MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qsort | 2025-04-08 18:46:44+00:00
I'm not a researcher, so start with the default assumption that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I had the same impression when studying those topics, asymptotic analysis is kind of broken.

For example, we assume that arbitrary arithmetic takes constant time. Good. Except that if you take that seriously, then P=PSPACE. So we might say that bit operations on fixed registers are constant time. But nobody does that because then arithmetic is O(lg n) and it's too much trouble to keep track of everything (and if you do, then hashtables aren't O(1) any longer!) If we are more sophisticated we might take a transidchotomous model, but that's really weird and we have results like sorting in less than n lg n time. Not to mention that the mathematical foundations get a bit shaky with more than one variable.

I think the hard problem underneath is that it's hard to define a computational model that (a) can be reasoned about and isn't extremely weird, (b) has solid mathematical foundations, (c) is reasonably predictive of real world performance, and (d) is not linked to a specific architecture. Asymptotic analysis is kind of a compromise. It can be formulated in very elementary terms, it makes mathematical sense and if you plot the performance of a sorting algorithm on a chart it kind of looks like the graph of n log n if you squint a bit.

Knuth does something similar to what you're suggesting IIRC, albeit without the analytic combinatorics machinery. For some programs he derives a precise expression as a function of the size of input that describes how many operations of each kind the underlying machine will perform. In numerical analysis there is a similar concept, e.g. evaluating a polynomial with Horner has the same asymptotic complexity as the naive method, but we say it's better because it takes exactly the optimal amount of floating point operations (and, in practice, because it uses fused multiply-adds, but that's another story...)

A research program along those lines would be certainly fascinating, but the combination of "needs to be reasonably predictive" and "needs to be portable" is a tough nut to crack.
by zahlman | 2025-04-08 18:47:13+00:00
Sure. But that population estimate is only something like 25% higher than today's population; the per capita decline with improvements in technology could be much more dramatic than that. Plus, the remaining increase in population is likely to be biased towards poorer parts of the world where per capita consumption is already lower. Parts of the world that haven't had a fossil-fueled industrial revolution by now shouldn't ever be expected to - they'll be able to leap-frog over those technologies.
by smjburton | 2025-04-08 18:47:47+00:00
I was just looking into charting libraries for React/React Native, and Apache ECharts seems like a great contender for cross-platform data visualization. The libraries that I came across - react-echarts (https://github.com/hugocxl/react-echarts) and react-native-echarts (https://github.com/wuba/react-native-echarts) - both seem to be actively developed, and the fact that it's under Apache is a huge plus for future development prospects and maintenance of the project.
by johnmaguire | 2025-04-08 18:47:59+00:00
I think the parent commenter used "understood" to mean "recognized."

That said, I don't really understand the supposed misunderstanding you point out. It seems that dang argues that "the exchange was pleasant and successful." I've never seen someone claim otherwise.

Rather, I've seen it used as an example of how technical users can fail to recognize the complexity inherent in their workflows, and therefore may also fail to see the real-world business value in creating (and selling) simpler interfaces. See also a SMOP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_matter_of_programming
by Jimmc414 | 2025-04-08 18:48:00+00:00
The core problem is that in 10 non-expansion states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming) young adults with chronic health conditions face a health insurance coverage gap from ages 19-26. At 19, they lose pediatric Medicaid coverage, yet many work entry-level jobs without benefits, earn too much for traditional Medicaid but too little for private insurance. Even the ACA provision allowing young adults to stay on parents' insurance until 26 only helps those whose parents have employer coverage.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-08 18:48:29+00:00
Yeah, they’re bombing kids. Even if it’s legally a military target, you’re not going to win hearts and minds bombing kids. My point is these protests seem to be more about the protesters doing their thing than trying to think about being effective. They’re voicing frustration, not agitating support. That’s fair. But it’s important to see it clearly for what it is, especially if someone wants to do something that’s more than performative.
by peterlk | 2025-04-08 18:48:34+00:00
Yes; you will burn through all the capital you raise in ~18 months. It is _extremely_ difficult to efficiently allocate large raises (100M+) in 18 months. In fact, I’m developing a pet thesis that no single human or business can efficiently allocate more than $100M. This would imply that any time a single raise is more than 100M, the investors always would have had a better return by splitting it into chunks of 100M or less. It’s not a _good_ thesis yet, just one I’m performing thought experiments with
by sanderjd | 2025-04-08 18:49:11+00:00
No, the alternative I suggest is "can't agents figure out how to use existing kinds of APIs if they are documented well?". I think the answer is that in the current state of the art, it's very useful to give them a nudge to help them along.

