MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joshstrange | 2025-05-18 16:26:37+00:00
> Side moral there: if you have access to a functional regulatory system, don’t be afraid to ask it for help when a large company is messing with you

True. I've used the FCC and CFPB in the past and while the UI to interface with them is somewhat clunky, it's functional and in all 3 cases I was satisfied (vindicated). In at least 1 of the cases the monetary value was low enough that it was absolutely in my best interests just to pay it and make it go away but it felt so good to have the CFPB slap down Spectrum and get them to drop the fee. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of what's going to happen to those agencies over the next few years.
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-18 16:26:50+00:00
When you hear managers, project managers, and other consultants talk like that, you code switch to fit in and show you belong in the room.

Of course it is not genuine, nothing about corporate America is genuine. It’s all bullshit.

If you saw some of my writing before LLMs existed - it’s out there on an AWS official blog somewhere - you would swear it was created by ChatGPT, it reads like all of the other generic salesy crap that was the house writing style at AWS.

Hopefully what I’m about to say next doesn’t come across as me pulling out the “race card”. I’ve hardly ever been rejected from any job I’ve applied to in 25 years as a developer and the last 5 working full time at consulting departments/companies - first working at AWS (Professional Services) and then at third party companies. So I am not claiming racism is endemic in the industry from my personal experience.

But I am one of very few customer facing, highly technical senior Black consultants I’ve come across - even at AWS I think I worked with one other person and even they were more IT focused (security, networking) than software development. I am now the only Black staff consultant out of 70 in my company. I’m not saying it’s racism - it just is what it is.

I am saying that when I am interviewing for consulting jobs, speaking to executives, writing proposals and assessments where real money is on the line, I speak corporate as well as anyone else. I don’t get the default assumed competence as a short black guy that a tall white guy gets.

When the rest of the people talk about the concerts they went to or what they do for fun as small talk, it’s also not like I’m going to talk about seeing WuTang Clan and Ice Cube in concert.

I am going to talk about how much fun my wife and I had in Costa Rica and our other vacations we take during the year.

When I talk to the technical side of the company, I turn off my corporate speak and talk to technical.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-18 16:27:08+00:00
That’s a thing, to be sure. The calculus gets a little complicated when that developer’s pay is far more than the EC2 bill. There’s a spectrum with a small shop wasting $1000 a year hosting inefficient code, and Google-scale where SRE teams would love to put “saved .3% on our cloud bill!” on their annual review.
by kazinator | 2025-05-18 16:27:20+00:00
Don't you now have actions in the middle of the computation that are putting names into a global dictionary? I'd at least give them names like tmp-numerator to put them into a namespace of local/temporary functions, and then "forget" them immediately after the computaton that references them.

What's the compiled version of : compute-numerator a b + c d + * ; look like? I imagine at the very least that there has to be a call to some run-time support routine to insert a compiled thunk under a name into the dictionary.
by paulddraper | 2025-05-18 16:27:37+00:00
> Destructuring was gone over many times; the problem with using it naively is that it's not clear upon first encountering it whether the destructured object or the fields destructured out of it are disposed.

Yes, and this trivially solves that!

for (const { prop1, prop2 } of iterable) ^ ^ Destructuring Iterable using (const { prop1, prop2 } of disposable) ^ ^ Destructuring Disposable

No ambiguity. Very clear.

> That is introducing a new variable binding

No. const, let, var are variable bindings with rules about scope and mutability.

using adds to that list. And for the life of me I can't remember what it says about mutability.

using-of would keep that set.

> strictly more verbose in all cases for no particular benefit.

See above.

Additional benefit is that the lifetime of the object is more clear, and it's encouraged to be cleaned up more quickly. Rather than buried in a block with 50 lines before and 50 lines after.

> This was already litigated to death and you can see the author's response in your links.

Absolutely. The owners unfortunately decided to move forward with it.

