MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cmontella | 2025-05-09 16:17:10+00:00
> If the OP's specific research was into The Changing Mating Habits of the Delta Smelt Due to Habit Destruction, then probably it was money that could far better spent paying tuition for, say, medical students or even just letting tax payers keep their money and spend it in a way that directly benefits their family, their community, and themselves.

The problem is it's very hard to know ahead of time which research directions will yield fruit. If we knew how to only fund good research, then science funding would be very easy. Unfortunately, that's not the case -- oftentimes things that are sure bets fail, and things that are rejected as "not promising" result in a breakthrough. So we have to fund a lot of stuff, some of which is not obviously going to yield a great ROI.

On the one hand, yes, funding science the way we do results in a lot of "wasted" funding. There are tons of inefficiencies. On the other hand, the way we fund science has been wildly successful in terms of the benefits we have reaped. Look around you, you can see them everywhere in every sector.

The danger is we pull back funding to things that are "sure bets" and they turn out to be duds while we miss out on other less sure opportunities. That would be a loss for everyone involved.
by kpcyrd | 2025-05-09 16:17:36+00:00
ssh-ed25519 is different from a gnupg ed25519 key, since it doesn't have any of the technical baggage that gnupg has. Even with ed25519, sha1 is still hardcoded into RFC4880, the standard that gnupg implements. Fingerprints are typically 40 characters long since they are hex sha1 hashes. There's RFC9580 that changes this to sha256, but it's still very new and currently being finalized.

But even then, when using ed25519+sha256 to generate a signature, you're still going to do this over a sha1 hash because of the way git works.
by jansan | 2025-05-09 16:17:43+00:00
Well, this is actually the idea behind it. There is an internal object model, but currently the mapping from SVG to the internal model is almost 1:1. One first exception is clip paths, which in Hyvector is a path with stroke and fill and a content that is clipped outside that path. In SVG handling of clip paths is quite cumbersome and not very intuitive.

If I can continue developing this other features will follow: Corner rounding of paths, non-destructive boolean operations, variable stroke widths, multiple fills, distortions, etc.

The thing is that I want to keep SVG as the export format, because it it really good for the wbe can be styled with CSS. Therefore effects must be exportable as true SVG (even if composed of multiple SVG elements), not some fake bitmap inserted into an SVG as some other editors do it when exporting SVGs. This for example means that there will be no conic gradients unless they are supported by SVG one day.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-09 16:17:44+00:00
Maybe because the weight was "close enough", at least closer than iron, so they figured they must be closely related. So we just need a "little bit" of work to it make shiny and beautiful and 40% heavier or so.

And I am sure they tried to change silver to gold as well. It's even closer in weight so an even a smaller changer is needed.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-09 16:17:55+00:00
It’s one thing to take an acronym and “demote” it to a common noun if it’s being used often by wide public (not unlike how proper nouns become common nouns), it’s another thing to randomly pretend that a regular noun is an acronym. I’m looking at you, photographers shouting “RAW” in all caps whenever the topic comes up. “WASM” rubs me wrong for the same reason.

I admit to being guilty of this and mimicking whatever form I encounter first, but then I’d switch once I look it up. I don’t quite understand why would anyone do otherwise.
by havblue | 2025-05-09 16:18:08+00:00
At the risk of splitting hairs, I was suggesting that people "promote the right to repair" more and not necessarily "pass legislation". While I agree that it's a good goal to buy less plastic junk, the subject probably needs more of a positive narrative behind it to gain traction. Repairability is a positive way to look at our stuff (eg speed queens and Toyotas last forever!). Plastic junk is a negative.
by gr4vityWall | 2025-05-09 16:18:25+00:00
> If you want to run code written in other languages in the browser, you could just as well compile to JavaScript.

That's how asm.js was conceived. You can compile other languages to a subset of JS that is super JIT-friendly and performs stupidly well.

I think WASM came to be due to a desire to run that resulting code in a heavily sandboxed environment, with much more limited access to certain APIs than the rest of your JavaScript code.

