MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by creata | 2025-05-05 11:37:56+00:00
As far as I know, the main differences (in the body text) between LaTeX and, say, Word, are the linebreaking algorithm (Knuth-Plass, which is used for both ragged-right and justified text) and the microtypography package. Is there anything else that contributes to the quality of LaTeX's output for ordinary English text?

Typst apparently uses Knuth-Plass, but I don't see any information about microtypography.
by echelon | 2025-05-05 11:38:23+00:00
That's what this is about.

Work for IATSE crew union members has declined precipitously.

During the pandemic, there was so much demand for content that the studios spent a lot of money teaching foreign crews how to produce films. They sent a lot of staff to Eastern Europe and Asia to train local crews. Serbia, etc., where the crews are making well below union wages and can work long hours without regulation.

Since 2023, 60% or so of productions have vacated LA, Atlanta, and New York in favor of being shot overseas. They just fly the cast out. It's significantly cheaper than filming at home.

IATSE membership is being decimated. Lots of folks have moved out of California because the jobs just aren't there anymore.
by throwanem | 2025-05-05 11:38:37+00:00
I've used it for my own such production, perfect binding with a hand guillotine and screw clamps in my attic - nothing remotely professional, but you still have to start by making a book block, and Paged.js is a solid call there. Unless beauty of typography (more than TTF/OTF hinting can handle) is of particular merit, it's usually my preferred first typesetting option.

As an old hand with PDF-in-browser production, I expected much worse of Paged.js than I found. It's powerful and mostly enjoyable to use! Oh, you end up with a large set of CSS rules, and it is not without bugs and gotchas (failing to specify a bleed rule somewhere at least once in every @page context subtly breaks layout; footnote layout is functional but automatic call numbering isn't always perfect, etc.)

You should definitely not expect to take Paged.js out of the box, slap a theme on it, and go; it comes as a box of parts with a mostly complete machine inside, and if it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. I imagine the publisher who uses it must have some prior interest in web technologies, for example.

Nor is Paged.js remotely as capable or flexible as InDesign or a comparable tool, especially for the deeply rudimentary condition of web typography overall - something even as elaborate a tool as this can't really approach fixing.

But Paged.js is also unlike InDesign in having a much shallower (days vs months) learning curve for folks like us with prior web experience, and however equivocal a review I may now be giving of its technical merits, I do actually like working with Paged.js quite a lot.
by habosa | 2025-05-05 11:38:41+00:00
The MAGA people attacking Hollywood is such a big mistake. Yes I know the average celebrity doesn’t share their views, but that doesn’t change the fact that Hollywood projects American culture around the world in a way that the government could never do itself. Movies and music made here are so often cited as the reason why young people around the world idealize America and want to emulate us (buy our clothes, speak English, etc)

It’s the cultural equivalent of being the world’s reserve currency, it’s a massive free advantage in almost any situation. Stupid stupid stupid to threaten it.
by majormajor | 2025-05-05 11:38:44+00:00
So your desire is to have to talk to people less as a way to meet people? Seems like a good way to have absolutely no useful social skills left for when things reach the offline world.

You're gonna lose all the best parts of life in an attempt to deal only with robots to avoid a few rough edges here and there. You don't know what you want as well as you think you do, serendipity is a necessity.

Well on our way to "everything is amazing and nobody is happy" times infinity.

(Much of this already exists, of course, and there are ANY number of "but our match percentages were so high!!" disaster dates out there that have left the human-blind-data-focused in sad confusion. The secret is that the accuracy of the match percentage was not the problem.)
by microtonal | 2025-05-05 11:38:45+00:00
That’s a very American point of view though. In many European countries people don’t build up such big debts. I’m from NL and the upper bound among my friends was something like 50,000, but most people had much lower debts between 0 and 20,000. (Yay for lower enrollment fees + part of the money is given as a gift).

