MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-05-10 14:09:52+00:00
What’s wrong with finding meaning in work?

Of course like all things the entrepreneurial ethos gets very silly and begins to incorporate a lot of very silly other ideas (think and grow rich!) when you dive deep into it, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that most movements, philosophies, and ideologies get silly if you go deep.

Thinkers, like people on dates, put their best foot forward first. As you get to know them is when you find out they never wash their underwear.

The alternative, I guess, is finding meaning in things other than work, and that’s okay too. Or you can do both.
by blkhawk | 2025-05-10 14:11:01+00:00
I have a 9070 XT... rockm ATM is unoptimized for it and the generation speed is less than what it should be if AMD isn't fudging the specs. Also the memory management is dire / buggy and will cause random OOMs on one ruin then be fine the next. splitting workflow helps so you can have one OOM crash in between. VAEs also crash from OOM. This is all just software issues because vram isn't released properly on AMD.

*OOM = Out Of Memory Error
by jvans | 2025-05-10 14:11:19+00:00
I think this blind spot exists because the pure engineering/logic mindset is such a massive superpower in so many elements of life, people fail to consider that it might not always be the right way to think about the world.

One obvious example where it falls laughably short is in interpersonal relationships. Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work
by Hilift | 2025-05-10 14:12:09+00:00
> Weber also argued that the Protestant work ethic influenced the creation of capitalism

An alternative explanation is for the first 140 years of the US, "Protestants" were the "people that did the work". Catholicism was illegal until the states re-wrote their constitutions/laws after the revolution (or ratification of the First Amendment, which ever came first).

Also, there wasn't anything to do but work. If you wanted a house, you cleared land and built it. 50% of early European settlers were indentured servants.

Oh and there wasn't any money or banks. Tobacco was the currency (in Maryland/Virginia). The only business partner was the UK, that managed the colonies as businesses. The entrepreneurial part was the Crown getting shareholders to foot the bill for provisions for the colonies. Shares in Virginia were sold on the London Stock Exchange. Maryland had a sole proprietor that funded the infrastructure build out.
by foldr | 2025-05-10 14:13:39+00:00
I think the concept of a stable gender-based sexual preference that’s part of your personal identity is relatively recent. Of course people were aware that there were men who liked having sex with other men, but that’s not really the same thing.

And yeah I mean people obviously use labels as part of homophobic abuse, but that’s not going to be helpful as part of an argument that such labels are useful or valuable. I don’t really see why it’s necessary to decide whether Henry James is straight bi or gay just because those are the major classifications in our present social context.
by briHass | 2025-05-10 14:13:53+00:00
If that is the case, then there should be no need for Energy Star, because manufacturers already have an incentive to increase efficiency due to customer demand.

I'm highly dubious of the $500b this program has claimed to save consumers. Almost without fail, efficiency improvements in home appliances has greatly increased complexity (less reliable), reduced common components across brands (higher cost to fix), increase purchase price, and compromised actual performance.
by djoldman | 2025-05-10 14:14:30+00:00
> Employees, no matter what their job, crave recognition, autonomy, and a personal connection to work, which is why they often contribute more than they’re paid for. Baker’s point is that celebrating workers’ “proactivity” disguises an essentially exploitative relationship.

The story of the modern Western economy is that all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked from the tree of technological and productivity improvements (in the context of the regulatory environment).

Therefore, the proportion of profit and revenue rooted in exploiting human flaws is and will continue to rise.

Examples are:

* Humans engage with drama and negative content (ad supported media)

* Humans overindex on a sense of family/belonging/tribe (employers as family extract more work for less pay)

* Etc

Perhaps the biggest is regulatory capture and exploitation of regulatory loopholes.
by belter | 2025-05-10 14:14:47+00:00
Please...Gates has been giving interviews about giving all his money for 24 years! While every year, topping the list of the richest persons on earth.

