MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-18 17:28:28+00:00
You've misrepresented what that page says. It talks about "Average hours of full-sun per day" which is very different than your claim:

> It looks like big parts of Pennsylvania only average about 3.5 hours of sunlight per day over the year.

3.5 hours of sunlight per day != 3.5 average hours of full-sun per day.

Additionally, if you re-read your page, the number is higher than your claim of 3.5, it's 3 hours and 50+ minutes for all PA locations listed. So you misrepresented what the page describes and you misstated the numbers. What's the point of your original comment?
by bayindirh | 2025-05-18 17:28:43+00:00
> But I felt frustrated when I wanted to access my notes on my phone while on-the-go and saw that I had to pay for this feature. Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices.

Errm, no? Obsidian sync is optional. I pay for it to support them, but my main vaults are all synced by iCloud, which was auto set-up by Obisidan during initial setup on my iPhone.

On the Android side, any service which can sync files can work, I assume.

Note: Yes, I use Obsidian on my phone without sync, all the time, and it syncs.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-05-18 17:28:50+00:00
Doesn’t HAVE to be GitHub, git is git is git. You could host your own git server like a self hosted Gitlab if privacy is a concern (which is a totally valid concern! I share the same concern, I don’t necessarily want all of my inner brain workings available to GitHub). You could probably also figure out some clever way to encrypt the files too, I bet there’s a plugin for that. Then you could use anything you want without that worry
by sarchertech | 2025-05-18 17:29:22+00:00
I stayed at the 4 seasons a few years ago just to give it a try. Not even remotely worth it. The only real difference I noticed was the obsequiousness of the staff.

If you want hotel employees to kiss your ass and pretend to respect you, then this is the place for you. But the quality of the room wasn’t noticeably better than other places I’ve stayed.

I will give you a good example of something that most upper middle class people can’t afford or at least can’t afford frequently.

Disney World VIP tours. My wife has family who are club 33 members and they gifted us a VIP tour as a wedding present. The tour guide drives you around to the different parks and walks you backstage through tunnels and hidden areas to get you the very front of any ride you want to go on.
by airylizard | 2025-05-18 17:29:50+00:00
The data "supply chain" has already surged ahead of production elsewhere. Companies aren't just passively taking what's out there, they actively harvest highly curated content, benefiting even further when we voluntarily correct and refine their models. Heck, some of us are even paying them for the privilege of training AI. The best time to have made this argument would've been when GPT originally released, but I think most people were too enamored with it to care and the idea it would be "open-source" meant we'd get it back at the end of the day.

Unrelated, but this is exactly why I've been spending time building my AI framework (TSCE). The idea is to leverage these open-weight LLMs, typically smaller and accessible, to achieve accuracy and reliability comparable to larger models. It doesn't necessarily make the models "smarter" (like retraining or fine-tuning might), but it empowers everyday users to build reliable agentic workflows or AI tools from multiple smaller LLM instances. Check it out: https://github.com/AutomationOptimization/tsce_demo
by neltnerb | 2025-05-18 17:29:52+00:00
And the counterpoint (not even an argument, you're simply correct) is that it doesn't have to be that way, trains used to handle all cross country shipping and could still for a lot more than they do.

We have the tools to do better, and a lot of these roads are going to be a giant maintenance burden that communities literally cannot afford. So you end up with bridges collapsing and roads going without any repairs for years. This is a huge problem that gets worse the more we build roads instead of building alternatives.

But yes, I agree with you that the reason it's subsidized is because of things like supporting USPS delivery and commuting being economically mandatory. And because voters mostly drive cars and are used to not paying for their roads.

I don't like that design, I am 100% certain that we are clever enough to do better, but I do recognize it is the sunk-cost prison we are stuck in.

Of course, the actual counterargument is that transit moving people around -- largely to work and shop -- is also contributing to the economy. So why would you charge a fare at all?
by jmount | 2025-05-18 17:30:19+00:00
As a fan of combinatorics, I love people looking into the topic. Though most of what a programmer would find useful are approximations or trends which are handled well by the Master theorem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_theorem_(analysis_of_al... ). For those deeply interested in the deep math of combinatorics I recommend Flajolet, Sedgewick, *Analytic Combinatorics, Cambridge 2009.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-18 17:30:25+00:00
Obsidian can automatically ingest files and store them on disk while giving links to it. My personal vault contains many kinds of files living in the "Attachments" folder.

> Markdown is popular 90% because of it’s in an accepted way to do plaintext and only 10% for the added formatting.

