MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toast0 | 2025-04-28 18:42:40+00:00
> thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability.

Yeah, they don't need to do that anymore. Around me, enough towers have battery backups that I can count on 2 hours of coverage when utility power goes out (if it goes out late at night or early morning, there's usually coverage until 6-7 am when people start waking up and use up the rest of the power). I don't have a real landline, but the telco DSL would drop instantly with utility power so I don't have big hopes and I wasn't willing to pay $60/month to find out.

Around when I moved, stores would pull out the credit card imprint machines, but those don't work anymore because cards are flat. Cash might work, and I've got some, but I don't think many people in my community do; people don't have cash for the snack shack we run at my kid's sports, so I doubt they have it for restaurants and stores either. And we get frequent 2-4 hour power outages, at least one, usually two or three per year; and ~ 24 hour outages every few years. The snack shack runs during summer where electricity is most reliable, but I doubt people stock up on cash in the fall and use it all up before spring/summer; they probably just don't have any.
by willvarfar | 2025-04-28 18:43:00+00:00
Yeah python has become more and more version and deps hell. Honestly 3 was all cost and no benefit and we'd all be fine if we'd stuck with 2. There were also some early missteps in api design like async and pandas and matplotlib that we all now have to live with. I even ran into problems with PIL changing API for textsize recently. Just a thousand cuts.

And yet for simple little standalone programs and notebooks, particularly for science, it is super simple and natural to turn to it.
by throwup238 | 2025-04-28 18:43:34+00:00
The key part of the phrase is actually "electric power station, a part of an electric grid or an industrial plant." Note how the definition doesn't include an entire grid.

Only the first power plant in a black-start (like a hydroelectric dam or gas plant started by a backup generator) is truly "black started." The rest don't fit that definition because they depend on an external power source to spin up and synchronize frequency before burning fuel and supplying any energy to the grid. If they didn't, the second they'd turn on they'd experience catastrophic unscheduled disassembly of the (very big) turbines.

Only the first power plant can come online without the external transmission network.
by HighGoldstein | 2025-04-28 18:43:48+00:00
> The first is that the LLM outputs are not consistently good or bad - the LLM can put out 9 good MRs before the 10th one has some critical bug or architecture mistake. This means you need to be hypervigilant of everything the LLM produces, and you need to review everything with the kind of care with which you review intern contributions.

This is not a counter-argument, but this is true of any software engineer as well. Maybe for really good engineers it can be 1/100 or 1/1000 instead, but critical mistakes are inevitable.
by mardifoufs | 2025-04-28 18:43:58+00:00
Nope, that's not what I said. I'm a westerner, and it's not about "good faith". It has nothing to do with behind decadent or lazy.

It's because the modus operandi of war mongers, since before world war 1 has always been to agitate for wars that they don't want to fight for themselves. We are talking about nuclear war here, the bad faith argument is to imply that being against it is a sign of being a paid Russian shill. I guess the Pentagon is full of said shills, since they have never even hinted towards a direct war against Russia, or wanted to get directly (by means of troops on the ground) involved in one.

Now I agree that sometimes it's simply not realistic to go all "well do it yourself then". But in this case, Ukraine accepts, trains and equips volunteers. It's not a hypothetical.
by larusso | 2025-04-28 18:44:02+00:00
I assume Lua would fit the bill then definitely.

Edit: Just want to mention that this sounds like a super interesting project. I have to admit that I struggled to see where python was run on the hardware when mentioning custom toolchains and a compilation step. But the important aspect is that your hardware runs this similar to how a vm would run it with all dynamic aspects of the language included. I wonder similar to a parent comment if something similar for wasm would be worth having.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-28 18:44:04+00:00
> Why not?

its prudent to identify and never engage in a strawman fallacy, which involves introducing an argument that was never the one under discussion in order to discredit the one that was, in amusing textbook fashion you follow this with

> Failure to address this inconsistency makes your reasoning seem capricious and unpersuasive

When the typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition

looks like we are at an impasse, but maybe you can find someone else to engage with
by psunavy03 | 2025-04-28 18:44:06+00:00
This is highly dependent on one's own belief system and theology, because beyond a certain point, we literally can't prove what happens to a human mind when the body dies, the existence or non-existence of a soul, etc.

Believe or disbelieve whatever you like, go on about a God of the Gaps, but that's why they talk about people's religious "faith."
by iJohnDoe | 2025-04-28 18:44:44+00:00
Obviously, everyone generates feelings in different ways. However, Pale Blue Dot I would hope generates feeling that we're all on this rock together. We're all human and we should all be on the same side of working together for our species.

Astronauts that have seen earth from afar get a profound feeling of love for Earth and humanity, and that we're all in this together (should be all in this together).