Unrelated, but it's not clear to me why you're getting downvoted. Your point sounded genuine and didn't look like flamewar bait.
by burningChrome | 2025-05-09 16:18:28+00:00
Back in the early aughts when I was still in college, My roommate was an IE and worked as an efficiency engineer intern during his Summers. I vividly remember him talking about the company he was working for had a huge project to improve UPS's efficiencies. Their big improvements was to add dozens and dozens of conveyor belts in order to move the packages faster. He concluded his experience by saying, "Yeah man, its crazy, this is what the future is going to look like. This is how they're going to automate everything."

Interesting to know companies are still using them as a means to automate their work.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-09 16:18:43+00:00
There are much easier ways to convert lead into gold.

If neutrons could be made an order of magnitude cheaper (hello, Helion?), conversion of Hg-196 into gold by neutron capture might even be economical. The isotope would have to be separated but there's an interesting way of doing that using magnetic separation of electronically excited atoms. The total gold production would be just a fraction of current global gold production from mines.
by datadrivenangel | 2025-05-09 16:19:10+00:00
Is the team/company's engineering culture decent otherwise?

Ultimately, someone at the company wants to have software that makes them more money or keeps them from worrying about losing money or going to jail (compliance.

Someone at the company thinks they can improve the state of software maintenance/delivery by changing the process. Maybe this is a VP accommodating a micromanaging CEO and doing something so that they can be seen doing something, but it could also be a well-intentioned change, in which case they want either more productivity -- with the theory that more software sooner results in more value -- or more predictability, with the theory that managing teams more closely results in less surprises and delays.

Identifying the root motivation may help propose alternatives, so it may be worth talking 1-1 with someone in leadership to try to understand the motivation. "On team X we're going to move to 1 week sprints. For my contextual awareness to better help implement this change, are we primarily hoping to increase predictability, even if velocity ends up decreasing, or should we focus more on increasing velocity even if work ends up carrying over?"
by netsharc | 2025-05-09 16:19:33+00:00
How is it possible that you still see the chance that the actions are being done in "good faith"? In my opinion you'd have to construct a lot of "visual barriers" in order to not see the "full picture" of what kind of people the current regime is made of, and what their motivations would be...

You'd have to be looking away, because looking at it would mean admitting you've been wrong.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-09 16:20:17+00:00
No, a priest must never coerce a penitent to betray themselves. This would be tantamount to the priest betraying the penitent, don't you see?

Confessors are generally advised to assign satisfaction [penance] that consist of prayers or other strictly spiritual works, so that they are easily completed and remain entirely in the internal forum.

A priest who tried to withhold absolution from a penitent, on the condition of the penitent turning themselves in or confessing to secular authority, that priest would be sanctioned, up to the penalties for breaking the seal of confessional.
by spacemadness | 2025-05-09 16:20:34+00:00
Trust me it’s embarrassing for a lot of us that have traveled to countries with decent rail travel. Part of it is the shamelessness of the car industry for lobbying for decades to shackle everyone to a car. Now the car is an engrained part of American culture and makes our cities much more ugly, isolating, loud, and dangerous than they need be.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-05-09 16:21:03+00:00
> You think all the work they do to bring you iOS does not deserve compensation?

Of course it does. And if iOS brings that much value, then charge a license fee for the purchase of iOS.

But trying to recoup the cost of iOS by taking a cut if store transactions is anti-competitive.

If the store were split off into its own company, would it make any sense to Apple for that company to take all the revenue for the value the store provides? Of course not. Let the store compete on its merits and charge for the value the store provides: API scanning, trusted market place, how publishers are treated... And compete against other stores providing those same values and picking their % cut.
Show HN: Oliphaunt – A native Mastodon client for macOS
by anosidium | 2025-05-09 16:21:19+00:00
I’ve been building Oliphaunt, a native Mastodon client for macOS, as a solo project — designed to be fast, lightweight and feel right at home on the Mac. It’s not built with Catalyst or Electron framework.

