MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phatfish | 2025-05-09 21:43:34+00:00
I'm not sure what was supposed to have happened 20 years ago. In 2005 everything seemed great. Maybe it's a reference to post 2008, the previous time America screwed everyone over? The election that spawned austerity was in 2010, so 15 years ago.

The Russian part is even more confusing. In relation to Brexit sure, but that was 9 years ago.
by munificent | 2025-05-09 21:45:15+00:00
> relies on V8 to run, which has multiple orders of magnitude more dependencies.

Actually, this isn't true. (Or at least wasn't a while back.) I used to work with a bunch of ex-V8 folks and they really despised third-party dependencies and didn't trust any code they didn't write. They used a few third-party libs but for them most part, they tried to own everything themselves.
by drivers99 | 2025-05-09 21:45:52+00:00
I dream of making my own OS that would eliminate this completely. It would use a framework of taking turns with the user. When it's the user's turn to provide input, nothing on the screen would change, ever. After the user completes their input, the computer can do whatever and then provide the output when it's done. Command lines pretty much do this all the time. I think there might be an old IBM terminal type that would send a form for the user to fill out and send back. If there were ever notifications (I would prefer not to have them at all), they would be incorporated into the next set of outputs.
by Hasz | 2025-05-09 21:46:18+00:00
This kind of fundamental research though is absolutely worth it. For a fairly small amount of money (on the nation-state scale) you can literally change the world order. Same deal with fusion or other long-term research programs.

Quantum computers are still in a hype bubble right now, but having a "real" functional one (nothing right now is close IMO) is a big a shift as nuclear energy or the transistor.

Even if we don't get a direct result, ancillary research products can still be useful, as you mentioned with fusion.
by twothreeone | 2025-05-09 21:46:55+00:00
That's just ignorance. In crypto "little people" is literally everybody, the "currency" is run by a handful of whales (largely quasi-criminal exchanges and casino mobsters), who have a track record of colluding to manipulate the market and hike up fees. And no, you cannot vote those people out of office. How is that _any_ better?
by bdhe | 2025-05-09 21:48:04+00:00
I think it matters a great deal! If that result comes at the expense of - let's say - progress fighting climate change because Elon also ended up defunding and destabilizing a lot of science with the same instincts that got him to proclaim his mission of going to Mars, it is not obvious that we only ought to focus on the end result, and even if we do, that only one set of end results need focus.

We may be closer to going to Mars, an extremely inhospitable place, at far greater expense than simply making the world we were evolved to survive in a little better.
by trealira | 2025-05-09 21:48:09+00:00
> That's overly alarmist. The one thing the US has going for it when it comes to elections is that they are run by the states, not by the federal government, which insulates them from a lot of possible election meddling.

Ah, that's reassuring. I'm sure Republican state officials won't allege mass voter fraud in 2028 and discount votes they claim to be from illegals when it seems like the election isn't going their way. And I'm sure there won't be violence threatened against election workers from the voters for harboring such fraud, either.
by thesz | 2025-05-09 21:48:12+00:00
These days one's program rarely does purely sequential random access. Usually, there are several threads or requests, all going into same data structure.

In the extreme case where all memory accesses of a immensely massively parallel program are deferred, the result is complete absence of cache misses [1].

[1] https://disneyanimation.com/technology/hyperion/

While our programs usually not ran at Hyperion scale, they still can benefit from accesses shared between processing of several requests.

For one such example, consider speech recognition with the HCLG graph. That graph is created through composition of four WFST [2] graphs, the last one is Grammar, derived from SRILM n-gram language model. This HCLG graph has scale free property [3] due to all G FST states has to backoff to the order-0 model, and some states are visited exponentially often than others.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_transducer#Weighted_automata [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network

By sorting HCLG graph states by their fan-ins (number of states referring to a particular one), we sped recognition process up 5%. E.g., most referred state gets index 0, second most referred is 1, etc, and that's it.

No code change, just preprocessing step that, I believe, lessen the pressure on the CPU's memory protection subsystem.

