MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dumbledoren | 2025-05-09 20:44:12+00:00
> just a fraction of the total cost if you had to host the highest workload yourself. Like lets say my company gets a very huge spike and lets say I wanted to be prepared for it for all times in baremetal, then I had to had a lot of vacant free metal

Huh? Autoscaling turned out to be a myth. Even in k8, you cant make users wait for nodes to come online, so you have to always have spare nodes waiting. And the spare nodes must be in proportion to regular spikes you expect and additionally any unexpected spike that you estimate. Why would that be different from having extra free metal for much cheaper and simpler? Along with an easier time finding infra people who can manage that as opposed to finding expensive talent with the expensive bloat of technical knowledge that AWS today requires?

Lets face it - this is the enshittification of infra brought by the lock-in Amazon was able to lure the orgs into. First, they locked-in everyone. Now they are squeezing everyone dry.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-09 20:46:33+00:00
Our system works because it doesn't have friction. I wouldn't think it would take too much to make things prohibitively expensive for the government by the people adding legal, simple friction at every possible pain point.

The government has forgotten it can only do what it does with the consent of the people, and that a small minority could really frustrate things if they truly wanted to.
Ask HN: RAG or shared memory for task planning across physical agents?
by mbbah | 2025-05-09 20:46:36+00:00
LLM-based software agents are getting pretty good at tool use, memory, and multi-step task planning. But I’m curious if anyone is pushing this further into the physical world; specifically with robots or sensor-equipped agents.

For example:

Imagine Robot A observes that an item is in Zone Z, and Robot B later needs to retrieve it. How do they share that context? Is it via:

- A structured memory layer (like a knowledge graph)? - Centralized state in a RAG-backed store? - Something simpler (or messier)?

I’m experimenting with using a shared knowledge graph as memory across agents—backed by RAG for unstructured input, and queryable for planning, dependencies, and task dispatch.

Would love to know:

- Is anyone else thinking about shared memory across physical agents? - How are you handling world state, task context, or coordination? - Any frameworks or lessons you’ve found helpful?

Exploring this space and would really appreciate hearing from others who are building in or around it.

Thanks!
by rs186 | 2025-05-09 20:46:59+00:00
I once wanted to contribute to the popular swc project (https://github.com/swc-project/swc). I cloned the repo, ran build, and a whooping 20GB was gone from my disk. The parser itself (https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/main/crates/swc_ecma...) has over a dozen dependencies, including serde.

Meanwhile, the heaviest JavaScript parser implemented in JavaScript is more lightweight.

I decided that I should leave this project alone and spend my time elsewhere.
by nartho | 2025-05-09 20:48:05+00:00
>2) we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it on their own in order to avoid tragedy of the commons situations which actually suppress ridership by people who can afford to pay the fee: vagrants, criminals and people who smoke crack on the trains.

These demographics have no issue jumping the gates/going through with someone else, are already present, and will be whether the ride is $1 or $1000. You're just excluding the honest people who can't afford it. I also don't know what makes you think that criminals have to be poor and can't afford a ride.

> I could walk off MUNI and just casually catch every type of person from every type of walk of life, and by that I mean mostly regular commuters with decent paying jobs, just casually free loading because they could.

I'm envious of your ability to access people's bank accounts and occupations by looking at them.
by pmelendez | 2025-05-09 20:48:10+00:00
Not really. This is an example of something that Claude Code handles very easily and for Github Copilot, is not even an starter (because can't read SQLite files)

>Read the Sqlite file in this directory and create an UX that would visualize and manage the data. The application should be responsive (so it can be use on mobiles) and should have some graphs when appropiate.
by timewizard | 2025-05-09 20:48:17+00:00
> A rich country is not one where poor people drive but rather one where rich people take public transport.

You've mixed a subjective measure "rich country" with an objective one "rich people." I can't think of any situation where people of greater means accept more limitations.

Anyways do you have any examples of "rich countries" that have solved this problem?
by Legend2440 | 2025-05-09 20:49:11+00:00
> How much more will material science, chemistry, and maybe even physics give us in practical (technology-wise) knowledge? Plenty for sure, but I don't think our rate of technological advancement will continue in these fields.

Strong disagree. We have only scratched the surface of material science and chemistry; we are typically working with the bulk properties of relativity simple materials.

There’s a very wide design space of metamaterials and molecular machines that we have not explored.
by Frost1x | 2025-05-09 20:49:18+00:00
I know you’re being facetious, but I think there’s some nugget buried in this sarcasm.

One issue with our ever increasingly intellectual focused economy is that it leaves behind people who may just not be cut out for these such careers. I’m not against having these economies (I too used to work in supercomputing, with national labs), they’re very necessary, but we need to find a way for people who might not fit very well in such positions to still feel productive in society, and most importantly, still live comfortably in society. Industry and jobs need to exist for people who can’t do science and supercomputing or at least aren’t cut out for it as a career day in/out to still live comfortably.