Key features:

• Native macOS UI using AppKit with some SwiftUI integration (not a web wrapper)

• Core Data for local caching

• Responsive, keyboard-friendly interface

• UX tailored for desktop-class Mac computers

• Supports multiple accounts, cross-instance timelines and search

You can try it via TestFlight (macOS 14+ Sonoma): https://testflight.apple.com/join/Epq1P3Cw

Feedback is welcome here, on GitHub, or via TestFlight: https://github.com/anosidium/Oliphaunt-Feedback-And-Support
by mmooss | 2025-05-09 16:22:02+00:00
First, the crime increase was indeed nationwide, including urban and rural, according to FBI statistics.

Second, this one study says only that property crimes seemed to increase 7% and that there is no other increase, including violent crimes.

Third, it omits the massive benefits of progressive prosecutors, including following the law (and not persecuting disliked people or groups; not manipulating trials with false evidence, etc.; making police and other goverment accountable), actual justice, and reducing jail and prison populations - which saves tax dollars and save enormous damage to communities as people who now can't get jobs become unproductive and as their families are left destitute.

That doesn't match the anti-progressive propaganda, which we should know by now is motivated not by truth or concern for the public, but self-centered political gain.
by blazeWayne | 2025-05-09 16:22:09+00:00
It is a god awful pattern! It should be gotten rid of across the web.

However, I have noticed that, on some fields, the field rejects certain input without any message if the input is not the correct intended field type. For example, copying a numeric one time password from an email which gets copied as string and pasting on a field which only accepts numbers. This might look like paste blocking but its not.
by conartist6 | 2025-05-09 16:22:49+00:00
Imagine the problem is picking a path against an unexplored desolate desert wasteland. One guide says that he's the fastest. Runs not walks, at a fork in the way always picks a path within 5 seconds. They promise you that they are the fastest guide out there by a factor of two.

You decide on a second opinion, and find an old wizened guide who says they always walk not run, never picks a path more quickly than 5 minutes, and promises you that no matter what sales pitch the other guide gives they can get you across the desert in half the time and half the risk to your life.

Both can't be true. Who do you believe and why?
by chao- | 2025-05-09 16:22:49+00:00
It feels crazy to me that Intel spent years dedicating die space on consumer SKUs to "make fetch happen" with AVX-512, and as more and more libraries are finally using it, as Intel's goal is achieved, they have removed AVX-512 from their consumer SKUs.

It isn't that AMD has better AVX-512 support, which would be an impressive upset on it's own. Instead, it is only that AMD has AVX-512 on consumer CPUs, because Intel walked away from their own investment.
by adamcharnock | 2025-05-09 16:23:10+00:00
This is exactly what we do (but now you mention this I think we should spell this out much more clearly to our potential customers)

We move companies onto bare metal, effectively giving them their own private cloud. This about halves their costs, doesn’t impact their engineering team as we handle the migration, and then we also include ongoing monthly engineering time to support their infra team. Overall it is a win-win for everyone (well, except AWS)

(https://lithus.eu)
by fallingknife | 2025-05-09 16:23:23+00:00
Every large company I have ever worked for has had noticeably lower standards for women and minorities (except for Asians of course because fuck them in particular). They will never say it in the trainings because they know it's illegal. They will never tell anyone anything except for "don't discriminate" but then they will incentivize discrimination by things like "diversity goals" (quotas) and setting recruiter bonuses higher when they bring in favored "victim" groups. Of course if they set higher bonuses for hiring white people the courts would immediately smack them down for discrimination, but it's apparently "legal" as long as - 1. it's implicit, 2. you deny it exists, and 3. it favors a group that the liberals approve of.
by chermi | 2025-05-09 16:23:51+00:00
Again, I'd say based on the conditions for the theory to hold, the US couldn't prove or disprove the theory either way. I guess to summarize my stance: we don't know what the learning curve for nuclear is because data that is too messy. That being the case, my prior would weight the theory holding, maybe weakly, given the evidence for it elsewhere. Maybe in a few years we can infer some honest data from China.
by drivingmenuts | 2025-05-09 16:24:05+00:00
No protection for clergy is how far it should go. As far as government is concerned, clergy should be exactly the same as any other civilian. Confession, in this case, is about a person’s relationship with a deity, over which government can make no claim, or relationship to church law, likewise.

