MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tomhow | 2025-05-18 13:06:02+00:00
Dang wrote about this general issue a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996035

To me this is the most significant point:

What happens in flamewars is that when people encounter material they strongly disagree with, these systems get activated and rapidly produce aggressive and defensive responses that have to do with self-protection, and nothing to do with thoughtful consideration of the material, things one might learn, points where one might be wrong, curiosity, playful interaction, and so on. When survival is at stake there is no time or space for the latter sorts of reactions. But it's the latter that we want on HN—they're what the site is for.

I have my own experience over several years undertaking various forms of subconscious work, and from that experience have become very aware of the way emotional reactivity and sympathetic nervous system activation are antithetical to curious, reflective exploration of topics.

The evidence can be seen right here in this thread: how many insightful, reflective, curious comments are there in the entire thread? How many commenters are even attempting to comment in that style, or favour that style of cognitive processing of the topic?
by amluto | 2025-05-18 13:06:48+00:00
I vaguely recall doing this calculation on a problem set. For a black hole roughly the size of the one at the center of our galaxy, IIRC you have well under a microsecond. I could be remembering wrong.

Even worse: the way to maximize how long you have before you hit the singularity, you should do nothing. Firing your rocket in any direction gets you to the singularity in an even smaller amount of proper time: the singularity isn’t in front of you in space — it’s ahead of you in time.

Keep in mind that all of this is for the Schwarzchild metric, which is a nice solution to Einstein’s equations in the sense that you can derive it on a blackboard. It can’t describe what we think of as a real black hole for plenty of reasons, including the major one that a Schwartzchild black hole has existed forever and therefore could not have formed in a supernova. You need a different solution for a black hole that has only existed for a finite time.
by nyanpasu64 | 2025-05-18 13:07:36+00:00
I've read that birds used to have penises (and paleognaths and waterfowl still have them today), but the Galliformes (including chickens) developed atrophied penises which are difficult to see (hence chick sexing and feeding males to the meat grinder), and the Neoaves lost them entirely. Though https://prumlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/brennan_etal_20... suggests the exact nature is more variable between birds in lineages that "have" them
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-05-18 13:07:39+00:00
Not buying at all that you learned 18000 words and 5000 kanji in ten minutes per day. Thats 60 hours a year for say five year, or 300 hours. Thats leaves you with about 70 words and/or kanji per hour or less than a minute per word/kanji. A rate which far surpasses native speakers.

Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-18 13:08:09+00:00
I made a tool based on this principle!

We spend hours a day browsing the web, so I made a browser extension[0] that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so that you're always learning a little through immersion.

I also used the same "10 minutes a day on Anki" strategy with my A levels, and it made the revision process so so much nicer because stuff I'd learnt two years ago was as fresh as if I'd learnt it a couple of months ago, rather than years.

[0] https://nuenki.app
by ryao | 2025-05-18 13:09:23+00:00
SuperH is owned by Hitachi. You cannot use them without a license from Hitachi as far as I know. RISC-V is unique in that its creator permits anyone to make and use RISC-V cores royalty free. It also supports 64-bit, which SuperH never did.

In any case, you should probably stop writing before you shove your foot any deeper into your mouth.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-18 13:09:29+00:00
Spaced repetition is time-optimised, but it isn't self-discipline optimised, nor motivation-optimised. If you're limited by time, it's very efficient, but it drains motivation. If you're anywhere close to being limited by motivation (or, failing that, self-discipline), it just causes burnout and failure.

I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burning out so hard I took a gap year!

And I'm enjoying the gap year, but Anki made it a near necessity.
by cjauvin | 2025-05-18 13:09:32+00:00
What I find interesting about spaced repetition is the underlying thesis that raw memorization, in certain contexts, is playing a more important role for learning than what some modern education ideas would make you assume. In mathematics or programming, for instance, there is this idea that understanding a concept is better than memorizing algorithms or recipes (derivation methods for instance). But spaced repetition challenges that, in a sense.
by csande17 | 2025-05-18 13:09:43+00:00
The only explanation I can think of is that GP is, somewhat tautologically, defining contrast as "the value returned by WCAG 2's formula for computing contrast" (and, probably, assuming that WCAG 2's "science" has more basis in reality than it actually does).

I can't speak to Material You, but I've seen this sort of thinking at companies that are more concerned with legal compliance with the strict wording of WCAG 2, rather than on-the-ground user experience. People can even learn to ignore their lying eyes and fairly accurately guess what the WCAG 2 "contrast" metric for a given pair of colors will be, independently of how easy or hard the colors are to distinguish from one another.

