MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anarticle | 2025-04-24 19:39:26+00:00
I agree that automation and robots are a good proxy for exploration. And yes it will be tough. That won't stop people from trying.

PR or not, there are still skydivers and wing suit people pushing the envelope. I really don't agree with the doomerism/well actually crowd on these sorts of things, there is still the indomitable human spirit, no matter how irrational it seems. We still have field scientists that get sent to the edges of the earth to explore and find things, even when we think they have completely been explored. A friend of mine is an arctic botanist that spends 3-4m a year in the high arctic tundra doing research on plants in that biome.

There is no rational reason to want to cross the entirety of Antarctica, and yet humans have done it.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-24 19:39:38+00:00
The signal is always going to be modulated, unless the source is maintaining a position with zero relative velocity to the Earth, or deliberately compensating for same - both of which would be far more impressive as a "hello" than a random-ish number which will always be distorted by orbital and proper motion.

Otherwise it's going to have a varying frequency - maybe not by much, and maybe not quickly, but certainly not static.
by Buttons840 | 2025-04-24 19:39:39+00:00
I've identified 4 distinct attitudes I've had towards work, and I'm constantly fighting not to slip into full psychopathy:

1) I have a meaningful job where I work towards a goal that is personally meaningful. I would do this work even without being paid, although I probably couldn't spend 40-hours a week doing it.

2) I have a job where I work towards making the company money. I may not be personally invested in the business, but I can work with a team of good people towards the mutual goal of making the company profitable.

3) I have a job where I can't identify any logical reasons behind decisions and what I'm being asked to do. The only logic (or lack thereof) seems to be towards making those with the power to fire me happy. Any attempts at finding a higher purpose fail because the company is taking actions contrary to those higher purposes.

4) My job is just a source of money, there is no purpose or logic. This encourages a full-psychopath mercenary approach to work and power--like study "48 Laws of Power" and use them--screw anyone over for a buck.

Obviously #1 is the ideal, and the hard part is I'm always quite close to it, because I love programming, even in my spare time.

I see #2 mentioned on HN fairly often as a supposedly clear-eyed view of work. I would be relatively happy to remain at #2, but corporate infighting and other stupid decisions quickly break it down. It's also hard to maintain #2 because society itself isn't the meritocracy that #2 pretends it is.

I'm usually going back and forth between #3 and #4, both of which are miserable--layers of hell. I'm not a bad person so I have a hard time remaining at #4, but #3 is miserable in-between land.

What level are you?
by stevenAthompson | 2025-04-24 19:39:51+00:00
I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted it. They make neat stuff.

Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he then got involved in politics.

Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that any of those companies might cease to exist if Elon gets high and does something stupid, then I'll be stuck without support.

Similarly, a social media account is an investment. I would never invest my time into building relationships on a platform like X. Even if it does survive Musk, the community is broken permanently.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-24 19:40:14+00:00
The options you have:

A) disagree and commit

B) disagree and wait to be fired

C) appear to commit, but secretly subvert your (elected) boss's plans/intentions

I use the word 'boss' here because the president has the right to hire and fire for this role:

SEC. 5. 42 U.S.C. 1864 (a) The Director of the Foundation (referred to in this Act as the ‘‘Director’’) shall be appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Before any person is appointed as Director, the President shall afford the Board an opportunity to make recommendations to him with respect to such appointment. The Director shall receive basic pay at the rate provided for level II of the Executive Schedule under section 5313 of title 5, United States Code, and shall serve for a term of six years unless sooner removed by the President.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-24 19:40:16+00:00
I never understood this obsession with what the underlying technology is. Saying we need to be "AI-first" is like saying we need to be "Blockchain-first" or "Python-first." Who ultimately fucking cares what technology is being used to build a product? You could build it with acorns, and if the customer needs it, you should be able to make money.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-04-24 19:40:30+00:00
Yep, same path. Arrive, get cards ASAP, usually as I walk out of the airport, give it to the hotel concierge the next morning. They will often stamp and drop it in the mail for me.

It is so much fun to watch my spawns showing me the cards they got with strange stamps and neat pictures of far away lands. I address them individually, so there are plenty to write, still fun.
by LiquidSky | 2025-04-24 19:40:37+00:00
In addition to what others have said, in theory it's also a way to call public attention to the problem. These are coveted positions that people don't just walk away from lightly, so someone in this position stepping down and explaining why can serve as an alarm bell.

That said, I don't know how effective that really is anymore since driving people out is one of the administration's stated goals.
by tough | 2025-04-24 19:41:03+00:00
Yep, this is way slower but considered SOTA on video-gen open source.

