MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-09 17:57:39+00:00
I see the difficulty of communications as the X factor here which is not so unknown. Our telescopes are not good enough to see a civilization like ours even on Alpha Centauri. It’s thought now we could observe a civilization like ours around a single star if we launch a probe past 500 au to the Sun’s gravitational lens. NASA wishes they could do that but it looks out of reach for now.

A ‘type ii’ civilization which could disassemble terrestrial planets could point a big-ass laser at us which we could see but maybe they don’t all (or ever) get that big. And they have to be motivated to do it.

If you want to visit another star you have to stop at the destination which is almost as hard as getting to speed but if you want to communicate a message which cannot be misunderstood you could bomb a planet with relativistic speed projectiles. Now maybe the average type ii civilization would not do that but maybe the fear that another one could so that might motivate a preemptive attack. It adds up to it being risky to attempt contact so why try?

Consider this message

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

to a star cluster 25,000 light years away. Even if somebody in that 300,000 star cluster has a telescope pointed in the right direction and the right time we could be long gone by the time they get a message back to us or maybe we forgot we sent it or now most of us live on another star…
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-05-09 17:57:49+00:00
it does appear cheaper because you can handle the highest workloads for just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself.

Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal.

But I personally believe that a dual strategy should be used, a minimum amount of stuff should be baremetal for the average traffic and only for huge spikes should cloud be used.

Except, clouds seem to be a lock-in, so people prefered the clouds untill the cloud started raining and asking them for a big ton of money.
by rthnbgrredf | 2025-05-09 17:57:59+00:00
18 PB is not a trivial amount of storage. I think what most people always underestimate is how much engineering effort it takes in the background to keep such big infrastructure up and running reliably.

I would like to have a detailed total cost of ownership calculation. Of course, renting hardware - let's say in Hetzner or some other cheap provider - is always cheaper than AWS or any other major cloud provider in simple 1:1 pricing comparison. So that is nothing new. But the pure CPU/RAM/SSD costs is just a fraction of what it really costs to run such infrastructure.
by GeoAtreides | 2025-05-09 17:58:16+00:00
Somewhere in a ex-communist country in Eastern Europe, the corpse of the secret police starts showing signs of life, animated by the sheer amount of irony coursing through its decayed body.

I never knew I would see the day the West would pass the same authoritarian laws used behind the iron curtain to spy on their own population. To be fair to the West, at least it's packaged neatly in a 'for the children' package; the communist totalitarian regimes didn't bother with explanations or 'reasons'.

In case it's not clear: priests were compelled to spy and report on the population by the secret police.
by roguecoder | 2025-05-09 17:58:32+00:00
I do not believe "it makes the control flow harder to understand" is as universal as you claim. If used badly any flow tool (including if-statements) can be be confusing. But "it can be complicated" doesn't mean we shouldn't use the tool when it is appropriate. One of the reasons I like Java Enums is because they provide much more structured guidance on what communicative inheritance looks like.

But we may also disagree on what "productive" means in the context of writing software.

The "taxonomy of code" you are dismissing is I believe what Fred Brooks describes as the "essential tasks" of programming: "fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity".

It's not that I don't sympathize with your concern: being explicit and clear about "what the code is trying to do" is why TDD is popular among OOP programmers. But the step after "green" is "refactor", where the programmer stops focusing on what the code is trying to do and refines the taxonomy of the system that implements those tasks.
by jpeloquin | 2025-05-09 17:58:34+00:00
Once something has a predictable ROI (can be productized and sold), profit seekers will find a way. The role of publicly funded research is to get ideas that are not immediately profitable to the stage that investors can take over. Publicly funded research also supports investor-funded R&D by educating their future work force.

The provided examples do not clearly support the idea that industry can compensate for a decrease in government-funded basic research. Bell Labs was the product of government action (antitrust enforcement), not a voluntary creation. The others are R&D (product development) organizations, not research organizations. Of those listed, Xerox PARC is the most significant, but from the profit-seeking perspective it's more of a cautionary tale since it primarily benefited Xerox's competitors. And Hinton seems to have received government support; his backpropagation paper at least credits ONR. As I understand it, the overall deep learning story is that basic research, including government-funded research, laid theoretical groundwork that capital investment was later able to scale commercially once video games drove development of the necessary hardware.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-05-09 17:58:39+00:00
I agree, was hoping HN would be where more 'civil discourse' could happen with those that are embedded in this particular area.

Like if you were a nuclear scientist, and wanted to talk to other nuclear scientist, while developing the bomb. And wanted to go beyond discussing the latest formula/experiment, and wanted to talk about the politics of what you're building. While building it.