There is a beautiful scene about this that articulates it well. It is a NASA documentary about a female astronaut that sees Earth from space for the first time. I wish I could find which movie it is.
by genewitch | 2025-04-28 18:44:59+00:00
That's assuming the people who want to strike care about having a job afterward. I know the state hospitals stop loss people when there's a disaster, so I keep abreast of predictable disasters and tell my wife and friends "hey you're sick, go get a doctor's note for the rest of the week" and then they're not stuck at the hospitals for days during a disaster.

Not that type of hospital.
by dang | 2025-04-28 18:45:41+00:00
HN has always been an actively curated site, so (in case it's comforting I guess?) the overlords (though I prefer the word janitor) have been at it for awhile.

Here's me explaining this the day after I was outed as a moderator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621 (March 2014)

Lots more along similar lines: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by sitkack | 2025-04-28 18:45:48+00:00
That is cool, but we cant be guaranteed that will always be the case, nor could we make a statement about all phones, it would be a phone by phone basis. Esp on Android where someone could have an alternative screenshot application.

Depending on your threat model, I'd argue that it would be impossible to prove that metadata is not included within the image itself (alpha channel, noise, pushed pixels, colorspace skew, etc).

I'd be interested in stego techniques that can survive image reduction and denoising.
by wrs | 2025-04-28 18:45:52+00:00
Is it? There's certainly $1T of other businesses built with the internet, but the internet business, itself, was rapidly commoditized. The valuable things were the applications built on it, not the network. The argument here is that nobody's found the $1T applications built on AI foundation models yet, but OpenAI is valued as if they have, because their demo chatbot took off out of peoples' curiosity and people are extrapolating that accident exponentially into the future.
by nostrademons | 2025-04-28 18:46:13+00:00
An MBA is exactly what it sounds like. It teaches you how to administer a business. Not how to found one (it’s often counterproductive for that), not how to have good ideas, not how to spot product cycles, but to take an existing business and make economically rational, not entirely stupid decisions for it.

Curriculum usually includes things like pricing; applied microeconomics; power & politics (ie how to get the org to do what you want), business ethics, some intro to corporate law, oftentimes electives that are deeper dives on how specific industries are structured.

My wife got an MBA at the same time I was working on founding a startup and they are basically completely disjoint skillsets. If you treat the MBA as training for how to be the hired Director/VP in an established organization and not the person who wills it into existence in the first place, it can be a pretty interesting curriculum.
by VWWHFSfQ | 2025-04-28 18:47:14+00:00
Python is just brutally slow. Anything performance-sensitive has to be done with a native module and now that requires all the same compilation and build tooling that everything else does.

The ecosystem is massive and the core team just keeps adding more and more dubious language features and syntax.

Realistically, Python should have been "done" after async/await and fixing str vs bytes.
by dynm | 2025-04-28 18:47:40+00:00
By complicated and unstated rules, I meant sort of norms about how you talk about previous work, how you caption figures, what order you have for the sections, how self-congratulatory vs. humble you are, etc. Theoretically, there are no rules for these things. But in practice, insiders seem to adopt a (deliberately?) complex ruleset and use it to signal to each other that they insiders.
by rglullis | 2025-04-28 18:48:55+00:00
> Having a good Twitter/social media presence will become a compulsory pre-condition. The company owned channels (like websites, email lists or apps) where you have direct access to customers will become key demand generation pipelines.

The ability to control their own media presence is what still makes me believe that ActivityPub has a future, but it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it; instead of just sitting on their hands and chasing the audiences wherever they think they are going.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-28 18:49:05+00:00
My SO worked at a nursing home which had several elderly with dementia cry out they just wanted to die all day long, day after day.

Yet they got their flu shots and got treated for any infections they might get. This went on for the two years my SO worked there.

My dad had cancer that spread to his lungs, and then he got pneumonia. The day after being hospitalized, he asked the doctor if it was a chance he'd ever get home and they admitted that no, that was not very likely. Later that day he asked them to turn off the oxygen, which they did after confirming his wish. He passed peacefully a few hours later.

I was so glad he was given the opportunity to make his choice, and that the doctors respected it.

Sure, I lost some months with my dad, but he'd be in a hospital bed struggling to breathe. I hope I get to make a similar choice when that time comes.
by nailer | 2025-04-28 18:49:16+00:00
Most profoundly autistic people don’t go the bathroom unassisted, or pay their own taxes. That’s true.

> Kennedy to do whatever he wants to them to restore their humanity, whether that be a registry, concentration camps (or as he calls them, "wellness farms") or whatever else he has planned.

Wild conspiracy theories help nobody, and also harm autistic people.
by spprashant | 2025-04-28 18:49:24+00:00
The gist is that basic Python at its very core is -

a) simple b) limited

The language really took off when developers took this simple limited language and pushed it to its very limits using C extensions. The data science explosion opened up the language to a very wide user base.

