MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-04-18 04:29:11+00:00
> Our enviable lifestyles in here are largely supported by our foreign relations out there - in this context, that exporting of culture such that elites from other cultures still strive to send their kids to college in the United States!

Seems unlikely, given that the U.S. has been among the per-capita richest countries in the world for almost its entire existence, including when we almost shut down immigration completely for almost half the 20th century. But I know we don’t see eye to eye about “soft power.”

> As far as the specifics of culture, the example of the overemphasis on book learning is a bit rich in the context of our homegrown MBAs pathological love for living out Goodhart's law. I've certainly encountered my share of foreigners over reliant on rote memorization. The thing is as long as they stay that way, they don't get far in America - and this is obvious to their fellow students. They're not becoming members of the "elite professional class", and nobody is following their tack thinking it's a good way to learn.

I’m talking about something more fundamental than that, which is a fundamental deference to the wisdom of the common man. To use an example, Anglo-American tradition not only gave us jury trials, but the general attitude that ordinary people are capable of understanding and resolving sophisticated disputes. The vast majority of Asians I’ve encountered in America, by contrast, have traditional asian deference for academic knowledge and academic credentials.

To use another example, consider Nixon’s Checkers speech: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-senator-ni.... I was thinking about this today and realized that my parents wouldn’t really get the speech. They’d understand the gist, but they wouldn’t really understand it the way it was meant to be understood, because it invoked various WASP norms that are alien to them.

- He mentions growing up in modest circumstances, which is valued in WASP culture but looked down upon in desi culture.

- He mentions military service, which is distinctly valued in WASP culture and not valued in desi culture.

- He says his wife “doesn’t have a mink coat,” but “she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.” My parents would understand this to mean he’s saying he didn’t accept illicit money to buy a mink coat. Which isn’t really what he meant—he was a private practice lawyer he could’ve afforded to legitimately buy his wife a mink coat. He was conveying that they’re not *the kind of people who wear mink coats—an appeal to WASP austerity that is alien to desi culture.

The Checkers speech was, of course, meant to be understood in substance as well as subtext by the American public at large. It’s not clear to me that would be true today.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-04-18 04:30:02+00:00
Honestly, you're the first person who hasn't recoiled in horror when I explained it. The code I have is very janky. It works about 90% the time and the other 90% of the time I revert to using grep from the command line. I'll document the doc standards I'm using somewhere and then try to fix the code.

The other thing I'm working on is figuring out git plumbing so I can force the ~/todo or ~/project directory in a repo to be the same in all branches (that way you can update them no matter what branch you're on.)
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-18 04:30:38+00:00
So the Internet is basically a series of tubes, and http packets are like mustard and ketchup that you pop into the tube, and it zooms along with air-pressure determined by the Chinese government. and then your bank puts dollar bills into the tubes on the Internet, and those tubes connect to vaults and safes underground, and that is how money gets into your account. Money doesn't come out of your account; it's just converted into dogecoin and then every User Interface automatically converts Dogecoin figures into USD before you can read it.

Also your computer is like a car. Your car works because there's a hamster or three in there and they keep them well-fed. Your computer also has a hamster, or a guinea pig sometimes. And your computer sends http packets over next door by means of carrier pigeons, or sometimes by semaphore.

Also men enjoy action-adventure films. Men enjoy films with lots of shooting. All men enjoy films with loud noises and special effects. Men like rock music with distorted guitars and loud drums. Men like loud soundsin general; that's why men are soldiers because we can blow stuff up and we listen to it.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-18 04:31:08+00:00
If half the people are lying, then half are criminal perjurers. I'm not labeling a class, I'm just believing what the numbers say.

You keep insisting that I'm making broad racist claims about a group of people, over and over.

You seem to think I have some secret agenda to support Trump or his policy, and you keep arguing as though arguing against that agenda is the same as arguing against what I'm saying. This is why I say you aren't honestly engaging and you are repeating talking points. I don't have a secret agenda, I'm a registered Democrat and I've never voted for a Republican as far as I can remember. I also think that most people claiming asylum are not being honest, because that's just what the information I have available clearly suggests.

You want to pick an arbitrarily impossible standard of evidence which is not reasonable and not even used in actual courts when evaluating whether testimony is credible or honest (that there is a criminal perjury conviction). People are caught lying in court every day, even when that's obvious and provable they are rarely (as in almost never) pursued for perjury charges.