Gates moved $50 billion into a tax-exempt entity he controls, avoided all capital gains tax, secured over $11 billion in total tax benefits, and only needs to distribute 5% of the foundation’s assets annually, all while retaining effective control and reaping massive reputational returns.

This is nothing more than tax optimization for billionaires and can guarantee you the private plane bills, security costs, hotel suites are invoiced to the foundation...

People who believe this, also believe Warren Buffet makes money by value investing and picking stocks. Warren Buffet who by the way also used the Gates foundation for tax optimization to the tune of avoiding 20 billion in capital gains tax.

If politicians wanted they could set a 95% tax on billionaires tomorrow, just like next Monday, and none of these 250 individuals would have the minor inconvenience of their lifestyle. It seems to be possible for tariffs...But those are a tax on the other 99% tax payers. It happens overnight...

Such a smart guy, but not smart enough to stay away from Epstein...
by hn30000 | 2025-05-10 14:14:53+00:00
The only business book I’ve read is that one about management by the CEO of Intel (I forget the name). It helped me a lot with my first big corporate client because until then I had only worked at startups and small businesses. I literally didn’t understand what the purpose of meetings was, etc. Anyway, I haven’t been compelled to pick up any other business books as most of the popular ones seem like self/help books.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-05-10 14:15:11+00:00
You don't know this, but instead assuming parent lives in some suburban area with lots of other cats. They could be living outside in the woods, 5km to any close settlement, with minimal side-effects of having a cat outside (besides the side-effect of having a few less rodents around).

But no, lets have a knee-jerk reaction to anyone who has an outside cat, without understanding any of the context.

Besides, many people put bells on their cats, and then they're unlikely to catch anything at all in the wilderness.
by moshegramovsky | 2025-05-10 14:15:33+00:00
Trump destroys everything he touches. Especially capital. The guy is the living embodiment of Dunning-Kruger. Didn't he have six bankruptcies? He couldn't get a job sweeping floors at a bank with that track record. He is incompetent to run a grocery store, let alone the country, but he certainly is compentent at running things into the ground.
by rubitxxx | 2025-05-10 14:15:45+00:00
From the author’s summary:

“small things like short commute times make you happier. ... Going to work most days and dropping a few friends you don’t have time for may actually be sensible right now if you are in the middle of your career, doing something meaningful.”

You’re correct that the author is not representing the other side of the argument sufficiently, but this is because the author is focused on rationalizing why it’s ok for people to overwork, and then suggesting a few “tips” to make it easier.

Personally, I overwork because I’m slow, mistake prone, insufficiently skilled, overly-idealistic, self-sabotaging, and only know how to say yes, while I live for a business that will only try so hard to work with a universal source of randomness before it must be let go, leaving it and its dependencies to the wolves, as it comforts itself that it was the right thing to do.

I often think of myself like one of the workers that built the pyramids, perhaps dropping stones and being whipped. I believe this isn’t the way, but this is where I am now.
by kyledrake | 2025-05-10 14:16:01+00:00
The goal of the program is to reduce the tragedy of the commons that causes the municipal water supply to run out, making it so that nobody's Speed Queen works anymore. Given the contrast, I would prefer a slightly derpy washing machine to no access to running water.

That said, your complaints about HE side loaders are not misplaced, they aren't very good.
by mpweiher | 2025-05-10 14:16:10+00:00
We're saving ca 10 million people from the actual genocide the Arabs have been trying to perpetrate against Israel since at least 1948.

There is no genocide, attempted or not, in the other direction. In fact, the IDF has a non-combatant/combatant casualty ratio of around 1.2 : 1, which is by far the best (lowest) in the world. Typical is around 10:1.
by ordu | 2025-05-10 14:17:30+00:00
> This is just being pedantic over the terminology, as means to discredit Varoufakis' thoughts and arguments.

I hadn't see the attempt to discredit Varoufakis' thoughts or arguments. What I did see is a critique of an analogy. If you like, I can agree that this is a pedantic take, but it is important sometimes, and I believe that this case is of that kind.

