MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apersona | 2025-04-04 20:10:59+00:00
> I do not agree with your conjecture that big corps would win by default.

Why wouldn't big corps win by default? They have the brand name, own the resources to make more polished version of any IP, and have better distribution channels than anyone else.

Can you tell me how this scenario won't play out?

1. Big corporation has people looking for new and trending IP.

2. Instead of buying the rights to it, they get their army of people to produce more polished versions of it.

3. Because they have branding and a better distribution channel, the money goes 100% to them.

> Ask why would people need protection from having their work stolen when the only ones welding weaponized copyright are the corporations.

People working in the field sell their copyright like Gravity Falls' Alex Hirsch: https://x.com/_AlexHirsch/status/1906915851720077617
by vel0city | 2025-04-04 20:11:10+00:00
Sure, there are suburbs that have existed for a long time and are still going strong. And a lot of 100 year old suburbs that became financially unviable and are now empty or torn down.

But large chunks of some of the largest metro areas are made up of massive suburbs largely built from the 2000s onwards. I'm talking Houston, Phoenix, DFW, Austin, Atlanta, Denver, San Antonio, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tucson, Knoxville, and similar areas. And that's just areas I've visited.

Sure, there are 100+ year old neighborhoods in Dallas. But around me, some homes were made in the 50s, a big spurt were made in the late 70s and early 80s, then a massive amount were built in the 00's to literally still being constructed. Massive neighborhoods, apartment complexes, shopping centers, and more exist where there was farmland just five years ago. This makes up a large percentage of the growth of this city. It's not like they're building 100 year old houses for the 30% of growth over the last 25 years.

Go take a look at satellite images of Prosper TX. Of Princeton TX. McKinney TX. Allen TX. Rockwall TX. Dickinson TX.

Where I grew up in Houston in the late 80s/early 90s, you practically couldn't find a house that was built before 1975 other than the derelict remains of old farm houses. The house I grew up in was built in '93 and was kind of out there at the time (had to take a dirt road to get to the neighborhood!) And there's been a ton of construction since then, going further and further into the swamps. Woods where I grew up playing in are now full of single family homes.

So no, the sprawl of suburbs continuously marching more and more into the country side isn't a new thing and it isn't something rare in the slightest. It's happening practically everywhere that's growing in the US and has been for 30+ years.
by codedokode | 2025-04-04 20:11:14+00:00
Let's say we want to store numbers in computer memory but we are not allowed to use decimal point or any characters except for digits. We need to make some system to encode and decode real numbers as a sequence containing only digits.

With fixed point numbers, you write the digits into the memory and have a convention that the decimal point is always after N-th digit. For example, if we agree that the point is always after 2-nd digit then a string 000123 is interpreted as 00.0123 and 123000 means 1230. Using this system with 6 digits we can represent numbers from 0 to 9999 to precision of 0.01.

With floating point, you write both decimal point position (which we call "exponent") and digits (called "mantissa"). Let's agree that the first two digits are the exponent (point position) and the rest four is mantissa. Then this number:

020123

means 01.23 or 1.23 (exponent is 2 meaning the decimal point is after 2nd digit in mantissa). Now using same 6 digits we can represent numbers from 0 to 9999·10⁹⁶ with relative precision of 1/10000.

That's all you need to know, and the rest should be easy to figure out.
by fishpen0 | 2025-04-04 20:12:34+00:00
There is more to it than copyright when you start going down the path of photorealism. As much as it is a picture of Indiana jones, it is also a picture of Harrison Ford. As fun as it is to make hilarious videos of presidents sucking ceo toes, there has to be a line.

There is a lack of consent here that runs even deeper than what copyright was traditionally made to protect. It goes further than parody. We can't flip our standards back and forth depending on who the image is made to reproduce
by WalterBright | 2025-04-04 20:13:11+00:00
I did learn how to program on the -10. A marvelous experience.

Looking backwards, writing an integer basic is a trivial exercise. But back in the 70s, I had no idea how to write such a thing.

Around 1978, Hal Finney (yes, that guy) wrote an integer basic for the Mattel Intellivision (with its wacky 10 bit microprocessor) that fit in a 2K EPROM. Of course, Hal was (a lot) smarter than the average bear.
by ryao | 2025-04-04 20:13:23+00:00
They replaced C with C++. For example, try passing a function pointer as a void pointer argument without a cast. C says this should work. C++ says it should not. There are plenty of other differences that make it C++ and not C, if you know to look for them. The fact that C++ symbol names are used for one, which means you need to specify extern “C” if you want to reference them from the CUDA driver API. Then there is the fact that it will happily compile C++ classes where a pure C compiler will not. There is no stdc option for the compiler.
by zupa-hu | 2025-04-04 20:13:45+00:00
Hey! I'm the founder of an early stage startup. The product was long in the making, about to release v2 and I planned to do sales myself.