But I feel like eventually I should be able to publish an API spec or a well documented interface / protocol / whatever my programming language calls it, and an agent should be able to grok that and use it without a separate protocol.
by undulation | 2025-04-08 18:49:15+00:00
I was in a somewhat relatable situation around 10 years ago after I'd finished a coding bootcamp right after graduating college. I didn't major in computer science and bootcamps were at the time already viewed with skepticism among most tech companies, but I did have a degree from a top 10 US university. I thought that meant I would be able land an engineering job, even if it was a bad one.

I was in for a horribly rude awakening. I spent 4 months applying for jobs non-stop through linkedin and company career pages and didn't receive a single response back. Finally, when I was nearly ready to give up and move back to my parents' house, I went on my university's alumni directory and searched for people in the Bay Area working in eng leadership at tech companies. I emailed the first person I found and explained that I was really struggling to get interviews and would be willing to take an internship or work for free if it meant I could get some experience on my resume. I got a response within the day. The guy told me that, while the roles listed on his company's website were filled, his wife was worked in engineering recruiting. He passed my resume along to her and within a day I had 3-4 companies asking for an interview. In the end, I got one final round interview and landed the job. Looking back, if it weren't for that email I likely would have given up and pursued another career path.

In short, my only advice is: completely stop applying to open job listings on linkedin or on a company's career page. Those jobs literally receive thousands of applications and, additionally, there is often a recruiter representing the company who is directly reaching out to the most desirable candidates for that position. There is nothing but disappointment that comes from applying to those jobs and, given we're in a very uncertain economic environment, doing so will only discourage you.

Instead, try to find anyone working in the industry you're targeting with whom you have some loose connection and send them an email. I know that sounds scary and stupid, but you would be surprised at how eager most people are to help others. At the end of the day, most people don't derive that much personal satisfaction from their work, but they do get a lot of satisfaction from helping other people.

Does MIT have an alumni directory where you can search for alumni contact info by industry and location? Are you in a fraternity or any social club that might have older MIT alumni that you could get in touch with? Try sending 2 or 3 people an email and see what happens.
by jstrieb | 2025-04-08 18:49:23+00:00
Generating functions are definitely strange and unintuitive, but they can be really helpful for combinatorics.

The introduction to generating functions in this well known text on the subject (at the beginning of Chapter 1) might be more helpful than the Wikipedia article linked in the original post:

https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/gfology2.pdf

From that text:

> Although giving a simple formula for the members of the sequence may be out of the question, we might be able to give a simple formula for the sum of a power series, whose coefficients are the sequence that we’re looking for.
by nickthegreek | 2025-04-08 18:50:21+00:00
Same. When my cell has an ip6 ip, I can’t get dns to resolve on my systems at home. I can still access everything by ip4 ip though. I haven’t had time to find a solution yet. I’m still trying to figure out if it’s nginx, pi-hole, router, or Tailscale config related… probably a combination.
by teslabox | 2025-04-08 18:50:23+00:00
Saccharin was the first artificial sweetener, discovered in 1879. It was popular in the early 20th century, and is available today as Sweet'n'Low or "the pink packet" (generics). The chemical has an advocacy group: https://saccharin.org/ - the latest news is that Canadians can now use saccharin too (2016). Walmart and Amazon have boxes of bulk sweet'n'low for baking/etc.