Bringing back manufacturing isn’t the answer to that, but at some point as competition pulls the bar up so high and specific, we leave a lot of people behind, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. They surely have plenty of other skills that contribute to society as well and even if they don’t, they should also be taken care of for at least trying. Maybe it’s just a lack of opportunity in education and training that fixes it, maybe it’s other careers that pay will, maybe it’s government subsidies, but I think plenty of the discourse now promoting these ideas like manufacturing are founded on shrinking of the middle class, and that’s partly due to how demanding it is now to live at that level of general financial security.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-09 20:50:07+00:00
William Shakespeare (c. 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) predates the first modern copyright law, the Statute of Anne (1710), by roughly a century. His income came from performances, that is, asses in seats, not book sales. His posthumous fame came in large part from the fact that those published plays were free from copyright encumberance and could be performed or published without licence fee.

Dickens pioneered the model of serial publication on which other authors of his time (notably Tolstoy) made much comment.

You've failed to mention Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who was constantly in debt, damned near killed himself with one of his two possessions (a revolver, the other being a nickel), broke and unemployed in San Francisco. His relative financial flush later in life was largely due to his father-in-law's support. And asses-in-seats on the lecture circuit.

Melville, like many other authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald of Gatsby fame comes to mind) saw a greatly-increased fame after his death, with Moby Dick becoming reestablished on the centennial of Melville's birth, some 28 years after his death. Melville worked during his life as a clerk, sailor, and farmer. His writing career met with very limited financial success. His works were great, no doubt, his income failed to measure up, and could hardly be considered his chief incentive. Later in life, like Twain, Melville benefitted by inheritance and lectures.
by immibis | 2025-05-09 20:51:29+00:00
First, you have to buy the thing. Second, take it apart. Third, think of ways to break in. Fourth, actually do them. Fifth, swear because you broke it.

Usually there's a UART. Apparently Starlink terminals don't have a UART, so the guy took off the eMMC memory chip (which is basically a soldered microSD card) instead.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-05-09 20:52:39+00:00
I don't think you know what authoritarianism is. Military interventions in foreign affairs are a completely orthogonal issue.

On that subject though, the US has generally been a force for good around the world. Iraq was briefly a liberal democracy until the US military pulled back out and a theocratic regime took over again by force. Vietnam was a well-intentioned but bungled attempt to stop the spread of communism. When the US lost and pulled out the country turned into a one-party dictatorship. Other political parties there are outlawed. That's who the US was fighting against. The fact that these interventions ultimately failed doesn't make the attempts any less noble, though you can certainly make the case they were foolhardy to even try. Or perhaps if you're a pacifist you could argue any military intervention, even in the defense of human freedom, is immoral. I have mixed feelings on that subject myself, but it's ridiculous to compare anything the US did in recent history to what China or Russia are currently attempting or threatening to attempt. We never tried to conquer Iraq or Vietnam, just free them.

The US is a bully to dictatorial regimes and a friend to liberal democracies around the world. Trump's cage rattling is a tiny blip in the grand scheme of that legacy.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-05-09 20:52:52+00:00
For those who think this is exaggeration, remember that JD Vance wrote a heartfelt endorsement for the skull book, the one arguing that anyone who opposes MAGA is a secret communist revolutionary who needs to be crushed by any means necessary to avoid an imagined communist genocide that they allege we are all plotting. Absolutely wild shit.

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

It's not even midterm season yet, they are already testing the waters by conducting extrajudicial deportations of random Hispanics to labor camps in El Salvador, and the sitting US President is on record saying the El Salvador labor camps need to be expanded by 5x to accommodate the "home growns."

Dark times ahead.
by darth_avocado | 2025-05-09 20:53:09+00:00
Contrary to the popular belief, more ridership makes it more safe and less dangerous. Pretending that a fee excludes the less desirable is laughable. Plenty of people that you describe, ride the trains even now, they just don’t pay the fee. By adding the fee you’re mostly excluding the people who would ride it if it were free: law abiding people who work hard to provide for their families, but can’t afford the fee.

And as for funding shortfall, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You don’t fund transit, the agency needs to make cuts, making it less reliable, less safe and reducing capacity. Once that happens, even fewer people ride transit, creating even more funding deficits. This also increases the unwillingness of people to fund transit.

We use similar funding structures for roads all the time. Everyone pays, and people who own cars get to drive to their suburbs 50 miles away from the city. I don’t see people complaining about that at any point in time.
by donnachangstein | 2025-05-09 20:53:42+00:00
> I think the whole program may have cost the government maybe $10k total.