Frankly at this point it's clear that you kindof agree with what I'm saying, that a lot of people lie in this process, and it's not the ground truth you are disputing but rather you want me to not say it because it might have consequences if we say things like this, but also you think the system needs to be reformed to address this problem, but also we shouldn't admit there's a problem.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-04-18 04:31:40+00:00
I had gone blind in my right eye. There was one person standing before me at the reception in the emergency room arguing with the receptionist because he did not have health insurance (before the ACA). I remember thinking about a post card I saw in Powell's Books on Hawthorn St. in Portland Oregon out of the corner of my eye years earlier that said (paraphrasing) "Be thankful for our enemies, for they give us the opportunity to learn patience and understanding -- The Buddha." (The Buddha never said that.) While waiting I thought this was a good opportunity for me to learn patience and remain calm letting the man finish. That was a good thought because I was suffering from a stroke and if I had not been calm likely I wouldn't have survived. Turns out, every prior moment I had learned patience and understanding was for that one single moment.
by julianeon | 2025-04-18 04:32:10+00:00
Related:

Only Claude (to my knowledge) has a desktop app which can directly, and usually quite intelligently, modify files and create repos on your desktop. It's the only "agentic" option among the major players.

"Claude, make me an app which will accept Stripe payments and sell an ebook about coding in Python; first create the app, then the ebook."

It would take a few passes but Claude could do this; obviously you can't do that with an API alone. That capability alone is worth $30/month in my opinion.
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-18 04:33:06+00:00
I believe it. It does use too much software, and also too many layers of software.

However, it is not only that; too many other things (not only software programs, but also things such as 2FA, databases, cookies, Unicode, HTML, JSON, etc) are used in cases where they do not need to be used, or where something else would do better instead.

They mention React. I think GitHub uses React, although I wrote my own scripts to use instead and it is much shorter than theirs.
by joseppu | 2025-04-18 04:33:40+00:00
Valid arguments tbh. In the struggles between European and Native American, there is the aspect of being able to escape and continue to pose as a threat and such. There is no total extinction. But in dark forest theory there is the total extinction of home planet aspect, without giving in your own location (no vengeance or kill switch can be carried towards you). And also attack factor being so much more advanced that there is little to no defense against it.

In our world, we never had this level of capability amassed in one hand. We were never tested in this scale. But lets think there was a button in cold war that completely erased soviets with no harm to planet, no harm to the western world and without anyone noticing the origin of this action. How many in U.S. would press that button? I think we would've pressed many times. And later, to know that another planet might be having a button exactly like this that they can press and erase us? we would press first so they never get the chance to do it. Paranoia and self preservation prevails, sadly.

I believe our cooperation in society also relies on our capability of projecting power be it physical or economical. The weaker individuals power becomes, the louder powerful peoples actions become. Saying this as Non-U.S citizen, right now the richest guy can easily interfere in state dealings, act like the president in a way, maybe this is evolution of lobbying tradition there but could you imagine such a thing happening in ancient Greece or even in Rome? What prevented this was citizens' ability to exert power. Right now there is little of that, power disparity is huge and so there isn't as much of a cooperation. Sorry if this part deviated from topic or smth. It is just I believe it 100% depends on real, physical factors rather than how advanced we get mentally.
by abletonlive | 2025-04-18 04:34:54+00:00
> No, actually the person asserting that a thing exists has the burden of proof.

Well, I'm not the one that made an assertion so I think both of you should provide some proof/evidence/support for your assertion. It doesn't matter if the assertion is for the existence of something or not. When you make an assertion you provide backing evidence to support it. Even for the assertion of nonexistence. This is basic stuff. Weird to even have to argue about it on HN. But just in case you never learned it, "There is no X" (your original assertion) is different from "There is no evidence for the existence of X".

> Easy. You have no evidence at all that the military has super advanced AI systems consumers don't have.

Okay I'll bite, we have access to project maven and knows exactly what it's capable of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Maven https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-ai-warfare-project-m...

Okay sure, whatever you say. You clearly are privy to all of the projects the government is involved with, and surely while all of the consumer AI capabilities have been released they've been sitting around doing nothing with it like a deer in headlights.

Consumer AI has more data available to train off of than the government....right?

I'm sure the government just threw away all their AI projects and bought a chatgpt pro subscription because it's better or the same as what they are using with all the same capabilities...

What a silly position to take. Why did everybody foolishly make such a big deal about all the data they were collecting all these years
by bee_rider | 2025-04-18 04:35:39+00:00
We do an awful lot nowadays, though. Hmm, actually, I guess it is a straightforward equation I just don’t have my pencil or envelope handy.