I mostly meant the using the previous frames to generate new frames insight that reminded me but lack knowledge on the specifics of the work

glad if its useful for your work/research to check out the paper

edit: the real-time-ness of it also has to have into equation what HW are you running your model on, obviously easier to make so on a H100 than a 3090, but these memory optimizations really help to make these models usable at all for local stuff, which is a great win i think for overall adoption/further stuff being build upon them a bit like sd-webui from automatic1111 alongside stable diffusion weights models being open sourced was a boom on image gen a couple years back
by lynndotpy | 2025-04-24 19:41:04+00:00
I agree, the API change was the last nail in the coffin, honestly. Reddit was always bad for several reasons, but it always had some availability of smart people that placed it alongside StackExchange and Hacker News. But 2022 and 2023 really saw a mass exodus of expertise from Reddit (and Twitter, etc.)

Lots of smart people left to Mastodons, at least.
by tgv | 2025-04-24 19:41:23+00:00
No, it isn't, but that's perhaps the point: it's so direct. It rarely gets in the way. Sure, some things are easier done in emacs, but that's when you just copy the text to emacs, do your thing, and copy it back.

What VSCode isn't, is elegant. I think the OP likes that very much, and VSCode has forsaken that in favor of simplicity and a kind of free-for-all extension mechanism.
by toast0 | 2025-04-24 19:41:29+00:00
Of course the nasdaq 100; the 100 largest (qualifying) companies on nasdaq is all huge companies. If there's hundreds of thousands of companies, and you pick 100 of the largest, they'll be huge. Very few small businesses will be listed on Nasdaq at all.

The stat says 43% of gdp is from small business and 50% of non-government workers, too. That means they're important. Of course, the large businesses are the other half of the economy with just 0.1% of the number of businesses.

I think the point is, if you ignore small or big business, you're ignoring half the economy.
by zeptonaut22 | 2025-04-24 19:41:33+00:00
Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)

I think on the How I Built This Instagram episode the Instagram founder said that Zuck was basically reading the data from Facebook's interactions and saw that the demographics and sharing tendencies of Facebook users meant that it was in a death spiral: people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).

Looking back at what I posted on FB in 2008-2012 is like observing an alien from another planet: it was a completely different platform.
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-24 19:41:39+00:00
People start using/abusing alcohol (and cigarettes, etc.) knowing it is addictive and damaging. This has not affected the business of bars/pubs. With this in mind, it shouldn't be a surprise that people still start using FB, IG, etc.

The fact that Zuck (and Elon) are all buddy buddy with the current admin in Washington shouldn't be lost in the conversation.
by standardly | 2025-04-24 19:42:22+00:00
You make solid points.

My only point of contention:

"I can donate to a food bank and help prevent starvation. But if I choose not to donate, no one is going to blame me for people being starved. "

In the case of a federal program, funded by congressional legislation.. It's a bit different? It's more like if you ran a food bank, then decided to stop serving food altogether because other non-charity programs you run were potentially having time, money, and resources taken up by the charity efforts.. in the name of efficiency.. and people starved as a result. You can claim you have no moral obligation to them, sure.

And, those three questions you bring up DO need answered. But that is what USAID did - they decided what was needed, and where. The executive branch shouldn't (can't?) unilaterally claw back funding earmarked by congress. Congress controls the purse.

I know the original conversation was about whether X resulted in deaths, and what our obligation there is.. But our frustration, on a political basis, is definitely more than that.

I don't argue with conservatives anymore anyways. Even if you laid out all of your points, and mine, they wouldn't budge.
by imoreno | 2025-04-24 19:42:29+00:00
First of all, loyalty happens when both sides have moats. I'm not talking here about the case where one side is very loyal and the other is very disloyal - I'd rather call that "suckering". But in the US, government jobs have lots of mutual loyalty. The business can feel confident the employee isn't likely to leave, because for those jobs a huge part of the package is the pension which you only get after staying 20 years. And they heavily reward tenure. Meanwhile the employees also feel confident they won't be dumped (DOGE aside) because these orgs are structured in such a way that it's very hard to fire people due to process and culture. Lo and behold, plenty of loyalty in government jobs. US companies fire much more easily.

In European companies both firing and quitting is much more complicated, so you get employer loyalty in Germany or UK for example, because you actually get long term benefits there and termination is not as simple. The US companies of 50-80s like the author's father's employer were similar as well.

By the way, US companies don't actually demand loyalty. They pay lip service to it, but complaining about that is like complaining that people in clothing catalogs are too attractive. That's just how the field works, nobody takes it seriously and you look silly complaining about it. "Demanding loyalty" doesn't look like this. If an employer offered a $1 million bonus on your 10 year anniversary, that would be demanding loyalty for real. But neither the employee nor employer side has interest in this, not to mention the implied slowing down of the termination process. Plus the can of worms of knowing the company will even be around then.