Maybe huggingface?
by coatue | 2025-05-09 17:58:57+00:00
[Joe, Hydra cofounder] That's good feedback. It's easy to change the default table type to rowstore "heap" (https://docs.hydra.so/guides/analytics#switching-the-default...).

We initiall set the rowstore as default, but people wouldn't create columnstore tables and were confused on why performance wasn't improving. So, figured this was cleaner, but you always have the option to switch the default table type back.
by gaws | 2025-05-09 17:58:57+00:00
> It's not open source at the moment, but I would consider it. Just have to think through it as once you go open-source it doesn't go over too well to go back. So, if I want to open source it, I want to be sure.

It's hard to trust your site's promise of "No uploads, 100% privacy guaranteed" when people can't audit the code.
by trhway | 2025-05-09 17:59:08+00:00
That $10K breeds a Democratic/progressive voter. The actions of the current admin are pretty logical if one considers the goal of increasing political power of the conservative populist mass (i don't say "voters" here as making voting meaningless is among the end-games here)

I'm waiting for an analog of my "favorite" AETA laws to be made into federal law (FETA - Federal Enterprise Terrorism Act) criminalizing any anti-government speech/protest into terrorist/extremist hell. Note about the First Amendment - AETA doesn't seem to be affected by it, and so FETA would be safe from it too. Would be pretty similar to the Russia's discreditation laws and those China' security laws being used against democratic opposition in Hong Kong for example.
by kevinventullo | 2025-05-09 17:59:11+00:00
It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.

The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research with no clear path to monetization.

Yes, private schools do both of these things, but in both cases they are only doing so by means of public funding.
by regularization | 2025-05-09 17:59:51+00:00
Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey.

It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.
by EnPissant | 2025-05-09 18:00:35+00:00
> its not widely reported on because the media is a mix of institutiins which tend to be either in support of the Administration doing it or in fear of being targeted in retaliation for reporting on topics like that.

Here is a list of major news media outlets from Wikipedia[1].

Which of the following do you think either supports the current administration or fears being targeted by it?

ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Bloomberg, Vice News, HBO, HuffPost, TMZ, CNET, NPR, The Hollywood Reporter, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Time , U.S. News & World Report

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_media_in_the_United_State...
by FrankWilhoit | 2025-05-09 18:00:46+00:00
"heard from" "aliens". Two sets of scare quotes, to make the point: suppose we had heard from them, how would we know? Why should we imagine (I know why we do imagine, but there is still no reason why we should) that their modalities of communication would have anything in common with ours? If they did, it would be a fantastically improbable coincidence. We have enough problems crossing language barriers between humans (and typically greatly overestimate the effectiveness of such communication); each new study of possible communication among animals, whether or not it appears parallel with what we call "language", reveals inconceivably basic differences, not just between their methods and ours, but, crucially, their purposes and ours. We have scientists who claim to be able to measure the information content of arbitrary signals, but upon inspection, their criteria invariably turn out to embody deep, unconscious assumptions that...whoever...would build those signals the same way we would. Again, there is simply no reason whatever to make such assumptions.
by jabroni_salad | 2025-05-09 18:01:01+00:00
All moving parts degrade. A nice thing about machines is you can service and refurbish them to like-new condition.

There are options to deal with your shitty knees, hip, and back, but none of them get you back to 100% of your original capabilities and, carry an element of gambling, and will involve the kinds of painkillers that can ruin you far more comprehensively than a shitty joint will.
by disambiguation | 2025-05-09 18:01:10+00:00
A few points:

The distinction between story telling and show business - sometimes content merely exists for shock value as a publicity stunt. For example, I had no idea Andor had another season.

Audience and brand - a jarring tonal shift undermines the story. If Game of Thrones ended with everyone singing kumbyah and holding hands, that would upset a lot of people (even more than the current ending, if that's possible). Meanwhile, it would be inappropriate to have Harry Potter end in genocide.

The increasing displays of violence in media and its effect on the psyche - there are real life examples of social media content moderators getting PTSD from exposure to harmful content. Just because something is fictional doesn't mean it can't cause harm, and just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it's valid art.
by nightpool | 2025-05-09 18:01:11+00:00
What parts of a C# approach do you think Ruby should adopt? The syntax? I don't think anyone thinks of C# as having a particularly good or noteworthy type syntax or features—anything you can find in C# you can probably find in most other typed languages. I'm curious what specifically you think C#'s typing system is better at than e.g. Typescript, Python or Rust
by BryantD | 2025-05-09 18:01:16+00:00
This law does not compel anyone to spy. It does say that priests, like teachers and psychologists, have a duty to report if they have "reasonable cause to believe that a child has suffered abuse or neglect."

