MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hackyhacky | 2025-05-09 17:01:42+00:00
> You speak of equal opportunity. What happens in practice is enforced equal outcomes which entails compromising on principles and standards to get the desired result.

Yes, I am aware of what you think DEI hiring practices are, but speaking as someone who has actually applied these policies, I'm telling you that that's not what happens. The propaganda simply is not true.

Under DEI hiring policies, we were required to document *outreach* to underrepresented groups in order to get a more diverse hiring pool. We *never* lowered our standards and always hired the best applicant.
by jwhitlark | 2025-05-09 17:01:42+00:00
https://github.com/clj-commons/rewrite-clj is an absolute superpower for this kind of thing, if you were using Clojure. It always saddened me it doesn't get more exposure.

As good as Rust is, I still feel there needs to be a "high-low" strategy for most biz/game code. You want to be able to depend on your low level abstractions, while constantly changing up how you fit them together.
by YouWhy | 2025-05-09 17:01:45+00:00
What I find remarkable is the way the Admiralty - a very imperfect system with multiple facets that are downright clownish is nevertheless principled as a whole when it comes to strategic interests - the nation's foes are harassed, leadership positions are manned by technically competent individuals, regulations are amended to incorporate major learnings and so on.

Also, the banality of how the system treats sailor lives as expendable is almost incomprehensible from a 21st century perspective.
by DeusExMachina | 2025-05-09 17:02:04+00:00
I am an Orthodox Christian and I can tell you that to us, Protestantism definitely looks like a completely different religion.

Despite claiming that they follow Christ, our and their definition of "following" is so different that what they do and believe often looks unrecognizable.

The same can be said about the difference between Catholics and Protestants. Despite our disagreements, the Orthodox and Catholic churches still share a lot theologically. The same cannot be said about Protestants (although, that also depends on what denominations you consider).

It's not to say that we don't share any values. We actually do and there are many individual Protestants that behave in a more Christian way than some members of the Orthodox Church.

However, that is not a highly relevant factor. For one reason or another, there are many atheists and members of other religions that do as well. But those still remain clearly separate and would never be classified as Christians.
by throwanem | 2025-05-09 17:02:37+00:00
See those three fluid inlets on the back in the render? Or what look a lot like quick-disconnect hose fittings, at least, and no wonder; this is among other things a life support system for brain tissue, and will minimally need to maintain hydration and exhaust waste. Operating the machine at all will certainly require engineering and environmental services only feasibly available in a professionally staffed and maintained laboratory.

That is one of the reasons why the "buy" CTA dispatches to a contact form. They can and must vet potential customers.
by sitkack | 2025-05-09 17:03:23+00:00
That is what Intel does, they build up a market (Optane) and then do a rug pull (Depth Cameras). They continue to do this thing where they do a huge push into a new technology, then don't see the uptake and let it die. Instead of building slowly and then at the right time, doing a big push. Optane support was just getting mature in the Linux kernel when they pulled it. And they focused on some weird cost cutting move when marketing it as a ram replacement for semi-idle VMs, ok.

They keep repeating the same mistakes all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432
by rahimnathwani | 2025-05-09 17:03:34+00:00
The PDF cites Justin's book about Math Academy.

I like how the paper lays out clearly the steps to create a skill tree, and some general guidelines.

The paper is perfect for use as part of an LLM prompt, e.g.

Using the approach detailed in the attached paper, create a skill tree for writing a magical realism novela. Turn this into mermaid code. Don't use parentheses in labels.

https://mermaid.live/edit#pako:eNqNWH9v2zgS_SqEFvufW8SWm228w...
by FireBeyond | 2025-05-09 17:03:37+00:00
Let me know when "FSD" can navigate this intersection in my state capital:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Q3VPJvJ6WwXe3gdZ7

Four lanes, left to right: straight+left, right turn only, concrete divider, right turn only, right turn only. Note that there are only two lanes when you turn right, so you can turn into the rightmost lane from lane 2, the leftmost lane from lane 3, rightmost from lane 4.

