MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-05-12 22:38:14+00:00
This isn't an "either or" situation. You can do both.

The absolute dollar value might seem high, because we're working with the budget of not just a country but the wealthiest country, but as a percentage it is quite low. You can certainly pull funds from other areas too, like the military, which also greatly benefit from such research endeavors.

Even if these were exclusively non-weapons and non-military based technologies being developed it'd be naive to not recognize that the best military defense is to stop a war before it happens. That comes through many avenues, but notably the development of new technologies, especially those that benefit people as a whole (e.g. medicine or see the Taiwan strategy). But even then, it would also be naive to think that the same technology couldn't be adapted to military uses. Anything can be a weapon if you use it wrong enough.

But note that we're also seeing a reduction in federal research funding. We're also seeing less fundamental research and these types of problems need a strong pipeline through the classic TRL scale[0]. I think you'll find some of that discussion over in yesterday's thread about Bell Labs. The pipeline doesn't work if you don't take risks and are rushing. You need a fire under your ass but too hot and you get burned. It's easy to be myopic in today's settings, and that's not a great idea for an organization who needs to have an outlook in terms of decades and centuries (i.e. government) as opposed to the next election cycle or next quarterly earnings report.

Mind you, we've done these things before. Both the Space Race and Manhattan Project. At the height of the Space Race NASA's budget was over 4.41% of the federal budget[2]. I'm not sure what percent the Manhattan Project's budget was, but it is very clear that this is A LOT cheaper than what actual war costs[3]. We're talking about less than a month of war costs. Remember, we spent over a $750bn over in Iraq[4]. The question is not if we have the money, but what we want to spend it on. Personally I'd rather stuff like this than bombing people. Frankly, you can eat the cake too, as it makes it cheaper to bomb people as well...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Cost

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
by toast0 | 2025-05-12 22:40:20+00:00
HAProxy used to support multiprocess and multithread. When performance needs exceed a single cpu, you do need to do one or both of those. But a lot of HAProxy users need to share state between workers and that's a lot easier in the threaded environment.

When I had a need for HAProxy at high throughput, I ran multiprocess, and it was tricky to make sure the processes didn't try to use the same outbound addresses, among some other challenges I had to address to get to the connection numbers I thought were reasonable. I can understand why they would have chosen to go with threads only in 2.5 though.

If I was doing the same thing today, hopefully enough has changed in my chosen OS that threads would work for me, but if not, it shouldn't be too hard for me to spawn the right number of haproxy threads with individual configs to get what I need.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-12 22:40:30+00:00
I get that it's risky and expensive, but I haven't seen it work better than this. The hack workaround sometimes ends up being better than the existing system, cause a rushed timeline forces everyone to be frank about what's actually needed and what they can ignore. They're also forced to pick something simple, not design an overly grand solution with tons of meetings.

The tech debt is still costly, but most of it isn't caused by lack of maintenance, more that something was designed fundamentally poorly from the start.
by dekhn | 2025-05-12 22:40:57+00:00
LLMs don't have a magical ability to arbitrate complex truths. If the "low-fat diet" narrative is prominent in the training literature, I would expect the model to say that more often that it said the opposite.

I don't ever really use the term "thoroughly debunked" when referring to nutrition science; as you noted, a better term is that the claim is not supported by the evidence. I've seen enough things debunked and then rebunked to know that nutrition science is not really that accurate.
by babyent | 2025-05-12 22:41:31+00:00
Yeah not denying that. Of course anyone single or without too many responsibilities can “survive” even on 100k. I’m not talking about that, because we get older and it doesn’t scale. my friend is a staff engineer who makes 240k plus stock.

He has a child on the way. His wife also works. Their rent is 7k a month (home in a good school district - important to us Asians) because they aren’t going to share an apartment and have means to live in a bigger space. They could rent a house for 4k and risk getting shot in Oakland, or live closer to work and have a decent home for their family.

He is always complaining about finances because he spends like 10k a month on just living. If he buys a home, it’s like 2 million at least for something decent in a good area.

I think Bay Area is mad expensive. You really need to make a lucky break to thrive here. Most people sell their vested stock immediately, so those guys who made millions etc are few and far in between because they held for a while.
by giantg2 | 2025-05-12 22:41:50+00:00
Your story doesn't add up. If it's as rural as you say, there's not enough rental market to make it worth while. It will be an even smaller market if it requires a good old boy network to not wipe you out. Many rural areas have plenty of rundown houses that surely would be cheaper than your place if it's in as good a shape as you make it out to be.
by Zambyte | 2025-05-12 22:42:37+00:00
To be fair, Guix was originally a Nix fork, so dismissing it was "just" a Nix fork doesn't seem that out there. I believe at this point all original Nix code has been replaced and Guix has completely diverged and is also awesome software, but I can see why someone would be inclined to say something like that if they were missing the full picture.
by nradov | 2025-05-12 22:42:57+00:00
You have to be realistic and assume that treating most major musculoskeletal injuries will be a lengthy trial-and-error process. Every injury is unique and imaging studies or other tests can only give limited clues about what's going on. There are patients in terrible pain whose scans look normal, and there are other patients whose scans indicate serious pathology yet they are pain-free and completely functional. Instead of getting discouraged, keep trying different modalities (except for the pseudo-science BS) until something works.