I see arguments on both sides of this but it's not compelling priests to spy. It's removing religious freedom protections from a long-standing precedent.
by vkou | 2025-05-09 18:01:58+00:00
I'm glad you took the time to point that out, because, as we all know, in the history of the universe, they have never made a non-viz minority hire who also happens to be completely incapable of doing the job.

---

When a viz-minority hire sucks, it's clearly DEI's fault, we shout from the rooftops.

When a non-minority hire sucks, crickets.
by raron | 2025-05-09 18:02:08+00:00
> For better or worse, CSV is easy to produce via printf. Easy to read by breaking lines and splitting by the delimiter. Escaping delimiters part of the content is not hard, though often added as an afterthought.

Based on the amount of software I seen producing broken CSV or can't parse (more-or-less) valid CSV, I don't think that is true.

It seems to be easy, because just printf("%s,%d,%d\n", ...) but it is full of edge cases most programmers don't think about.
by TomMasz | 2025-05-09 18:03:04+00:00
I remember as a kid seeing the ghost fleet of Liberty Ships in the Hudson River near NYC. They gradually disappeared, with the last of them sold off in the early 70s. You could even buy parts like hatch covers from the ships in antique stores for a while until the supply dried up. It didn't mean much to me but certainly did for my parents' generation.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-09 18:03:38+00:00
Well, first, you have to consider that the Roman republic was never really democratic but was at the hand of a small aristocracy which had sometimes but rarely the interest of the Romans at all, let alone the non citizen inhabitants.

But even, then it is definitely not accurate. Augustus gained powers through the numerous conflicts which followed Caesar murder at a time when the Republic was already challenged thanks to legions he more or less inherited (oversimplification) from Caesar. He was given powers by the Senate through what we would call rubber stamping only after his military power was inescapable.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-09 18:04:06+00:00
"Study finds it's a widespread concern" is a news story – for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01925-3

> Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action. […] Despite these encouraging statistics, we document that the world is in a state of pluralistic ignorance, wherein individuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act.

The situation is similar in the US: the majority of people don't think the government should be kidnapping citizens from their homes and shipping them off to foreign prisons without trial, but they also think everyone else is okay with it.

"It's a widespread concern" is not a news story, unless and until someone does the research and confirms it. Otherwise, how do the journalists know it's the case? And investigative journalists aren't usually running large-scale population studies.
by jajko | 2025-05-09 18:04:06+00:00
Why are you theoretising? I can tell you from out there its used massively, and its not going away in contrary. Even rather small banks can end up generating various reports etc. which can easily become huge.

The speed of human decision has basically 0 role here, as it doesn't with messaging generally, there is way more to companies than just direct keyboard-to-output link.
by nightpool | 2025-05-09 18:05:18+00:00
As a meta comment (responding to your question about downvotes): This is a very, very frequent topic of discussion any time Shopify, Stripe, Github or another huge Ruby shop make a technical post that's interesting to Rubyists. It's very annoying to have to retread the exact same discussion over and over again just because some people have to make this comment every time Ruby is even tangentially mentioned. So people aren't downvoting because they blindly disagree, they're downvoting because this is an uninteresting comment to leave on this article specifically.
by bad_haircut72 | 2025-05-09 18:05:26+00:00
replyming to my own comment here but for this audience in particular, consider that given this reasonable train of thought (that alchemy was like an advanced science which, if cracked, would have this really cool financial upside of providing infinite gold) - consider how many companies must have been created, raised money to do R&D, built working prototypes, rewrote the books & sometimes even made money by accident. If you were someone balancing their portfolio in 1700s Amsterdam, from a risk management perspective you would have invested at least a little bit on AlchemyTech just incase it really doesn turn out to be a real thing. People had lifetime careers wrapped up in it !
by autoexec | 2025-05-09 18:05:47+00:00
I agree that there needs to be a line drawn somewhere and I sympathize with the desire to keep control in the hands of individuals when it makes sense. I'd say that wherever government requires people to have insurance, the government should also provide it since that will keep the costs lowest and ensure the highest value.

I'd also say that in many cases the best thing you can do to empower individuals is to give preference to government over corporations. Government is (or at least can be made to be) accountable to the people. You don't have the power to elect the CEO of a company or vote for their corporate policy. Voting with wallets is largely a myth. If that actually worked there wouldn't be massive numbers of companies constantly screwing people over. Some companies are even basically universally hated yet remain highly successful. Government is where individuals hold the most power, especially at local levels. Care has to be taken to not let fear of government power back you into a position where you're being taken advantage of by others looking to force you into paying for their negative externalities.
by drdaeman | 2025-05-09 18:06:10+00:00
As someone who used a bunch of good products with less than great firmwares I would like you to ask to please consider not doing this, unless you have a strong, real and well-analyzed reason.

