MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-05-23 16:49:26+00:00
> Yes. So the Democrat's message of "The economy is improving" is a bad lie even though it was true, and "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?

Yes, unfortunately, because an incumbent has to run against the state of the world during the election cycle, and their opponent gets to run against it. And yes, Trump created the terrible economy that Biden inherited. But it doesn't matter. Kamala and her campaign should've realized that early and switched course.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-23 16:50:00+00:00
Few understand this. You’re allowed to openly advocate for whatever absolutely insane, horrific ideas you want.

You’re allowed to be a Nazi, you’re allowed to be a Hamas (non-financial) supporter, you’re allowed to be a pro-Gaza genocide advocate if you want. You can advocate for the extermination or enslavement of all black or white or Christian or atheist or gay people if you want.

You may (and probably should) become a social pariah and private parties can decline to affiliate with you, but the government isn’t allowed to do a damn thing about it.
by oldpersonintx2 | 2025-05-23 16:50:45+00:00
they've had some missteps

Apple Vision Pro just flat out failed (please don't try to contrarian-take this)

Apple Intelligence may be something one day, but for now Apple seems completely out of the AI race (and they want to be in it, regardless of what HN readers think)

Apple Car was either a failure or a total lie

Apple TV seems to be lots of money spent for a little money back

the iPhone has become a replacement parts business with incremental upgrades but no real reason to run out and stand in line for a new phone

MacBooks are fine but MacOS just seems to be slowly rotting

Watches still seem to be doing fine

Apple Silicon chips are great but I doubt most users care about incremental improvements they will never exploit

Trump keeps hounding them to get manufacturing in to the US, and he has some levers to pull (like it or not)

Tim Cook probably just needs to claim victory and move on, let someone else try something new
by switchbak | 2025-05-23 16:51:22+00:00
Memory mapping is fun, but shouldn't we have some kind of async IO / uring support by now? If you're looking at really high-perf I/O, mmaping isn't really state of the art right now.

Then again, if you're in Java/JVM land you're probably not building bleeding edge DBs ala ScyllaDB. But I'm somewhat surprised at the lack of projects in this space. One would think this would pair well with some of the reactive stream implementations so that you wouldn't have to reimplement things like backpressure, etc.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-23 16:51:52+00:00
I think there is a difference between there being a universal moral Truth (ontological) vs. a particular individuals ability to know that universal (epistemological). The former doesn't necessarily imply the latter. Rejecting the latter (the ability to know) doesn't require rejecting the former (the universal).

If one considers that these two are decoupled, it poses a question: how could one live in alignment to a universal truth that one cannot know. It makes me wonder, can we find meaning without certainty.

Even in this age of the rejection of religious dogma, I tend to notice that people still want to cling to certainty. They are certain there is no morality (nihilism) or they are certain that morality can be found either in the study of nature (through empiricism) or reason (through rationalism).

I hardly ever see anyone suggest that they humbly do not know.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-23 16:52:31+00:00
Maybe you saw this story recently?: https://phys.org/news/2025-05-universe-decay-years-sooner-pr...

Also, bismuth was once thought to be the most massive "fully" stable element, but turns out does decay with a half life of 10^19 years, compared to the universe's age of ~10^10 years.

Neutrons decay into a proton/electron pair after 15 minutes when not part of a nucleus.

Protons appear to be fully stable for any practical considerations, however they might decay after 10^30 years.
by pugworthy | 2025-05-23 16:52:34+00:00
Not gas dispersion, but it's crazy how fast some compounds can disperse in the human circulatory system when introduced by IV. If you've ever had IV saline flush you may know that metallic taste that seems to show up in your mouth almost instantly.

