MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by someperson | 2025-04-04 18:32:21+00:00
In part it's because SF is relatively old. BART is 50 years old, and New York Subway is over 100 years old.

Check back on China's gleaming rail system and newly constructed cities in 50 or 100 years.

You can bet it will look older and more tired, an ageing snapshot of a once in a century construction boom. Especially if China experiences several lost decades like Japan, which is increasingly likely.
by anonym29 | 2025-04-04 18:32:40+00:00
There are two points I'd like to address here.

>So given you didn't address any other part of the reply am i to assume you agree ? Future consequences and poor outcomes based on current day incompetence and mismanagement ?

With your post I was replying to? I do agree with large parts of it. I think Elon Musk brought a "move fast and break things" approach to the Federal government, which has traditionally not been a place where that approach is welcome, and the "break things" part certainly carries a different level of impact when the thing being broken is the single income source of many people who either neglected to adequately financially prepare themselves for retirement, were unable to avoid unexpected financial difficulties in life, or otherwise wound up in a situation where they were left otherwise destitute in old age (e.g. romance scammers stole their entire private retirement balance). That said, to answer the core question being asked: "does removing systems actively (and provably) preventing deaths count [as killing people]?", I don't necessary think so as a rule of thumb. I see a fundamental difference between initiating an act of violence designed to deprive someone else of their life or safety, and overly hasty bureaucratic maneuvering to attempt to streamline efficiency, however reckless the latter may be carried out. This doesn't necessarily mean I condone the approach DOGE is taking, either.

>To address your reply: You asked for costs on money and lives, and while i think billions and millions were hyperbole there are still directly attributable deaths, even now.

I am sorry if I phrased my question poorly, I was not attempting to ask whether this could or would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and/or millions of lives, but rather whether it has cost billions of dollars and/or millions of lives, as the original post made by ZeroGravitas seemed to imply, from the way I read it.
by glenstein | 2025-04-04 18:33:25+00:00
Right, and I think there has unfortunately been an avalanche of low effort gotchas along these lines.

My favorite (or least favorite?) example is from Jennifer Burns' biography Goddess of the Market, which charges that title "The Fountainhead" was a haphazard last second choice, selecting a word that never appears in the novel. But slight problem with that, a climactic conversation about ideals, perhaps the climactic articulation of values in the book, occurs between two main characters who use the term "fount" as a stand-in term for the wellspring of human creation, value, and meaning. Fountainhead, then, is who the main character is, and nothing other than typical artistic restraint in selecting a title that simultaneously points to the intellectual center of the novel without being browbeating about the term itself. I actually emailed Jennifer Burns and pointed this out at one point but didn't hear back.

I do think the collapse of many of Rand's closest interpersonal relationships, the depression and drinking that her husband went into, as well as the legacy of her institute and estate, are quite damning. As of course is the shallow treatment of complicated topics, the fundamental misunderstanding of Kant that inspired the name of the whole philosophy, and the inapplicability of principles to mortals who wrestle with personal flaws. Those are real, but the social security thing isn't.
by ben_w | 2025-04-04 18:34:07+00:00
I'm already accounting for all that. Footprint of a car is close to 8-10m^2, that area of 20% cells with a 10-15% capacity factor (covering night and clouds) is 160-300 watts.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1kW%2Fm%5E2%2A8m%5E2%2A...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1kW%2Fm%5E2%2A10m%5E2%2...
by aeblyve | 2025-04-04 18:34:11+00:00
Seems like a hard sell. Technical people probably are good to use github/cloudflare/whatever pages, while nontechnical people are fine with real estate on social media platforms. It would be difficult for you to match the SLA of either without considerable resources, or for the people in-between that Just want a battle-tested CMS/brand to deliver business to customers with minimal interesting stuff or fuss.

Maybe consider promoting this free tier in/to university students? Worked for UNIX. I could see a lot of college kids wanting something more advanced than a twitter feed to create a web portfolio, willing to use something new, but without the investment of learning Jekyll for someone that's, say, a MechE or ChemE student.
by rcpt | 2025-04-04 18:34:18+00:00
Home building is the largest manufacturing job in the nation.

Want to bring manufacturing jobs to the US? You don't need some insane tariff policy, all you need to do is allow people to build housing on land that they own.

Bonus: this will grow GDP by double digit percentage points instead of throwing into another recession https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulatio...
by belter | 2025-04-04 18:34:27+00:00
Corrupt to the bone: "Trump Picks Golf Dinner Over Dignified Transfer of U.S. Troops’ Bodies" - https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-picks-golf-dinner-over-d...