Everything is fine, zoomers are not some insanely disloyal alien changelings. We're just in a transitional economy.
by gosub100 | 2025-04-24 19:42:54+00:00
If I could afford one I would, not because of security, but just the geek in me finds it cool.

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, there were several non-x86 architectures that were more powerful, and even 64 bit long before Intel ever did. The DEC alpha, SPARC, and others. I was also too poor to afford those back then but I remember them fondly.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-24 19:43:13+00:00
We are swiftly moving to thoroughly reject the "Reality-based Community"[1] of facts and expertise that (reportedly) Karl Rove dunked on 20 years ago:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
by bayindirh | 2025-04-24 19:43:48+00:00
If I were a bank, I'd order one of those and put all the financial modelling and prediction load on it. Like real time analysis to approve/deny loans, do projections for deciding what to do in slower moving financial products, predicting some future looking scenarios on wider markets, etc. etc. simultaneously.

That thing is dreadnought matmul machine with some serious uptime, and can crunch numbers without slowing down or losing availability.

or, possibly, you can implement a massively parallel version of WOPR/Joshua on it and let it rip scenarios for you. Just don't connect to live systems (not entirely joking, though).

P.S.: I'd name that version of the Joshua as JS2/WARP.
by JimBlackwood | 2025-04-24 19:44:31+00:00
> China is a communist country with real life re-education camps. They manipulate markets and steal intellectual property. They’ve been cozied up to authoritarian and oppressive regimes, like Russia, for a long time.

Yes, definitely agree.

> America is a free market who uses its military to keep shipping and global trade free from interference. We deport some illegal immigrants.

I think everything you said about China applies to America now, just for shorter period of time than for China. America's government officials say things that are indistinguishable from Kremlin propaganda. Directives and tariffs are put in place to directly manipulate markets in other countries. America is now deporting immigrants that were allowed to stay in America to prisons where human rights are violated. America's Secretary of Health is advocating for labor and re-education camps.

With China, I feel like we know how insidious they are and what they do. With America, we have no clue how far it will go.

So out of two evils, currently I expect China to be the lesser one. That really says something.
by camel-cdr | 2025-04-24 19:44:44+00:00
> How do these fare in terms of absolute performance? The NEC TSUBASA is not a CPU.

The NEC is an attached accelerator, but IIRC it can run an OS in host mode. It's hard to tell how the others perform, because most don't have hardware available yet or only they and partner companies have access. It's also hard to compare, because they don't target the desktop market.

> I ported some numeric simulation kernel to the A64Fx some time ago, fixing the vector width gave a 2x improvement.

Oh, wow. Was this autovectorized or handwritten intrinsics/assembly?

Any chance it's of a small enough scope that I could try to recreate it?

> I was specifically referring to dynamic vector sizes.

Ah, sorry, yes you are correct. It still shows that supporting VLA mechanisms in an ISA doesn't mean it's slower for fixed-size usage.

I'm not aware of any proper VLA vs VLS comparisons. I benchmarked a VLA vs VLS mandelbrot implementation once where there was no performance difference, but that's a too simple example.
by petsfed | 2025-04-24 19:45:37+00:00
No more probable than any other value, whole or otherwise. In particular, its (per wikipedia) 21.106cm.

Its funny how our brains find nice whole numbers unsettling in the natural world. I was always sort of weirded out by the distance light travels in a nanosecond: just shy of 1 foot. How weird it is that it flops between systems!
by sathackr | 2025-04-24 19:45:47+00:00
Comply but leak the truth to the media.

Comply in a maximally obstructive way.

Comply just enough to not get fired but not as much as someone who may be more inclined to please their boss.

Enlist other opposition and find ways to multiply your obstructive compliance into other departments.

There's tons of "how-to" guides on how to maliciously comply with work demands without getting fired.
by adpirz | 2025-04-24 19:45:53+00:00
The dot com boom is an apt analogy: the internet took off, we understood it had potential, but the innovation didn't all come in the first wave. It took time for the internet to bake, and then we saw another boom with the advent of mobile phones, higher bandwidth, and more compute per user.

It is still simply too early to tell exactly what the new steady state is, but I can tell you that where we're at _today_ is already a massive paradigm shift from what my day-to-day looked like 3 years ago, at least as a SWE.