So to answer your 3 questions: a) Python is not a fast language by any means. There is a lot of overhead in every function call that makes it almost impossible for low latency/real-time use cases. b) I don't think Python is particularly the best language for this. This is just a demonstration of someone building their own custom toolchain to show what is possible with just pure Python. The author has highlighted why they think this is interesting on the website. c) I keep thinking Python will go away soon, and we will see a much better alternative. But the reality is Python is entrenched deeply just like JavaScript. Lot of smart people are putting in a lot of effort to make it better. Personally the ecosystem and packaging story does not annoy me much, but the lack of proper threading (GIL) has hurt my projects more than once.

For your particular pain point, the current community recommended solution is to use uv (https://github.com/astral-sh/uv). There were several detours (pip, pyenv, pipenv, poetry etc.) the community took before they got behind this.
by mardifoufs | 2025-04-28 18:50:01+00:00
It's not a cheap deflection. You want other people to die in the trenches or worse, to die in a nuclear war. The deflection is to say that "your life won't change anything", which I mean sure yes, but that's what every single war mongers that doesn't want to fight the wars that they promote say. If everyone said that, no one would be fighting against Russia right now.

And it's funny to say that it's a repeat of Munich / Ethiopia. Again, war mongers will always prefer comparing to the few times where war was the only solution. The only issue is that not only do both situations have nothing in common (not that anyone cared about Ethiopia, since European colonialism in Africa was nothing new), but it also erases the fact that we are talking about nuclear powers here. If Hitler had nuclear weapons pointed at London and New York back in 1938, then obviously the equation wouldn't be as simple as "stop him now" even with hindsight lol.
by StefanBatory | 2025-04-28 18:50:07+00:00
Because you need experience. At least in my country, unpaid internships are the norm; and you won't be taught anything, or held to a lower standard. You just do the job that you'd be normally paid for, just for free.

And even then, I had a few friends that had to go for another few months of unpaid job (not internship) later on. Because nobody would hire them without experience, and some companies don't consider internship to be one.
by dheera | 2025-04-28 18:50:22+00:00
If the law set the speed limit as the hard boundary, with hard punishments for driving at 70, everyone else would drive at 65, occasionally getting close to 68-69.

If the reasonable speed for a road is 70, the legal hard limit could be at 75 to be considerate of this effect. But make 75 the actual hard limit with $200 fines for hitting 75, $1000 fines for hitting 80, and jail time for hitting 85. Make it almost certain to be caught if you hit these hard limits.

I guarantee you fewer people would die on the roads if this is the way things worked.
by genewitch | 2025-04-28 18:51:14+00:00
Concur, they have huge fire breaks they put high tension lines in, where the easement is easily 100' to either side of the lines. This is in Louisiana. When there's a hurricane these lines still break, but not because of trees. During heavy storms, smaller trees hit smaller (480? Some KV?) Lines that go along highways to residences. A high tension line down means a few days without power (about 3-4), a tree on a lower voltage line is usually fixed within hours.

They go through and remove damaged trees near the easements of the highway lines, as well as branches that could break into lines.

As an aside we lived on the same section of grid as the sheriff, and our power was rock solid for a few years, then he left office and now our power is better than average (at least better than our neighbors who's power line cones from the other direction).
by ebiester | 2025-04-28 18:52:03+00:00
You cannot build a tractor unit (the engine-cab half of the tractor-trailer) with Model T Technology even if they are close.

And the changes will be in the auxiliary features. We will figure out ways to have LLMs understand APIs better without training them. We will figure out ways to better focus its context. We will chain LLM requests and contexts in a way that help solve problems better. We will figure out ways to pass context from session to session that an LLM can effectively have a learning memory. And we will figure out our own best practices to emphasize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. (We will build better roads.)

And as much as you want to say that - a Model T was uncomfortable, had a range of about 150 miles between fill-ups, and maxed out at 40-45 mph. It also broke frequently and required significant maintenance. It might take 13-14 days to get a Model T from new york to los angeles today notwithstanding maintenance issues, and a modern car could make it reliably in 4-5 days if you are driving legally and not pushing more than 10 hours a day.

I too think that self-writing code is not going to happen, but I do think there is a lot of efficiency to be made.
by ithkuil | 2025-04-28 18:52:21+00:00
I don't know but I find it very practical to not carry piles of cash in my pocket and home and know that we're less likely to get robbed just because of the cash we have.

I don't know how true the relationship between the cashless lifestyle and safety actually is, but it works and I feel ok; I'm not sure that the prospect of a few hours of national blackout once in 20 years will make me change my mind significantly.
by lysace | 2025-04-28 18:52:34+00:00
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/22/nx-s1-5372733/60-minutes-bill...

> The longtime head of CBS' 60 Minutes resigned Tuesday, as the network's parent company contemplates a settlement with President Trump over his lawsuit focusing on an interview the show did with then-Vice President Kamala Harris last fall.

