MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrtomservo | 2025-05-04 00:09:42+00:00
I live in a city with a large number of unhoused people. I think I would use unlimited resources to buy and renovate old buildings[1] downtown to build housing, and fund support services on-site to help people escape homelessness and addiction.

I would want to solve this because unhoused people are suffering, and downtown (as a neighborhood) has been sort of hollowed out by business choosing to leave for practical reasons (WFH) and because of the perception of "too many" unhoused people. I love downtown, it's just not a pleasant place to spend time, especially at night.

I do not have the resources nor the political acumen for these kinds of initiatives, and I think it would take a great deal of resources to not only buy the land but demolish or renovate the buildings. It would create a lot of jobs (construction at first) but I think there's a large amount of activation energy required to get started.

[1]: https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/legal-action-taken-a...
by mgraczyk | 2025-05-04 00:09:47+00:00
OpenAI compatible API is missing important parameters, for example I don't think there is a way to disable flash 2 thinking with it.

Vertex AI is for grpc, service auth, and region control (amongst other things). Ensuring data remains in a specific region, allowing you to auth with the instance service account, and slightly better latency and ttft
by devilbunny | 2025-05-04 00:09:54+00:00
> You can eat delicious and unique meals but there are other restaurants where you’ll get ripped off.

Your risk of getting railroaded as a tourist drops dramatically if you stay away from the French Quarter. If you also stay away from any location the hop-on/hop-off buses stop, that drops almost to zero.

I live close enough to go 6-8 times per year. We only go into the Quarter to dine at restaurants that we know (and usually were recommended by natives) or shop at a handful of places whose only location is there.
by sandworm101 | 2025-05-04 00:10:10+00:00
>> generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons"

Not anymore. Great many now believe that there should be no commons, that everything should be owned by someone and leased back to those who use it. Such people see it as the duty of government to efficiently disperse the commons to the highest bidders. Those bidders will then "protect" their asset by ensuring it is put to the highest economic use.
by calebhwin | 2025-05-04 00:12:12+00:00
A system that does the following given a task_description:

while LLM("is <task_description> not done?"): Browser.run(LLM("what should the browser do next given <Browser.get_state()>"))

This simple loop turns out to be very powerful, achieving the highest performance on some of OpenAI's latest benchmarks. But it's also heavily unoptimized compared to a system that is just LLM("<task_description>") for which we already have things like vllm. BLAST is a first step towards optimizing this while loop.
by 0xCA1EB | 2025-05-04 00:12:16+00:00
My favorite was "UUIDs as Primary Keys" (subheading: "Just Say No"). :)

It doesn't feel full of memes but it does have great illustrations! For example, this visualization of the fragmentation of data for a UUID v4 idb file:

https://cdn.zappy.app/b1b54bb0c780c0f6dd891475589aeee3.png
by wenc | 2025-05-04 00:12:29+00:00
Probably no difference for your use-case (ST_Distance). If you already have data in Postgres, you should continue using Postgis.

In my use case, I use DuckDB because of speed at scale. I have 600GBs of lat-longs in Parquet files on disk.

If I wanted to use Postgis, I would have to ingest all this data into Postgres first.

With DuckDB, I can literally drop into a Jupyter notebook, and do this in under 10 seconds, and the results come back in a flash: (no need to ingest any data ahead of time)

import duckdb duckdb.query("INSTALL spatial; LOAD spatial;") duckdb.query("select ST_DISTANCE(ST_POINT(lng1, lat1), ST_POINT(lng2, lat2)) dist from '/mydir/*.parquet'")
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-04 00:13:23+00:00
I see many scenarios where the items would add up to less than this. I see more where it doesn't. e.g.: What you say makes sense for a single person who owns a PC, a TV, and Ikea + amazon furniture.

Now imagine a couple or family, who's been (criticize the capitalist/consumer culture or not) buying nice wood furniture, has a well-stocked kitchen, multiple computers, hobby equipment etc.