There will be lots of things thrown at the wall and the things that stick will have a big impact.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-24 19:46:15+00:00
In that case you are just objectively incorrect, you can build a far, far more efficient autocomplete in the standard query order. I will guess something like half as many keystrokes to type the same select and from clauses. You are imagining a very niave autocomplete that can only guess columns after it knows the tables, but in reality you can guess most of the columns, including the first one, the tables, and the aliases. Names in dbs are incredibly sparse, and duplicate names don't make autocomplete less effective.

If you are right about why they did it its even dumber than my reason, they are changing a language grammar to let them make a much worse solution to the same problem.
by quantadev | 2025-04-24 19:46:19+00:00
RSS is around, but Google successfully relegated it to a grave yard, when they stopped supporting it in a big way. RSS is such a simple and powerful thing, it's a shame it's almost nonexistant. Even ActivityPub should've been "built around and on top of RSS" rather than as a separate thing. Same is true of Nostr. Nostr could've been an extension to RSS and let RSS be the least operative fallback for the entire protocol, but yet the format for all delivery nonetheless.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-04-24 19:46:26+00:00
This is underdiscussed. The gap between the perception (accurate, largely) between the 2010s and now for "software jobs" (broad term for all related professions) is stark.

We'd hear stories of ballpits and "20% time" (or whatever Google had), and now we've seen rounds of layoffs, thunderdome for even marginal employment, and Big Names publicly saying they intended to replace staff with LLMs.

How could anyone have loyalty in this environment?
by allemagne | 2025-04-24 19:46:31+00:00
The article does say "precisely 21cm" in the subtitle, repeats it in the "key takeaways" section, and then close to the end of the article these's this:

>By measuring light of precisely the needed wavelength — peaking at precisely 21.106114053 centimeters

Which I assume is the actual measurement every time "21cm" is brought up in this article.
by tmpz22 | 2025-04-24 19:46:36+00:00
I'll reach for it - Meta increases consumer spending and has enabled a lot of small businesses to profit during the previous economic booms. Yeah they were drop shipping products from China using the de minimis exception, or hocking worthless supplements, or promoting influencer products that are no different then the generic but costs twice as much, but a lot of people made a living off an ecosystem that arguably would not exist without Meta.

Further the success of Facebook was arguably the biggest contributor to startup culture ever - I would expect we'd have seen a fraction of the growth in VC if Facebook had never come to pass.

Groups, WhatsApp, etc, would be replaced overnight with, at least initially, a worse version. More hacking, probably worse moderation at scale, worse accessibility, etc.

Meta also gentrified East Palo Alto, and the Zuckerbergs now own a substantial amount of real estate in Redwood City and elsewhere. They've made a big footprint on the peninsula that deserves credit for the now $8 lattes in my hometown.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-04-24 19:46:41+00:00
I get your reaction but it discounts that all of these people are both human (with limited amounts resolve) and have many alternatives. Look at Trump's first cabinet. I believe it had several people who didn't need or want to be there, but felt they needed to supervise: Tillerson, Kelly, Haley - none of them lasted very long.
by Marsymars | 2025-04-24 19:46:53+00:00
Unfortunately, I think we'll need regulation for much of that.

As-is, super-fast charging hardly matters because you only really save money by charging at home where super-fast doesn't matter - for people who can't do most of their charging at home, the incentives for EVs (or disincentives for gas) mostly aren't strong enough for faster charging to tip the scales.

I don't know about the pricing situation - the average new car in North America costs $50k, so I don't know if the incentives are lined up right to sell entry level cars that are much better than today's entry-level cars.

For touch screens, we probably need safety regulation - it just doesn't seem like people care about everything being moved to touch screens enough to vote with their wallets.

The autonomous driving to me is a big unknown, timeline-wise. It's certainly the most obvious candidate for a real difference in car functionality.
by stuxnet79 | 2025-04-24 19:47:39+00:00
> To me, that feels like a failure of the deeper social system. I want to be loyal to the people I work for/with, not treat our relationship like a transaction that is socially acceptable to end at any minute.

Great comment. The confounding variable here is culture.

American cultural norms devalue stable relationships in favor of personal fulfillment and self-actualization.

It isn't like this everywhere. There's a reason why business culture is different in Asia. The underlying attitudes there regarding social norms and how people can relate to each other i.e. what's acceptable and not acceptable, are very different. As a result, commerce there is conducted differently as well. Richard Nisbett wrote a book that goes into detail on this topic [1]

I will not make a judgement on which approach is better, or tie it into economic metrics but the bottom line is that attitudes towards work such as this one are highly influenced by the underlying behavioral norms. Without acknowledging this I don't think you can have a productive conversation on the topic.

[1] The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why - Richard Nisbett