~4 weeks ago I reposted a submission about Aspartame: Aspartame aggravates atherosclerosis through insulin-triggered inflammation (sciencedirect.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313574

My comment tried to put saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame potassium and sucralose into context. Aspartame is not heat stable, so it's often combined with acesulfame-K. The diet soda industry standardized on aspartame in the 1980's because saccharin has a metallic aftertaste. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43313575

I think saccharin is probably the safest of all the artificial sweeteners. Stevia and monk fruit extracts (herbal sweeteners) are probably okay too, as long as you're not allergic to them.

If you want to try saccharin-sweetened beverages, I've noticed that zero sugar tonic waters at my local grocery store (brand name and generic) use saccharin.
by keybored | 2025-04-08 18:51:24+00:00
> Numerous different documentaries and individual travel videos. Like all things there is a bias but I am also not sure what your point is? Are you suggesting North Koreans are not subject to massive amounts of propaganda and indoctrination into this idea of the supreme leader?

North Korea is famously one of the most closed-off countries in the world. Its Western-aligned neighbor is officially still at war with it. But at the same time people will make assertions with certainty about what North Korea is.

North Korea is an unreliable narrator. So are South Korea and America because they are hostile to NK. And people in the West don’t trust whatever countries are aligned with North Korea.

That’s the discrepancy—speaking boldly about the most closed off country in the world. Like documentaries and travel videos? Travel videos will be cherry-picked because of the government’s[1] policy of stalking and sheepherding all their tourists. That’s just one example from the NK side. We can also get into Western outlets making up NK fairytales based on no NK sources at all.

> This is starting to feel like a flat earth discussion.

Asking what level of information you have on a very closed-off country is comparable to denying a scientific fact that has been hypothesized for millenia, empirically proven probably for centuries, and can probably be empirically proven by an amateur scientist mountaineer?

Oh yeah? Have you got any more tired cliches up your sleeve?[2] “Oh hush” to quote a HN user.

[1] Or the regime if you prefer

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43618619
Ask HN: DOGE on an IT resume – Asset, or liability?
by reaperducer | 2025-04-08 18:51:55+00:00
An acquaintance I only know in an online sense recently mentioned in passing that he's part of the DOGE effort. Since I'm of a generation that doesn't discuss religion, politics, or the Great Pumpkin at work, I responded with a neutral, "You must be very busy these days." But it made me think about how sooner or later, there are going to be people in the job market with DOGE listed as where they worked in 2025. Any advice for handling this sort of thing, as both a job seeker, and as a hiring manager?
by wiether | 2025-04-08 18:52:09+00:00
Thank you for the reply!

I don't work for a big company but work for/advise multiple companies of various sizes.

For clients already on a public cloud, there's no way they'll want to make a new migration if 80% is not just adapting Terraform code to the new provider.

For those thinking about going on a public cloud, they are still (for now) prioritizing costs and stability; they don't want to invest in a project where they'll have to bear part of the partner's R&D costs; in this case they'd rather invest in their own on-prem/private cloud setup.

I think the only thing that could really change the hen&egg problem (completely agree with you on this) is EU putting tariffs on US tech services. If the three US public clouds cost 30% more one morning, companies will start thinking about working with other partners. But then it's going to be a FFA with everyone trying to migrate to EU clouds with a very limited supply and I don't see how it could end well...
by zahlman | 2025-04-08 18:52:32+00:00
It seems very unlikely that we'll make it to a 1.5°C target - but it now seems likely that we can get much closer to that than we were fearing around the time of the Paris Agreement being drafted. The planet seems very much set to survive, and in the longer run (on the scale of centuries) we can enable temperatures to come back down again - if we keep caring, and if we find that it would be optimal. (There is tons of room to restore tree cover.)
by gobdovan | 2025-04-08 18:52:46+00:00
I wanted to give a rebuttal with all the logical fallacies in the Memo, but I tried to let LLMs do the work first, as the memo suggests. So, while disagreeing with the memo, I followed its advice successfully. Yet it seems that Tobi himself didn't listen to his own advice and didn't try to let an LLM do the memo instead. https://chatgpt.com/share/67f56ffe-b408-800e-ad76-46a12eabe0...