In general a lot of those injuries will eventually heal on their own. So it's easy to fool yourself into believing that a particular treatment was effective even when the real cure was time.
by rdmirza | 2025-05-12 22:43:56+00:00
Your take on Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) is wrong.

At the top of the evidence hierarchy is N-of-1 trials (and below that are high quality meta-analyses of trials). Nothing is more informative about treatment response in a person than testing it in that person. This is the heart of personalized medicine, and exactly for the reason you stated: Different interventions work differently for different people.

And any practitioner worth their salt is unsurprised by this headline. A great example is that illness and inflammation increase insulin resistance via counter-regulatory hormones.

You got one thing right, intuition often turns out to be wrong. That is why the vast majority experimental therapeutics built on great ideas never get passed initial testing.
by quantadev | 2025-05-12 22:44:05+00:00
Hashing is about destroying meaning, structure, and data, albeit in a special way for a special purpose. Semantic Vectors are about creating meaning, structure, and data.

The only similarity at all is that they're both an algorithm that maps from one domain to another. So your logic collapses into "All mapping functions are hashes, whenever the output domain is smaller than the input domain", which is obviously wrong. And it's additionally wrong because the output domain of a Semantic Vector is 1500 infinities (dimensions) larger than the input. So even as a "mapper" it's doing the inverse of what a hash does.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-05-12 22:44:16+00:00
lumping in a camping trip with investments is odd. A camping trip might cost very nearly zero dollars, depending on distance and what I have available. We'll be generous here and assume $100 was spent for some reason. That $100 is expended, you don't get it back.

A stock investment might "cost" $4000, but I would hope to have nearly $4000 in some asset. My absolute worst investments, I typically still exited them with 40% of my initial capital.
by dspillett | 2025-05-12 22:44:50+00:00
> Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being

It isn't fear of the call or the human being (though for some that can be part of the problem.

It is that some or all of these, and other irritations, will be true:

* The call has to be in their working hours, which is possibly your working hours too. I can get away with sitting on hold for a personal matter in work time, but many can't.

* The call will not be short…

* You will need to interact with irritating menu systems to get onto the relevant queues, and if you hit the wrong thing or an issue causes a disconnect, you will be right back where you started.

* The interminable hold muzak and/or staticy silence…

* When you finally get to that human they will have a long script, and it can be hard to divert them from it to just let you cancel. They will try to dissuade you from cancelling with various offers, and occasionally lies, no matter how much you insist that you just want to cancel.

* If you call at the start of a period they'll tell you that if you cancel now, you'll lose the remaining X weeks and try get you to call back later to not lose that “investment”. If you do call back a couple of weeks later you'll be told there is a notice period and you'll be billed for another period. There are other underhand tricks similar to this.

* After all the upsell/resell the first person you get won't be able to process the cancellation. You'll be put back into the queuing system for some more lovely muzak/static.

* The second person might not be able to either. Lather, rinse, repeat.

* All this time, any technical issue that causes a disconnect puts you right back at the start.

* If you get exasperated by all of this and start sounding to aggressive in your irritation, they will sometimes state that you are being rude (maybe I am, but not as rude as them wasting my time and trying to con me…) and hang up, meaning you have to call back and restart at a later time.

Some years ago I cancelled a magazine subscription, that I signed up for in seconds online, in a call that lasted nearly an hour. I've been very wary of subscribing to anything that needs payment details ever since, a stance that has done me well. The only way they will stop doing this sort of crap is if enough people simply stop subscribing to things because of it, or if relevant legislation without easy loopholes is passed.
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-12 22:45:01+00:00
I worked on a project that was using federal tax information and had IRS 1075 compliance requirements. Those follow some version of NIST that was out of date at the time.

We had two security teams. Security and compliance. It was not possible to be secure and compliant, so the compliance team had to document every deviance from the IRS standard and document why, then self-report us and the customer to audit the areas where we were outside the lines. That took a dozen people almost a year to do.

All of that existed because a US state (S Carolina iirc) was egregiously incompetent and ended up getting breached. Congress “did something” about it.
by pedalpete | 2025-05-12 22:45:49+00:00
Blood glucose is dependent on more variables than just what you eat.