"Trump won't be present today for the dignified transfer of four U.S. soldiers at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.Instead, he'll be attending a LIV Golf dinner reception in Florida. The White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on which administration officials might be in attendance.

The soldiers died during a training exercise in Lithuania. They were honored during a dignified departure ceremony from Lithuania, with Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and other dignitaries paying tribute.

Trump isn't attending dignified transfer of soldiers who died in Lithuania, continued The 3rd Infantry Division identified the soldiers as Sgt. Jose Duenez Jr., 25, of Joliet, Illinois; Sgt. Edvin F. Franco, 25, of Glendale, California; Pfc. Dante D. Taitano, 21, of Dededo, Guam; and Staff Sgt. Troy S. Knutson-Collins, 28, of Battle Creek, Michigan."
by rsynnott | 2025-04-04 18:35:05+00:00
There's an aspect of "have to", as well, in many larger cities. I mean, I suppose if you were morally opposed to walking maybe you could spend a couple of hours a day in traffic and rent parking somewhere... Many offices, even offices in which very affluent people work, would not necessarily have parking, and if they did it would not be enough for everyone. I work for a big multinational in Dublin, in an office that has about 500 people and I think about 30 or 40 parking spaces. This is the first office I've worked in that had parking at all (mostly a consequence of it being from the 1970s), and Ireland is one of the _more_ car-oriented European countries.

And Dublin isn't exactly a huge city. If you take the likes of London or Paris, most affluent people are going to be commuting by public transport; driving just isn't really practical.

I'd be curious whether NYC, which has some aspects of this, has longer life expectancies than elsewhere in the US.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-04 18:35:33+00:00
I don't think either of you are persuadable, actually.

I didn't have to enroll anything; I assume they are signed by MS. I'm pretty sure nvidia drivers are dkms, and I think they have to be for legal reasons (off the top of my head and IANAL so grain of salt) so I don't view that as a fault because they can't do otherwise.
by xracy | 2025-04-04 18:35:46+00:00
I'm saying that the problem isn't identity politics, but that the American right is terrified of actual policies from the American Left. And they're so terrified they have to make a bid deal of the more divisive social policies (characteristic of the term "identity politics") rather than their economic policies that are incredibly popular.

The majority of the Democratic party is the group being actually shifted by the Overton window away from the actual political left. They are mostly centrists, and not leftists. Frequently they are conservatives. I wish Harris suggested half of the policies that got ascribed to her, but she was honestly to the right of Clinton.
by conradev | 2025-04-04 18:35:55+00:00
SQLite has an experimental change, "BEGIN CONCURRENT", which uses optimistic locking to allow concurrent non-overlapping writes: https://www.sqlite.org/src/doc/begin-concurrent/doc/begin_co...

So the "rebase" could be the exact same pages (no compute) if none of the writes overlap. If they do, you'd likely need to replay the transaction and make new pages (some compute).
by mckn1ght | 2025-04-04 18:36:04+00:00
Look at what happens in poor areas of less developed countries. Honor killings, deification of dictators, rampant scamming and crime, cartels and gangs... all still things.

Your questions betray an ignorance of how a significant plurality of the world still lives to this day. You need to get out more, and not just at the resort towns.

And new problems are cropping up in the foremost developed nations, like depression due to social media addiction, that we'll also need to think critically about, instead of reverting to medieval religious remedies.

Alternatively, maybe you just think we're better off because we're intrinsically better kinds of humans? Gods chosen few? No doubt many people actually believe that.
by rorylaitila | 2025-04-04 18:36:23+00:00
Early stage startups, no. They don't typically know what to sell, how to sell, or who to sell it to. Many failed founder sales efforts start out with wishful thinking "I just need to find someone to help me sell." Pre PMF founders will drive you crazy with their naïve sales/product decisions.

However, for a company with PMF, if you have industry connections, and can help them get a short term boost of deal flow, I could see that being very attractive.

Helping first time founders setup any sales process at all can also be viable. You help them refine their closing process, hire on their team, and then move on.
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 18:36:23+00:00
I don't watch sports. Almost everything I watch is scripted. The closest thing I can think of might be cooking shows (bake off), but even in that case I'd have to get off the couch and go to the store and buy a bunch of things I don't have (often including equipment) before I could even attempt to make those same foods for myself.

Children watching minecraft videos instead of playing minecraft don't even have to get off the couch. They just have to reach for the controller and remote, or even just for their phones, and they can do the activity they've been watching someone else doing.

Playing with blocks is fun. Watching a stranger who can't see or hear you play with blocks seems far less fun, but kids spend hundreds of hours doing exactly that.