The speech recognition process with HCLG graph uses beam search [4], there are several (9-20) hundredths of states in the beam front to be evaluated. Most of them have outgoing arc to some of the most visited (fan-in) states. By having these states close to each other we incur less page faults exception handling during processing.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_search

Basically, we shared more MMU information between requests in beam front.

PS

Fun fact: WFST created by OpenFST has "structure of arrays" layout. ;)
by zhisme | 2025-05-09 21:49:17+00:00
The thing is I don't want ruby to meet the fate of javascript. Javascript community is much bigger than ruby will ever be. They had to manage so many people writing too many code, and invented tool for them so they can contribute without making them learn completely new programming language. Easier to jump in. And I should mention typescript types is much better than what we have in rbs/sorbet. They have types inside language, without annotation like what we have separate sig DSL in ruby.

We should invent new programming language typed_ruby and give him separate life, and then history will prove us whether it should have been implemented in the first place. But not try to push it into stdlib and persuade everyone else that it is the right way to go.
by hu3 | 2025-05-09 21:49:20+00:00
> I have yet to come across a go project that doesn't pull in tons of 3rd party code as well.

These have Zero dependencies. It's not rare in Go land.

- https://github.com/go-chi/chi 19k stars

- https://github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter 16k stars

- https://github.com/gorilla/mux 21k stars

- https://github.com/spf13/pflag 2.6k stars

- https://github.com/google/uuid 5.6k starts

Many others have just a few dependencies.
by kpennell | 2025-05-09 21:49:23+00:00
I ride the system all the time and I don't think it's trashy. Also there are the new gates all over that block people from jumping in as easily and that has been cut down quite a bit. I think it's tough for Bart to probably come back still because people don't need to be in downtown SF as much as they used to because a lot of people work from home now, but yeah I just don't think it's fair to say that the system is some trashy system. I think it's mostly pretty nice.
by kibwen | 2025-05-09 21:49:37+00:00
Yes, but you can't enforce this at the language level if your objective is security (at least not for natively-compiled languages). You need OS-level support for capabilities, which some OSes do provide (SeL4, Fuchsia). But if you're in a VM rather than native code then you can enforce capabilities, which is what Wasm does with WASI.
by neonsunset | 2025-05-09 21:50:07+00:00
AVX2 vs AVX512 in this case may be somewhat misleading. In .NET, even if you use 256bit-wide vectors, it will still take advantage of AVX512VL whenever available to fuse chained operations into masked, vpternlogd's, etc.[0] (plus standard operations like stack zeroing, struct copying, string comparison, element search, and other can use the full width)[1]

So to force true AVX2 the benchmark would have to be ran with `DOTNET_EnableAVX512F=0` which I assume is not the case here.

[0]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...
by everybodyknows | 2025-05-09 21:50:37+00:00
Thanks -- thus quote seems on the mark:

> Economics professor L. Randall Wray criticized Reinhart and Rogoff for combining data "across centuries, exchange rate regimes, public and private debt, and debt denominated in foreign currency as well as domestic currency," in addition to "statistical errors," and for lacking a "theory of sovereign currency".
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-05-09 21:51:03+00:00
The same mechanism that lets you convert gold-197 to mercury does in fact work to convert the equivalent isotope (that is, 1u lighter than gold) of the element left of gold on the periodic table to gold.

The only problem, the element left of gold is platinum, and platinum-196 is not even the most common isotope of platinum, making up ~25% of it. You're rather unlikely to be able to make money on this.

(Not that you would have been able to regardless of the price of platinum. There are 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a gram of gold, and a desktop fusor is going to generate ~<1m neutrons per second.)
by jaredsohn | 2025-05-09 21:51:42+00:00
LLMs can probably help maintain them so that probably could be solved if you start using LLMs more.