Despite being awkward, subpar.
by david_allison | 2025-05-18 16:28:21+00:00
Given what you've said:

* Make your own cards (unless there's an automated workflow [Japanese, sentence mining], really good shared decks, or you're studying for a standardized exam [USMLE])

* Deck Settings (scheduling): Enable FSRS. Press 'Optimize', then press optimize once per month.

* Deck Settings (workload): Wait 2 weeks before gradually increasing new cards per day (if you want to study for longer). Decrease it immediately if you feel you're getting overwhelmed.

* Deck Settings (backlog): Set max reviews/day to 9999

* App Settings: Disable 'Show next review time above answer buttons'

* Addons: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/876946123 (you seem to have a problem with answer button selection)

* Recommended: Press 'sync', and create an AnkiWeb account. In app settings, set Anki to auto-sync on open/close. This is a free backup.

* Optional: Use a mobile client (AnkiDroid is free on Android, AnkiWeb is free on iOS)

You'll feel like you completed the first day far too quickly, and will want to do more. Avoid overstudying until you build intuition for how it impacts your daily workload.

Use Anki every day
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-18 16:28:44+00:00
This reminds me that you have to be a little crazy to resist some of the most powerful forces in our world. You basically have to say, I'm willing to sacrifice my life, be willing to be thrown in jail, be bankrupted, etc, just to keep people informed. There's no personal benefit here. And nobody's going to stop him on the street and thank him for keeping the powerful honest. In today's world, we definitely need more crazies for good. (And we need more organizations formed to help protect them!)
by accrual | 2025-05-18 16:29:25+00:00
> sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services.

Yeah, that was a little surprising to me too. One would imagine that ones iCloud or Apple account would have everything in one place on Apple's side. The support person should have been able to pull up the account and see some reference number related to the incomplete trade-in, the bounced payment, and some status message about the account being auto-locked due to missing payment.

If the support person saw a normal, unaffected account - that makes me think visibility into the account is restricted into support tiers and the person should had the ability to escalate or request (logged) access to more details. It's a shame it took the author multiple days and calls into different departments to find resolution for what should have been a very obvious payment problem.
by bryan0 | 2025-05-18 16:29:39+00:00
Not a physicist, but the more accurate “intuitive” explanation I read is that an accelerating observer sees thermal radiation in a vacuum. This is called the Unruh effect [0]. And since a black hole requires an accelerated observer to not be pulled in you will always have thermal radiation coming from the black hole UNLESS you are free falling into it. Physicists please correct me where I’m wrong!

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect
by brookst | 2025-05-18 16:30:29+00:00
Agreed, role playing as real people is unacceptable for both AI and other real people.

“Tell me what Bernie Sanders might say about…” is fine, so long as the response is in the form “based on his past statements”. “Pretend to be Bernie Sanders and talk about” is not ok to prompt, nor ok for the model to respond to with an impersonation.
by roenxi | 2025-05-18 16:30:52+00:00
> I don't see what the big deal is about paying wholesale rates for electric generation whether it's a company or resident generating it

Is that the big deal? It looks like the big deal is that utilities are being forced to buy energy at a higher-than-market price. If it wasn't legally required there is no way they would be paying retail prices for solar. It'd be like a supermarket paying retail prices to buy their stock - they can't make money if they buy at retail prices, sell at retail prices and have overheads of doing business.

That is a lot of money they're talking about. Such things are big deals.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-18 16:31:00+00:00
> What I found shocking was the inability to contact someone who could resolve the situation.

But they did. The first person was unfamiliar with the issue, likely because the Apple Card program was relatively new at the time. They opened a case to escalate.

Apple’s phone support has been relatively good in my experience. I expect they’d have this situation more integrated into first-line support in 2025 than they did when the program was new.
by allenu | 2025-05-18 16:31:52+00:00
I've written my own flashcards app (Fresh Cards) and once in a while, users ask if there's a way to import flashcards from things like web pages and PDF files, but to be honest, I still don't know how it would work, so maybe you can help me.