I can understand people watching other video games that have characters and a plot, and I can understand people watching sports which have teams/players and a contest with an uncertain outcome, but watching a stranger play with blocks where there is zero story and zero stakes seems insane.
by zahlman | 2025-04-04 18:36:27+00:00
The two situations are not at all comparable. "Making parentheses mandatory" for `print` was a consequence of making it a function rather than an entire separate statement. This was a radical syntax change with far-reaching implications:

* The special syntax for redirecting to a file could no longer work, so that became a keyword argument

* Using a trailing comma to suppress a trailing newline could no longer work, so that became a keyword argument too

* A keyword argument could also be added to control spacing between items - there was no reasonable way to express that in the old syntax (and the old syntax used some complex heuristics here to try to "do the right thing")

* Being a function, `print` can now be used as a higher-order function (I have done this)

* Being a function, arguments to `print` can be taken from a sequence, even e.g. a generator, using the `*` syntax (I have done this)

It would have been completely impossible to preserve the old semantics while ending up with a function. Offering both new and old semantics would have required using a different name for the new function, creating parallel but subtly incompatible ways of doing the same thing and completely defeating the purpose.

The proposal here, on the other hand, is simply to deprecate (implying eventual removal) a method (`__mod__`) from the built-in string type. That would break existing code and create churn, but it doesn't appear to offer anything on the other side of the equation except for a tiny reduction in the size of the CPython code base. (It seems rather unlikely to me that the bit of code in question sees frequent changes, so it isn't creating a maintenance burden. It's just inelegant - and while I personally value elegance rather highly, I would still draw a line here.)

Well, it would offer the OP the ability to use the operator for something else. But I strain to imagine the use case OP is describing in that thread. There's a long tradition of understanding the `%` operator this way (thanks to C's decision to use the % symbol for formatting codes in `printf`), so it would be confusing.

More importantly, though, IMO: OP describes a math library, and in ordinary mathematical interpretations, the modulo operator is not commutative. With two operands of the same type, x % y is not expected to equal y % x; with different types, I don't see why it's expected that both are even possible.
by seanhunter | 2025-04-04 18:36:37+00:00
Socrates allowed himself to be put to death even though his supporters had bribed the jailer to allow him to escape. Given his philosophy of ethics, even though his trial had been unjust, he felt it was incompatible with his teachings for him to avoid the sentence that had been handed down to him.

Some people believe that their ideals are important enough to live up to even though life can be brutal.
by askonomm | 2025-04-04 18:36:54+00:00
How often do you start a new project? In most companies you work on the same project for years, and even in consultancies it is multiple months at least, so it's not like in a professional setting this issue would come up a lot. I also find LLM bootstrapped projects tend to use massively out of date dependencies and practices for things, riddled with linter errors, which often results in me having to still fix everything, and in the end would've been faster if I just did all myself anyway.

On a side note, get diagnosed for ADHD. I did, and ever since I got on meds my life has drastically improved. Though I never had a big issue with motivation, it has greatly helped with memory and mood stability.
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-04 18:37:23+00:00
At the risk of coming off like a dolt and being super incorrect: I don't put much stock into these metrics when it comes to predicting AGI. Even if the trend of "length of task an AI can reliably do doubles every 7 months" continues, as they say that means we're years away from AI that can complete tasks that take humans weeks or months. I'm skeptical that the doubling trend will continue into that timescale, I think there is a qualitative difference between tasks that take weeks or months and tasks that take minutes or hours, a difference that is not reflected by simple quantity. I think many people responsible for hiring engineers are keenly aware of this distinction, because of their experience attempting to choose good engineers based on how they perform in task-driven technical interviews that last only hours.

Intelligence as humans have it seems like a "know it when you see it" thing to me, and metrics that attempt to define and compare it will always be looking at only a narrow slice of the whole picture. To put it simply, the gut feeling I get based on my interactions with current AI, and how it is has developed over the past couple of years, is that AI is missing key elements of general intelligence at its core. While there's more lots more room for its current approaches to get better, I think there will be something different needed for AGI.

I'm not an expert, just a human.
by cpursley | 2025-04-04 18:37:31+00:00
This is a lame excuse, look at the Moscow Metro, it's old yet clean, maintained, safe and constantly expanding. As are many European metros - while dated, they are fine (despite the grumblings of Londoners and Parisians). This is a political will issue, not an infrastructure one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNpsWx8DPGk
by Jun8 | 2025-04-04 18:37:34+00:00
Ben's videos are fantastic, learned a lot. For HW beginners like myself I suggest to skip the computer but just build the clock - very easy and great testing tool!