I've played with the idea of this model myself, in the sense that it would be an interesting value-creating service. I'm open and also skeptical.

1) My product is software, you were in hardware. 2) Do you have a large existing rolodex? 3) How many startups do you plan on representing? 4) Where are you from & where are you located?

I'm not shy of talking to people. The biggest help for me would be prospecting and qualifying.

I'm in a rush, please reach out! Email in profile.
by tracker1 | 2025-04-04 20:13:50+00:00
Related is the fear some have of Saturated Fats and Meat. So many people don't even realize that the body does need some Saturated Fats, or that fats are often a mix of them and vary by the species, breed and how they're fed.

It doesn't help in how far some foods have been bred in the past century and a half in particular. Or how different people with different genetics may react to certain foods.
by netsharc | 2025-04-04 20:13:55+00:00
Sorry for the unsolicited advice, but that sounds like the seeds of conspiracy theory thinking, which is dangerous if you end up with confirmation bias and start finding clues that satisfy your theories, e.g.: https://archive.is/sS3W1 . "Satisfy" in the sense of "I knew it! I was right, I'm onto something!"

Of course it's possible your theory is right, at the moment my uneducated guess about what the Trump admin is doing is like some art critic seeing paint on canvas and asking "I wonder what this artist' motivation is..." when it's in fact just a monkey having smeared its droppings on the canvas.

Whereas the lockdowns around the world are probably governments being scared that they'll have too many deaths. If there was a conspiracy, with so many governments, what do you think the chances are of somebody leaking the plans are?
by dkarl | 2025-04-04 20:14:48+00:00
> Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying

In my city, the same people who are against housing also oppose transit. They don't want the city to grow, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. If you tell them we can build transit and create walkable neighborhoods, and growth can be a positive rather than a negative, they hate that idea just as much as if we grow and it's a gridlocked disaster. Maybe even more so.
by drdaeman | 2025-04-04 20:15:17+00:00
> any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable

If you haven't read it, you may enjoy Robert Sapolsky's "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will". I haven't yet finished it (only halfway through the book) but I found it a very fascinating read so far, no matter whenever one agrees with the conclusions or not. And I think it resonates and kind of confirms your comment, coming at it from a neurological viewpoint.

The book basically outlines which parts of the brain are responsible for our decision making. While I understand that he's drastically [over]simplifying things for readers' sake (as it's always the case with pop-sci), it provides a nice overview (a bunch of fun facts, with references to the actual scientific research where they came from) of how our decisions are heavily influenced by a lot of various things, in the context of your comment specifically - the processes going on in our brains that we can roughly call "emotions".
by godsinhisheaven | 2025-04-04 20:15:23+00:00
People certainly can make themselves neurodivergent, but I think most people are born that way. I think there are lots of reasons why CS and tech at large is full of neurodivergent people, but I think people are joinging because they are neurodivergent, not the other way around. That being said, there are lots of neurodivergent people in finance and (the higher levels of) politics, they're just mostly psychopaths.
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 20:15:29+00:00
Copyright can stop me from making a star wars movie about wizards fighting each other with laser swords in space. Even if I don't make a star wars movie, if I make a movie that makes disney feel threatened because it's close enough to being a star wars movie I could still end up losing in courts.

There are plenty of examples of copyright hurting people for creating something that wasn't exactly the same as something else which was copyrighted. Copyright is a threat to all creative works. The bigger the investment required for a creative work, the bigger the risk. For this reason, we see it a lot more often in music where the investment needed is lower than films. People have been successfully sued because they wrote a totally new song that was in the same genre as someone else's song https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-copy-a...
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-04 20:15:32+00:00
Yeah, here it is: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-foreign-policy-ad/

A headline from the times during that same year: TRUMP GIVES A VAGUE HINT OF CANDIDACY (https://archive.is/xF2pW)

As much as I dislike advertising in general, and specifically the opinions in that ad, I think that whether the New York Times was willing to publish it is not the important detail here.

This was at a time when the US and China were working together to keep the USSR in check while at the same time the US was sending weapons to Taiwan so that they could be used to keep China in check. So imagine being China in 1991. The USSR has just fallen, so they're no longer a threat, but US-sold weapons are still being pointed at you from Taiwan. You'd want the US to leave you alone and stop arming your enemies. And here's this candidate who wants the US to step off the world stage and focus instead on what it can build alone at home.

It seems pretty likely that they'd be in favor of getting Trump elected. Whether they ultimately did is an open question, but if so then it's not shame on the New York Times, but shame on us for not better protecting ourselves against foreign interference.
by jajko | 2025-04-04 20:15:44+00:00
He basically cleaned whole route for world dominance for China. All they have to do is to be more friendly to Europe, rest of Asia and literally rest of the world, thats enough. Just a bit friendly, nothing more.