From a user standpoint, would it be an interactive process where you highlight things and then click a button to say "turn this into a flashcard", or would it be an automated tool that would scan the content and come up with a list of questions and answers t hat would test the material for you? What criteria would be used to determine what's worth turning into a question and answer? And how granular should the question be? I've seen demos of things that pick out specific facts, like dates or names, from the text to turn into questions, but that might not be that useful to quiz for some material. It seems like a very open-ended process to me, so it would be hard to get right for everyone's needs.
by matula | 2025-05-18 16:31:59+00:00
Very nice. I tried with Ollama and it works well.

The biggest issue is having the Ollama models hardcoded to Qwen3 and Llama 3.1. I imagine most Ollama users have their favorites, and probably vary quite a bit. My main model is usually Gemma 3 12B, which does support images.

It would be a nice feature to have a custom config on the Ollama settings page, save those to Chrome storage, and use that in the 'getAvailableModels' method, along with the hardcoded models.
by kazinator | 2025-05-18 16:32:10+00:00
That's possible only if the condition is constant-foldable.

You can achieve it by turning the if part into an inline function.

Before:

function(cond, arg) { if (cond) { true logic } else { false logic } }

after:

inline function(cond, arg) { cond ? function_true(arg) : function_false(arg) }

Now you don't do anything to those 37 places. The function is inlined, and the conditional disappears due to cond being constant.
by paulddraper | 2025-05-18 16:33:08+00:00
Of course not. Nor did I think that "94 lines of Ruby" was assembly.

But "94 lines of Ruby" is actually "94 lines of Ruby plus 100x other lines of Ruby plus Anthropic."

The high level form is indeed 94 lines.

I think it could be 15 if you are going for concepts.
by vunderba | 2025-05-18 16:33:33+00:00
Great article. The mention of Cyrix brought back a rush of nostalgia - one of the earlier PCs I built used a Cyrix 686 166mhz processor.

From the article:

> 8BitDo makes a fantastic modern keyboard inspired by the M looks and feel.

Hard disagree. I found most of their keyboard replicas to be rather cheap feeling. However, their controllers such as the Arcade Stick and Pro 2 are excellent.

I think the closest approximation you can get to an old school model M keyboard with buckler springs is probably from Unicomp. If you don't care about that kind of authenticity I would just stick with something like a Keychron mechanical keyboard and call it a day.

https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/NEW_M
by Spivak | 2025-05-18 16:33:36+00:00
It depends if you believe the government is buying something with that money or not. A local example the township just installed bunch of sump pumps in people's houses free of charge— they covered whole neighborhoods with them. This is great for the homeowners who will save money on water damage repairs and flooding but it's possible that actual rate of return for the homeowner isn't that much and they would have been better off with the cash. But this analysis excludes one crucial fact which is that the city doesn't care if the homeowners save money, that's not what the program is for, it's to control water flowing into the storm sewers. The fact that the homeowners also save money is the carrot that gets them to agree to the program.

So if you believe that the government is getting some tangible value out of rooftop solar being widespread then you need to account for that value as well as the value for the homeowner.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-18 16:34:13+00:00
One time I got a senator to tell the Navy Exchange to stop hounding me for a bill where I had receipts showing that I paid. I would’ve loved to be a fly on that wall when the senator’s office called the admiral in charge, resulting in a wet-ink-signed letter of apology from him to me. I bet some people had a “fun” week after that.

Most recently, California’s Department of Insurance helped me when State Farm was being a thorn in my side: https://honeypot.net/2024/04/08/i-fought-state.html

Sometimes the only way to fight bureaucracy is with a bigger bureau.
by djoldman | 2025-05-18 16:34:43+00:00
A slightly adjacent question:

Why is it that at many levels of US government, there aren't more and smaller bills?