Imagine that we are interacting with all the accumulated good stuff, plus the modern good stuff, as well as the old good stuff (the old crud is forgotten). If our productivity is growing exponentially, is the proportion of crud increasing over time?
by vasco | 2025-04-18 04:35:49+00:00
Whenever you have these feelings, go watch actual real life combat footage. A great recent one is a knife fight to the death where one soldier admits defeat and asks the first one to leave him to die https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/s/tAUwd2MWqT

Watch that and tell me if you think it's still cool and normal life is boring. I find that it snaps me right back out of "Hollywood war" thinking and makes my stomach turn.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-18 04:38:20+00:00
One thing in the podcast I found really interesting from a personal pov was:

> I remember talking to a very senior person who’s now at Anthropic, in 2017. And then he told various people that they shouldn’t do a PhD because by the time they completed it everyone will be automated.

Don’t tell young people things like this. Predicting the future is hard, and it is the height of hubris to think otherwise.

I remember as a teen, I had thought that I was a supposed to be a pilot for all my life. I was ready to enroll in a school with a two year program.

However, I was also into computers. One person who I looked up to in that world said to me “don’t be a pilot, it will all be automated soon and you will just be buss drivers, at best.” This entirely took the wind out of my piloting sails.

This was in the early 90’s, and 30 years later, it is still wrong.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-18 04:39:34+00:00
A lot of the guys I met in the YPG had seen way more combat than that and still yearned for it. One of them was retired foreign legion that did this as his retirement. When we were getting shot at one of the older guys would get viscerally excited and joyful, and he had seen many dead.

Junky is a good description of what they were. They wanted another taste. I can't imagine after 5+ years of that life how you would detox from that, not easily I imagine.
by cryptonector | 2025-04-18 04:46:18+00:00
The thing consists of a) a pump that goes on the output of the water heater, and b) wax-based valves that go between the hot and the cold under each sink where you want hot water without having to wait a long time. The valves turn on when the water on the hot side cools, and they close when it gets hot. The pump stops when the valves and hot faucets are all closed, and it has a timer for scheduling hours of operation. I believe it's this:

https://aurorixs.shop/product/watts-500800-instant-water-recirculating-pump-system-with-built-in-timer
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-18 04:47:46+00:00
I mean, it was like $40 and sold as a Christmas toy? You get what you pay for.

The Armatron could do nothing productive; it was typically boxed with a few pylons and other plastic tidbits whereby a 10-year-old boy could practice picking them up and stacking them or dropping them back on the table. If you attempted to grip something substantial, there was some protection that would ratchet awhile, or you could just strip the gears, and ruin the toy by December 28th.

It did look really cool. It was ABS plastic but the colors were striking: dark navy blue and a vivid orange. It looked like it was a miniature of something that worked 24/7 in an automobile factory and something that took away jobs, and pensions and homes and electricity, from 11 factory workers in 1985.
by lolinder | 2025-04-18 04:48:20+00:00
I find that FreeTaxUSA has a much better interface than TurboTax. They don't play games with fake loading screens needlessly making you wait (when we both know that the math involved takes just a few CPU cycles) and make the whole experience much easier with fewer upsells, but the biggest deal for me is that they're far more transparent about how everything maps to the underlying documents.

TurboTax wants you to be scared of the tax forms, so they make it really hard to see what it is that you're actually doing and signing. FreeTaxUSA actively encourages you to look at and understand the forms you're filling out and signing at every step of the way. After a few years with them I actually feel that I could fill out my taxes by hand, but I don't want to because their interface is a genuine improvement on the tax forms, as opposed to TurboTax's which is very much not.

My understanding of the tax code has shot up dramatically since switching to them, and I feel much safer submitting taxes now than I ever did with TurboTax because I understand every single line I submitted.
by nayuki | 2025-04-18 04:49:24+00:00
> The speed of light in glass or fiber-optic cable is significantly slower, at approximately 194,865 kilometers per second. The speed of voltage propagation in copper is 224,844 kilometres per second.

If I understand correctly, the speed of light in an electrical cable doesn't depend on the metal that carries current, but instead depends on the dielectric materials (plastic, air, etc.) between the two conductors?
by mintflow | 2025-04-18 04:50:02+00:00
Recently I have built a iOS network extension by porting fd.io vpp to Darwin platform, though the UI part is written by SwiftUI. But the core is written using good old C and dns component is written using rust with hickory library, I was considering using c-ares but wanna get a try with rust.

So I think if UI stuffs can be written using C it then can build app using pure C.
by rgoulter | 2025-04-18 04:50:52+00:00
Right.

This is one case where I've found writing code with LLMs to be effective.

With some unfamiliar tool I don't care about too much (e.g. GitHub Actions YAML or some build script), I just want it to work, & then focus on other things.

I can spend time to try and come up with something that works; something that's robust & idiomatic.. but, likely I won't be able to re-use that knowledge before I forget it.