Similarly, there is a sensation from Adenosine for chemical cardioversion that creates a hot flushing feeling inside your body as it spreads, and it's quite the sensation to feel it going from your chest down to your extremities in a few seconds.
by zahlman | 2025-05-23 16:52:45+00:00
> Why Bellmac-32 didn’t go mainstream

This is the main thing I wanted to know, the last section heading in the article, and not explained by the remaining text. AT&T choosing someone different is a lame excuse (others could have bought in, like how Apple got ideas from Xerox PARC), and the rest is padded out with a restatement of how the Bellmac-32's ideas shaped future chip development.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-23 16:52:50+00:00
I feel like I'm too thoroughly cynical and jaded to take the tropes in "graduation speeches" seriously. Bringing someone back in who graduated in a totally different time, to a totally different world, in a totally different competitive, political, and economic landscape, to ramble about what they did when they graduated seems kind of pointless. Is her (or anyone's) story from the 90s really useful for someone graduating today?

Ms. Livingston graduated around when I did. I can't think of anything that I (or she) did to launch a career, either pre- or post-graduation that would be applicable to someone graduating today. When we graduated, you could actually get an entry level job in an office as a generic English major. You were generally competing with others in your local area or state, not the entire world's best. You could spam a bunch of resumes out and count on a handful of interviews and a few offers. You had at least a little assurance that if you did a good job, you'd advance or job-hop your way to something better. Back then, your student debt was (usually) manageable post-graduation and not a ball and chain holding you back. With a little diligent saving, you had a shot at affording a home and getting on the real estate ladder. And, you could do all these things as a B or C student, without being the world's foremost expert in your field.

I don't think any of these are true anymore. Graduates today are entering a dog eat dog capitalist slugfest where a lucky few winners take all. They're graduating into relative poverty and crushing debt, with no realistic opportunity to save. The job prospects for people without experience are generally awful. You're up against the world's best, plus a growing number of privileged elite "sons of the right people" sponging up all the really good jobs. Crappy work as a temp worker if you're lucky, stocking shelves or waiting tables if you're not. Good luck finding an actual full-time office gig related to your degree, unless you're top of your class. And even if you do, you're under constant threat of PIP, downsizing, or AI taking your place. "Find the people that you think are interesting" is kind of tone deaf happy-talk in today's reality.
Show HN: KeepYard – A free open-source Pocket alternative
by yoheinakajima | 2025-05-23 16:53:08+00:00
I'm a big Pocket user and was sad to hear they were shutting down. As an exercise, I challenged myself to vibe code and open source an alternative over night.

It has a downloadable chrome extension, web UI for managing bookmarks, categories, tags, and favorites. Optional AI Summary feature is pretty rough but you can provide your own OpenAI key. Added a Glasp integration where you can push bookmarks into your Glasp "second brain" so you or your friends can ask questions against it.

It's a relatively simple tool, and this is far from perfect (ran into CORS issues before bed, and I suspect there are security issues), but I find it insightful to see how far you building with just natural language in 24 hours.
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-23 16:53:25+00:00
None of those concerns typically apply with regard to international workers gaining citizenship. Practically all of them gain them lawfully, and with great difficulty too. For all intents and purposes, it is irrelevant to the matter at hand of employment of citizens. The point is the laws of revocation of naturalization alone will not get you or me a better job.

In contrast, just the simple act of eliminating non-PhD work visas could fix the situation, but politicians work for corporations, not for the people.
by munificent | 2025-05-23 16:53:45+00:00
> I just made a joke in passing because this piece isn’t about that.

I get that and maybe it's just me but it really fell flat. The world is on fire and it's reasonable to take a break from writing about that sad reality but in that case, I'd rather the writing not mention it at all instead of making me think about the horrorshow but then making light of it.

Your article about Procurement Capture is spot on.
by belter | 2025-05-23 16:54:28+00:00
You seem to be implying this thread is unkind to the team. Given most of the experience here, probably many are intellectually attracted by the architectural problem of scaling a product like ChatGPT, while examining how a company with almost unlimited funding approaches hiring.

Statements like these: "The presentation also specifically mentioned that using ORM can easily lead to inefficient queries and should be used cautiously."