What the point of analogies? I know two of them:

1. an appeal to emotions: you can show some similarities between a regime and a fascism and you kinda won. Everyone knows that fascism is bad, don't they? But it is a political thing, and if you don't want to be a mindless zombie in hands of a politicians, you must know what exactly fascism is, and to break the analogy apart to see where it matches and where it breaks.

2. explanation. If you can to draw analogies between an unknown thing and a known thing, it can be easier to understand the unknown one. It can help really, but again you need to stop at some point and to figure out where the analogy breaks, where its limits of applicability are. If you try to push analogy beyond its limits you'll form wrong opinions about the unknown thing you are trying to learn.

(1) uses failure mode of (2) (overextending an analogy) to fool people. So pedantic approach to analogies is something you should have around you ready at all times.
by roenxi | 2025-05-10 14:17:59+00:00
Well, yeah. Regrets are cheap and plentiful. Which raises the salient point of why deathbed regrets would suddenly become a source of wisdom. But they are often a sample of things that the person thinks they were consistently miscalibrated on over their entire life so it isn't clear why they'd suddenly gain clarity into what they should have done instead.

The top 5 list in the article is some really basic stuff. And a lot of people do get that wrong (most people, really) but (1) if they get told they will persist in making the same mistakes and (2) there are a lot of people in absolute sense who actually get those things about right if you look for them and practice a bit. You don't need to be dying to regret those things and the dying still probably don't actually understand what they got wrong. If they actually understood the mistakes they were making they wouldn't make them and most people keep making stupid mistakes like not expressing their feelings or working too hard instead of talking to people for entire lives of 50+ years. Expressing feelings and not working too hard are actually pretty easy things to do if you keep chipping away at it; these people probably don't really understand what they did wrong.
by chneu | 2025-05-10 14:18:00+00:00
It's almost as if people don't know how to wash their clothes.

If a machine is working for the vast majority of people then it isn't usually the machine.

Washing machines fall under the same umbrella as dishwashers for me. They work amazingly well but there will always be a decent chunk of people who claim they just never get dishes clean.

It has nothing to do with the dishwasher. It has to do with how people use them incorrectly.
by notpushkin | 2025-05-10 14:18:20+00:00
Good point, though the article mostly discusses static site generation (no server-side JS) and I think we can take it a step further and have no runtime / client-side JS as well.

Next.js does usually have the runtime part, but I imagine it’s not too hard to disable (or you can strip all JS from the output). Astro, like I mentioned, strips JS by default (from island components, not from .astro components, though you can usually use those without any client-side JS, too).

It is kinda roundabout way of generating HTML from JSX though.
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-10 14:18:24+00:00
One of the things that opened up my eyes to how much of life is mindset & purpose was, ironically, dealing with some of the very wealthy in NYC.

Some of the most anxious, unhappy, complaining people I met were the underemployed spouses of the very well off. And this isn't a sexist statement because it was both women and men. And some good percent of them had no kids either. Truly no responsibilities.

The kind of people who I'd bump into at the gym just after sunrise on the way to a long day of work, and they lament to me how their weekly in-home massage got cancelled due to a scheduling conflict, and they just don't know what to do with their day. LOL.

One can be happy or unhappy at any objective income/wealth/stress level. You'd be very surprised.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-10 14:18:39+00:00
https://naturalwomanhood.org/interview-abby-johnson-planned-...

Abby Johnson: You can find different studies that say different things. One in Colorado said you give women contraception and abortion rates go down; other studies say that’s not true. What we do know for sure, according to Guttmacher themselves, Planned Parenthood’s own research arm, is that 54% of women who are having abortions are using contraception at the time when they get pregnant. So the idea that contraception is working for women and that it’s preventing abortion is not true. If it were, that number would not be 54%.