I encourage you to run a rough estimate of your own household's items. Do the same for your a neighbor's; a friend's.
by morsecodist | 2025-05-04 00:15:30+00:00
I feel like the elephant in the room here is that their back end was in RoR before Next.js and remained that way the entire time. They then switched from next.js to a framework designed, in part, with RoR in mind. It seems unsurprising that they had a much better experience using a thing that was tailored to their use case.

I love Next.js. I have used other frameworks including RoR and there is nothing like it (except Svelte or Nuxt but I view them as different flavors of the same core idea). But I only use it to make monoliths. I can see getting frustrated with it if I was using it alongside a different back end.
by SkepticalWhale | 2025-05-04 00:15:51+00:00
Minimizing state simplifies the codebase but it’s a trade off.

There are times the user experience is just objectively better with more state, and you have to weigh the costs.

If I am filling out a very long form (or even multi-page form) I don’t really want all that state lost if I accidentally refresh the page.
by cgio | 2025-05-04 00:16:36+00:00
I can confirm. Was driving for a while, impervious to any sign of having a flat tyre before someone on the street signalled me to stop. And that was on a Citroen Saxo, which I don’t think had the suspension of C5 etc. Amazing car, lasted for 15 years with me, with only battery and frankly inconsistent oil changes. The lady who bought it when we immigrated still runs it 15 years later. Build quality is a hit and miss per model I think.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-04 00:16:55+00:00
The Sovied Union and Communist China all had vast natural resources. But a third world economy.

Japan, S Korea and Hong Kong have next to no natural resources. Great prosperity.

Germany turned to free markets after WW2 and enjoyed the "German Miracle". (Germany has since turned to socialism, with predictable results.) Germany received far, far less Marshall Plan money than Britain and France, who had no miracle.

> but to say it's the only unique thing about America is just wrong

History shows otherwise.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-04 00:17:11+00:00
> It's the case with telcos.

Here in Australia the government owns the last mile (the government org is called the NBN), but you have to buy your connection off them through a retailer.

Our biggest retailers predate that arrangement. They are exactly as you describe. They are expensive. Their customer service is complete crap, echoing all the complaints you see here. The small ones the NBN enabled are the reverse: cheaper, and the customer service ranges from OK to brilliant. Brilliant invariably costs more, so you get what you pay for.

So your theory is wrong, or at least the equilibrium you paint is incomplete. I can give you a clue on how a large dominant ISP can survive in a highly competitive market: their advertising saturates the airwaves. They use their higher prices, lack of service and scale efficiencies to pay for it.

It doesn't work so well on me. I suspect like most people here I will happily do a couple hours of research on prices and forums before making a purchase. The continued existance of these big ISP's can be explained by one thing: most people don't put that effort in.

Putting in the effort only works if there are alternatives if course, and this is where there is a glaring difference between Australia and the USA: whereas everybody in Australia gets to choose from literally hundreds of ISP's (most tiny), I regularly see complaints from Americans they get no or very few choices. That's because Australia governments go out of there way to engineer competitive markets. ISP's are just example. You see similar efforts in water, banking, insurance - lots of places. In the case of the NBN it was extraordinarily heavy handed. After years of existing telcos refusing to upgrade the copper network without being given a monopoly the government owned NBN was created to overbuilt it with fibre, rendering the old copper network worthless.

I doubt the USA's worship of "free markets" would permit such behaviour, which I suspect is the real reason you are stuck with shitty customer service. There is no point providing good customer service if there is no competition, and if there competition the usual approach in the USA seems to be Peter Thiel's: eliminate it.
by vemom | 2025-05-04 00:18:53+00:00
This writer doesn't look obnoxious to me they make good points. Of course they make good points only for their use case. I'd rather keep computers as a thing and have all the medical advances, plane safety, science advances we have seen. I also couldn't do what I first did on a computer with a pencil: program an automaton. But it is worth reading other points of view and seeing their side.
by wenc | 2025-05-04 00:18:55+00:00
That requires data to already be in Postgres, otherwise you have to ETL data into it first.