Hopefully WCAG 3 will incorporate better color guidance from places like APCA, and at the very least these companies will stop producing unreadable black-foreground buttons and badges all the time.
by falsaberN1 | 2025-05-18 13:09:49+00:00
What do you mean? How can AI cripple an artist? Even if the AI can do stuff better than I can in less time, it doesn't affect my art at all. It's the same thing as human artists better than them existing. Then again, I've seen people who get jealous to a raging degree because artist X can do better than them, so...

Every artist worth anything strives to be better at their craft on the daily, if that artist gets discouraged because there's something "better", that means that artist is not good because those negative emotions are coming from a competitive place instead of one of self-improvement and care for their craft or the audience. Art is only a competition with oneself, and artists that don't understand or refuse this fact are doomed from the start.
by wesleyd | 2025-05-18 13:09:55+00:00
British TV is doing _great_ in the streaming era: black mirror, adolescence, peaky blinders, the crown, call the midwife, derry girls, downtown abbey; and so many great police procedurals: line of duty, endeavour, the bay, Sherlock, grace; even those Harlan coben miniserieses - the ones with at least one absurd plot twist per episode - are great fun!

While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.

It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!

[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-18 13:09:55+00:00
The typical solution for reverse proxies is to extract the relevant information and pass it on as either custom headers or environment variables. That works fine, assuming you make sure to ignore the headers the client might send to take that information, of course.

It's pretty easy to set up in Apache and Nginx at least.

For forward proxies, the only option is to either accept the connection unaltered or to drop the connection entirely.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-05-18 13:10:31+00:00
Yes, I would. But, depends on the cost. In general, I'm not poor, but I tend to flip the cent back and forth and if I can avoid spending, I won't spend it. So, I have to meter the benefits against doing it myself and learn something or just being lazy and let it be done for money or apples.

So, for now, I'm clueless about mcp and agents - so, I would rather start learning and looking at it. Afterwards, if it's difficult, I would use an tool like yours. If it's not to difficult then "learn to honey, save the money"
by jwrallie | 2025-05-18 13:10:45+00:00
When I was a kid, most of the foreign culture I was exposed from came from the US, and then Japan followed with a small amount.

No wonder my second language was English and third language Japanese.

Never heard a single word of Mandarin in any media I was exposed to. I can understand Spanish very well but I do not count it as a learned language as it is too close to Portuguese (my first language).
by trustsafe | 2025-05-18 13:10:59+00:00
I think money won some thousands of years before cyberpunk showed up.

Hippie and punk were really the same thing, with different haircuts. Both were useless beyond selling lifestyle.

"cyberpunk" always carried an aesthetic baggage that accomplished nothing, but there was still something there, and it is still there, if you know where to look. I think the deterioration of the political situation in the US and Europe has people dusting off their cyberpunk inclinations. I know that it has lit a fire under me.
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-18 13:11:00+00:00
I've followed crypto since late 2011, and the ideology today is completely detached from what it used to be. Back in the day you had crypto maximalists that mainly viewed it as freedom from authority, regulations, and traditional banking. No more expensive fees for sending cash, no more third parties like PayPal to charge fees and potentially freeze your money. Detaching your wealth from political systems.

Yes, a lot of techno anarchist and ancaps were part of the scene - with grand dreams of defi taking over the world.

These days it has just evolved into play money for finance bros and hedge funds, and more lately, a mechanism for circumventing corruption for the powerful and wealthy.
by openasocket | 2025-05-18 13:11:23+00:00
I think the author significantly underestimates the supply consumption of land forces in combat. You’ve got food, ammunition, spare parts, medicine, tents, shovels, uniforms, fuel, the list goes on. US military planners in 1943 estimated that infantry units in combat consume roughly 4.4 tons of supplies per person per month (13.1 tons for armored units). In modern combat that is probably an underestimate. That means to support a single infantry brigade combat team (4,413 people, last I checked) you would need a starship flight about every 6 hours! And that’s about the smallest unit you could deploy on its own.