No religious authority or relationship should receive special treatment under civil law.

This is not an “it’s for the children” argument, but rather about complete separation of church and state. Religious law should never overrule civil law in any circumstance, in the US.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-05-09 16:24:50+00:00
Indeed, people usually contribute to FOSS by supporting the authors group or nonprofit directly, and contributing features and bug reports/fixes.

However, from a maintainability standpoint it is important that a project solves their own needs first. The "eat your own dog food" advice is important, or groups end up fragmenting a project into every pet use-case.

Best regards =3
by drdeca | 2025-05-09 16:25:23+00:00
The part about “is it in the convex hull?” was an important part of the question.

It seems to me that if it isn’t in the convex hull, it could be more fitting to describe it as extrapolation, rather than interpolation?

In general, my question does apply to the task of predicting how a time series of vectors continues: Given a dataset of time series, where the dimension of each vector in the series is such and such, the length of each series is yea long, and there are N series in the training set, should we expect series in the test set or validation set to be in the convex hull of the ones in the training set?

I would think that the number of series in the training set, N, while large, might not be all that large compared to the dimensionality of a whole series?

Hm, are there efficient techniques for evaluating whether a high dimensional vector is in the convex hull of a large number of other high dimensional vectors?
by darth_avocado | 2025-05-09 16:25:24+00:00
Well you also need to account for what kind of deviation are we talking about between the 21. If they selected the 5 because they were the best, but the others showed results that were within say 0-5% of the 5, then sure that is acceptable. But if we’re talking about flipping a coin 21 times, seeing heads 16 times and then choosing the 5 tails outcomes as the results, then I would say that’s pretty unacceptable.
by Johnny555 | 2025-05-09 16:25:25+00:00
This is pretty common among transit agencies, I got on the wrong platform in Japan once and couldn't get back out until I talked to a station agent, the fare gate gave an error and wouldn't open the gates. Not sure if that's better or worse behavior than charging a fare.

It's called an "excursion fare", which is meant for those that just ride the train without getting off and come back to the same station. You can talk to a BART station agent (assuming you can find one) and they'll let you out, or call customer service and they'll reverse the charge.

Modern fare systems should be able to figure out when you've exited right after entering and not charge you. BART is supposed to be adding a 30 minute grace period so if you go in and out of the station within 30 minutes, you won't be charged.

https://www.bart.gov/guide/faq#3
Show HN: UpToTrial – OSS AI agent for clinicaltrials.gov that streams custom UI
by ivalm | 2025-05-09 16:26:39+00:00
I built UpToTrial to test two ideas:

1. Equip an LLM with the right tools to navigate complex APIs (clinicaltrials.gov).

2. Stream structured UI components instead of plain markdown.

What we made:

- Backend (Python/FastAPI): wraps the clinicaltrials.gov API, exposes higher-level actions to the agent, and streams an XML-like markup.

- Frontend (React/TS): incrementally patches the partial stream and maps tags to React components (trial cards, phase progress bars, etc.) for live rendering.

Clinical-trial metadata is dense; cards and timelines surface the important bits faster than prose.

Links:

Demo: https://uptotrial.com

Code (Apache):

– Backend: https://github.com/MaterialModel/uptotrial-backend

– Frontend: https://github.com/MaterialModel/uptotrial-frontend

Next:

If there’s interest, I’ll break out the streaming-UI layer as a standalone OSS library. Feedback and PRs welcome!
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-09 16:27:05+00:00
5k pages in 5 minutes? That's only 16/second. If your generator/server is on the JVM I'd expect it to be capable of more like 5k/second at least (and if you have a sensible `last_updated` or `version` field, you could early return with a Not Modified for even better performance). If you're batch processing, you could do a lot better than that.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-09 16:27:27+00:00
It would sort of be funny to see the best alchemist get the explanation. “Oh dang, I was not even close.”