Decreased sleep slow-wave activity (not just sleep time, but the actual restorative function of sleep) significantly decreases next day insulin response [1].

This is my area (I work in neurotech/sleeptech), but other things that come to mind are changes in changes in gut biome, which can be altered by previous meals, and I assume is always in flux (not my area of expertise), hormonal changes, I'm sure there are others.

However, the conclusion that it undermines the CGM measurements. In fact, I think this makes CGMs more valuable, not less. For those without diabetes, I always thought you'd use the CGM for a few weeks, figure out what your body responds to, and then sort out your diet.

This shows that it isn't that simple, and that we likely need to be monitoring more regularly. If my breakfast spiked my glucose unexpectedly, that may be a signal that I should change my lunch in order to reduce the likelihood of another spike. It becomes about constant management, rather than a 1 time look under the hood.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2022.03.005
by raufakdemir | 2025-05-12 22:46:27+00:00
Good questions.

1) the integrations are done traditionally so with REST/SQL. The MCP/REST search layer rests on the data that gets synced.

2) most providers are painless. Slack doesn’t want major exports in one go but most developers point at a single channel anyway so the rate limit errors don’t bite too much.

3) this is all orchestrated by the platform itself. Incremental syncs will receive the latest “watermark state” and sync from there. Hashes are used to compare data for persist actions (update/insert/keep)
by tuatoru | 2025-05-12 22:46:50+00:00
Educational credentialling will have to change in the new environment of AI existence. Students will have to be evaluated in real time, in controlled situations.

This has been happening for a while in medical ed, with the OSCE system (objective structured clinical examination). [1]

I am not sure how such a method transfers to evaluating English Lit majors or MBAs, but University professors are supposed to be smart. I'm sure they'll figure it out.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_structured_clinical_...
by netsharc | 2025-05-12 22:48:16+00:00
I wonder how a system with 2 planets with intelligent lifeforms would've developed culturally and politically... if both civilizations grew at the same rate, 2 Galileos would've looked at the other planet and figured out "we have neighbors!", but it'd be several hundred more years before communication could be done. Even know we don't have manned missions to Mars or Venus...
by wnevets | 2025-05-12 22:49:02+00:00
> . If we're talking about the views of the copyright office and how that relates to artists, it's implicit that we're staying in copyright land, because there has never been a case about style-as-IP in visual art.

This article is literally about the copyright office finding AI companies violating copyright law by training their models on copyrighted material. I'm not even sure what you're arguing about anymore.
by happyopossum | 2025-05-12 22:49:35+00:00
This is the type of thing that the linked studies refute - there are either too many external variables to control, or our bodies glucose response is far more complex than we currently understand. Or both - both of the above seem possibly true at the same time.

Either way, if something as simple as eating a few bites of bacon before you eat your toast can change your glucose response, manually logging your meals for Zoe isn’t gonna provide enough data for any reliable extrapolations.
by 0xTJ | 2025-05-12 22:50:24+00:00
A fun read, but I do find it a bit odd that in 30 years the author doesn't think that we would have reverse-engineered making CPUs, or at least gotten as far as the mid-70s in terms of CPU production capabilities.

Also, the 10k years lifespan for MC68000 processors seems suspect. As far as I can see, the 10,000 figure is a general statement on the modelled failure of ICs from the 60s and 70s, not in particular for the MC68000 (which is at the tail end of that period). There are also plenty of ICs (some MOS (the company, not the transistor structure) chips come to mind) with known-poor lifespans (though that doesn't reflect on the MC68000).
by anyfoo | 2025-05-12 22:52:17+00:00
Wow, someone else who (used to be) using Clash. I still use it for everything I can in my (hobby) FPGA projects. I'm not sure I've used GADTs, but I've certainly made use of other more "advanced" parts of the type system, like type families.

What you're doing here is pretty cool, I think I will start doing so, too. I have a number of places where I use "undefined" instead. (The "undefined" from the Clash Prelude, which translates into a "don't care" signal state.)
by SigmundA | 2025-05-12 22:52:20+00:00
Solar hot water has to account for pumping losses as well, its going to be in the same ballpark but the electric heat pump hot water system is much more flexible in how the power is used and decouples production from use along with electrical vs plumbing on the roof which is simpler and dare say less prone to issues.

Solar thermal heating used to make more sense but cost of photovoltaics has come down so much along with relatively cheap heat pump systems nobody is doing the former anymore it seems.

I just got a large solar system installed and next up is a heat pump water heater as thats the second largest user of power next to the HVAC, plus it will cool and dehumidify my garage some where the solar inverter and batteries are located, converting some of the waste heat from the inverter into hot water at the same time.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-12 22:52:20+00:00
All the more reason to bring such initiatives inhouse and not outsource them.