This maybe already exists, but it would be nice if RBS or Sorbet had a command you could run that checks that all methods have types and tries to 'fix' anything missing via help from an LLM. You'd still be able to review the changes before committing it, just like with lint autofixing. Also you'd need to set up an LLM API key and be comfortable sharing your code with it.
by porcoda | 2025-05-09 21:51:49+00:00
I use it as a C++ alternative on Linux. We ported a substantial code base from C++ to Swift last year and it works great. Performance is better in some places, comparable to C++ in others. Productivity is definitely improved over the C++ codebase. We didn’t use rust for this project after evaluating how that migration would impact how it was designed internally, and we decided it wasn’t the right way to go. I think the “swift is only relevant in apple ecosystem” view is inaccurate these days. Swift certainly isn’t the answer to every project, just like rust or any other language isn’t the universal answer to every project. It’s worth considering though if it is appropriate.
by analog31 | 2025-05-09 21:52:26+00:00
Wow that takes me back. My graduate physics experiment ran on two MS-DOS computers with Turbo Pascal programs exercising the parallel ports. Each machine had a grotesque board that I made, with multiple ADC and DAC channels. I finished in 1993. By that time, of course, everything was obsolete, but I wasn't going to delay my project by upgrading.
by kelnos | 2025-05-09 21:52:29+00:00
Heh, I was in Japan a few weeks ago, and had left my bag in a locker at a station (inside the fare gates). I went back to get it later in the day (when I could check into my hotel), and the station attendant charged me 150 yen just to go in to get it and come right back out!

I get that they want to charge people who ride the trains for... fun?... and then get off at the same station, but it felt really silly.
by dtkav | 2025-05-09 21:54:04+00:00
I'm building a plugin for Obsidian called Relay that makes Obsidian real-time collaborative [0].

It isn't end-to-end encrypted (yet), but you can self host the document collaboration server on a private network (like tailscale).

If you're like me and you need real-time collaboration and privacy but e2ee isn't a strict requirement for your collaborative docs then you might enjoy it.

I also use Obsidian sync for e2ee device sync -- it is a fantastic product.

[0] https://relay.md
by decimalenough | 2025-05-09 21:54:08+00:00
> It's the American experience that decisions are made at the executive level based on faulty intelligence, while people working at the coal face such as yourself have a much better understanding of what's really going on.

The article notes that the people being axed are NSF execs making funding decisions, and contrasts this with the NIH, where panels of outside experts make the call.

I can't say I have personal experience with either, but all things being equal, the NIH's model sounds like it would work better, no?
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-09 21:54:13+00:00
Well that is a goal post. They can do it doesn’t matter if they are allowed to or not. My friends tesla I’ve seen it in action. It goes on the highway. It goes on all the streets even hilly ones unlike waymo. It can even find a free parking spot in the lot and fully park the car. All while he does nothing at all with his hands on his lap. So yeah it totally can self drive.
by kbelder | 2025-05-09 21:54:13+00:00
Statistically, size or quantity is a major part of significance. But that's not really the sense in which 'significant' is being used here... it's being used as a synonym of 'important' or 'meaningful'. In those terms, you have to ask the question, 'significant to whom?' Significance doesn't exist outside of somebody to attach meaning to it.

Most often, the answer is 'to me, the guy making the observation.'

In that sense, that tiny speck of dust in our corner of the galaxy is very significant. At least to me.
by quotemstr | 2025-05-09 21:54:15+00:00
They might think that they don't need metaprograming, but like everyone else, they eventually do.

That's how we get monstrosities like https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/master/sys/sys/q... (plenty of Linux equivalents --- e.g. the tracepoint stuff)

Better to use a language with thoughtful metaprogramming than tack it on badly later.
by krastanov | 2025-05-09 21:54:20+00:00
There has been a programmable electromechanical computer build in the late 1800? Not just a simple calculator? Please share examples, this sounds awesome.

Yes, late 1980s is when I would say quantum computing was conceived.