Traffic lights (four signals) on the far end of the intersection work thus:

1. Left two lane lights turn green (Right two lanes are red). You can have traffic going straight, left or right. Traffic in lane 2 can turn right, but lanes 3 and 4 cannot. 2. Right two lane lights turn green, left red. Lane 2 cannot turn right but lanes 3 and 4 can.

All the lights are circles, no arrows. The only indication of weirdness is that there's a "No turn on red".

I do not see FSD behaving appropriately.
by lokhura | 2025-05-09 17:03:41+00:00
I'm not the one that made the original claim. The 25% is the government's figure. Whether some of it was classified incorrectly is up for debate. I haven't personally double checked every claim, but it is not hard to believe that money is being siphoned via those grants into DEI programs, and it is the government's position to not fund these programs anymore.
by autoexec | 2025-05-09 17:04:56+00:00
> Should government’s role be to prevent all dumb decisions that affect only the people/families making dumb decisions?

You don't think other people are impacted when families lose their homes and everything they have? Who do you think is going to end up having to pay to house and feed them? Taxpayers. The economic effects on people who still have their house aren't immediate and obvious so it's easy to pretend that nobody else is impacted, but it's almost never the case, especially when it's not about one guy whose house burned down after he tried to save a little extra money by not insuring against fire, but entire communities who lose everything.

When government manages insurance and everyone is covered the costs are dramatically lower and everyone is safer. The role of government should be to provide important safety nets to people providing stability and confidence to communities and the economy. Government can do it without needing to continuously stuff their pockets with higher and higher profits like shareholders demand, and without doing everything possible to avoid paying out valid claims the way private insurance companies do in order to protect those profits.

While there does come a point where it doesn't make sense for people to continue to live in certain areas, for more typical cases it'd be a major improvement that would save more money than letting people who just want to gamble on the odds get away with not paying for insurance at all. Eventually many of those people lose that game and instead of just upsetting their lives it destroys them while everyone around them pays the higher costs.
by kodablah | 2025-05-09 17:04:57+00:00
> I hate this idea that Ruby needs to be more like Python or Typescript

It's not be more like those, it's be more like helpful, author-friendly programming which is very much Ruby's ethos.

Every time I think about ripping out all of the RBS sig files in my project because I'm tired of maintaining them (I can't use Sorbet for a few reasons), Steep catches a `nil` error ahead of time. Sure we can all say "why didn't you have test coverage?" but ideally you want all help you can get.
Show HN: Bumble Bee Flower Finder
by jhedwards | 2025-05-09 17:05:58+00:00
Hi HN, this is a project I did for a friend of mine[0] who is a scientist researching both plants and insects. He had collected a really amazing data set and wanted a set of tools for searching through the data and for designing gardens. Jarrod did most of the design and basic HTML and provided the data, I implemented the various search and sort algorithms and did the map generation. It was a lot of fun and I think the product is useful.

The "find" function allows you to specify various constraints and get a list of native plants that satisfy those constraints. Clicking on a plant gives you detailed information about that plant. The "plan" function uses the provided constraints to build a set of plants whose genera and bloom time are evenly distributed, and provides a randomly generated map that can be used as a planting guide. Clicking on a plant in "plan" mode removes that plant from the plan and selects a new one from the set of eligible alternatives. It also shows you which bumble bees your garden will potentially support. For more info just read the site, it is pretty information dense.

[0] https://jarrodfowler.com/
by pragma_x | 2025-05-09 17:06:35+00:00
That was my takeaway as well. Pivoting a conventional structure in a column-major storage system just smells like a look-aside of some kind (a database). Plus, you lose the benefits of bulk copy/move that the compiler will likely give you in a standard struct (e.g. memcpy()), should it be on the big side. From there, we can use lots of other tricks to further speed things up: hashes, trees, bloom filters...

