MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by misja111 | 2025-05-12 18:43:11+00:00
The reason that a byte array is in reality layed out as a (mostly empty) long array in Java, is actually for performance. Computers tend to have their memory aligned at 8 byte intervals and accessing such an address is faster than accessing an address that's at an offset of an 8 byte interval.

Of course it depends on your use case, in some cases a compact byte array performs better anyway, for instance because now you're able to fit it in your CPU cache.
by twoquestions | 2025-05-12 18:43:20+00:00
Why do regular people like this? For real, is it all "Those People Have it Worse", or do they just like the government making things worse for it's own sake?

There's people who like this who will never benefit at all, does anyone know why?

I don't get it. Then again I don't get the appeal of tearing the wings off of flies either.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-12 18:43:47+00:00
The insane risk aversion in the USA is at least an opportunity.

I also got my land incredibly cheaply that way. No one wanted to take a risk on an unproven plot of land, everybody wants some place where they can already legally get water/power/electric. By doing all the legwork and legal to prove utilities I basically made $30k profit in a year just by passively testing and connecting water/electric/septic at my own risk.
by MrPowerGamerBR | 2025-05-12 18:44:29+00:00
If it is how I think it is, then yes, it is a proof that you attended the event.

I'm not sure how it is in other countries, but in some countries (example: Brazil) some courses (like Computer Science) require you to have "additional hours", where these hours can be courses, lectures, etc related to the course.

To prove to the university that you did these courses, you need a certificate "proving" that you participated. Most of the time they are a PDF file with the name of the event, the date and your name in it.
by ajross | 2025-05-12 18:44:33+00:00
Lots of "DSLs" are general purpose Turing-complete environments. What distinguishes them is their specific features that target a particular usage, usually just limited to syntax that directly reflects the domain in question.

But my point upthread is that even though these are "general purpose", they're still extremely limited in Practical Expressive Power for Large Scale Development, simply by being weird things that most people don't learn.

Python and Rust and even C++ projects can draw on decades of community experience and best practices and tools and tutorials that tell you how to get stuff done in their environments (and importantly how not to do things).

Literally the smartest people in software are trying to help you write Python et. al... With e.g. SystemVerilog you're limited to whatever the yahoos at Synopsys thought was a good idea. It's not the same.
by hn_acker | 2025-05-12 18:44:45+00:00
> “The Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon,” Alina Habba, the Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, posted on X.

Let's ignore that Baraka did in fact listen to the warnings.

> “The ICE personnel came out aggressively to arrest him and grab him,” said Julie Moreno, a New Jersey state captain of American Families United. “It didn’t make any sense why they chose that moment to grab him while he was outside the gates.”

I can entertain the notion that Ras Baraka may have committed illegal trespass by wrongly passing a front gate for some number of minutes, but getting a warning and listening to it surely is a normal and sufficient remedy.

> The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that as a bus of detainees was entering the detention center, “a group of protestors, including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility.”

> Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin was quoted in the statement as calling it “beyond a bizarre political stunt” and saying it put agents’ and detainees’ safety at risk.

> “Members of Congress are not above the law and cannot illegally break into detention facilities. Had these members requested a tour, we would have facilitated a tour of the facility,” McLaughlin said.

No one broke into the facility. The mayor (probably?) trespassed. The members of Congress had permission to go in [1]:

> Watson Coleman's office told Axios they "arrived at Delaney Hall today at about 1PM to exercise their oversight authority as prescribed by law. After a period of explaining the law to the officials at the site they were escorted in."

If I give the DHS's framings some charity, I would appreciate if Assistant Secretary McLaughlin (and everyone above her) were to apply the same standards of "beyond a bizarre political stunt", `put safety at risk`, and "illegally break into" to January 6th, 2021.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/05/09/newark-ice-facility-ras-bar...
by tristor | 2025-05-12 18:44:55+00:00
> So people with a Latin background are not part of the public?

Hispanic people don't like being called "latinx" so anything with that word in it is pretty much automatically invalidated as being credulent, especially if it is purporting to be helping people when they're colonizing their language.

The person you're responding to is way overplaying their case, though, most of the funding that was cut wasn't DEI related, but let's also be serious people here.
by photonthug | 2025-05-12 18:45:33+00:00
Sorry but I reject being labeled as a liberal, I'm not interested in bothsideism or whataboutism, and I don't much like groups, teams, or cliques of any kind. I tend to hold everyone to same high standards of integrity because I just don't like lies, hypocrisy, hidden motives, self-interest masquerading as ethical behaviour, etc.