You can hope that a defense company is doing the right things in terms of supply chain attacks, but that's a pretty lucrative corner to cut. They'd not even need to cut it all the time to reap benefits.

The only other alternative is frequent audits of the defense company which is expensive and wouldn't necessarily solve the problem.
by muzani | 2025-05-12 22:52:37+00:00
I have a list of technical questions I tend to stumble over. Things like SSL pinning, cache management, CI/CD, github stuff, and DI. Often things that colleagues have set up 3 years ago and are now just a function call on Slack.

Every interview will ask the same questions: "Tell me something about yourself. Why would you leave such an awesome job? Are you willing to take a pay cut for equity? Why do we need you instead of paying a junior and giving them AI? How do you practice Agile in your workplace? How would you train a junior? How much are you being paid now? How do you feel about trans people and dogs?"

Some of these are traps. The only wrong answer is sounding defensive or evasive. So it's important to practice taking these head on.

I find that if you nail the first interview with the decision maker(s), you will get the job. You can fail the interview but they'll even give you another one because they see it as some kind of error. If you excel at the technical interview and don't pass the vibe check, they'll find a reason to reject you. Then they'll pick at the number of past jobs you held (too many or too few), resume gaps, 'culture fit', etc. And if they absolutely find nothing to reject you for, you'll get rejected for being overqualified.

Also it's important to interview for the role you're applying for, not the one you hold. For me, it's a shift – founding engineer/staff+/TL/EM/CTO at this point. The IC roles aren't being evaluated from an IC angle. They're being evaluated from an angle of whether I can lead product next year once the company has raised $100m.

They don't know anything about you. They don't know that I used to spend my teenage years as a kind of PM making games with strangers over the internet. The unwritten question I have to answer by the end of the interviews is, "Can this engineering degree nerd from a developing Muslim majority country lead a team of white people who went to MIT?"
by etblg | 2025-05-12 22:52:39+00:00
Since you brought up sampling in music and I feel compelled to point this out in any AI thread when that gets mentioned:

sampling machines don't give you a free pass to sample music all willy nilly, if you're going to publish the result for commercial gain you have to clear the sample, the original artist is getting royalties from it. This is something that was fought for and won by musicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music,_Ltd._v._W....

(Not that you implied otherwise, I just want to point that out)
by matkoniecz | 2025-05-12 22:53:17+00:00
> and driving a wedge - in this case "woke" and "DEI" - is exactly how trump and goons get average people to consent, or even support, this decimating of our research apparatus.

Note that consent/support is partially result of this wedge being based on a real problems.

Note: I am not claiming that what is happening is a good idea. But there are multiple reasons why many people actually support this or see no reason to spend their energy on opposing it. And some of them are quite valid.

I think that https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w... mostly matches my viewpoint

> It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it. But surely it also reflects poorly on the Republicans when they propose it for cancellation just because it did include the sentence about minorities. Just fund research to cure cancer without judging it on whether there’s a sentence about minority outreach in the grant proposal!

> Still, if true that would be ~500 woke grants representing ~$250 million in funding. I agree with Cruz that the government has funded a lot of woke garbage. Getting rid of it ought to be an easy win. But this just makes it even worse that the administration has bungled it so badly that they make the DEI establishment look like paragons of competence in comparison.
by thechao | 2025-05-12 22:53:28+00:00
I've talked to my rep about the idea of "credit card cancellation": the idea that you should be able to go through your bank (or you credit card provider's web app) go to a recurring charge and click "cancel" from there. I'm pretty sure most major credit card companies would be on board; what's stopping them is the legal thicket of contracts that are in the way. What the CC providers need is a clear framework from the legislature to support them. The FTC ain't enough.
by godelski | 2025-05-12 22:53:31+00:00
Even more importantly, they are GPU based. The US has 3 exascale computers (out of 3 in the world). I should stress that these measurements are based on LINPACK, and are at fp64 precision. This is quite a different measurement than others might be thinking of with recent announcements in AI (which are fp8)

https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/
Ask HN: I burnt out, quit my job – any advice on moving to freelance/consulting?
by gardennoise | 2025-05-12 22:53:35+00:00
I've been working as a software engineer for close to 7 years now, ended up burning out pretty bad after a long period of impossible deadlines and lots of pressure at work, so I decided to quit.

I did not look for other work - really needed a break, and luckily cost of living in my country is pretty low so I could afford it.

2 months later I feel much better and I would like to get back to working, though I would like to have more direct control over how expectations and deadlines are set - so I thought that freelancing would be good way to get that.

I'm wondering if I am thinking in the right direction here, and also how the situation is on the freelance market currently, I did some reading up and I hear that AI has caused a lot of competition/spam on Upwork and other platforms.