At the same time, I don't completely understand how such a pivot would result in a speedup for random access. I suppose it would speed up sequential access, since the multiple array storage scheme might force many more cache line updates.
by tzs | 2025-05-09 17:06:38+00:00
Yup, but they needed arms to do that and a huge amount of Soviet arms came from the US.

The US supplied a little over half of all ammo, shells, mines, and explosives the Soviet Union used during the war. The US also supplied something like 400k trucks, 13k combat vehicles, 14k aircraft, and 13k tanks along with petroleum and food that the Soviet army needed to sustain operations.
by thesz | 2025-05-09 17:06:45+00:00
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf

"As pointed out in [57], there has never been a genuine implementation of Shor’s algorithm. The only numbers ever to have been factored by that type of algorithm are 15 and 21, and those factorizations used a simplified version of Shor’s algorithm that requires one to know the factorization in advance..."

If you have a clue what these factors are, you can build an implementation of Shor's algorithm for them, I guess.
by BuckRogers | 2025-05-09 17:06:57+00:00
A bytecode for the web was a dream for a very long time.

As a C# developer who appreciates Blazor being on the cutting edge with WASM from early on, I'm looking forward to WASM 2.0's changed being added. .NET has a massive jump on this and I think it's one of the better bets they've taken.
by attila-lendvai | 2025-05-09 17:07:14+00:00
swarm is made of two, relatively independent components:

1) the storage/comm layer (has not much to do with web3/blockchain stuff)

2) the incentive layer to encourage cooperation/participation, and to make the various attacks expensive.

without a functional 2) i'm yet to be convinced that it's possible to create a truly distributed censorship resistant 1).
by seadan83 | 2025-05-09 17:07:43+00:00
AFAIK it would be more fitting to say it is of little comfort to a factory worker who lost their job, that there are now 1.5 more jobs, better jobs, now available to other people.

The reason for AFAIK, my understanding is it is more common for people to be left behind than to transition entirely to a new industry. (That is my memory of seeing some data around that, not saying I'm correct, but that I find it just as plausible to speculate that industrial transitions don't always transition with the same workers.) Perhaps we should talk farming? That is the biggest example pethaps. Some 80% plus of all populations used to do agriculture. The Grapes of Wraith were all about this very topic.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-09 17:07:46+00:00
The general story about the LLM-scraper problem is that (1) "companies like OpenAI run badly implemented web crawlers to get training data" but there is (2) with LLMs scrapers could do content understanding (inference) that would make them more useful and I think the even more impactful (3) LLMs will empower people to write scrapers that would never have written them before.

I kinda laugh at (3) because it's been a running gag for me that management vastly overestimates the effort to write scrapers and crawlers because they've been burned with vastly underestimating the effort to develop what look like simple UI applications.

They usually think "this will be a hassle to maintain" but it usually isn't because: (a) the target web sites usually never change in a significant way because UI development is such a hassle and (b) the target web sites usually never change in a significant way because Google will punish them if they do [1]

It is like 10 minutes to write a scraper if you do it all the time and have an API like beautifulsoup on your fingertips, probably 20 minutes to vibe code it if you don't.

I am still using the same HTML scraper to process image galleries today that I used to process Flickr galleries back in the 00's, for a while the pattern was "fight with the OAuth to log into an API for 45 minutes" or "spend weeks figuring out how to parse MediaWiki markup" and then "get the old scraper working in less than 15 minutes". Frequently the scraper works perfectly out of the box, sometimes it works 80% out of the box, always it works 100% by adding a handful of rules.