Here's my question: Obviously there's tremendous interest in kits like this. Why doesn't Ben or someone else create small company to:

* Modernize the components * Update the videos * Add additional modules to make the computer a bit more powerful

People would pay money for this. I would.
by notnullorvoid | 2025-04-04 18:38:11+00:00
> While all of these things are certainly possible, I also do think that the development time is longer.

I agree, but I don't think dev time is longer due to some intrinsic reality that local-first is technically harder. Nearly 2 decades of work has been put towards tailoring building blocks for SaaS systems. Similar building blocks can be made for local-first.
by mwigdahl | 2025-04-04 18:38:26+00:00
Personally I don't impute any malice whatsoever -- these are soulless corporate entities -- but a for-profit company with fiduciary duty to shareholders releasing expensive, in-house-developed intellectual property for free certainly deserves some scrutiny.

I tend to believe this is a "commoditize your complement" strategy on Meta's part, myself. No idea what Deepseek's motivation is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a similar strategy.
by throw0101c | 2025-04-04 18:38:34+00:00
> Why shouldn't the US be interested in being able to clothe its own people?

There are plenty of made-in-USA clothing companies: what do those items (shoes, shirts, pants, underwear, coats, etc) cost compared to the same items made not-in-USA? How much do you want your citizens spending on such items compared to other things? Do you want them to spend 3-5% on apparel:

* https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/spending-on-clothing-and-foot...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_consumption_expenditu...

Or 10%? More?

Most people have a finite income, so whatever they're spending on clothing they're not spending on something else (which could include services). How important is making clothing as an industry compared to something else?

Yes, manufacturing is important, but given that a country has a finite population it may be prudent to be more focused:

> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.

> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now

Do you want people operating sewing machines or (say) welders?
by dr-smooth | 2025-04-04 18:38:36+00:00
Amazing that anybody can look at that guy and think he's "strong". It's so obvious that he's a chicken shit at heart. I mean I guess he talks big, although his language and vocabulary is so stunted, I can't even see that. I guess he was really brave after getting "shot" (probably nicked his own ear with a fingernail when he was pulled to the ground by secret service).
by cduzz | 2025-04-04 18:38:41+00:00
I think you're missing the basic distinction between private parties and government.

Private parties (including companies) largely have freedom of association. There are (theoretically) protections in "commerce" against a company discriminating against a person or group based on "innate" factors (such as skin color or gender).

But largely, people and companies have a wide degree of latitude about what they are and are not allowed to do.

The government, on the other hand, (theoretically) is largely not allowed to stop people from saying things or associating with each other, and when these prohibitions are in effect they're subject to both documentation and review. This is "theory" because the government has done lots of shady things.

The government, similarly (and theoretically), is bound by a variety of procedural constraints, such as due process, right to see an attorney, right of the attorney to request your presence, right to a trial, etc.

There's a categorical distinction between:

I, a private party, am offended that I face consequences of offending someone else when I would prefer not to face any consequences.

and

I, a private party, am abducted by the organization in this country with a monopoly on violence and which interprets all laws, and I vanish with no recourse from anyone.
by hinkley | 2025-04-04 18:39:03+00:00
The person GP is responding to made it clear they’re willing to pay a premium for a burger that isn’t based on a pyramid of misery, which makes the response all the more misplaced.

There are models of agriculture that achieve better sustainability by using a small number of livestock as unskilled labor to emulate the wild environments that the plants our gene stock come from were adapted to. This will likely be the model moving forward, especially as petrochemical fertilizers get more expensive.

“Just enough” livestock will still get too old to breed or provide labor. They will still have too many babies in good weather and need to be culled in subsequent bad years. That doesn’t put T-bone steaks on everybody’s plate, but it does provide enough animal protein to approximate the traditional Asian diet of a few ounces of animal protein per day, as soup stock and a bit of variety.

The future will still have chicken soup even if burger joints go away.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-04 18:39:15+00:00
This comment redefines the "power" as it's defined above, in particular by forgetting that it's "over others":

> I think both of those things do give people that rush of power and control over others.

That was presumably unintentional; I just wanted to point out that it's a different philosophical topic.

I don't strictly disagree with the idea but it's not the same as saying that someone solving a sudoku is doing it for the sake of having power over the puzzle's creator and/or the curator of the book/app that included the puzzle. It seems more likely that they're doing it instead because when they would solve puzzles in the past they would get a hit of dopamine, which taught them that solving puzzles is rewarding. I think this seems to fall under "rush of power" per this meaning but it's not "rush of power and control over others" per the initial one.