I gave plenty of examples of positive outcomes thanks to quantum information science in my parenthetical. It is much more than the overhyped VC-funded vapor.
by to11mtm | 2025-05-09 21:55:22+00:00
I'm not the biggest fan of Protobuf, mostly around the 'perhaps-too-minimal' typing of the system and the performance differentials present on certain languages in the library.

e.x. I know in .NET space, MessagePack is usually faster than proto, I think similar is true for JVM. Main disadvantage is there's not good schema based tooling around it.
by dukeofdoom | 2025-05-09 21:55:24+00:00
Can capitalism buy it's own goods it produces without inflation? I heard someone claim that the only way the system balances is by printing money. Workers are paid less than the value they produce, and they're most of the consumers. So governments encourages workers to borrow money from banks (home loans, car loans, credit cards, and so on) to buy the goods they produce. But in the end the government still needs to purchase the excess through deficit spending. Like we saw for example during covid. In Canada government doubled its debt. To keep things from falling apart. And inflation is the only way they made it go on. But it's not sustainable, because now good chunk of taxes go to paying previous government's debt, and citizens get less services in return for more taxes. Clearly this loop is not sustainable too many times.
by counters | 2025-05-09 21:56:29+00:00
> This is an opportunity for private industry to step up and step in, while drastically reducing the size of government.

Did... you actually read the comment you're replying to? They're explicitly stating that there is a large pool of work that _the private sector is actively disincentivized to invest in_, and the only way it gets done is for other mechanisms to fill the gap.

The alternative to federal investment in research isn't the private sector picking up slack. It's for the old patronage system of the 1800's to come back. But that system was effective only when the size of problems was relatively "small" - we need to leverage economies of scale to efficiently pursue many types of cutting edge research.
by Kye | 2025-05-09 21:57:06+00:00
Expansive discussion on what this means in the comments and quote posts here: https://bsky.app/profile/atproto.com/post/3loqxjvk3fs2c

But basically it's the next step toward easy self-hosting of the most important part of Bluesky and AT protocol to have in the hands of users.
by simpaticoder | 2025-05-09 21:57:22+00:00
I've paid attention, and I don't think his goal is to "destroy the USA". His goal is self-enrichment, and side-effects don't matter. He is a master at promising the world, and then deflecting blame when he doesn't deliver, and yet the people love him anyway. It is very easy to destroy something under those circumstances without having the goal of destruction. See Hanlon's Razor.
by triceratops | 2025-05-09 21:57:31+00:00
Computers and electronic markets don't solve currency conversion so easily because it's not just about doing math.

If say a Thai company wants to buy cocoa beans from Nigeria, the Nigerian exporter doesn't have any immediate use for Thai baht if they aren't planning to buy something from Thailand. If exports and imports between two countries aren't relatively balanced there won't be a liquid market between their currencies.
by recursive | 2025-05-09 21:57:51+00:00
> I don't particularly like how control logic needs to be embedded within JSX using ?ternary : operators and .map(() => stuff) within the HTML.

It doesn't.

In my[1] framework, there is JSX, but control flow like map is done with a function.

<ul> { ForEach(model, item => <li>Fruit: { item }</li>) } </ul>

There is a lambda there, yes, but at the top level it's a ForEach() function call.

Likewise, it is possible to use get conditional elements in JSX without using react's ugly approach.

[1] https://mutraction.dev/
by lossolo | 2025-05-09 21:58:37+00:00
You're not alone, someone in ancient Rome probably read a clay tablet saying the denarius was doomed. Centuries later, a merchant in Spain might've heard whispers about the decline of the Spanish real, and a banker in London likely scoffed at predictions of the pound’s fall from grace. Empires always feel eternal, until they’re not. History doesn’t repeat, but it does hum the same tune. Maybe this time isn’t different, just... next.
by SR2Z | 2025-05-09 21:58:54+00:00
> You can’t just keep automating every non-knowledge job away and just hope people find something else to do.

[citation needed]

We've been at it for more than a century now and it seems to be working pretty well for nearly everyone!

Our goal is not to preserve jobs. Our goal is to be more productive for fewer resources.

Jobs in Detroit went away - but so did the people, who found new jobs in other cities. There has been no lasting unemployment from automation, ever.

Human beings are good for more than pulling levers and carrying heavy objects and we do each other a disservice by pretending otherwise.
by krastanov | 2025-05-09 21:59:36+00:00
On the contrary, we have plenty of examples of long-lived (many hours, days, or more) examples of superposition in many solid state materials and chemical systems. For a quantum computer you need both (1) something that can retain superposition and (2) be easily controllable. Point 2 is the difficult one, because if you can control it (interact with it), the "environment" can interact with it and destroy it as well.