With an LLM, I'll likely get just as good a result; or if not, will have a good starting point to go from.
by elevaet | 2025-04-18 04:52:24+00:00
This is a bit off topic, but what do you think about people doing nitrous recreationally? It's always concerned me that people are inhaling close to pure nitrous oxide and holding it in. I've always wondered if this creates damaging low-oxygen conditions without the normal reflexes kicking in, and if this can cause brain/neuronal damage.

I believe in medical settings it's delivered in a mixture with O2, but in recreational settings it's usually inhaled directly.

I see a lot more talk about the risks of vitamin B12 depletion, and not much talk about O2 deprivation, so not sure if everyone else is crazy or if it's me who is the crazy one.
by nayuki | 2025-04-18 04:52:31+00:00
The site specifies a base font size of 12px. The better practice is to not specify a base font size at all, just taking it from the user's web browser instead. Then, the web designer should specify every other font size and box dimension as a scaled version of the base font size, using units like em/rem/%, not px.

Related reading: https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/never-use-px-for-font-size
by int_19h | 2025-04-18 04:52:40+00:00
All naturalized citizens are in the crosshairs since naturalization can in fact be reverted. It's supposed to be a very difficult process, but with this admin, we already know that their modus operandi will be to throw the book at you and get you whisked away to some detention center and promptly deported, and then good luck fighting it in courts (which they will also stonewall and ultimately ignore anyway).

Worse yet, Trump and his clique have already openly talked about denaturalization and threatened to apply it to political opponents, so it's not idle speculation either.
by mkl | 2025-04-18 04:53:03+00:00
Yes, I was disappointed.

The original paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22046 did look at chord progressions. They also trained a machine learning model to predict the next chord. Some of the chord progression data is in graph form at https://github.com/spyroskantarelis/chordonomicon.

The raw chord data is at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ailsntua/Chordonomicon/tree/.... It consists of one row per song containing a list of chord names in song order (no timing information) and Spotify ids for track and artist. It seems like Spotify has a different id for every released version, so it's really hard to search for particular songs in the data.

To normalise across key signatures you need to know what key the song is in (at each point), and the data doesn't contain that. For many genres it could be guessed reasonably accurately from the chords.
by oooyay | 2025-04-18 04:53:07+00:00
I guess enough time has passed.

I used to work in Intuit's Security R&D business unit and worked on the software that made it so that even if someone at Intuit/Turbo Tax wanted to do that it'd be impossible. Intuit spends a lot of money on cryptographers and very skilled programmers to ensure that. The definition of PII extends all the way to the HTTP logs of filers such that we couldn't even visualize filings on a map as they came in during tax season.

There's plenty of things that Intuit does that aren't good without alleging baseless claims.
by throwanem | 2025-04-18 04:53:15+00:00
I referred to the relevant chapters of a book which I named. This is the book: https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

Not every configuration system is as bad as the m4 nightmare that sendmail used, and I understand nothing really better was feasible in the prelapsarian or Stone Age days of its implementation. But I worked - fought - with sendmail for years and, as in the book, I also remain mildly surprised that Allman continues to perambulate. Most such things in my later professional experience differ by degree, not kind. YAML is not as bad as what was typically perpetrated in Perl days, but it does too much and too little and all its fiddly rules give me headaches. JSON is awful and what we're basically stuck with, because even though it's so simple it's almost useless, at least it's simple. XML is much better than it gets credit for, but nobody likes it because most programmers seem to regard the need to use a keyboard as an imposition, and I assume also have frequent nightmares featuring lots of pointy angle brackets. (I use Emacs because I don't hate myself, and I wish more people had the sense to keep things as simple as Emacs Lisp typically is.)

I don't want to talk about X. Wayland has been about 60% mistakes by volume, and I like too many of the people who made it too well to be anything other than sad about that.
by card_zero | 2025-04-18 04:55:52+00:00
That's what I was trying to express, though: if "the wall clock runs slower", that's less useful than it sounds, because all you have to interact with is yourself.

I exaggerate somewhat. You could interact with databases and computers (if you can bear the lag and compile times). You could produce a lot of work, and test it in any internal way that you can think of. But you can't do outside world stuff. You can't make reality run faster to keep up with your speedy brain.
by mandeepj | 2025-04-18 04:56:42+00:00
Mr. Bessent (Treasury Secretary) was repeatedly asked during his confirmation hearing whether he would protect DirectFile and he said "Yes" :-)

A small snippet of that conversation. The video recording has much more details -

Do you agree with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) report finding that the Direct File pilot was successful and should be expanded?

Answer: As noted during the hearing, I commit that for this tax season, Direct File will be operative to prevent any disruptions for taxpayers. And if confirmed, I will consult and study the program and understand it better, and evaluate whether it works to serve the best interests of taxpayers.

From page 36 at https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/responses_to_qu...

So he evaluated not to expand :-(