Yeah, it’s about as much as a C-5 galaxy. But air-based sustainment is also largely impractical at scale. Sustainment is still firmly in the realm of ships. Airplanes (and space ships) can deliver with very low latency, but nothing matches the bandwidth of ships and rail
by asadk | 2025-05-18 13:11:27+00:00
One of my favorite genres of HN submission is a list of books that make up the "canon" for a field or line of work. I know we have a reasonable number of hobbyist and other pilots on here and put together a list of the finest books about flying. I've included more tactical/reference material as well as plenty of fiction and history that's recommended over and over. I plan to update it over time and would welcome additions/corrections!
by rck | 2025-05-18 13:11:40+00:00
Just about everything that a non-specialist in combinatorics needs to know about counting can be found in Rota's twelvefold way, which lists the 12 counting problems that you can define for finite sets and shows how to solve them:

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

This also takes care of most of discrete probability.
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-18 13:11:54+00:00
If you're trying to assert this isn't a child with cancer (and an American citizen) being sent out of the country before his treatment is over, present evidence. Otherwise you're trying to ignore the facts in your face by deflecting and equivocation. Which you must if you hope to maintain this endeavor to defend the administration, because the facts are monstrous.

I've seen your other posts on other threads. You are attempting to cope with the wheels coming off of the United States by shutting your eyes to the news. It has to be lies, because if it's not lies then what this administration is doing is an existential threat, and you'd much rather not be facing an existential threat. I get that. It sucks being in the middle of history.

I will entertain for a bit accepting your premise that there is a national threat on the border and something must be done (I think it's a flimsy premise; I think these immigration laws are an attempt to build a beaver dam against a rising tide of demographic shift globally, and their incompatibility with the reality on the ground is demonstrated in their inability to be enforced; I think Americans get, at some fundamental level, that we don't get to enforce border constraints like a scared ethnostate while at the same time being America, but we aren't willing to admit that to ourselves yet).

It is entirely possible for the goal to be just, but the process to be monstrous and the administrator to be too stupid to find a balance between efficacy and mercy. You kicked off this subthread by interjecting that people should have just enforced the law. Well here we are. This is what enforcement looks like. It is not the people we want to be.

If previous administrations didn't do this? Good. That was wise leadership that we replaced with a fool.

(Concretely, in this situation: they simply could have let them stay until the treatment was complete. That is always a choice. The executive has broad leeway over enforcement, and that's a feature not a bug.)
by Hilift | 2025-05-18 13:12:26+00:00
The next logical step is US Treasury Bonds to be redeemed in Crypto. The current administration is proposing a 2026 budget that adds $5 trillion in new debt (more spending than revenue). Jerome can't print money that fast.

Even the Fed is counting on the "economy to grow faster than the debt". It's like a fiction world. I fully expect a "crypto equivalence" executive order for things where the US can muscle trade partners.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-18 13:12:38+00:00
There are workarounds for that, by specifying a custom key store file and overriding the socket factory to force it to load your keys.

Unfortunately, most example code for SSL socket factories just disable TLS validation entirely. So yes, your custom CA now works reliably, but unfortunately so do self-signed certificates if you're not careful.

Luckily, modern Java doesn't need keystores anymore. Unfortunately, half the world seems stuck on Java 8.
by iandanforth | 2025-05-18 13:15:27+00:00
I wrote "Why Anki Doesn't Work for Me" (https://medium.com/@iandanforth/why-anki-doesnt-work-for-me-...) six years ago, which means it was before the new algorithm was implemented. While Anki likely still suffers from all the other issues I mentioned, this directly addresses my point (3). I'm going to have to give it another try and see if the other points are still too much friction, or if the frustration caused by the algorithm was a majority of my pain.
by dagw | 2025-05-18 13:15:52+00:00
Japanese media is quite popular, and many fans want to watch/read their favourite thing in its original language. This is probably the reason most people learn a language, and a huge reason why so many kids around the world speak English. Chinese culture doesn't have the same impact, yet. As to Spanish, most kids who want to learn Spanish can do so at school so there is no need to go above and beyond to learn Spanish on your own.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-18 13:15:56+00:00
The point about control has some validity, but support lifetimes on iPhones/iPads are generally among the longest in the industry, at least if going by how long you continue to get full security updates.

There’s a good chance that various Android devices (though not all) will continue to get LineageOS updates for longer, but that’s caveated by things like baseband ceasing to be updated and becoming permanently vulnerable. Depending on the manufacturer this can happen in as short of a period of time as ~3 years.
by ljm | 2025-05-18 13:16:20+00:00
Something still has to convert the JSON to SQL but in this case, who is writing the JSON? An LLM?

Sometimes, it's easier or more efficient to just learn the shit you're working with instead of spending 1000x the compute fobbing it off to OpenAI. Even just putting a blob of SQL in a heredoc and using a prepared statement to parameterise it is good enough.