I do have some advice though. If you want a stronger left, then you should probably stop using a label like "enlightened centrists", because this is just one of the ways that the left alienates their own allies for not being orthodox enough. Similar to what the right calls RINOs. It's not productive, it's immature playground politics, like when middle-schoolers get mad at their friends for not hating their enemies "enough" to be real friends. Instead of thrashing around trying to work out whether someone is on your "side".. maybe just listen to what they are saying and evaluate it on those terms
by kaycebasques | 2025-05-12 18:45:36+00:00
By results I assume that you're asking about the related pages experiment? The results were definitely promising. A lot of the calculated related pages were totally reasonable. E.g. if I'm reading https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/development/html_themes... then it's very reasonable to assume that I may also be interested in https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/theming.html
by bityard | 2025-05-12 18:46:18+00:00
That sucks. I've been selling things on eBay for... longer than I care say out loud but I've read enough horror stories that I don't think I could get the nerve to sell anything high-priced for fear that I would get scammed by a "professional buyer" like you did. They know eBay's rules and how to work within them to get what they want. Unfortunately, as a seller you have to know the rules as well as they do (or better) to keep the scam from working, and even that is not always a guarantee.

When there is a dispute or request for a refund, as a seller, the hardest part is knowing the correction action to take when these things happen. If you do the wrong thing, or do the right things in the wrong order, you unknowingly paint yourself into a corner. You basically have to be your own "ebay rules lawyer" and read _all_ the docs and policies (some of which are hard to find) as well as discussion threads.

One of the big things I do to defend myself against scammer buyers is I make it clear that I don't offer partial refunds, only full product returns where return shipping is (initially) at the buyer's expense and the shipping is reimbursed ONLY if the item is received by me in good condition. This isn't 100% protection against the kind of scam you encountered, but it's been effective for me so far.
by ryao | 2025-05-12 18:46:31+00:00
The Rheem heat pump for domestic hot water that I have in my home claims a maximum energy savings of 75%. That implies that at 20% efficiency out of my solar panels, the efficiency of photovoltaic panels + the heat pump is equal to the 80% efficiency of solar hot water. However, this ignores losses from DC to AC and the lines.

The photovoltaic panels have the added bonus that the energy can be used for other purposes (e.g. transport, HVAC, computers, cooking, laundry, A/V equipment) should my hot water needs be low compared to what the system is designed to produce. However, from a pure efficiency standpoint, it is unclear to me which approach is better. They seem to be a rough tie, with losses for both approaches making the real world worse than ideal conditions. I am not sure if one is better than the other in the actual real world and if anyone who knows the answer is kind enough to share it, I would find the answer enlightening.
by lotharcable | 2025-05-12 18:46:34+00:00
There is a 0.0% chance I am going to buy a car that requires a network connection.

All of this is complete nonsense and a huge waste of resources.

Especially for electric cars. These things are so simple that it is not funny. The level of sophistication required is barely much more then what went into a 1990s era Sony Walkman.

What a humiliating fail for modern automakers.
by baobun | 2025-05-12 18:46:40+00:00
Revert recent changes on github.com so content can render without waiting for dynamically loaded JS from a dozen domains.

The whole site used to degrade gracefully and progressively enchance. Now, it's obvious that change is driven by the Clueless. Accessibility, usability, efficiency and privacy all going down the drain view by view as the "improvements" spread.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-05-12 18:46:45+00:00
You can't just hit "pause" on this stuff.

I have at least one friend who runs a biomedical research lab.

From conversations, here is what it going on:

- incoming students and researchers have been retracting their applications because of fear of ending up in detention for having something the regime doesn't like on their phone or on social media, or having their photo snapped at a protest about something the regime doesn't like, or their research being on a subject the regime doesn't like...or even something as stupid as the letters "trans" appearing as part of a word like "transgenic." (That's actually happened.)

- the schools have had to retract offers for others because there's no money to pay their stipends or for their lab/office space

- meeting with their administrations to discuss how long their schools can float salaries for lab staff. Admin assistants, scientific support staff like lab and animal technicians, and so on.

- planning phases of the euthanization of their organism / animal models

- planning phasing of the liquidation of lab equipment (in a market being flooded with such equipment)

My friends are talking about not being able to bear making their techs or researchers mass-euthanize research animal populations (typically rodents) and doing it themselves, in tears. Many of them justify the normal 'sacrifice' of research animals because their deaths help us advance science - but in this case, it's just because some transactional dickhead can't directly draw a crayon line between their research and GDP. But it's also because it's a visceral representation of scientific progress being destroyed. All to "own the libs" (but really to give billionaires tax cuts.)

One said they are trying to figure out what to do now that their career, which they have spent two decades of 60+ hour weeks on, is basically over - what little positions are left will see hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Salaries will plunge both out of necessity and a saturated labor supply.