I work on a product that has a React-based site and it seems the "state of the art" in scraping a URL [2] like

https://example.com/item/8788481

is to download the HTML and then all the Javascript and CSS and other stuff with no cache (for every freaking page) and run the Javascript and have something scrape the content out of the DOM whereas they could just go to

https://example.com/api/item/8788481

and get the data they want in a JSON format which could be processed like item["metadata"]["title"] or just stuffed into a JSONB column and queries any way you like. Login is not "fight with OAuth" but something like "POST username and password to https://example.com/api/login with a client that has a cookie jar" I don't really think "most people are stupid" that often but I think it all the time when web scraping is involved.

[1] they even have a patent for it! people who run online ad campaigns A/B test anything, but the last thing Google wants is for an SEO to be able to settle questions like "will my site rank higher if I put a certain phrase in a <b>?"

[2] ... as in, we see people doing it in our logs
by jerlam | 2025-05-09 17:09:09+00:00
As an occasional BART rider, the changes they've made since the pandemic have been in the right direction. I'm mostly indifferent to the new trains and payment cards, but they've increased the frequency so that missing a train doesn't mean you can be waiting for over 30 minutes, which can be longer than your entire trip.

The main problem which BART cannot fix is that the trains usually don't go to where you want to go.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-09 17:09:14+00:00
And I've identified that it's the 1,000,000 most recent comments/posts which are accessible:

I just checked against oldest accessible article (at this writing), and subtracted that from the newest comment (from the "comments" titlebar link):

43938990 - 42938990 = 1000000

Others can confirm this by going to the newest comment, and subtracting 1000001 from the contentID to find the first inaccessible comment.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments>
by simantel | 2025-05-09 17:09:34+00:00
You can get pretty far with Google's Webmaster Tools, only pay for the Ahrefs if you want to use it for keyword research or to monitor your results in more detail. They have lots of great free content though, like: https://ahrefs.com/academy/seo-training-course

Ultimately SEO boils down to building links and writing content.
by usernamed7 | 2025-05-09 17:10:00+00:00
I've been a ruby dev for 15+ years; i'd really love it if ruby adopted a C# similar approach to typing (albeit, more ruby-like and more flexible). It's the most readable, simplest way I would enjoy as a rubyist. Everything else (including sorbet) feels bolted on, cumbersome and cringe. I appreciate the article and how it goes over the constraints; but genuinely sorbet is just not good enough from a DSL standpoint.

Type's can be fun and useful, and i'd love to see them incorporated into ruby in a tasteful way. i don't want it to become a new thing developers are forced to do, but there is a lot of utility from making them more available.
by dleeftink | 2025-05-09 17:10:39+00:00
I've been getting productive with Facet's approach, especially its 'templates as mixins' paradigm [0]. This gets really powerful when you consider how template scripts are automatically scoped.

But there is much more to like. In fact, while a scripting escape hatch is there, this microlibrary asks you to touch JS as little as possible.

[0]: https://github.com/kgscialdone/facet
by ajmurmann | 2025-05-09 17:11:33+00:00
If someone else replaces all workers with robots first instead, what will Bezos do then?

What you are describing is a political problem, not one for entrepreneurs. IMO the solution would be a form of UBI that we can smoothly increase as automation in fact removes jobs or lowers wages. I'd like to see that start ASAP, but OTOH we are still close to record-low unemployment and the last years saw the largest wage increases at the lower end in decades.
by gruntbuggly | 2025-05-09 17:12:30+00:00
I see this thinking thrown around often, but I don't see how net new jobs would be created by efficiencies. Amazon wouldn't adopt robots if it created more employment overhead downstream. Sure, there will be robot maintainers, but not at a replacement level of the roles replaced. Companies adopt technologies because they reduce the net amount of human input (cost) required, right?
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-09 17:12:54+00:00
Sure, but targeting hardware suited for this purpose. That is: hardware that does not come with complex 3D GPU. Only some framebuffer(s), and -perhaps- a basic 2D accelerator.

Then a driver (if needed at all!), would be trivial, you could take Linux out of the equation & collapse the software stack into a tiny amount of code.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-09 17:13:25+00:00
There's no embedded interpretation in JSX, it's a direct "sugar" for a function call pattern. If you are already using Typescript, it's a "free" syntax sugar that Typescript supports well.