And even if you ramped up a 50k debt, it’s a government loan where the interest rates are low, your monthly pay off is based on your salary, and if you are not able to pay the debt within a certain period, it’s wiped away.
by noufalibrahim | 2025-05-05 11:39:39+00:00
As I've grown older, my main regret is not having spent time with people i wanted to. Photographs have never come up. Perhaps it's because I've always disliked it and looked down on people who killed moments by trying to immortalize them.

The photos at best act as a trigger to remember but in a very limited way.

And being a photographer i think really does alter your way of looking at things imo for the worse.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-05 11:40:10+00:00
In 2020 he reversed some? I dont believe he has reversed anything in 2025.

The de minimis revocation and decoupling level tariffs means china-usa trade is over. There was no standing up.

He did have to reverse on CUSMA protected trade to avoid lawsuits. He's now targeting non-cusma protected trade.
by JanSchu | 2025-05-05 11:40:36+00:00
Why can’t I just write <include src="header.html"> and be done with it?

We almost could. Chrome shipped a draft of HTML Imports back in 2014. You’d do exactly that, the browser would fetch the fragment, parse it, and make it available for insertion. The idea died for three reasons that still apply today:

Execution‑order and performance hazards. Images, scripts, and styles are fire‑and‑forget: the preload scanner sees a URL, starts the fetch, and the parser keeps streaming. With HTML fragments you need the full subtree before you can finish parsing the parent document (otherwise IDs, custom‑element upgrades, <script defer>, etc. fire in the wrong order). That either stalls the parser—horrible for TTFB—or forces async insertion, which produces layout shifts. Everyone hated both outcomes.

Security and isolation. If an imported fragment can run scripts it becomes an XSS foot‑gun; if it can’t run scripts it breaks a surprising amount of markup (think onerror, custom elements with module scripts, CSP inheritance, etc.). The platform already has an “HTML that can’t run scripts” container: it’s called an iframe. Anything more permissive lands in a swamp of half‑trusted execution.

The “circular dependency” tar‑pit. Templates inherit CSS scopes, custom element registries, and base URLs from the document that instantiates them. Once you let HTML pull in more HTML, those scopes can nest arbitrarily—and can link back to parents. The HTML spec team tried to spec out the edge‑cases and basically threw up their hands. (There’s a famous TAG thread titled “HTML Imports considered harmful” that reads like war diaries.)

Meanwhile developers solved the “shared header” problem higher up the stack—SSI, PHP include, SSG partials, React components, you name it—so browser vendors didn’t see a payoff big enough to justify the complexity. The attitude became: “composition is a build‑time concern, not a runtime primitive.”

Could it ever come back? Maybe, but the bar is higher now that everyone has a build step. A proposal would need to:

Stream (no parser‑blocking)

Sandbox (no ambient script execution)

Deduplicate (avoid circular fetch hell)

Play nicely with CSP, SRI, origin isolation, and the module graph

That starts to look a lot like… <iframe src="header.html" loading="eager">, which we already have—just not the ergonomic sugar we wish for.

So the short answer is: HTML includes are easy in user‑land but devilishly hard to make safe, fast, and spec‑compliant in the browser itself.
by nsriv | 2025-05-05 11:41:18+00:00
I got the warning when I shared, but I think it's ostensibly a security/privacy measure that users can toggle on and off.

Anyways, here's a more direct source that should be publicly accessible, the prior was my first encounter with it.

https://bsky.app/profile/robertandrewp.bsky.social/post/3log...
by cess11 | 2025-05-05 11:42:10+00:00
One person has been somewhat successful in this area, Gunther von Hagens.

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

He has a method of plastination that he has used for decades to preserve corpses, notably as the exhibition Body Worlds.

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

https://bodyworlds.com/
by latexr | 2025-05-05 11:42:27+00:00
> There didn’t seem to be a particularly appealing set of options for the electorate.

I mean, there was one candidate who fawns over dictators, is a felon, always acts in his own personal interest, and had very public plans to try to dismantle democracy and seize ultimate power. Then there was another who would at worst continue the status quo and not try to overthrow the government.