DuckDB on the other hand works with data as-is (Parquet, TSV, sqlite, postgres... whether on disk, S3, etc.) with requiring an ETL step (though if the data isn't already in a columnar format, things are gonna be slow... but it will still work).

I work with Parquet data directly with no ETL step. I can literally drop into Jupyter or a Python REPL and duckdb.query("from '*.parquet'")

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's possible with Postgis. (even pg_parquet requires copying? [1])

[1] https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/pg_parquet-an-extension-to-...
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-04 00:19:31+00:00
> just want the label to tell me what's in the product

You will never, ever get that. It's simply impossible. Label games are the biggest legal tug-of-war between consumers, regulators, vendors, and the industries.

When I began reading about labeling and its regulation, and all the bullshit tricks that are played to "stay compliant" but also lie out their asses to the consumer, and hide everything from us, I concluded that there is no way to truly read a label properly.

It basically comes down to a question of whether you trust this vendor or provider to give you a quality product. If you do not trust, then do not purchase. If they play games and lose trust, then do not purchase. Once you have a decent-sized blacklist, then there is no reason not to patronize those survivors.
by quantadev | 2025-05-04 00:19:42+00:00
I agree. My preference is React, but I've got 4 years of Vue experience and so I know Vue is good too, and mature. There are just some people who are anti-framework entirely, and they're never actual professional web developers, but mostly hobbyists or college dabblers, who've never been involved with a large project, or else they'd know how silly their anti-framework attitude is.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-04 00:19:48+00:00
I think I understand my mistake. As the variance of the intervals widens the average event interval remains the same but the expected average distances for a sample point change. (For some reason I thought that average distances wouldn't change. I'm not sure why.)

Your example illustrates it nicely. A more intuitive way of illustrating the math might be to suppose 1 event per 10 minutes but they always happen in pairs simultaneously (20 minute gap), or in triplets simultaneously (30 minute gap), or etc.

So effectively the earlier example that I replied to is the birthday paradox, with N people, sampling a day at random, and asking how far from a birthday you expect to be on either side.

If that counts as a paradox then so does the number of upvotes my reply received.
by mcv | 2025-05-04 00:19:48+00:00
I've been thinking a lot about the Leningrad Cowboys recently. I've always loved their performance of Gimme All Your Lovin' with the Red Army Choir, and after looking that up on YouTube last year, The algorithm eventually started feeding me more of their songs, some of which I vaguely recognized, others were totally new to me, but I learned a lot about them.

Mostly that they've got no respect for genre boundaries. They play a lot of American rock and pop with Russian folk influences, but also the other way around, and later started mixing in even more genres. And they're always funny and irreverent.

A personal favourite is their interpretation of Eloise, which includes the weird shout "Kozachok!", which is the name of a Ukrainian dance, but is also used (in exactly the same rhythm, though a lot more repetitive) in a French or Romanian cover of a Russian or Ukrainian song (I momentarily forgot which one or who the singer of that cover is). Anyway, complex references that are nearly impossible to get.

Also, having the Red Army Choir perform parodies of American pop and rock songs seems like something that was only possible in the early 1990s, after east-west tensions had softened, the Cold War ended, and we got closer together. And the Leningrad Cowboys definitely did their part to bring us together. Sometimes I wonder if maybe we need them again.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-05-04 00:21:21+00:00
Here's the Porsche way and it's actually available, today, if you go to a Porsche dealership and buy a Panamera with the active ride system:

(active ride begins at half the vid, at 1:17):

https://youtu.be/LU9s4q0FUS8

Or look the slalom at about one minute in the vid. That's not 3D.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELmY_HLtxTo
by dotslashmain | 2025-05-04 00:21:23+00:00
I'm not referring to spam. I'm thinking about how AI-enabled email/messaging/writing actually makes communication clearer. Many people are not very good at expressing themselves in writing, either due to language barriers or simply lack of writing skills, but I've seen a noticeable difference in how some of these people are now able to communicate with me over email. They leverage the LLM as a function to transform their naturally-poor and hard-to-understand writing into a clear, comprehensible message with proper grammar that I can easily consume and immediately understand what they need. The fact that the message has been clearly transcribed by an LLM is completely okay with me.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-04 00:21:51+00:00
> I'm thinking that it's simply because it's fairly easy for animals to change size. Like imagine a size constant in your code and you can just update it and everything magically works.