It's less pure in that it doesn't run directly in the browser today, but it is also way more pure than the template compilers in Angular and Vue and others.
by ncruces | 2025-05-09 17:13:51+00:00
They were sufficient for me to implement most of `string.h` and get speedups between 4 and 16x vs “portable musl C code,” including sophisticated algorithms such as this one: http://0x80.pl/notesen/2016-11-28-simd-strfind.html

I posted about my efforts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43935284

Or, if you wanna jump to the code: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/blob/main/sqlite3/libc...
by tetha | 2025-05-09 17:13:59+00:00
This is honestly something that caught me off-guard a bit. If you have good internal network connectivity, small queries and your relational database has the data in memory, it can be faster to fetch data from the DB via the network than reading it from disk.

Like, sure, I can give you an application server with faster disks and more memory and you or me are certainly capable of implementing an application server that could load the data from disk faster than all of that. And then we build caching to keep the hot data in memory, because that's faster.

But then we've spent very advanced development resources to build a relational database with some application code at the edge.

This can make sense in some high frequency trading situations, but in many more mundane web-backends, a chunky database and someone capable of optimizing stupid queries enable and simplify the work of a much bigger number of developers.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-05-09 17:14:07+00:00
You are externalizing all of the problems of the electorate and treating them as if they have no agency. As if every other part of the system is a clever actors, and voters are all mindless dolls with no choice in how they vote, what they read, or what they watch.

I agree consequences are a powerful incentive. If you reject updating the law, where does that leave you?

What exactly is your position? Should I go out and shoot people I disagree with or not? Are you going out and shooting people?
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-09 17:14:47+00:00
But the amount of money going by is so huge they can take a tiny percent of it to pay their server bills.

Dynamic languages in large systems have been controversial since there have been dynamic languages. It was routine for heroic AI systems of the golden age (1980s) to be prototyped in Lisp and then be rewritten in C++ for speed. You'd hear stories about the people who wrote 500,000 lines of Tcl/Tk to control an offshore oil drilling rig and the folks who think "C++ is a great language for programming in the large" but who don't seem to mind having a 40 minute build.
by wyre | 2025-05-09 17:15:14+00:00
Google is easily in the best position to hold competitive pricing with their LLMS. They can rely on their multi-billion dollar ad business to prop up their AI advancements, compared to OpenAI or Anthropic that only exist with heavy investment from VC.

Google will probably put 2.5 Pro behind a Google One account once it is out of preview, but I don't see a compelling reason they wouldn't keep Gemini incredibly price competitive with Claude or ChatGPT.
by ClaireGz | 2025-05-09 17:15:31+00:00
When it comes to SQL writing we are more relevant, when it comes to speed this is hard to benchmark exactly against Cursor and Windsurf but we are a bit slower (around ~600ms on average) obviously and we know what we have to improve to speed it up.

Next in the list is the next edit suggestion dedicated to data work, especially with dbt (or SQL transformations) where when you change a query you have to change the downstream queries directly.
by treetalker | 2025-05-09 17:15:45+00:00
I met him at the Court once during law school.

He came across as the most even-keeled person in the world.

I asked him how he thought he had changed, if at all, throughout his years on the Court. He said, "We never see ourselves as others see us." I'll never forget it.

He'll be missed; sorry to hear that his papers won't be released for 50 years.
by stickfigure | 2025-05-09 17:15:57+00:00
It depends on whether you want to build bunker capacity for every citizen or just the half that live in cities. It's just cities, you have to convince all the suburban and rural citizens to pay for it.

You could imagine this being accomplished at a city-wide level out of city budgets and local taxes, but again this just reinforces the point that size is a problem.

Sweden's population is more concentrated in cities than the US's population. In the US, rural voters have a dramatically outsized influence over the senate.