The damage that has been done in less than 6 months to scientific research is immesurable and the consequences will be generational.

If you don't believe me, go through your list of friends, coworkers, family, etc and see who works in research and see what they're posting on social media or talk with them.

Got any friends who work in companies that make scientific equipment, reagents, etc? They might not have a job already, or soon.

Kids get into science in part because their parents or a family member is in science. Or they see a cool show on PBS about science. All that's going away. We're going to see a precipitous drop in the number of people pursuing scientific educations and careers.

Billionaires are about to find out that it doesn't matter how much money you have if your kid has cancer and there's nobody to treat them, no drugs being researched or manufactured, no diagnostic equipment (that was in part funded by research project grants), and o on.
by hiatus | 2025-05-12 18:47:01+00:00
> Rarely have I found that compliance to the goals was an issue in themselves. Or that making changes to tick a checkbox correlated to material improvements.

I am confused when I hear people say stuff like this. I guess if you turn on a tool and never look at it again, it won't result in material improvements. But complying with regulations or a particular compliance regime should _absolutely_ result in at least _some_ material improvement to your security posture. Like you can implement segregation of duties just as a checkbox, or use the requirement to revisit the way you gate changes to production, as just one example.
by gnarlouse | 2025-05-12 18:47:05+00:00
The article did not go the direction that I imagined, which I loved. What if we could use embedding spaces to clean up documentation to be more explicit and direct? The biggest thing that stuck with me from my technical writing class was “get to the point”. Finding ways to narrow word choices in an almost 1984’esque ingSoc seems appropriate? Ish?
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-12 18:47:29+00:00
> When I use them — which is every day — I find I’m three to ten times faster. Not only that, I can forget entire courses. I needed a data structure the other day and the LLM suggested the right one. Then it wrote the code for that data structure in a language I barely know. Two complete semester courses replaced by machine learning.

How did you know it was the right data structure? Perhaps you had some courses that put you in a position to evaluate the selection...

> A biologist once asked me to solve a problem in DNA sequence matching and I came back with the claim that it was NP-complete, a class of problems that can take a very long time to solve. He didn’t care. He needed to solve it. And it turns out that most NP-complete problems are fairly easy to solve most of the time. But theoreticians are obsessed with the thin set that confound the simple algorithms, despite being rarely observed in everyday life.

Did a fresh grad write this? The idea that instances of NP-complete problems are often practically solvable is well known. They're upset because they spouted off their half-baked idea and someone, probably not them, figured out it wasn't a real limiter on the task at hand.

> Turing machines present the same problems. Dutiful CS students learn nihilistic results like Rice’s Theorem, which shows that we really can’t analyze computer algorithms at all.

That's not what Rice's theorem shows. Like the halting problem, it means a general solution can't be found for many categories of analyses we want to perform. There are still a lot of things we can determine about algorithms and code despite Rice's theorem.

> Even Apple used stock open-source tools when it created the compiler for Swift.

Stock open-source tools whose development it funded and developers it employed...
by sirbutters | 2025-05-12 18:47:32+00:00
Reminds me of that one time I ordered a super shuttle to the airport, and the website had an offer to get 15% off if I subscribed to that random thing (first month free, cancel anytime). I’m good at immediately marking my calendar to cancel as soon as I got what I want, so I thought this would be a walk in the park. And surely enough, as soon as I was out of the shuttle and got my discount, I immediately cancelled that subscription. Fast forward to 18 months later when I notice a $16.99 charge I do not recognize. I look at my previous statement, it’s there too, the one before, it’s there. I go back 18 months and I see I have been charged $16.99 per month ever since. Bonkers. I try to look up the merchant but I don’t find anything in my emails that match. I forgot how I made the connection but at some point I find that subscription. I call the guys and I ask what’s going on since I cancelled 18 months ago. They say “oh, but actually when you accepted the terms, you also agreed to sign up to that completely unrelated subscription, so yes, you cancelled with us, but you did not cancel that other business”. I call that second business and tell them I’ve never used whatever service they offer, and that sneaky scheme is unacceptable. They say “ok, we can refund the last 3 months”, I say “no, you refund me the entire 18 months”, they say “no”, I say “let me talk to a manager”. Manager picks up, I say “refund the entire 18 months or I report you to the FTC”. And finally they refunded the whole thing. Would not recommend.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-12 18:47:55+00:00
> but to take on power you need other powerful people/networks backing you. Most whistleblowers don't do enough homework.

Doing your homework and having powerful people behind you are orthogonal. You can do all the homework you want but powerful people got in power and staid in power for playing for those in power, they're not gonna throw away all that to die on your hill with you.