Shows they are not experienced enough, to run this type of infrastructure at scale.
by akomtu | 2025-05-23 16:54:29+00:00
Math needs to be this way for precision. There are dozens of "conversions of signal into frequencies" besides Fourier transform: Z-transform, Laplace tansform, Wigner transform and so on. Normal language deals with few concepts, math deals with thousands.

Soviet countries wanted to isolate their peoples from western ideas. If you start teaching about Fourier transform in schools, students are going to ask who that Fourier is.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-23 16:54:56+00:00
>What an utterly absurd statement.

And comparing the election of Trump to the election of Hitler is not absurd? I'll end this conversation here due to you not being willing to argue in good faith. Please have a read on the history of WW1, Weimar Republic and the circumstances that led to Hitler getting elected, including the election process, then maybe you can stop bringing up the Hitler every time someone mentions Trump.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-23 16:55:04+00:00
The reason the semantic web failed is not only because "nobody makes money when things aren't locked down". It's also because nobody ain't got no time for generating infinite amount of metadata when full-text search and indexing, with a judicious pinch of fuzzy matching, is both faster and more reliable. And LLMs, as much as I dislike the technological/societal consequences of their existence, are effectively further development of the latter, so they won't go away.

Manual or even semi-automated cataloguing of websites (and further curating) of websites wasn't the answer to "how do I find stuff on the web" — Google was. Having standardized metadata format for menus is undoubtedly nice — but good luck making people to use it. You just can't. It really is both cheaper and easier for everyone involved to have website with arbitrary information layout scraped and fed into an LLM to extract relevant data: because what is "relevant" is different for everyone. You can't pre-ordain the full list of possible relevant metadata, and, again, good luck forcing everyone to fill out those 500 items-long forms. Ain't nobody got time for that.
by throwanem | 2025-05-23 16:55:26+00:00
Even when we use inches, they're frequently themselves metricated via division by 1,000 to produce the "thou." This is an extremely strong convention; I have one (inexpensive) digital caliper that can read in fractional inches, but every such tool I own reads in both millimeters and thou.

I do think it's funny all these folks insisting metric is so humanist seem never to have noticed which of their finger joints is an inch long. For me that's the second of the little finger, but I have large squarish peasant hands. As for the rest, treating a centimeter as 10/25 of an inch and vice versa seems to work well enough for measurements not requiring particular precision, or in other words anything I'd be comfortable doing without a caliper. Where's the trouble, really?
by ketzo | 2025-05-23 16:55:39+00:00
Aside from the pure “networking” factor, the expectations/environment are a big deal too

I went to private school and in hindsight it pretty obviously altered my life for the better — I was a smart but lazy kid, and being surrounded by people who were dead-set on going to Harvard, and by teachers who expected excellence, was a huge factor in making me actually try hard.

If I was a smart lazy kid at a school where I had to try to find that environment, rather than being thrust into it, I would have had a much lower trajectory.
by doug_durham | 2025-05-23 16:55:45+00:00
Plain human readable text is not an "artificial barrier". It the nature of our our world. Requiring that a restaurant publish menus in a metadata format is an artificial barrier. That the beauty of these new NLP tools. I don't need to have a restaurant owner learn JSON, or buy a software package that generates JSON. We can use data as it is. The cost of building useful tools goes to near zero. It will be imprecise, but that's what human language is.
by pvg | 2025-05-23 16:56:07+00:00
OP was giving what amounted to legal advice

That is a huge overstatement that you can't really use to justify the haranguing. They just popped in to address the potential issue and let people know they're trying to sort it out. Nobody is giving legal advice and nobody is going to end up in legal trouble because Microsoft messed up their license boilerplate for a bit.
by Y_Y | 2025-05-23 16:56:13+00:00
Fixing all of those at once might be a bit too much to ask, but I have some quick suggestions. I'd say for a more robust JSON you could try Dhall. If you just want to exchange lumps of data between programs I'd use Protobuf. If you want simple and freeform I'd go with good old sexps.