It seems like bills on solar energy end up getting smushed together with bills on police spending. Two or more almost totally unrelated issues.

The naive answer is that two unrelated issues in one bill allows for direct compromise: you vote for my thing and I vote for your thing. Also, usually the majority party gets to bring a vote to the floor so they have the power.

But an advantage to the single issue bills is that you'd get your opponents on record voting against stuff that may be popular, if it's truly what the people want.

You'd also get to pass a ton of items that would make for great PR bites. They might be small in effect but great talking points.

As majority leader, you can force everyone to vote yea or nay, I wonder why they don't use it more often.
by beyarkay | 2025-05-18 16:36:15+00:00
(author here) I absolutely agree that knowledge transfer shouldn't be left to chance, and that there should be more consistent processes in place to make sure this happens. But I still think there's something to be gained from experts and novices having a more casual conversation about various topics.

When I was getting started in software, some of the most valuable conversations I had were after a technical meeting, when I could pick a seniors brain on the way out of the room, asking them why XYZ solution was dismissed immediately.

Encouraging frequent and casual conversation between experts & novices is key.
by resource_waste | 2025-05-18 16:36:25+00:00
>I think one of the problems of modern society is the level of risk people deem acceptable - its now near zero, instead of "reasonable risks".

I've watched plenty of youtube videos that say something like 'But management needed dem profits so they took the risk'

So... let us not pretend we don't cut corners and take risk. There are plenty of modern deaths and environmental destruction because people take risk.

What I think should be more acceptable, is that people take personal risks. Nothing wrong with accepting risk being the first person in an unregulated prototype space ship or taking unverified medicine.
by kennywinker | 2025-05-18 16:36:54+00:00
The blog post was written NINE days after their first contact with apple support. "They were able to talk to someone and get it fixed" yes, after at least nine days of being locked out. This was all triggered by being 15 days late on a payment, because APPLE screwed up and didn't send a trade-in kit.

If you're ok with being treated that way, that's fine - I'm not.
by abathologist | 2025-05-18 16:37:16+00:00
I think it was indeed use of GPS that first made me aware of how much the systems we are building are trying to automate me. From the socials to Jira to slack GitHub to crypto to GenAI... it is now painfully obvious that all these systems are pressing upon us to react to stimulus in predictable ways to execute a part of some larger movement which -- probably -- no one has actually designed or considered the purpose of.

I think we are in the third act of a very long play:

> If mechanical thinking and ingenious experiment produced the machine, regimentation gave it a soil to grow in: the social process worked hand in hand with the new ideology and the new technics. Long before the peoples of the Westenr nworld turned to the machine, mechanism as an element in social life had come into existence. Before inventors created engines to take the place of men, the leaders of men had drilled and regimented multitudes of human beings: they had discovered how to reduce men to machines. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Civilization)
by jonahbenton | 2025-05-18 16:37:20+00:00
+1 to all that. My business is a kind of consulting collective, high trust, people who have known each other for decades. High bar for participation. Careful to ensure everyone stays on the right side of the IRS "self-employed" line, while trying to be coordinated and efficient about common expenses and benefits. Cooperative but not a democracy or cooperative per se- having participated in coops including the famous Park Slope Food Coop- think the low-trust semi-informed cooperative democracy is really, really hard to make work when the context ultimately is business and making a living. We have looked very closely at the web3 and especially programmatic stablecoin machinery, there are so many ways having little structures like that would help with risk and cash flow- like, being able to easily self-set up escrow structures with clients who may themselves have cash flow risk. Could definitely do it outside the US, adoption inside probably never get over the hump. Therapy is not so much project based but some common insurance and billing tooling, and then tax reporting, would be beneficial. Anyway, hope you are able to get traction.
by nine_k | 2025-05-18 16:37:22+00:00
In short, the manuscript looks like a genuine text, not like a random bunch of characters pretending to be a text.

