance-free, but gas cars require lots more hands-on over time, especially getting out of the warranty period.

I don't get the appeal of hybrids - twice as much complexity seems like the combining the problems/maintenance of an EV added to a gas car.

I will say I had a non-tesla EV with a small battery and it was not comparable to a tesla. Tesla puts in enough battery to preclude charging most of the time. The supercharger network makes the remaining charging easy enough for everyone in the family to do it without being an engineer.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-22 20:44:31+00:00
The quote has absolutely nothing to do with my point.

The scaling to an interval in the quote is about formal mathematical reasons,in particular that polynomials do not approximate continuous functions globally. This is totally unrelated to numerics.

The issue is that in particular the interval 0 to 1 has to be chosen, as otherwise the numerics totally fall apart. The message of the article is that high degree polynomials pose no danger, but that is wrong. All the examples in the article only work because of a specific choice of interval. All the major numerical issues are totally ignored, which would immediately invalid the core thesis of the article. If you calculate 10^100 in 64 bit floating point you will run into trouble. The article pretends that will not be the case.
by azinman2 | 2025-04-22 20:44:47+00:00
“ Sapphire is a next‑generation, Rust‑powered package manager inspired by Homebrew”

Doesn’t tell me how it differs. What makes this next generation? Just the programming language?

If it’s just a for fun personal project that no one else is supposed to use, I’m not sure why it’s on HN.