It feels ridiculous to claim there was no appealing option. It’s like being given the option between losing both arms or being slapped in the face and shrugging that none of the options is appealing. At least try to pick the least unappealing.
by the_duke | 2025-05-05 11:42:37+00:00
I feel like current top models (Gemini Pro 2.5 etc) would already be good developers if they had the feedback cycle and capabilities that real developers have:

* reading the whole source code

* looking up dependency documentation and code, search related blog posts

* getting compilation/linter warnings ands errors

* Running tests

* Running the application and validating output (eg, for a webserver, start the server, send requests, get the response)

The tooling is slowly catching up, and you can enable a bunch of this already with MCP servers, but we are nowhere near the optimum yet.

Expect significant improvements in the near future, even if the models don't get better.
by karel-3d | 2025-05-05 11:43:03+00:00
one tiny thing I see quite often: people think that if you do `log.Fatal`, it will still run things in `defer`. It won't!

package main import ( "fmt" "log" ) func main() { defer fmt.Println("in defer") log.Fatal("fatal") }

this just runs "fatal"... because log.Fatal calls os.Exit, and that closes everything immediately.

package main import ( "fmt" "log" ) func main() { defer fmt.Println("in defer") panic("fatal") }

This shows both `fatal` and `in defer`
by ben_w | 2025-05-05 11:43:19+00:00
I was just thinking of this XKCD comic specifically.

Most people won't even have the slightest idea what 1 AU is. Most people know less about most topics (including space) than the original ChatGPT (3.5) did — probably only people who at least started a degree with a space sciences module are likely to know more than 3.5, and I expect plenty of space.com readers to be enthusiastic amateurs rather than professionals.

That said, I do I expect the average reader of space.com to know what an astronomical unit is, but even so I don't expect them to know the average orbital distance of Pluto.

But is even that assumption my quartz?
by JanSchu | 2025-05-05 11:43:29+00:00
$900 million on a $9 billion post‑money means investors are paying ~45× trailing ARR if the FT’s “about $200 million annual run‑rate” number is right. --> https://www.ft.com/content/a7b34d53-a844-4e69-a55c-b9dee9a97...

That multiple only makes sense if you believe two things at once:

Cursor keeps compounding like GitHub itself. Right now the product is an Electron wrapper around VS Code plus a very slick Copilot‑style agent. It’s winning dev‑to‑dev word‑of‑mouth, but most of the heavy IP (the frontier model) still lives at OpenAI. Cursor’s moat has to be distribution + workflow lock‑in, otherwise every IDE extension store is a free market.

AAC (AI‑assisted coding) is still early‑days, not a feature. The bullish view is that we’re going from “autocomplete that writes a function” to “agent that forks a branch, edits five files, and opens a PR.” If that happens, the IDE vendor that owns the agents could take a tax on all software creation—$9B looks cheap in that scenario.

Skeptical takes:

Switching cost is low. Developers live in tabbed editors; the moment VS Code ships “Copilot Agent” with equivalent quality, the convenience advantage evaporates.

Model margins flow upstream. OpenAI (already on the cap table) can keep more of the unit‑economics by bundling a first‑party agent, leaving Cursor to chase seat growth while gross margins compress.

FOMO capital cycle. We’re at the part of the hype curve where Tiger 2.0 funds can’t buy equity in OpenAI/Anthropic but still need AI exposure on the balance sheet, so application‑layer plays clear at eye‑watering marks.

The part I do find compelling is speed: two years from MIT dorm to ~$200 M ARR is wild. If Cursor can convert that velocity into genuine platform gravity—plugins, team workflows, per‑repo context that doesn’t travel well—then maybe the bet pencils out. Otherwise it’s an expensive option on a feature the incumbents haven’t finished shipping yet.
by gota | 2025-05-05 11:43:32+00:00
From the same author:

https://acoup.blog/2019/06/21/collections-punching-through-s...

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-a...