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-lang

https://protobuf.dev/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression
by modeless | 2025-05-23 16:56:23+00:00
> we then train models on noisy, corrupted traces which have no relation to the specific problem each is paired with, and find that not only does performance remain largely consistent with models trained on correct data, but in some cases can improve upon it

This is the interesting part. We've probably all had the experience where the model is going off the rails during the thinking process but somehow spits out the right answer at the end. Apparently the reasoning doesn't even need to be correct during training?

I guess it suggests to me that the reason CoT helps is that the model gets more compute to think internally, not that the words it produces are meaningful. I'm surprised nobody has come up with a good scheme for adaptive compute per token yet. Maybe we can skip CoT entirely.
by munificent | 2025-05-23 16:58:17+00:00
The game every big media company is playing now, and the thing that Doctorow coined as "enshittification" works sort of like this:

1. Companies want you to keep paying for the subscription, so they want to offer you things with value.

2. At the same time, since you're paying a flat fee, they don't get much incremental reward for offering you things of incrementally greater value. So their incentive is to cut costs by offering you as little value as possible as long as the value is juuuuust above the threshold where you (well, the aggregate behavior of all users as "you") cancel.

3. Because of lock-in effects like having a huge library of liked songs and playlists in Spotify, being in the middle of binging an exclusive show on Netflix, the threshold of frustration where you would cancel gets higher and higher.

4. Thus, they are incentivized to increase lock-in because it enables them to cut more costs and deliver less value.
by majoe | 2025-05-23 16:58:29+00:00
This is the answer.

Interestingly, wind/storm loads are oftentimes the limiting factor for the configuration height of a crane.

This is because, when adding another tower segment, not only the total area increases but also the wind forces. The other loads stay roughly the same

This is the reason why bottom-slewing cranes, which are commonly used for small buildings, sometimes are built with solid walls. Top-slewing cranes, which are used for high buildings, always use a steel framework.
by BitwiseFool | 2025-05-23 16:59:52+00:00
As an American, I finally relented and purchased a Metric measuring tape after the ordeal of trying to measure the dimensions of the rooms in my house. When it comes to interior decorating, trying to figure out how to evenly space items that are sized in feet, inches, and fractional inches is a nightmare. Imagine trying to space objects 2 feet 7½ inches long against a wall that is 13 feet 2 inches long. Now imagine this task with 80 centimeter long objects and a ~400 centimeter wall.

I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to view dimensions in metric site-wide. You can still see dimensions in metric but those only appear on the pictures of some items. The webpage still converts all textual measurements to Imperial. You can't sort and search using metric values. IKEA designs everything in metric, using nice, even, whole numbers. Please let me see those. Seeing them converted to the nearest 32nd of an inch feels like vandalism.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-05-23 16:59:59+00:00
Oh, interesting; I wasn't even aware that he'd written anything in the Culture universe after Look To Windward since there was such a long hiatus after that one. I'll have pick up his last few books.

I still think there's a gap between individuals not having to exercise much self-restraint because nearly anything can be provided to them on demand at no cost because goods and services are too cheap to meter in the Culture and the real world where individuals have to exercise considerable self restraint to hold the means of production by the community and for the community. If the Culture is socialism, it's post-scarcity socialism, which is not a form which most people would recognize.
by Barrin92 | 2025-05-23 17:00:41+00:00
>Of course! You chose to run Debian. Debian is entirely upfront about this!

Okay, then going back to the beginning of the argument and the comparison you denied is accurate. If merely choosing Debian is sufficient reason enough for the user to assume that Debian as the distributor acts as a middleman in all sorts of ways, how exactly is that different from an app store?

After all you choose to buy an iPhone or use the Google Play store, so if the argument is that consent, given exactly once invalidates any concern, that applies to any platform, nobody's ever been held at gunpoint to install an operating system.