<quote>

Key Findings

* Cluster 8 exhibits high frequency, low diversity, and frequent line-starts — likely a function word group

* Cluster 3 has high diversity and flexible positioning — likely a root content class

* Transition matrix shows strong internal structure, far from random

* Cluster usage and POS patterns differ by manuscript section (e.g., Biological vs Botanical)

Hypothesis

The manuscript encodes a structured constructed or mnemonic language using syllabic padding and positional repetition. It exhibits syntax, function/content separation, and section-aware linguistic shifts — even in the absence of direct translation.

</quote>
by jamesponddotco | 2025-05-18 16:37:30+00:00
I have the complete opposite experience, as for me and my wife Home Assistant has been excellent. I mostly use Zigbee though, as it can’t phone home, and that may be related.

Heck, I even set up the HomeKit bridge so my wife can use Siri or the Home app to control everything, and she still prefers the dashboard I built on Home Assistant.

I only have two problems, which aren’t even Home Assistant problems:

1. Some door and window sensors I got from Sonoff become unavailable at times, which is a problem since I use them on the security system. Haven’t had the time or money to replace them yet, but I’ll probably go with Aqara next.

2. While my wife loves the dashboard, I like to thinker with it, and am never satisfied. I’m still looking for a way to expose all devices and controls in a visually pleasing way.

Actually, three. My only cloud integration, which controls my LG air conditioner, recently started to give me problems and I can’t turn the units off from Home Assistant anymore. But I’m sure this will be fixed soon, so, meh.

All in all, I’m very pleased with Home Assistant. Wish they had a better design, but themes fix that, so, overall, very pleased.
by tyleo | 2025-05-18 16:37:59+00:00
I’m doing it on my personal site, tyleo.com.

This question comes up enough that I’m writing a guide on it now.

I don’t use any CSS framework except CSS modules. I was going to write the guide without module support and add a section about it near the bottom.

There’s some really simple patterns you can follow with built-in JS features to make this easier.
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-18 16:38:12+00:00
Wrong question, boring answer.

I wake up every day with my best friend. We have been together for so long, we have regularly similiar thoughts on things.

If i even want to know this, i want to hear the real people using their money in a way that i'm envy.

There was a documentary on netflix about a guy who was diving in the ocean in front of his house and befriended an octopus.

Besides this story (its well made), i had the feeling this person made it. Beautiful house, self care routine and the opportunity (which he actually uses) to use the ocean every day.
by qrobit | 2025-05-18 16:38:17+00:00
I had a similar problem where I can't remember the answer to the card, but after revealing it, it seemed too easy to make it due in a few days, so I would lie to the program and press Hard/Good. Later I removed scheduling times on top of buttons and decided to trust the algorithm. I believe it helped me to stop caring about schedule times and loosing progress on a certain card. After all, these algorithms were made for ordinary people with ordinary memory behavior.
by ryao | 2025-05-18 16:38:28+00:00
The RP2350 lets you choose between 2 RISC-V cores and 2 ARM cores. I believe it even supports 1 RISC-V core and 1 ARM core for those who like the idea of their microcontrollers using two different ISAs simultaneously.

Microchip Technology has a number of RISC-V options.
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-05-18 16:38:35+00:00
This looks very interesting - nice work!

I have no background in NLP or linguistics, but I do have a question about this:

> I stripped a set of recurring suffix-like endings from each word — things like aiin, dy, chy, and similar variants

This seems to imply stripping the right-hand edges of words, with the assumption that the text was written left to right? Or did you try both possibilities?

Once again, nice work.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-18 16:38:37+00:00
The author said "I hope to get around to posting it on F-Droid soon, it doesn't seem like too much work" back in 2023 <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36051011> but my 3rd-hand experience with F-Droid is that it is a lot of work

There is an issue tracking that outcome if you wanted to follow it https://github.com/SimonHalvdansson/Harmonic-HN/issues/185