For me Markdown allows me to write and format text at the speed of thought. Added bonus is that it's readable with "less xyz.md" or anything which can render text.
by fplonka | 2025-05-18 17:30:43+00:00
This mostly works with Mochi - you can paste PDFs etc into ChatGPT and the Mochi markdown format is simple, so it can generate flashcards for you (I have the format explained in my system prompt so I don't have to re-explain it every time). This synergizes nicely with the fact that you really want to understand something before you make flashcards from it.

If you pay for Mochi you also get API access, so one could make a ChatGPT wrapper which adds the cards for you. But since I like to review the cards manually before adding I don't mind the copy paste step.
by chvid | 2025-05-18 17:31:04+00:00
Huawei is probably the one that possibly might move away from arm because they have their own operating system. The US could tighten their controls more and ban them from arm altogether- so far they are prohibited from arm 9.

I am not sure Huawei would go for riscv - they could easily go for their own isa or an arm fork.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-18 17:32:27+00:00
C++ is a perfectly good programming language if you never make mistakes. So the problem is that of course you'll make mistakes, and the people who wrote your compiler make mistakes, and the C++ committee makes mistakes, and the language's inventor makes mistakes, if you work in a team the other team members and the tooling both also have mistakes. Other than these issues, sound choice.
by TMWNN | 2025-05-18 17:32:28+00:00
>The one thing you'd think it gives them is freedom, but they all pretty much end up working til they die so I don't know.

From "Requiem" by Robert Heinlein, 1940 <https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v24n05_1940-01_dtsg03...>:

>"What? You are old D. D.? But, hell's bells, you own a big slice of the company yourself; you ought to be able to do anything you like, rules or no rules."

>"That is not an unusual opinion, son, but it is incorrect. Rich men aren't more free than other men; they are less free—a good deal less free. I tried to do what you suggest, but the other directors would not permit me. They are afraid of losing their franchise. It costs them a good deal in—uh—political contact expenses to retain it, as it is."

>"Well, I'll be a— Can you tie that, Mac? A guy with lots of dough, and he can't spend it the way he wants to."
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-18 17:32:39+00:00
The last administration fought for the greatest support package ever provided to rural Red America since the New Deal with the Inflation Reduction Act (putting renewables, battery, and EV manufacturing in their states), and these people still voted poorly. So, forgive me if I have no empathy for people who will vote the country into the ground. Let them pull bootstraps.

> Yeah I'm sure the Chinese will sell you cruise missiles when the time comes.

I support cultivating domestic high tech, high throughput manufacturing capacity, just with as few humans required as possible.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/03/clean-energy-gene...

https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/its-conservative-states-t...

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25042572/e2-clean-eco...
by beyarkay | 2025-05-18 17:33:00+00:00
(author here) I agree, although I only realised this after the essay hit the internet. I think keeping things simple probably helped with the overall argument, but polarising things into "experts" and "novices" isn't a good abstraction to work with.

I now think it's more accurate to think that someone is an expert relative to someone else, and only for a specific field. But that'll have to be another essay (:
by vunderba | 2025-05-18 17:33:13+00:00
Yep. Obsidian strikes a good compromise of automatically copying attachments into a relative subfolder for the note and then linking them in the MD file:

lotr-recipes lotr-recipes/manflesh.md lotr-recipes/media/manflesh_1.png lotr-recipes/media/manflesh_2.png

Also makes it trivial to run a note through a static site generator and publish online.
by williamsss | 2025-05-18 17:35:26+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed Git can be used to sync your notes. Its a great solution for those comfortable putting their notes into a Git repo like Github. I wasn't comfortable with that however.

Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!
by jkestner | 2025-05-18 17:36:01+00:00
Kickstarter works like this too. If you know anything about fixed manufacturing costs, when you see hardware projects with a 4-digit goal, you cringe. Some have other sources of funding, but the reason you set an artificially low goal is that it 1) gets people more excited when they see the % of goal go to 800% or 3000%, and 2) people are more inclined to back a project that's already hit its goal, regardless of how crowdfunding works.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-05-18 17:36:13+00:00
How about we do the exact opposite?

Create expensive products which materially improve the lives of those with wealth? Align the incentives of the rich so that they don't spend on these zero sum status goods. Also incentivize the rich to get richer so that they can buy these products that make their lives better in a non-shallow way.

Work with incentives instead of against incentives.
by skydhash | 2025-05-18 17:36:22+00:00
In person interactions is better, but we have a good amount of open-source projects that do fine with remote interactions. The issue with remote interactions is with processes. Instead of having tooling to promote adhoc interactions, most teams will get into some kind of rigid structures because the tooling is imposed from high.

I loathe having slack because it quickly becomes full of noise. There should be friction from having another department chiming in. Having announcements in #general and #random have a cognitive load. I like email, because you can have filters and deal with things when it's suitable to do so. Slack is no where close to that.
by BrouteMinou | 2025-05-18 17:36:32+00:00
I always find it funny when people say to not repeat h-l, w-W keys for horizontal movement.