> Sex is normal and healthy

So is pregnancy and childbirth. Why administer drugs to disrupt normal, healthy biological processes? Absurd!
by jsheard | 2025-05-10 14:19:16+00:00
That's the least of the problems with how they've optimized their assets, there's about 250MB of animated GIFs on the Huggingface page (actual 1989 vintage GIFs, not modern videos pretending to be GIFs). AI people just can't get enough of wasting bandwidth apparently, at least this time it's another AI company footing the bill for all the expensive AWS egress they're burning through for no reason.
by znpy | 2025-05-10 14:19:34+00:00
I had a similar bad experience not with posting but with answering questions.

Some overly-zealous mod came and edited (!!!) what i wrote because they didn’t like the wording. No swear or any kind of trouble involved, they just didn’t like the words i used.

Picking the specific words, besides merely answering questions, is quite literally what makes me me and what makes someone else someone else, in a text-only community.

I never replied any other thread since then and never posted again. Whatever I write can be edited according to what random person somewhere thinks is better.

Going to extreme: if some mod decides to edit my comments to include racial slurs, that’s entirely within the realm of possibility.

I do not play that game.

No wonder they’re getting crushed by ChatGPT and other LLMs.
by simion314 | 2025-05-10 14:19:36+00:00
>Cats--which as I recall are descended from African wildcats--are arguably the most successful carnivores around. They're incredibly adaptable.

I live in a village in Romania, a lot of cats get killed by cars, I always have an old cat that seems to be more smarted and survives for long time, but most younger cats get killed before 1 year. You would think they are smart and plus evolution that filters out the less adapted one the cats would be capable to avoid cars. Here we do not keep cats locked inside so it is sad but there is nothing we can do about this.
by simpaticoder | 2025-05-10 14:19:40+00:00
Listening to Cryptonomican 20 years after reading it. It is a curious embodiment of this "cult" but from a deeper, more epistemic place. The way Steaphenson treats the world, the way he describes it, is frenetic, packed with trivia and connections and ADHD deep-dives into related topics...but there is no heart to it. It's an empty, mechanistic view of the world, reducing almost every person a neat little network of abstractions, and then moving on. It is a strange book in that it seems to be a promotion of a narrative viewpoint rather than about the plot or characters. It is certainly the viewpoint of the "modern" tech entrepenuer, circa 1999. Somehow both extremely open minded AND judgemental; utterly unsentimental about anything, including the self; mere acceptence and wariness about indelible human needs. And so on.

Word on the street is that Cryptonomicon was required reading at Thiel's early Palantir. I read it now and it definitely hits differently. To accept that you must dwell in something in order to understand it, and therefore in order to wield power over it with any wisdom, is the antithesis of "The Cult of Doing Business". The hubris is baked in deep at an epistemic level, which is demonstrated to lead to epic moral hazards at an epidemic level.
by graemep | 2025-05-10 14:20:03+00:00
Firstly, who said war with Greenland? They want to buy Greenland, This is not new and the US has proposed this many times and has considered it many more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_acquisi...

Leaving that aside, the US is hugely more powerful than Denmark, Panama and Canada combined. If could walk over all three right now - no need for increased military expenditure.

Iran has been preparing to fight the US, and will probably have fanatics who will fight on after defeat of the military creating an Iraq like situation - but AFAIK the direction of expenditure is wrong for that as preparing for that would require spending on counter insurgency and boots on the ground. There would also be lots of support from other countries in the region for that.

The ONLY country that is a peer rival to the US is China.

Other nuclear powers are probably able to deter the US, but only China can actually fight it in a conventional war.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-05-10 14:20:32+00:00
For me, an American, the work ethic comes from reading Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography after being inspired by a passage found in an American Literature textbook in 10th grade. [0]

edit: Of all the different philosophies a young person can subscribe to, entering in the middle of my life, I'm lucky to have chosen one of the better ones. I remember at the time really wanted to embrace an identity of being American and here is a founding father who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the Constitution who was born and raised with the institution of slavery owning slaves himself and evolving into an outspoken anti-slavery advocate working to abolish the practice. That is what it means to be an American, to grow, change, and become better, just.