> In an emotionally charged meeting Tuesday afternoon, and again in a note to staff released publicly shortly after, the show's executive producer, Bill Owens said he was departing after 37 years with CBS News following months of heavy-handed treatment of the show by corporate leaders.

> Owens, only the third leader of the show in its more than half-century history, did not explicitly cite Trump. But the president's open rancor toward 60 Minutes looms over all. Corporate parent Paramount and its controlling owner, Shari Redstone, are seeking the approval of federal regulators to sell it to the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison. The billionaire software mogul is a friend of Trump who visited the president at the White House earlier this year.

Edit: So, exactly was what flaggable in this post? Free speech proponents my ass.

The fantastic person in question also flagged another, completely unrelated commment of this within seconds of this flagging this one, as if to make a statement.

There needs to be consequences for the people/accounts who abuse HN like this. I don't believe there is.
by XCSme | 2025-04-28 18:53:17+00:00
It's funny that I was just looking to get a VPS from them yesterday, and today their entire platform has been changed, including their pricing plans.

One-paragraph summary here too: https://www.uxwizz.com/blog/a2-hosting-now-hosting-com

> A2 Hosting, founded in 2003, has rebranded to Hosting.com. The rebranding was announced in April 2025, marking a change after over two decades in the web hosting industry.

> A2 Hosting was also acquired by World Host Group (WHG), with the deal closing around January 29, 2025. WHG is expanding its hosting services by acquiring established brands. Former A2 Hosting CEO Bryan Muthig stated that joining WHG would provide the resources needed for continued growth.
by chimeracoder | 2025-04-28 18:53:24+00:00
> HN also does the same for far left authoritarian ideologies, those are also here and upvoted.

Appropriately, this reply (which is exactly what I was expecting) is itself an example of the effect I'm describing: the false presumption that two point which can be distinguished are inherently equivalent and comparable.

> I don't see how this pushes out anyone.

Given your other extensive other comments about these topics, I can understand why you don't think this dynamic would push anyone out, and I also don't think we're going to see eye to eye on any of this.
by mardifoufs | 2025-04-28 18:53:39+00:00
And you've managed to pull the typical online war mongers deflection of calling me a Russian shill. Let's say you're right, I'm a complete Russian shill (nevermind that I completely abhor the Russian regime since their intervention in Syria, and think that Putin belongs to the Hague tribunal).

Are you going to actually dismiss the fact that yes, nuclear war would be a very likely possibility if we declared war against Russia? Much more likely than... Not doing that?

Or are you going to use the Reddit argument that somehow, it just won't happen because trust me bro, and only Russian shill would care about getting nuclear bombed?

And yes, it's cowardly to call people cowards because they won't push for a war that you yourself won't fight. I didn't bring up cowardice first by the way, but I guess it's fine to do it when you agree with the person lol.
by prescriptivist | 2025-04-28 18:53:45+00:00
I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the commercials I think was from Facebook (IIRC, it could have been Google...). It was directed toward students, so I'm pretty sure it was an organic ad, but there were several aspects to it that felt fairly personalized to me (bicycling and outdoor related) that I actually wondered if it was generated on the fly using an LLM.

FB knows me and what I like and they have enough of data on my searches that they could customize a pretty relevant audio ad that, now with LLMs, can feel really relevant and natural, especially with audio gen being so good.

My point though is I wasn't sure if it was LLM generated or not and that's stuck with me. Random ChatGPT copy-pasta is easy for me to pick out – most people do not write that well. But a sophisticated application of this tech probably approaches the it-could-go-either-way territory.
by kragen | 2025-04-28 18:53:47+00:00
8–11% nickel, not antibacterial, and five times weaker than this CuLiTa alloy in the annealed state. Thin out the middle and leave thick edges to avoid pain. None of this is an option with this new alloy unless someone finds a cheaper way to make it and probably some kind of beryllium-copper-like precipitation hardening process so you can form it.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-28 18:53:52+00:00
> Software is the most cush job I have had. More money for less work. Better perks. Less stress overall. Constantly learning, yes. Often frustrating, yes. But having financial resources beyond what the other jobs could provide is a thing. Other jobs I could leave at work, sure, but others I couldn't. I would never go back to being a public high school teacher; that shit was the suck. So was selling stocks. Software is a dream in comparison.

The problem is: there exists a very specific group of people who do software development as a job who are really passionate and idealistic about software (that's why they actually got interested in software development and decided to do this professionally). For these people, the whole "politics" about software devlopment, bullshit project management processes, not being allowed to make use of their full potential and skills, and office politics is (thus) hell on earth.

I thus very plausibly do believe that exactly for people who are incredibly passionate about software development, other jobs (that are outside their passion) can actually (paradoxically!) be more convenient.