Besides all this, Point 5 is truly bonkers. How I read it is an unintended epistemological farce. The null hypothesis is that AI can do your job. Then they double-down on their burden-of-proof horsing by asking you to prove your work can't be done by a hypothetical, idealized AI.
by antisthenes | 2025-04-08 18:52:51+00:00
No one will take the risk of educating them to work the lathe.

Working the lathe is probably not any easier to learn than "vibe coding" or generic office work like customer support or data entry.

The unspoken problem is that it's enormously expensive to re-educate adults to do something different. Adults just have worse brain plasticity and don't pick things up as quickly as younger workers. Some just refuse to learn thanks to the pervasive culture of ignorance that permeates USA.

And adults cost more as well (even just the basics such as food, which children eat less of) and if they have aging parents or kids, have additional responsibilities that distract them from learning.

No one is taking this risk on and why should they? If I was starting a company, and you suggested to me that I should indiscriminately hire minimum wage workers to work in a machining workshop, but first I have to educate them about machining from scratch, you'd be (rightfully) laughed out of the room, because you're dooming this business to failure.

Once you break that link (e.g. skip a generation of a profession), it's incredibly hard to bring that back. It's like losing institutional knowledge, because your genius employee was hit by a bus, or moved countries.
by EliasWatson | 2025-04-08 18:52:53+00:00
Google results have gotten so terrible over the years. I switched to Kagi long ago and haven't looked back. Whenever I use Google on another computer, I'm shocked by how awful the results are compared to Kagi.

As for AI search, I do find it extremely useful when I don't know the right words to search for. The LLM will instantly figure out what I'm trying to say.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-08 18:53:12+00:00
When very little, I thought I wanted to be a farmer, and tried growing crops in the back yard. Total failure. I threw an entire bag of grass seed in my yard 6 weeks ago. Not a single seed sprouted (a flock of birds ate every one). Total failure.

But by age 7 I knew that I was a born engineer. Engines, electronics, software, structures, all of it.
by some_random | 2025-04-08 18:53:15+00:00
Until law enforcement brings a case to court and secures a win, this is in fact exactly how it works. I'm not saying that it's right or good, but bullshit "bug bounty" payouts are pretty well established in the crypto ecosystem at this point and to the best of my knowledge the only case of anything like it resulting in a conviction is Joe Sullivan being convicted for covering up a data breach at Uber with such a scheme.
by danielvf | 2025-04-08 18:53:45+00:00
Maybe it's just semantics, but to me hacks and rug pulls are different things.

Team backdoors in code to steal funds tend to be obfuscated, and access to run them locked down. This is quite different than a hack that exploits "well intentioned" code. I think very few actual exploits are by the team - there's just much easier ways to steal funds than leaving a bug open in the world for a long period of time that anyone could find and use.
by nsluss | 2025-04-08 18:53:50+00:00
The category of search I've stopped doing is the one where I'd append "reddit" to the end. The models are going to do a great job of distilling a wide range of opinion into something super digestible better than the old flow of looking for a bunch of threads on the subject from expert-amateurs and having to read them all myself.

For the people who say they've reduced their search engine use by some large percentage, do you never need to find a particular document on the web or look for reference material?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-08 18:54:02+00:00
LLMs have taken up a significant share of my technical/programming questions, because there’s a pretty good chance it’ll give me a correct or mostly correct answer and if it doesn’t, the results aren’t catastrophic. I don’t trust them for much else though, and so I still use a search engine (Kagi) for most other things. For odd exceptions, I ask the LLM to cite its answers and in the event that it can’t do that or provides false citations, I fall back on search engines.