No, the opposite is the case. You can just scale an animal up. But it won't work well; the larger size requires different support structures than the normal size does. Hence, giant humans tend to be in poor health, with circulatory and other problems.

The reason island populations show size changes is that the tiny environment leaves environmental niches open, and animals of the wrong size can radiate into those empty niches without facing competition from animals that are already filling them more effectively. Island dwarfism is common, and so is island gigantism.

Note that New Zealand obviously is small enough for island dwarfism, since it was small enough for island gigantism. The size seems less relevant than the fact that it was isolated by deep ocean.
by kevmo314 | 2025-05-04 00:22:09+00:00
> If you could have the same solitude, sweeping views, natural beauty, cameraderie, etc., but without real danger, would it have the same appeal?

Well, yeah. Most of the gear for mountaineering and other pursuits are to try and minimize risk because we deem the gain is worth the risk but still it's worth reducing risk.

After all, that's the same reason people drive despite it being a leading cause of death.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-04 00:22:10+00:00
You seem to be arguing from the idea that roads are filled with "killing machines" while mountains are "peaceful".

But that's arguing from emotion. The only thing that actually matters is statistics.

And statistically, it seems like people get injured far more often when climbing on mountains than when on the road to climbing.

It doesn't matter if you might die on roads because you "get distracted for a moment", because that's actually a very rare occurrence. It doesn't matter that when you get injured on a mountain, you "opted into that risk", because you opt into driving too.

The point is just where are you more likely to get injured. And roads seem to be the safer place if you're talking about hours spent.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-04 00:22:43+00:00
> it's a lot of training to get people to up to speed on coordinate systems, projections, transformations, etc

This can mostly be avoided entirely with a proper spheroidal reference system, computational geometry implementation, and indexing. Most uses of geospatial analytics are not cartographic in nature. The map is at best a presentation layer, it is not the data model, and some don’t use a map at all. Forcing people to learn obscure and esoteric cartographic systems to ask simple intuitive questions about geospatial relationships is a big part of the problem. There is no reason this needs to be part of the learning curve.

I’ve run experiments on unsophisticated users a few times with respect to this. If you give them a fully spheroidal WGS84 implementation for geospatial analytics, it mostly “just works” for them anywhere on the globe and without regard for geospatial extent. Yes, the software implementation is much less trivial but it is qualitatively superior UX because “the world” kind of behaves how people intuit it should without having to know anything about projections, transforms, etc. And to be honest, even if you do know about projections and transforms, the results are still often less than optimal.

The only issue that comes up is that a lot of cartographic visualization toolkits are somewhat broken if you have global data models or a lot of complex geometry. Lots of rendering artifacts. Something else to work on I guess.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-04 00:22:45+00:00
> 3. Big brains don't come from standing upright, whales and dolphins have larger brains

That is a terrible "counterexample" to the idea that it's easier to balance a large brain on top of a spinal column than to support it as it sticks out in front of the animal. Whales are aquatic; every part of their body is supported by the water.
by lemming | 2025-05-04 00:23:09+00:00
Additionally, there's no OpenAPI spec, so you have to generate one from their protobuf specs if you want to use that to generate a client model. Their protobuf specs live in a repo at https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/tree/master/google/.... Now you might think that v1 would be the latest there, but you would be wrong - everyone uses v1beta (not v1, not v1alpha, not v1beta3) for reasons that are completely unclear. Additionally, this repo is frequently not up to date with the actual API (it took them ages to get the new thinking config added, for example, and their usage fields were out of date for the longest time). It's really frustrating.
by hnick | 2025-05-04 00:23:12+00:00
PDF was basically created as a final presentation format, it's essentially append-only by design, which is why you hear so often of redactions just marking up a white/black box over text.