No way I am starting to count how many characters there are in front of my cursor just to have the satisfaction of typing "31-l"...

I am totally going to spam some 2w 3w llll until I reach the desired position.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-18 17:37:11+00:00
Israel gives the Palestinians a contiguous state with sea access is exchange for a mutual recognition of borders.

The root problem that anti-Zionists have in practice (rather than the "no state of Israel" loonies) is Palestinians having a viable state (economically and territorially).

Both of those are things Israel (with the help of Arab funding) could fix tomorrow, if its current government weren't kowtowing to its ultra-right / illegal settler minority for political reasons.
by jillyboel3 | 2025-05-18 17:38:08+00:00
not paying for a new phone in full does NOT warrant retaliatory action against all of the author's accounts.

block the device, sure. send collections after him for the unpaid amount, sure.

retaliating by blocking all his unrelated, paid for, accounts is yet another reason apple should be broken up. it also doesn't sound like they refunded him for the days of usage that were lost that surely still had to be paid for.
by hamburglar | 2025-05-18 17:38:26+00:00
I have an appleid that I’ve had for over 15 years. A couple months ago I bought a Mac and I decided to do it by getting an Apple Card and financing it at 0%. I made the apparent mistake of not creating a new Apple ID for this new machine, because it’s quite a shock to me that if I miss an Apple Card payment, my 17 year old Apple ID that controls my long-paid-off phone is at stake. That’s an unusual amount of leverage for a company to have.
by exiguus | 2025-05-18 17:38:28+00:00
The X220 ThinkPad was launched in 2011. Since then, I have owned more than three of them. I have also had several X201 and X230 models. Among them, the X220 is my favorite because it features the iconic blue Enter button.

All of these models are nearly unbreakable. The only issues I've encountered so far are related to the fans and the fact that they tend to get very hot after about two years of daily use. By daily use, I mean working on them and having daily video calls—the hardware just isn't designed for that level of usage.

I have given all of my previous ThinkPads to friends and family. Recently, I purchased a used X220 (with an i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD) for 250 bucks. It's now my "holiday" notebook, running FreeBSD and Sway.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-18 17:38:30+00:00
Every editor and language I use is fine with Unicode in files, but I don’t know if that’s true for everyone I collaborate with. Sure, I can type all those symbols, but can they? Does a screen reader pronounce them reasonably? Do they render correctly in GitHub’s web source code viewers? Will I ever get as fast typing composed characters as just pressing `>=`? Does everyone use a font that supports those codepoints? I don’t know. Probably, but who can tell? I tend to limit non-ASCII text to inside quoted strings and use exclusively ASCII-compatible codes for all identifiers.

But the great part about ligatures is that I can use fonts that support them and enable them in my editors because I think they look pretty. Anyone who doesn’t like their appearance can just not use them. We can both have editors that look nice to ourselves without making the other’s editors look worse. How often can we say that?
by ubertaco | 2025-05-18 17:38:43+00:00
I think much of human history (not just recent US history, but that's a prominent example on folks' minds these days) proves that the biggest differentiator that the wealthy can buy is complete immunity from any sort of legal consequences.

Even if you don't already live in a high-corruption society, you can either spend some of your wealth introducing that corruption (which pays dividends), or you can just go somewhere else that's already high-corruption and bribe your way into immediate permanent residence.

Live in a democracy? Just buy public opinion by leveraging your wealth into a highly-profitable propaganda network, which will also give you an appealing platform for opportunist would-be government officials, who will then owe you, making your bribes cheaper. Maybe you can even just directly blackmail or entrap them along the way, so you don't even have to pay.

Live in an autocracy? Buy enough weaponry and PMCs to insulate yourself or even rival the government itself, or just buy the autocrat's favor directly.

Live in an oligarchy? Psh, your work is already done. Just use the system as it's designed: to be exploited by your vast wealth.
by Razied | 2025-05-18 17:41:17+00:00
Super cool library guys, I think this is by far the quickest way and most painless way to train a humanoid policy. I tried messing around with mujoco and isaaclab stuff a while ago, and it was truly horrible.

A bit more of a hardware question: how modular are the robots? I'm looking at the feet and hands in particular and thinking that there are a bunch of applications where purpose-build parts would work much better than the current ones you have there. I understand the arguments for a humanoid form-factor, but I think flat feet are making it much harder than it should be to get a robust locomotion policy, and training hand-dexterity is also unbelievably hard. Seems like the path of least resistance to usefulness is to have an array of different hand attachments.
by gwd | 2025-05-18 17:42:41+00:00
> It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. ...If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it.