These tools are useful, but in my view the level of trust seemingly commonly being placed in them far exceeds their capabilities. They’re not capable of distinguishing confidently worded but woefully incorrect reddit posts from well-verified authoritative pages which combined with their inclination for hallucinations and overeagerness to please the user makes them dangerous in an insidious way.
by johnea | 2025-04-08 18:55:37+00:00
I really think this is a "drink the koolaid" phenomenon.

Personally, I don't want an LLM synthesized result to a query. I want to read original source material on websites, preferably written by experts, in the field in which my search is targeted.

What I find in serious regression in search, is interpretation of the search query. If I search for something like "Systems containing A but not B" I just get results that contain the words A and B. The logical semantics of asking for "not B" is completely ignored. Using "-B" doesn't work, since many discussions of something that doesn't have B, will mention the word B. These errors didn't seem to be so egregious historically. There seemed to be more correct semantic interpretation of the query.

I don't know if this has to do with applying LLMs in the backend of search, but if LLMs could more accurately interpret what I'm asking for, then I would be happy to have them parse my queries and return links that meet my query specifications more accurately.

But again, I don't want a synthesized result, I want to read original source material. I see the push to make everything LLM synthesized prose, to be just another attempt to put "Big Tech" between me and the info I'm trying to access.

Just link me to the original info please...

p.s. Something like the "semantic web" which would eliminate any 3rd party search agent completely would be the ideal solution.
by burgrkng | 2025-04-08 18:55:53+00:00
Compared to the resources costs for humans to prop up the industry, a handful of DCs that can do this and still improve is cheap.

Work phones, laptops, personal stuff. We duplicate a lot of resource use for one person to have a career.

There will still be pencil and paper. There’s still creative things to do. Do we even get that these days? Where’s our generations LOTR or Star Wars? Yep just prequels and sequels of same old.

Are we that creative copy-pasting and git pull deps someone else maintains? IT is librarian work these days. Little in the day to day is novel creativity.

Your argument is not a compelling one. Feels like hand wavy nod to a human soul, while ignoring we all complain about soul crushing jobs capturing so much of our agency, sucking fun out of life since it’s just the same todos different day… not that creative and we tacitly notice and complain but keep doing.

It’s a really lame circular routine and lived experience being around my peers these days; oh I hate my job but this new thing is an abomination and affront to my chosen job. I’m gonna be someone someday! Don’t take it away! Unicorn! Disrupt!
by geocrasher | 2025-04-08 18:56:11+00:00
I use search engines (Google) and when they (it) fails to provide me the responses I need, I turn to ChatGPT. For example:

I recently upgraded my video card, and I run a 4K display. Suddenly the display was randomly disconnecting until I restarted the monitor. I googled my brains out trying to figure out the issue, and got nowhere.

So I gave ChatGPT a shot. I told it exactly what I upgraded from/to, and which monitor I have, and it said "Oh, your HDMI 2.0 cable is specced to work, but AMD cards love HDMI2.1 especially ones that are grounded, so go get one of those even if it's overspecced for your setup."

So I did what it said, and it worked.
by matthewkayin | 2025-04-08 18:56:13+00:00
If you're using google you can just specify "-ai" at the end of your search, which I've started doing ever since Google's AI tried to tell me that the American Civil War was that time when the North and South fought over gold in California.

DuckDuckGo also has an option where you can turn off the AI search so that you don't have to specify every time. I've found DDG sometimes gives me better results than Google and sometimes doesn't.
by ikeashark | 2025-04-08 18:56:24+00:00
This is way too harsh of a tariff, by doing this Trump isn't sending clear signals to manufacturers.

Trump's "schizophrenic" decisions to announce high tariffs only to whiplash manufacturers by announcing pauses or straight dropping tariffs makes it hard to justify setting up a plant in the US.

If given the choice of committing to building a plant to reduce costs because of the tariffs, or just cutting costs / employees, most will do that latter.

One cannot justify building a plant if halfway through building it, tariffs are dropped ( due to an admin change or something else). Because then you have a factory that costs you more money than just importing from China.