[0] https://fs.blog/the-thirteen-virtues/
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-10 14:20:36+00:00
It's because most people on the left are not aware that there even is a right wing populism. To them it is an oxymoron.

Pulling someone out of that "it's an oxymoron" hole takes a long time. I don't want to go back and forth with you here trying to explain what right wing populism is here, and the philosophy behind it.
by throw0101d | 2025-05-10 14:20:45+00:00
> If that is the case, then there should be no need for Energy Star, because manufacturers already have an incentive to increase efficiency due to customer demand.

Energy Star is handy because it's a known quality with set standards. If there was no standard companies could start doing all sorts of marketing BS with meaningless numbers. With ES you know what you're getting and it's a apples-apples comparison.

Same with dishwasher: Energy Star means some specific, and if a unit has a sticker than it's at (at least) the same level as another unit with the sticker. An OEM has now go above and beyond that in features.

Contrast that with the MaP Test, which is voluntary in the toilet industry, which most manufacturers use if those it is voluntary:

* https://map-testing.com/

If there was an ES-equivalent standard for laundry then perhaps Energy Star itself would not be needed at that point.
by mbreese | 2025-05-10 14:21:21+00:00
I don’t think there is a need to limit this geographically. As a rule hardware companies are bad at software. It doesn’t really matter where they are from. If you’re including things like TVs that spy on you, don’t forget Visio. They are one of the poster children for making TVs with content tracking and/were they are based in California.

The exceptions I see include Apple and Raspberry Pi. And even then, there are missteps.

It’s not intentional… it’s just that companies rarely have integration as one of their core strengths. If you’re a hardware company, you are good at making hardware. The skills necessary for that are very different than the skills needed for software. To get both, you need management that values both and can build the separate teams. Especially true when you can argue that you’re working with the “community” to build out software and fix bugs. If you’re still selling enough hardware, how can you say these companies are wrong?

That’s honestly a hard thing to do unless that is your competitive advantage. And for Apple and Raspberry Pi, I’d argue that is their competitive advantage in their markets. For a long time they were the small fish in big ponds. So they needed to have some trait that allowed them to command higher margins. Integration of hardware and software was it.
by zahlman | 2025-05-10 14:21:31+00:00
>...expressed a desire to destroy several other countries... Canada stand out for being explicitly named

A bit of banter about Canada being economically or political subordinate to the US is not even remotely in the same ballpark as expressing a desire to destroy Canada. Even the literal meaning of what was obviously a joke is not remotely in the same ballpark. This is the same kind of thing I've been hearing my entire life; it means no more than the old adage "when America sneezes, Canada catches a cold".

I say this as a left-wing Canadian, btw.

Regarding Iran, the headline of your source already contradicts you, as does the article. Bombing is not invasion, and a threat made to get what you actually want (a "nuclear deal") is not expressing desire to execute the threat (it is in fact explicitly saying that you want something else).

Is this bad? Sure. Is it an unusual level of saber rattling (especially from someone who didn't come across as much of a military interventionist in his first term)? I suppose so. But it is not anything like "an expressed desire to destroy other countries". It is not warmongering.

All the recent headlines about "not ruling out" various military actions are just decades-old MAD policy applied to conventional warfare.

> Not as a percentage of GDP.

Right, so by your own source:

* Spending as a percentage of GDP recently peaked in 2010 (in the middle of Obama's first term);

* Spending as a percentage of GDP recently bottomed out in 2017-2018 (in the middle of Trump's first term);

* If we apply the 2010 percentage to 2022, the US would have already been at 1.25T in spending - while this thread is expressing concern because of approaching the 1T mark. Notwithstanding the import shock, US GDP has been recently growing rather impressively, too - see e.g. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP/ .)

Also, the implication of your phrasing is that an increase as a percentage of GDP is happening or will happen soon, but you left out any evidence for that.

I very much don't like that the US spends this much on the military (about 3x as much as China, next on the leaderboard); but it's not historically out of line, nor does it look like an indication of trouble afoot.