I have a slightly different system I'm developing:

Rather than reviewing with flashcards, review with actual content:

1. Tag the content with the words and grammar concepts

2. Estimate the difficulty [1] for you of each word or grammar concept -- the difficulty being essentially the inverse of your familiarity graphs in this article.

3. Choose content to read which balances difficulty and the impact on learning.

Since reviewing something you're about to forget has more impact than learning something new, "spaced repetition" falls naturally.

And instead of spending your review time going through flash cards, you spend your review time reading content in the target language.

[1] If you know the details of the FSRS algorithm, I'm using "difficulty" here differently than they do in their algorithm.
by nothrabannosir | 2025-05-18 17:42:45+00:00
Purely out of pedantic interest: is that a meaningful distinction, or is it just the same thing for a different audience? I'm reminded of chess youtubers who give similarly "click baity" titles to their videos which are only click bait to people who watch chess videos. Isn't it the same?

All the power to them by the way. It's the crushing power of the algorithm. No hard feelings, just something I've been wondering.
by pyuser583 | 2025-05-18 17:42:49+00:00
No but we need to address the fact that in conditions of warfare, this is the human default.

It starts it training, warning soldiers they will be tempted to commit war crimes. Looking at case studies where the “norm” has been averted.

When it comes to punishing offenders, you have to be very careful not to punish only those who speak out.
by xboxnolifes | 2025-05-18 17:43:25+00:00
> Working remotely means there's some higher bar for quickly bugging a colleague, since you have no idea if they're casually reading their emails or if they're in deep focus.

I haven't yet tried this, but I've wondered for a while if it could be a good thing to just be visibly in voice chat while working if you aren't in a deep focus mode. Make it easy for someone to jump on and have converdation.

I've seen people do it and call it open office and it be at specific times, but I'm thinking even more casual than that.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-05-18 17:44:31+00:00
Yes. Fastmail has a feature that allows you to generate masked email addresses, e.g. "funny.hat123@fastmail.com" (also known as temporary email addresses). Emails sent to these addresses still arrive in your inbox, but you can easily block them any time. They are suitable for making accounts at garbage websites, so that you can block their spam any time. In fastmail though those email addresses are permanent (they won't disappear on their own after X minutes or anything like that).
by zikduruqe | 2025-05-18 17:45:50+00:00
Hell, you don't even need obsidian. Just create a bash function

notes() { if [ ! -z "$1" ]; then mkdir -m 00750 -p /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes Now=$(date '+%B %d %Y %H:%M') echo -en "\n$Now\t$@\n" >> /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes/notes.txt else echo "${Now}" cat /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes/notes.txt 2>/dev/null fi }
by criddell | 2025-05-18 17:46:09+00:00
More than once I’ve had a TI-99/4a and fully loaded peripheral expansion box and an Atari 800XL on my eBay watch list. I’ve come so close to pulling the trigger but I know it would give me a weekend of fun and that would be about it. Back to eBay it would go for the next impulsive dinosaur.
by mattmcknight | 2025-05-18 17:46:21+00:00
This is my thought exactly, if what they say is true: "It was always a financial decision,” Suppon said. “We wanted to be able to offset our energy costs, produce our own energy and only pay distribution [fees] back to the grid.” Then they should be able to finance it. If it takes a grant to break even, then the financial decision is about getting grant money, not solar.
by theamk | 2025-05-18 17:46:30+00:00
I have no objection to Vlang having "null", after all many languages have it. My problem is the outright lies on the front page. Someone who is looking into Vlang might actually believe what's written on the front page, spend some time learning language, and come up disappointed. So I am saving them some time by warning them in advance.

And no, if you that using null is V is "improper", this still means V has nulls. If the it will not have nulls "in the future", it means it still has nulls today. The front page does not mention any "future" part. And mentioning that you cannot assign it to any variables outside of "unsafe" is outright wrong.. It works just fine, it's just spelled differently (as "voidptr(0)"). Try it yourself in playground:

ptr := &int(voidptr(0)); println(*ptr);

The thing is, there are plenty of languages without "null" - Rust of course, but also much more "conventional" languages like Kotlin and Swift. So we know what language-without-nulls looks like - there are nullable and non-nullable pointer-things (they may be called using different terms), they are distinct types, and you need a special ceremony to access nullable pointer-things where you specify what to do if the value is null/missing. Vlang does not have anything like that, and it's trivially easy to get the null pointer (either intentionally or from trivial programming error) in safe code.
by JoeAltmaier | 2025-05-18 17:46:33+00:00
You are a parent? Or just blowing smoke. That was an anecdote in support of a well-founded generalization, born of twenty years of child raising.

Thanks for lecturing me on my friends and speaking style, neither of which you have the tiniest knowledge of.

This kind of know-it-all content-free post is something AI should be able to filter in future. I look forward to it.