If you're not yet aware of it (unlikely as it made it 'big' in the overall internet), I believe the video from Tod's Workshop with actual experimentation is a must see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE

There is a sequel and many other related videos, but this one is the source for a very famous clip (at 20:50 - https://youtu.be/DBxdTkddHaE?si=oISZqXvdv8ymoCDi&t=1239)
by Gigamegs | 2025-05-05 11:43:38+00:00
This package can perform a very fast Delaunay triangulation for a set of points in a plane. It uses the hilbert sort and the Bowyer-Watson algorithm.

The main class takes the coordinates a set of points and determines which form edges of a triangle whose points are on the same circumference. It can be used to find minimum spanning trees.

Another class can render the graph of triangles with the edges computed with the Delaunay triangulation.

web+git: https://tetramatrix.github.io/triangulation/
by jaimebuelta | 2025-05-05 11:44:41+00:00
Not sure I follow.

Biggest real action movie last year was “Deadpool & Wolverine”, a Disney movie which was shot in UK and made a bit over 50% of its revenue overseas[1]. Its main stars were Canadian and Australian. Does this mean that you’ll have to pay double to go watch it to cinemas in the US? Will that make Disney to focus on the international market?

[1] https://the-numbers.com/movie/Deadpool-and-Wolverine-(2024)
by jpambrun | 2025-05-05 11:44:56+00:00
Not sure how you even tarif movies. I guess Netflix will receive bills based on viewership?

Anyway, as usual other countries will retaliate. American movies will become both more expensive to make and taxed abroad. Meanwhile, we can expect more people will turn to piracy to cope with rising inflation. I can't imagine any scenario where this isn't backfiring.
by smolder | 2025-05-05 11:45:20+00:00
Primordial black holes can theoretically be much smaller than those formed in the usual way from collapsed stars or neutron star mergers, etc, because the early universe was dense with matter already and perturbations could have caused gravitational collapses for arbitrary volumes. I don't think we've observed any directly, which would be hard as small low-emission masses. They're still a potential piece of the dark matter missing-mass puzzle.
by antonvs | 2025-05-05 11:45:28+00:00
C# and Java still do linking, it just happens dynamically at runtime. That’s part of why startup time is slower in those languages, and why performance can be less predictable.

The main difference between linkers for native binaries and linking in IL-based languages is that native binary linking involves resolving memory addresses at build time. In the object files that are being linked, memory addresses are typically 0-relative to whatever section they’re in within that file. When you combine a bunch of object files together, you have to adjust the addresses so they can live together in the same address space. Object file A and B both might use addresses 0-10, but when they’re linked together, the linker will arrange it so that e.g. A uses 0-10 and B uses 11-21. That’s just a bit of simple offset arithmetic. And if both reference the same non-local symbol, it will be arranged so that both refer to the same memory address.

The IL-based languages retain all the relevant symbol information at runtime, which allows for a lot of flexibility at the cost of some performance - i.e. runtime lookups. This is typically optimized by caching the address after the first lookup, or if JIT compilation is occurring, embedding the relocated addresses in generated code.

The linker UX issues you ran into were mostly a function of the state of the art at the time, though. Languages like Go and Rust do native linking nowadays in a way that users barely notice. IL-based languages had a better linking UX partly because they were forced to - linking problems at runtime do still occur, e.g. “class not found”, but if linking in general had been a common problem for users at runtime instead of developers at build time, those languages would have struggled to get adoption.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-05 11:45:41+00:00
I did the same.

Something I've noticed over the years.

Digg: We stand for freedom of speech.

Digg establishes censorship and everyone leaves for reddit.

Reddit: We stand for free speech.

Reddit establishes censorship and everyone leaves for X, bluesky, mastodon.

X, bluesky, and mastodon: We stand for free speech.

X, bluesky, and mastodon establishes censorship and everyone leaves.