You can edit text streams, which needs a decompress/recompress, messes up all the object reference offsets for the entire file, potentially adds or removes characters to the subset font, which may not be referenced by the glyphs but a number instead to intentionally break copy/paste/scrape (e.g. 'a' is not 'a' in the text stream, but a random number), etc. Assuming the text is even marked up as strings, and not individually positioned characters with nested offset co-ordinate scaling to further muddy the waters.

The fact so many people want to edit PDFs probably indicates a design flaw on Adobe's side, when considering what customers really want.
by sandworm101 | 2025-05-04 00:23:56+00:00
14k? I know people who own more than 14k worth of fishing equipment ... not including any sort of boat. A family of four with any sort of hobby, say four sets of skis/boots/poles, will easily hit 14k on that hobby alone. I don't want to think about how much all my climbing gear would cost to replace.

Packing up everything into suitcases is all well and good for single IT workers moving between generic white-walled apartments. People with kids and hobbies have stuff that takes up space.
by thunderfork | 2025-05-04 00:24:58+00:00
A profound number of companies fail every year and cease to exist, which is probably more inefficient (and also not an outcome that many would consider acceptable in a government context.)

Of the ones that survive[1], some may be more efficient, but whether they remain efficient, effective and extant in the long term is not a given.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
by ThunderSizzle | 2025-05-04 00:25:08+00:00
That's the double edged sword. Requiring labeling doesn't prevent label fraud, and pretending label fraud is rare is either naive or obtuse.

Oversight is then called for (eg USDA organic) which itself can still be frauded around, especially when dealing with sources outside of the US.

I'm reminded of a tiktok that had raw chicken labeled with a particular weight at Walmart. When they weighed it on a checkout scale, it didn't match the weight the label had. On multiple packages.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-04 00:25:46+00:00
Easier firing would increase the market rates for every role. At least unless combined with generous unemployment benefits, as in Denmark. It could make the government more efficient in the long term, at the expense of higher spending (and therefore higher taxes) in the short term. Which many voters would not like.

The issue with unions negotiating with politicians is mostly a consequence of an excessive number of political appointees. Many things would be cleaner with more career civil servants in top positions. Top officials would have fixed-term appointments, and they could not join unions or be fired without a criminal conviction. They would run their departments, while political appointees would only set the goals and directions with little direct control. And then the rest would be more like ordinary employees who just happen to be working for the government.

Government employees are a mostly irrelevant category anyway. Depending on the time and place, the exact same job can be performed by an actual government employee, outsourced to a private contractor, or done by an employee of a company fully owned by the government. What the employee can or cannot do should depend more on the actual role than on the administrative structures above them.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-04 00:25:57+00:00
> >> a desirable position difficult for a new graduate.

This is an interesting example of a mangled quote. It's a perfectly grammatical English string. But in the phrase "a desirable position difficult for a new graduate", what's difficult for a new graduate is the position. In the sentence you pulled the quote from, what's difficult for a new graduate is the getting, a word omitted from your quote.

Something similar has happened with "nullius in verba", which is purported to be a quote from Latin, but is actually a selection of unrelated words from a larger sentence in Latin.
by didgetmaster | 2025-05-04 00:25:58+00:00
I always thought that someone would invent a cheap, simple, reliable, and passive tracking system. No need for sensors or intelligent electronics.

You have a simple motor that slowly tilts the array from facing East to facing West as power is being generated. The motor does not start until the panel is generating a certain amount of power. The motor runs at a fixed rate with a screw that takes about 7 hours to move the panel.

Once power stops (when the sun sets) weights on the opposite side slowly tilt the panel back to the starting position so it is ready for the next day.