Once oil starts trading in parallel in RMB, the only thing going for US will be waning momentum and its military, while China will be in reverse situation.

Just like putin being arrogant and aggressive about Ukraine wanting to join NATO, causing Finland and Sweden to join (which they wouldn't do otherwise), he is causing what he is causing. I am fixing my floating mortgage on monday, we have currently 0.2% SNB rate but the risk of it shooting up is massive.
by cubefox | 2025-04-04 20:16:00+00:00
Yes they can overfit. SLT assumed that this is caused by large VC dimension. Which apparently isn't true because there exist various techniques/hacks which effectively combat overfitting while not actually reducing the very large VC dimension of those neural networks. Basically, the theory predicts they always overfit, while in reality they mostly work surprisingly well. That's often the case in ML engineering: people discover things work well and others don't, while not being exactly sure why. The famous Chinchilla scaling law was an empirical discovery, not a theoretical prediction, because theories like SLT are far too weak to make interesting predictions like that. Engineering is basically decades ahead of those pure-theory learning theories.

> Please point me to these papers because I'm still learning.

Not sure which papers you have in mind. To be clear, I'm not an expert, just an interested layman. I just wanted to highlight the stark difference between the apparently failed pure math approach I learned years ago in a college class, and the actual ML papers that are released today, with major practical breakthroughs on a regular basis. Similarly practical papers were always available, just from very different people, e.g. LeCun or people at DeepMind, not from theoretical computer science department people who wrote text books like the one here. Back in the day it wasn't very clear (to me) that those practice guys were really onto something while the theory guys were a dead end.
by markus_zhang | 2025-04-04 20:16:12+00:00
Can you please elaborate? I get that he brought maybe a couple of dozens of people from Prism to Microsoft, but I can't see why that brought down DEC, especially it was DEC who paused Prism.

I also know that some Prism code was used in NT but again I hardly see why that brought down DEC.

That could be the cause, if DEC had some competitive hardware or software projects, but none that I know so far. Please share your knowledge with us.
by MajimasEyepatch | 2025-04-04 20:17:17+00:00
In the case of Airbnb, wouldn't that show up in the listing's reviews, requests for refunds, etc. and ultimately drive down the listing's LTV? Nobody leaves reviews on an ad, and I imagine that very few users report inappropriate ads, so you can only measure that indirectly. But if somebody books an Airbnb and has a bad experience, they are much more likely to give you direct feedback about it.
by ryao | 2025-04-04 20:17:26+00:00
I want to write C code, not C++ code. Even if I try to write C style C++, it is more verbose and less readable, because of various C++isms. For example, having to specify extern “C” to get sane ABI names for the Nvidia CUDA driver API:

https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-driver-api/index.html

Not to mention that C++ does not support neat features like variable sized arrays on the stack.
by cess11 | 2025-04-04 20:17:28+00:00
It's borderline insane to call Newsweek "left leaning".

'His attorneys claimed, and ICE later confirmed, that the only verification came from a form filled out by the Prince George County Police Department, which based his membership on the fact that "he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie; and that a confidential informant advised that he was an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique" – a group based out of Long Island, New York.'

The state has confirmed to the press that it doesn't have any evidence of the claims you're making.

MS-13 is less evil than the Biden and current Trump administrations, who are guilty of genocide. I think you're part of an attempt to distract from that and other crimes, as well as the ongoing turmoil in the financial system.
by hannasanarion | 2025-04-04 20:17:29+00:00
> Objectivism has merits around notions of reality being singular and shared by everyone in one way or another, and (hypothesis mine) if everything derives from a singular reality, by understanding this singular reality we should be able to in a certain sense understand everything (including ethics, art and morality, which I think is highly counterintuitive)

But this is a violation of Hume's Guillotine. You cannot derive "ought" statements from "is" statements. There is only one reality, and science can tell us how it is, but science cannot tell us how it ought to be, how much we should like it, or in what ways we should want to alter it.

Rand and her followers fail in their attempted logical chain by leaping from "humans evolved rationality as a tool to survive and enhance their lives" to "enhancement of each individual's life via self-interest is the standard of moral value", which is non-sequitur. Rationality is the ability to make plans and accomplish goals, the fact that it exists does not tell us which goals we should use it in the service of.

She smuggles in her own pre-existing moral preference when she defines individual flourishing as the ultimate moral good. You can see this very easily if you take the exact same syllogism and substitute "community interest" for "personal interest". In fact this modified version of the argument may be even more valid, since a defining feature of humanity even more than our rationality is our unique community organizing power, which is also evolved, and thus community service also serves perfectly well as an evolution-informed yardstick of moral value.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-04 20:17:29+00:00
In other words, a floating point number consists of 2 numbers and a sign bit:

1. the digits

2. the exponent

3. a sign bit

If you're familiar with scientific notation, yes, it's the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation

The rest is just the inevitable consequences of that.
by DrScientist | 2025-04-04 20:17:41+00:00
We could definitely do more - one of the challenges here is that some bacteria are quite picky about where they grow - ie there a lots that don't grow on a petri dish. So not always so easy to grow side by side.