Your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. There is no government program in existence that costs $10k total, you are almost assuredly ignoring overhead and all other costs. It's like calling a contractor to repair something, then crying foul when he charges $350 because you found the part on Amazon for $15.

But let's assume it was $10k.

> $10k to build knowledge of cutting edge science that filters into industry. $10k to help give needed manpower to research projects that need it. $10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.

To be blunt, you are upset because you got to work on a fun boondoggle project and others are being denied that privilege. I won't doubt it was fun and educational but I can't in all honesty pretend that is a good value for the taxpayers.

Unless you are producing something of value to the public, it's wasteful, and that $10k deserves to be returned to the taxpayers.

Taxpayers are not on the hook to keep you busy with pointless yet fun busy-work. That is private industry's job.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-05-09 20:53:42+00:00
The fact that priests protect the pedocriminals is to me a proof of their cowardness: they prefer to sacrify the life of children today to protect their own in the afterlife.

I hope that when they meet their creator he will show them the way to hell. If he rewards them for their practices, well, they will be in good company.

Heads up to this US state. I am ashamed that my country, allegedly supporting freedom and equality (France) never had the balls to do that.
by al_borland | 2025-05-09 20:53:59+00:00
I’ve been on a team managing on-prem data centers for nearly 2 decades at a larger place.

At one point they did a study to see if it would be cheaper to go to AWS, and the conclusion was that it was cheaper to run our own. We have some stuff in the public cloud now, but it’s still more expensive than running our own.

One of the biggest things I see, at least on the surface, is that there are certain sunk costs with on-prem. If you can do more with the same hardware (licensing costs aside), it really doesn’t cost much to add a VM or container. Whereas with the public cloud everything comes with a price tag and there is a much greater cost to leaving your dev server running when not actively using it, or that pet project that is helpful, but not in a way that’s quantifiable in dollars and cents. This is how companies end up with old laptops in closets and under desks running critical tools.
by Lammy | 2025-05-09 20:54:19+00:00
Fun fact: the reason it's like that is because both levels were envisioned for BART usage before the Peninsula lines got cut. In the original design both levels would have been the same fare area and you would have been able to walk between them instead of having to take the big escalators down to BART caged off from the Muni level. It's comical to watch one of the Muni trains crawl to one end of the giant platform that was sized for 10-car BART trains.
by jorblumesea | 2025-05-09 20:54:33+00:00
tbh I don't know if many senior leaders in the admin that actually think these policies are going to make anything better. It just seems like a mass looting project. Lutnick, for example, is definitely a wall street insider and is under no illusions that any of these policies benefit the nation.

If you look at the agenda it's all cultural wars stuff (smoke screens) and wealth transfer to the rich.

They understand this, most educated people understand this, it's just his base that is in the dark.
by jamesrr39 | 2025-05-09 20:55:48+00:00
> Developers (often juniors) use LLM code without taking time to verify it. This leads to bugs and they can't fix it because they don't understand the code

Well... is this something new? Previously the trend was to copy and paste Stackoverflow answers, without understanding what it did. Perhaps with LLM code it's an incremental change but the concept is fairly familiar.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-09 20:55:52+00:00
I have not looked at Swift since I last wrote some around maybe v3. I hear that it's generally not a competitor to Rust, and is only really useful within the Apple ecosystem. Why is it not more useful as a C++ alternative, since I think that's kind of what the initial goal was? Is it just that non-Apple support is new-ish and not yet matured? Or a more fundamental issue?
by fsckboy | 2025-05-09 20:55:57+00:00
mmmm, not exactly. you cannot see atomic brownian motion with an optical microscope, what you can see is visible brownian motion of otherwise visible particles caused by their collisions with molecules/atoms. this says as much about the momentum/energy of the collisions as it does about the mass (which bears some relationship to the size which bears direct relation to optical visibility)
by anigbrowl | 2025-05-09 20:56:10+00:00
I'm trying to decide whether this is a valid decision in response to a slow expensive modernization project, or setting up conditions for a change in how the LoC treats copyrights, which could have huge implications for the AI industry.

EDIT: per the press secretary, their objection is to DEI and 'the inclusion of books in the library that were inappropriate for children.'

https://bsky.app/profile/acyn.bsky.social/post/3loqynk6oje2k

As far as I'm aware, you have to be at least 16 to visit the LoC. I'm gonna hazard a guess that some in the executive branch are unclear on the concept of what the LoC does.
by counters | 2025-05-09 20:56:28+00:00
> I won't doubt it was fun and educational but I can't in all honesty pretend that is a good value for the taxpayers.

The students who work on these types of projects go on to create technology, companies, and jobs. The skills and experience they learn is a direct injection into our innovation economy.