Beyond that, query building is just part of the functionality an ORM provides. The main chunk of it is the mapping of DB-level data structures to app-level models and vice-versa, particularly in an OOP context.
by keiferski | 2025-05-18 13:17:26+00:00
If you zoom out and look and the shift in educational systems from pre-industrial revolution to modernity, memorization is a key topic. Basically educational reformers wanted a switch from memorization-heavy classics-based education with lots of Latin and Greek – to one with less emphasis on memorizing and more technical focus, more “understanding” and so on.

Like other big cultural shifts from the time, the correction was necessary but also probably went too far in the opposite direction.

Which is a long way of saying that memorization is underrated and it mostly has a bad reputation from anti-Victorian reformers.
by gadilif | 2025-05-18 13:17:58+00:00
The facts are, well, different: As of now:

No international court has ruled that genocide has been committed by either side.

The term "genocide" is used politically and emotionally by many, but legally it carries a very high burden of proof.

The ICJ case and other investigations (e.g., by the International Criminal Court) are ongoing and may shape future judgments.
by joenot443 | 2025-05-18 13:18:27+00:00
This is a really good article.

There's a quality in strong developers which is difficult to select for in an interview but wildly valuable once they're up and running; maybe the best word is "scrappiness".

When I interview juniors or interns, one of the questions I like to ask is something like this-

"You've got two computer, one Linux one Windows. There's 50gb of files on the Windows machine which need to be moved to the Linux one, but you've only got 1h to do so. What's your strategy?"

Anyone with some experience knows it's a bit of a silly question - there are a tonne of unknowns and countless "correct" answers, but that's just the rub - it's not about the academically optimal answer, but about coming up with an answer that would probably work, given the constraints I'd be arbitrarily throwing at them. It's about realizing that the vast majority of decisions we make in software engineering have costs and tradeoffs, and being able to discuss them with a colleague is 10x more valuable than graph traversal.

More than anything, I try to select for people that I know spent a good chunk of their formative years behind the computer, just like many of us did. The maze-traversal skills you learn as a child installing Ubuntu on your parents' computer stay with you forever. Given the option, I'd take the self-taught-indie-dev-state-college-grad over the honor-roll-ivy-league-leetcoder any day.
by b0ringdeveloper | 2025-05-18 13:18:27+00:00
I like WaniKani because it forces me to type the right answer. When I tried Anki, it was too easy for me to "cheat" and press space for something I "kinda" remembered.

I do agree with the author's phrase of "...a daily ritual of feeling bad about what you’ve forgotten..." though, and would like to try the new algorithm. Is there a way to configure Anki to force you to type the correct answer?
by wongarsu | 2025-05-18 13:19:54+00:00
Most modern programming lives by the idea that you don't need to remember something as long as you remember where to look it up. Of course that's only true for some things: I can look up an API call, but I need a reasonably complete working knowledge of the concepts offered by my chosen programming language and its idiomatic design patterns. In most cases this is maintained through application (practice is unstructured spaced repetition), but if I wanted to get into say C++-based driver development then spaced repetition would definitely help build and maintain the necessary knowledge
by eesmith | 2025-05-18 13:19:58+00:00
I have not gotten a smartphone in part because I know how much even laptop access distracts me, to the point where I'll go places which have no wifi, like a park, just to get work done.

I felt less alone after finding "Swapping 5G for 3G: Motivations, Experiences, and Implications of Contemporary Dumbphone Adoption" at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3637402 last year as it told me there were others who felt similarly.

> Another group of participants (the second ideological grouping) saw dumbphones as a tool for defending their attention spans from smartphones. These participants described smartphones as “a hungry monster” for attention (U3-27) and an “itch in your pocket” (U5-28). Switching to a dumbphone was described by U6-41 as releasing an anchor that had been tightened around their waist. Reflecting on their time as smartphone users, these participants reported feeling that they had been missing out on meaningful activities – e.g., personal connections, shared moments with loved ones, and reading books. Instead, they engaged in activities like doomscrolling or, “the action of compulsively scrolling through social media or news feeds which relate to bad news.” Experiencing distraction was annoying for many participants, but for others it took a physical and mental toll. Having two children diagnosed with Autism spectrum disorders, U6-41 empathizes with the endless capabilities, settings, and launchers of the smartphone as not only “overwhelming” but “terrifying”.
by beagle3 | 2025-05-18 13:20:01+00:00
For American higher education, It was Pascal ages ago, and then it was Java for quite a while.

But Java is too bureaucratic to be an introductory language, especially for would-be-non-programmers. Python won on “intorudctoriness” merits - capable of getting everything done in every field (bio, chem, stat, humanities) while still being (relatively) friendly. I remember days it was frowned upon for being a “script language” (thus not a real language). But it won on merit.