Dead internet theory: We stand for robots talking to each other while everyone moves to censorship free avenues.
by devfrankduah | 2025-05-05 11:46:40+00:00
This toolkit is a game-changer for anyone building LLM-powered applications in TypeScript. Its modular design—featuring structured prompts, parsers, and executors—makes it incredibly straightforward to create well-typed, maintainable workflows. The ability to switch between providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini without altering your core logic is especially valuable. Highly recommended for developers aiming to streamline their LLM integrations.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-05-05 11:46:41+00:00
I don't think this was ever my issue with Latex, which instead are mostly:

- the cryptic error messages and infinite logs

- the unintuitive ways to do stuff like store a value for later use or sum two lengths

- the very long compile times

- the amount of reliance on global state from various packages, which contributes to even more cryptic errors or weird behavior when something goes wrong

- various other quirks, e.g. the fact you often need to end a line with a comment or the newline will skrew up your content.
by egorfine | 2025-05-05 11:46:41+00:00
I'm in the same position as the GP. Impossible, because EU bureaucracy sometimes yield kafkaesque deadlocks. For example, some EU countries stated that their permits given to ukrainians are to be considered valid past the printed expiration date and thus stopped producing new plastic for them. Now, good luck finding any KYC provider that will accept that. Or any KYC provider that accepts printed Poland's TPS. Or any provider that doesn't chuckle on a set of documents, each of which is from a different country (like me). Etc, etc.

KYC is way, way more complex than it seems. Essentially, complete remote KYC is simply impossible.
by DrFalkyn | 2025-05-05 11:47:21+00:00
In the medieval era in Europe few were generally professional, in the sense that it was their full time job even in peacetime. Like you said the Kings retinue would be one of the few exceptions. Since the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire there just wasn’t the concentration of resources in Europe for maintaining standing armies. Most were effectively a reserve force, somewhat akin to the. National Guard in the US hat could be “called up” in the event of a war.
by larvaetron | 2025-05-05 11:47:22+00:00
> The saddest part is that both the Alexa and Apple walled gardens spent years constraining users from integrating with other ecosystems, but now they are all racing to give data to 3rd-party LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, which can ... integrate with other ecosystems via APIs, MCP servers.

That reminds me of an announcement maybe about a year(?) ago, when people on the internet were making a huge deal out of ChatGPT integrating with Wolfram Alpha like it was this game changer, and I just remember thinking... we already had this with Siri over a decade ago, with no LLM middleman necessary, until Apple decided to kill it and start integrating their "machine learning" into all their products around mid 2010s.
by palata | 2025-05-05 11:47:36+00:00
Yeah I think you don't understand my point.

Many of the posts I find here defending the use of LLMs focus on "profitability". "You ask me to give you 3 pages about X? I'll give you 3 pages about X and you may not even realise that I did not write them". I completely agree that it can happen and that LLMs, right now, are useful to hack the system. But if you specialise in being efficient at getting an LLM to generate 3 pages, you may become useless faster than you think. Still, I don't think that this is the point of the article, and it is most definitely not my point.

My point is that while you specialise in hacking the system with an LLM, you don't learn about the material that goes into those 3 pages.

* If you are a student, it means that you are losing your time. Your role as a student is to learn, not to hack.

* More generally as a person, "I am a professional in summarising stuff I don't understand in a way that convinces me and other people who don't understand it either" is not exactly very sexy to me.

If you want to get actual knowledge about something, you have to actually work on getting that knowledge. Moving it from an LLM to a word document is not it. Being knowledgeable requires "internalising" it. Such that you can talk about it at dinner. And have an opinion about it that is worth something to others. If your opinion is "ChatGPT says this, but with my expertise in prompting I can get it to say that", it's pretty much worthless IMHO. Except for tricking the system, in a way similar to "oh my salary depends on the number of bugs I fix? Let me introduce tons of easy-to-fix bugs then".
by cpursley | 2025-05-05 11:47:58+00:00
Why does American drinking water need fluoride - for the few seconds people brush their teeth? Other developed nations seem to do get by just fine without it (i.e, most of Europe). Does modern tooth paste not contain the components for proper cleaning? I feel like I'm missing something here, because I don't swallow my tooth paste but I drink my tap water. But if fluoride is fine in water that we drink, why not just add all the other vital chemicals to the tap water that our bodies crave, like soma? Because it really smells like peoples opposition to this is not science-based but emotion-based (i.e., anti-RFK and Trump admin).