And of course that's not even to mention that a lot of the things they work on will never get vetted in private industry, so we'll never even know if there is value hidden in the weeds.
by cgriswald | 2025-05-09 20:56:32+00:00
This law as written doesn't require a confession or proof, but only suspicion and not of a crime, but of the law's definition of 'child abuse' which at its broadest defines abuse as "...injury of a child by any person under circumstances which cause harm to the child's health, welfare, or safety,..." It also has a specific carve out for members of the clergy requiring them to report it even when they suspect it only from privileged conversations.
by MeetingsBrowser | 2025-05-09 20:57:39+00:00
I agree that relying on unknown dependencies is a risk, but this misses the point IMO. Number of dependencies and disk space are kind of arbitrary.

> Meanwhile, the heaviest JavaScript parser implemented in JavaScript is more lightweight.

The lightest weight javascript program relies on V8 to run, which has multiple orders of magnitude more dependencies. Most of which you have never heard of.

At least cargo makes it easier to get a clearer picture of what the dependencies are for a program.
by bjelkeman-again | 2025-05-09 20:58:15+00:00
I had to export all of our documents and sheets out of Google Drive. I used something called Google Take Out, that packages everything and puts it somewhere where you can download zip files. It took a few days for it to be available. Except it didn’t do what it said it did. It didn’t export even half the files. I unpacked and compared with what was online.

In the end I had to download folders by hand. Took me half a day. And make sure they weren’t too big, because then it wouldn’t include everything.
by taylorallred | 2025-05-09 20:59:09+00:00
Odin really hits the sweet spot for everything you would want from a language for the game dev and game-dev-adjacent space in terms of simplicity, convenience, and speed. I think a major design decision of the language that will make or break it for users is the fact that the language gives you common features instead of giving you the means of abstraction to make those features yourself. For example, instead of preprocessor macros you get the `when` clause for conditional compilation because in Bill's estimation, that's one of the only real needs for macros. The same goes for data structures. Odin gives you the certified classics like dynamic arrays and maps but doesn't give you a whole lot to make your own custom data structures (it's possible, just not encouraged by the language design). All in all, I think if you want to make an application with a language that has batteries included and you don't need a lot more than that, Odin is nearly flawless.
by procaryote | 2025-05-09 20:59:10+00:00
Java did this sometimes by essentially adding slightly tidied up versions of whatever was the de-facto standard to the standard library. Java 1.3 didn't have regexes but most people were using the same apache commons thing, so java 1.4 added regexes that looked exactly like that. Java's date handling was a pain so people mostly used joda-date; a later java version added something that mostly works like jodadate. Etc.

It is an easy way to get a somewhat OK standard library as the things you add became popular on their own merits at some point.

Once added, the lowest friction path is to just use the standard library; and as it is the standard library you have a slightly better hope someone will care to maintain it. You can still build a better one if needed for your use-case, but the batteries are included for basic usage
by status_quo69 | 2025-05-09 20:59:22+00:00
One thing that I've wondered is why sorbet didn't choose to use the stabby lambda syntax to denote function signatures?

sig ->(_: MyData) { } def self.example(my_data) ... end

Obviously this opens up a potential can of worms of a dynamic static type system, but it looks sufficiently close enough to just ruby. My opinion is that sorbet doesn't lean into the weirdness of ruby enough, so while it has the potential to be an amazingly productive tool, this is the same community that (mostly) embraces multiple ways of doing things for aesthetic purposes. For example you could get the default values of the lambda above to determine the types of the args by calling the lambda with dummy values and capturing via binding.

Personally having written ruby/rails/c#/etc and having been on a dev productivity team myself, I say: lean into the weird shit and make a dsl for this since that's what it wants to be anyways. People will always complain, especially with ruby/rails.
by r0nlt | 2025-05-09 21:00:14+00:00
The framework has taken another step forward. Decided the foundation is finally good enough to add quantum field theory within the simulated environment. Specifically Klein-Gordon, Dirac directly into the radiation damage models. This helped achieve 22% improved prediction accuracy in the most extreme conditions. It's now a seamless multi-scale physics spanning classical to quantum regimes. Adaptive computing now activates quantum corrections only when necessary. This should help next-gen semiconductor devices that are <20nm and low temperature electronics as well where quantum effects become the dominant factor in radiation damage. This is now a unified physics engine as well that helps understand quantum phenomena and radiation hardening applications.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-09 21:00:19+00:00
I definitely will mis-speak/mis-write, but my mathematic (also flawed) tells me that if Gold + 1 = Mercury, then Something + 1 = Gold, so we can find that "something" add 1 of the thingie, and booya!! gold!! (right?) (please read the above with silly humor)

In a slightly more serious note, I remember listening to Elon in some podcast 1-2 years ago saying how they create new metals/alloys that nobody had created previously, because they needed specific needs covered, and no known material had the attributes they needed. So.. in a way..