Rather, please consider spending your resources wisely, on something that benefits everyone and makes your product better. For power users, a theoretical ability to modify your product (possibly, in a ways you've never even thought about) can be a valuable benefit. So, unless you're certain to be seriously harmed by this in some way, please consider not wasting your (and your users') time on something of questionable value.

Just saying how it looks like from a technical end-user perspective. I'm just really tired and even somewhat depressed of having to hack my devices (lights, cat feeders, now a rowing machine) to make them work properly.
by tristor | 2025-05-09 18:06:16+00:00
In some ways, actually yes. College has gotten more expensive over time, partly because demand for college has outweighed the benefits of college on the other side. It is a shift in the education market away from the cost profile being aligned with outputs, to being focused on prestige/experience as the primary selling point. It's also largely related to the glut of paying foreign students nearly outnumbering Americans.

Prior to these shifts, college was much much much less expensive.
by cookingmyserver | 2025-05-09 18:07:21+00:00
As an aside, I've always thought of this when listening to discussions of technological advancement. I often hear the argument that in the early 20th century many people thought we were near the apex of technology. That often gets brought up when people claim the same today. I don't think we are quite there, but I get a feeling that the limit we are approaching is more a limit, not of knowledge, but of resources and engineering.

We have literal alchemy, but we don't have the capability to make useful amounts of gold. It is not that we don't know how to, but that it is not practical. How much more will material science, chemistry, and maybe even physics give us in practical (technology-wise) knowledge? Plenty for sure, but I don't think our rate of technological advancement will continue in these fields. That said, we have so much to learn even if it is not immediately applicable to technology.

Where I think there is an absolute abundance of applicable and practical knowledge to be collected is in the fields of biochemistry and biology. We haven't even scratched the surface there. We may never find a way to travel faster than light but if we can adapt our bodies to last for hundreds or thousands of years in stasis it may not matter. To me, being able to easily manipulate biology is so much more dangerous than nuclear proliferation. Anyways, not an expert of any of these fields.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-09 18:07:30+00:00
Fox News supports and many of the others fear being targeted by it, some are a bit in between like Washington Post and LA Times (billionaire owners sucking up to the dictator, as is tradition when such regimes rise to power)

Unless you think threats of DOJ investigation, pulling broadcast licenses, or extremely expensive lawsuits don't produce fear? In that case you should let authoritarians know their playbook is out of date. Of course it's not, which is why authoritarians follow such a distinct pattern.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-09 18:07:31+00:00
"DEI" is the rebranding of "affirmative action",† which was itself a euphemism for distributing special privileges (most notably jobs, higher education placements, and loan approvals) to members of legally favored racial groups while punishing members of disfavored groups.

All of the relevant laws specify that (1) you are not allowed to treat anybody differently based on their race, and (2) if your outcome numbers don't match what the government wants to see, there will be hell to pay.

Only (2) can be directly measured, so that is the part of the law that's enforced. People report that they treat all races equally for the same reason that Soviet agriculture officials reported that the grain harvest was better than expected.

† It's not clear to me why a rebranding was felt to be necessary. "Affirmative action" was popular; a lot of the loss in status of this type of initiative seems to be fairly directly related to the fact that, once the name was changed, people could reevaluate the concept without being confused by the preexisting knowledge that they approved of it.
by ClaireGz | 2025-05-09 18:09:09+00:00
Usually what we've seen is data people having notebooks/worksheets on the side with a bunch of manual SQL queries that they run to validate the data consistency. The process is highly manual, time consuming. Most of the time teams knows what kind of checks they want to run on the data to validate it, our goal here is to provide them the best toolbox to do it, in the IDE.

Tho, i'd say this is like when writing tests in software, you can't catch everything the first time (even when going 100% code coverage), especially in data when most of the time it breaks because of upstream producers.

It will still require live observability tools monitoring data live in the near future.
by Aloisius | 2025-05-09 18:09:57+00:00
Uh. California began offering $5,000 rebates for electric vehicles in 2007, before Tesla sold its first car. It was literally a selling point touted by Tesla.

From Tesla's blog (2009): Tax incentives: Why the Roadster costs less than its sticker price

https://web.archive.org/web/20090118215254/http://www.teslam...