All of the examples of macroscopic effects above are possible thanks to effects explainable only through the existence of superposition. It is just that they are not particularly controllable and thus not of interest for storing quantum information.

Another fun point: the example you are focusing on, fusion happening in the sun, is only possible due to the quantum tunneling effect, which is itself dependent on "superposition" being a real thing. Looking past the clouds at our star is already an example of quantum mechanics working, which is very much an experimental observation of an effect possible only thanks to the existence of superposition.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-09 22:00:20+00:00
However, if neutron loading has gone down, and the reactor is the same size, the volumetric power density must also have gone down.

The comment about fission and neutron dpa is misleading. The neutron damage issue is much less bothersome in fission reactors.

Fission produces about 3% of its energy in neutrons, vs. 80% in the DT fusion reaction. The spectrum of fission neutrons is much softer, with a peak around 1 Mev, vs. 14 MeV for DT neutrons. The DT neutrons are above threshold for (n,2n) reactions in most materials, and have much higher cross section for (n,p) and (n,alpha) reactions. The latter is particularly troublesome, as helium accumulates inside materials, forming microscopic very high pressure bubbles that rip the materials apart.

But it's even comparatively worse for fusion than that. In a PWR (for example), the core is carefully designed so that the only parts exposed to unmoderated neutrons are the fuel rods and the replaceable parts of the fuel rod bundles. The latter provide structural support for the fuel rods and are removed along with the fuel rods when the fuel is spent. The actual core supports for the fuel bundles are well away from where the chain reaction is occurring, shielded by water. The mean free path of a fission neutron in water is just a few centimeters, so their energy is quickly dissipated before reaching these components.

So, exposure of permanent reactor components to fast neutrons is essentially a non-issue in PWRs. Even control rods are not exposed much; reactivity is controlled by boric acid dissolved in the water (BWRs do it somewhat differently.)

This same strategy cannot be used in a fusion reactor; the plasma facing surfaces are exposed to the full, unshielded brunt of the DT neutron flux. Maybe a few cm of liquid lithium could be flowed along some surfaces? This is a stretch, particularly in a toroidal reactor.
by bramhaag | 2025-05-09 22:01:25+00:00
I have a Boox Go 10.3 and the hardware is fine.

What is not fine is that they actively violate the GPL [1], use outdated and vulnerable Android and kernel versions, and send loads of telemetry to some Chinese servers [2].

If you do end up going this route, consider not giving it internet access or securing it in other ways. You may also want to consult this guide: https://gist.github.com/fardjad/97baf36de97d1c4ae3953b3d359b...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...

[2] https://github.com/JordanEJ/Onyx-Boox-Blocklist
by neonsunset | 2025-05-09 22:02:30+00:00
AVX512 is not just about width. It ships with a lot of very useful instructions available for narrower vectors with AVX512VL. It also improves throughput per instruction. You're not hand-writing intrinsified code usually yet compilers, especially JIT ones, can make use of it for all sorts of common operations that become x times faster. In .NET, having AVX512 will speed up linear search, memory copying, string comparison which are straightforward, but it will also affect its Regex performance which uses SearchValues<T> which under the hood is able to perform complex shuffles and vector lookups on larger vectors with much better throughput. AVX512 lends itself to a more compact codegen (although .NET is not perfect in that regard, I think it sometimes regresses vs AVX2 with its instruction choices, but it's a matter of iterative improvement).
by KieranB_ | 2025-05-09 22:03:00+00:00
I'm a technical founder exploring ways to improve the user interview process. I'm curious how other founders and product folks manage their user interviews - particularly the note-taking, analysis, and insight extraction parts. If you conduct user interviews: What's your process? What tools do you use? What's most frustrating about it? How do you do it well?

I've also put together a short 7-question survey if you prefer to respond that way: https://tally.so/r/wop2BX

Appreciate any insights you can share!