You might think you can get away by playing one political side against the other for your protection and rally support, but when it comes to national security, military industrial complex, the ultra wealthy elites, etc, those tend to be part of and fund both sides so it won't work out in your favor as you might expect.

>They just want to dump things out there and hope for the best.

What's the alternative? Once you start "doing your homework" those in power will already find out you're rocking the boat and will lock you up under the usual $ESPIONAGE, $TERRORISM, $PATRIOT laws before you manage to send a text, so your safest bet is to release all info quickly to the public/press while you're still able to.

Time works against you here. The longer you're in possession of dirt that can get those at the top in trouble, the more you risk finding yourself "Epsteined".
by trainyperson | 2025-05-12 18:47:56+00:00
The Barbican is one of my favorite places on Earth and this post in a simple way does such a good job of capturing the beauty and wonder I associate with it. Others have mentioned the greenhouse and the concert hall; I’ll the exhibition space which consistently hosts great exhibits including the only good AI-themed museum exhibit I’ve ever seen (and it was back in 2019).

For those interested / invested, they recently launched a Barbican renewal project: https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/barbican-un...
by brudgers | 2025-05-12 18:48:06+00:00
For me, the art of the The War to End All Wars that impacts me most is the art that doesn't allude to religious and classical themes. E.g.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Sargent%...

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decoru...

They remind me of the importance of art as a non-commercial pursuit. YMMV.
by timewizard | 2025-05-12 18:48:54+00:00
> I’m certain you aren’t that important for anyone to care.

Storage is cheap. We know the NSA hoovers up everything it can and puts in a database. This is facile reasoning.

> So you can get help.

How many accidents resulted in fatalities because 911 couldn't find the victim? What's the percentage on that you think? Is there _no other way_ to get help other than this system?

> I’m sure someone more qualified than you would have already reported if

You're just full of confidence. Pray tell where it comes from. What makes you believe this is true?
by quantadev | 2025-05-12 18:49:04+00:00
A hash is a way of mapping a data array to a more compact representation that only has one output with the attribute of uniqueness and improbability of collision. This is the opposite of what embeddings are for, and what they do.

Embeddings are a way of mapping a data array to a different (and yes smaller) data array, but the goal is not to compress into one thing, but to spread out into an array of output, where each element of the output has meaning. Embeddings are the exact opposite of hashes.

Hashes destroy meaning. Embeddings create meaning. Hashes destroy structure in space. Embeddings create structures in space.
by dudeinjapan | 2025-05-12 18:49:05+00:00
I'm against this because it will be abused, and cause chaos vis-a-vis well-established conventions in the Ruby world.

The example given in the ticket, defining a global constant PORT in the root namespace and then loading it separately into two apps--nobody actually does in Ruby this today, because it is well-known that it will cause conflicts. Any gem (Ruby library) that did this sort of thing has long-since been barked at and corrected--the solution is simply to nest the constant inside your main module e.g. MyGem::PORT.

Now, gems will be free to define whatever constants/modules/etc. they want. When someone files an issue, the response can be: "Oh you don't like that I redefined Array? Load my gem in a namespace!"
by RHSeeger | 2025-05-12 18:49:07+00:00
> I find that my blood glucose spikes much later than what is suggested.

I'm a type 1 and my blood glucose can response can vary wildly. Sometimes it can spike quickly (15-30 minutes), other times it can take 2, 3, or even 4 hours. The reverse is also true, in that insulin can sometimes effect me quickly, and sometimes it can take effect 3+ hours later. In general, when having a big meal, I'll take a "fairly large" amount of insulin, but not enough for the entire meal; then I'll take more[1] when my blood starts increasing into 200+ range. Otherwise, I risk it dropping because the insulin was having a "fast" day but the food was "slow".

My endo finds it weird, but we've gone over specific cases of it, including exactly what I ate, when, and what the CGM history for the day looked like. I'm just defective :)

[1] Note I'm not talking about reactively taking more insulin after the "right" amount turned out not to be enough (which is generally a bad idea). Rather, I'm talking about splitting what I know to be about the right amount... into 2 different doses.
by cduzz | 2025-05-12 18:49:23+00:00
I think that the ability to learn adjacent skills (and I'd call fintech and physics PhD adjacent) is a function of domain expertise. For instance, if I were running an automotive body shop I'd put the expert hvac technician slightly ahead of the quant in the "how quickly they'll pick it up" and I'd put either ahead of the person who's never run down to the end of the "obsessive about a subject" maze. For lots and lots of kids, that "obsessive about a subject" focus comes naturally and often is beaten out of them by "please go back to your data entry task; we're not paying you to find weird buffer overruns while speed-running mario brothers 720"