I think what would help is indeed if maintainers make significant changes that the user is informed about that very visible during the installation process.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-23 17:00:42+00:00
Original title "Tulsa Remote's $10k Question: Why Paying Remote Workers to Relocate Returns $4.31 per Dollar" compressed to fit within title limits.

Analysis:

The Effects of Tulsa Remote on Inducing Moves to Tulsa: Estimates and Implications - https://research.upjohn.org/up_technicalreports/50/ | https://doi.org/10.17848/tr25-050

Abstract:

Tulsa Remote is one of the largest of over 100 remote worker attraction programs in the United States. Since its beginning in 2018, the program has provided generous incentives ($10,000 for moving to Tulsa and staying one year), along with accompanying networking services and incentives to encourage entrepreneurship, to over 3,000 Tulsa Remote member households, selected out of tens of thousands of applicants. Tulsa Remote’s purpose is to promote economic development in Tulsa. Tulsa Remote members spend more locally and generate fiscal benefits, as well as start up businesses and help make Tulsa more attractive for high-tech job growth. These benefits depend on the degree to which Tulsa Remote actually induces Tulsa moves. What percentage of approved Tulsa Remote applicants would not have moved to Tulsa “but for” the incentive offer? Using data on applicant households, including both approved and not approved by Tulsa Remote, this report estimates Tulsa Remote’s “but for” rate. Using a variety of models, this report estimates a “but for” rate of 58–70 percent, averaged across all member households. The report then enters these “but for” estimates into a regional econometric model that simulates the effects of Tulsa Remote on the per capita incomes of the original Tulsa residents. In the baseline estimates, the benefits to original Tulsa residents, in higher incomes, are over four times the program’s financial costs. Simulations also show that benefits go up with the following: a higher “but for” rate, a higher retention rate, higher wages of Tulsa Remote members, higher entrepreneurship effects among Tulsa Remote members, and increased housing supply to accommodate the induced population growth. The program’s support activities and other policies accompanying the program (e.g., housing supply policies) are at least as important as the incentive payments and the selection process for membership in Tulsa Remote.
by bko | 2025-05-23 17:00:51+00:00
> The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world.

This sounds good sure, but what if you give your child a wide orientation and they want to be an influencer, or club promoter, or grind it out in acting? They almost certainly won't want to become an accountant or nurse. Who would want to do that by choice?

But maybe an accountant or nurse is the path to a good life. The extreme is celebrity children which often have issues.

I think its good to have restraints. If you have an infinite bank roll and no real forcing function, you're likely to get lost
by softfalcon | 2025-05-23 17:01:18+00:00
I mostly agree with you, as a person who went to a middle-of-the-road public school.

I will point out though, anecdotally, my spouse went to the highest tier of public school in our city. She has a good balance of "seeing the world for what it is" while also having an edge of being personally networked to a ton of folks who are rich, well-connected, and capable.

I look at the friend groups I built when I was a kid, and then I look at hers.

- My old friend groups are all stuck in a range of poverty to lower-middle-class.

- My spouses friends are all doing very well for themselves, live all over the world, prestigious careers, active hobbies, highly intellectual, cultured, etc.

It's a stark contrast.

There is something to be said for ensuring your kids go to the best schools possible. Those early networks are pivotal in forming an above average life.

Competency is secondary to connection.
by yencabulator | 2025-05-23 17:01:45+00:00
It's about the likelihood and probability distribution of the kinds of bugs.

An Excel sheet made by NASA as part of their official space operations, to that rigor will probably have 0 problems ever. But compared to typical software, just consider this: Excel sheets do not have a culture of any kind of testing. If the output looks plausible, move on. Garbage in, garbage processing, garbage out.

AI slop has a similar but not exactly the same problem: It's highly, highly likely a human "reviewing" the generated code will just nod their head and not think critically/independently, just accepting all things that are superficially plausible. That may be fine for your webdev CRUD but I sure hope those people are never given credentials that can access anything critical.