Note from the paper - they stored the soil samples for a year on growth media before testing ( to allow any compunds to build up presumably ). That doesn't sound like a fast process.

Our knowledge of what's out there is quite biased by what grows well in the lab - probably less than 1% of all bacteria will grow on an agar plate.
by ManuelKiessling | 2025-04-04 20:18:07+00:00
I guess we are slowly but steadily approaching splitting-hairs-territory, so not sure if this is still worth it…

However. I‘m not quite sure where I complained. Certainly not in the post.

And yes, I’m very convinced that the result turned out a lot better than it would have turned out if an unexperienced „vibe coder“ had tried to achieve the same end result.

Actually pretty sure without my extensive and structured requirements and the guard rails, the AI coding session would have ended in a hot mess in the best case, and a non-functioning result in the worst case.

I‘m 100% convinced that these two statements are true and relevant to the topic:

That a) someone lacking my level of experience and expertise is simply not capable of producing a document like https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co...

And that b) using said document as the basis for the agent-powered AI coding session had a significant impact on the process as well as the end result of the session.
by trompetenaccoun | 2025-04-04 20:18:34+00:00
Interesting, that's not what they teach these days from what I've seen. The economic aspect is a side note and the focus is on the politics, racism, Holocaust, etc. Which imo doesn't really how teach the kids the root cause.

Communism is usually also not discussed enough. In the Weimar Republic in the 30s it was inevitable that either Communists or Nazis would come to power. The mainstream parties had completely failed the country so the people were desperate and sought refuge in radical ideologies. It was either or, there was no alternative.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-04-04 20:19:34+00:00
It's an okayish tool.

After using it for a few years, accumulated enough quirks to significantly diminish my initial enthusiasm. The concurrency gotchas, the utter lack of debugging and profiling tools, the weak management of today's most common deployment models (e.g. Docker/containers and cloud services)...it's not "good" by 2025 standards.

I'm sure enterprises still do use it. But they also still use RPG, PL/I, and IMS. So...
by returningfory2 | 2025-04-04 20:19:42+00:00
I think that a significant cause of homelessness is unaffordable housing. In 2025 housing affordability is better in Republican-run states like Texas because the state governments allow more housing to be constructed. Because housing is more abundant and cheaper, the population is growing faster. (This is why the Electoral College is on track to become more biased in favor of Republicans after the 2030 Census: the US population is disproportionately growing in Republican states.)

For context I'm a center-left person, but at this point I'm pretty fed up with the standard California Democrat stance of simultaneously saying that housing affordability is really important but also using many tools of government to actually block housing construction.
by throwaway657656 | 2025-04-04 20:20:05+00:00
If the El Salvadorian gov't is corrupt enough to run an international pay-based prison, couldn't they also accept a payment, from anyone, for releasing an international prisoner? The logistics after release would be secondary but at least we'd know they aren't being abused in what is effectively a dark-site.

But if the current administration is offering $20k a year for imprisonment (rough guess) then they might want $200k to free him.
by KittenInABox | 2025-04-04 20:20:12+00:00
There are US citizens who want to shoot gays, kill people different in creed or heritage, and bomb people for religious reasons. We had the gay panic defense (the legal defense to kill gay people just because you found out they were gay, and the shock justified you killing them). We had people shooting sikhs assuming they're muslim. We had folks bombing abortion clinics. There are US citizens who have done far more, and far worse, than writing an op-ed or taking over a building.

So, frankly, why not treat these people the same we treated like these other folk-- a trial and then appropriate punishment proven in the court of law. If an immigrant is violating the terms of their visa, the US gov't can prove it in their own courts and then deport them appropriately.
by fmxsh | 2025-04-04 20:20:59+00:00
Seems like the poetic ability of culture to comment on itself while simultaneously lacking self-awareness.

(the article is what it cricisizes. It tells how the author uses it (or not), it is talking about it like everyone else, it is vilifying it like everyone else, etc...)

(it's thus a clever critique by itself being the subject of criticism. The reader senses there is a higher level criticism, but can't really be sure. The reader must even suspect AI wrote it. The reader can sense something... But it's all potentially hollow, like nothing there, just appearance)
by mentalgear | 2025-04-04 20:21:28+00:00
It's more of a UI/UX problem than a hard limitation. For uses cases that require collaboration with offline editing, the person that last merges might be given a split view to sync their changes.

Again, syntactically possible, semantically harder, but it depends on your use-case plus additional constraints (eg max offline time). Maybe not a fully automatic system, but still very useful.