It is somehow radically simpler in terms of fundamental underlying rules, and radically more complex in terms of… I dunno, emergent complexity or something.

Edit: imagine,

Alchemist, “But then we were right, it is made up of a small number of tiny discrete elements at the lowest level?!?”

Modern physicist: “Oh man… ah, yeah, but here’s the thing about ‘discrete’…”
by oldprogrammer2 | 2025-05-09 16:27:35+00:00
In my opinion, this was decades in the making. Most Americans are sick of the two party system that can't seem to get anything done, as well as with a political system owned by the elite. As odd and bizarre as it is, Trump was able to channel that disgruntlement into a voting bloc. And it certainly doesn't help that the Democratic party has been unable to put forth a charismatic candidate since President Obama.
by zahlman | 2025-05-09 16:28:14+00:00
I didn't expect to get much new out of the article (because I'm accustomed to noticing the complexity and wishing it weren't so), but I love this observation:

> There’s an interesting observation here: The biggest programs so far are the ones designed for humans to interact with. Turns out humans are complicated and making computers do things they want is hard. There’s the argument that humans need to learn computers better, with simpler and more composable primitives, and it will result in great benefits in smaller and more powerful programs. Then there’s the counter-argument that if a program is written once and used many, many times, the extra time a programmer puts into making the learning curve shallower will rapidly be made up for by the time saved by the users. Both these arguments are valid. “Design” is the art of striking a balance between them, and different people will want different balances.

I get that this isn't the main point the author was trying to make (about language/ecosystem comparison, surrounding their approaches to the dependency problem), but.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-09 16:28:15+00:00
Ahh there it is. I figured you weren't American. Look man, politics sometimes comes up on here. I don't see you materializing whenever that happens to pitch a fit. Since America is the most significant nation, and where most of this site's users live, we can expect that when politics-adjacent topics are posted, American politics will always be at the forefront. You're going to have to get over that. If you have a counterargument, I suggest you present it.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-05-09 16:29:39+00:00
My spouse is principal architect for a platform made by a large cloud vendor.

It takes an Act of Congress, a Papal Conclave who produces white smoke on the first vote, Divine Intervention, and Interdiction by a Vice President, all offered in triplicate upon the altar of subpar IT support organizations, to get a ticket closed -with- a resolution in less than a year. If it’s not something they already have a script for it’s almost certainly impossible as far as IT support is concerned.

The company makes billions of dollars a year, employs tens of thousands of people, and they still can’t craft a competent and empowered IT support organization. Even if just for their own developers and technical experts.
by notahacker | 2025-05-09 16:31:55+00:00
They're not spending 55% of their budget on unnecessary administration. Though ironically, having their ideological crusaders check every science paper that mentions the word "bias"[1] to check that it doesn't also mention minorities they wish to normalise bias against will probably increase the administrative overhead...

[1]I think it's probably fair to assume that whoever concluded the word "bias" indicated a likelihood the paper was "woke" struggled with high school statistics and has never read an academic paper of any sort...
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-05-09 16:32:27+00:00
You don't have to "imagine" anything. Here's the 2025 budget request: https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00_NSF_FY25_CJ_Entir...

I'd be interested in discovering what the breakdown is, DEI vs non-DEI, but I wouldn't be surprised if this move was to censor climate change research, since this administration doesn't consider climate change to be real.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-09 16:32:39+00:00
> only to find that they can’t solve the problems but create the kind of institutional damage that reduces the ability of any successors to solve those problems.

I watch all sorts of news. Ultra-liberal Democracy Now!, CNN, ABC, NBC, podcasts on the left and right, right-leaning Fox, etc.

I can say that the right is cheering perceived win after win. From their perspective, tariffs are bringing manufacturing jobs back, what they see as corruption is being rooted out, government is being made leaner, more efficient, and more local. Law is being enforced.

The left seems to be focused on publicizing what they see as losses, assuming that the right will inevitably see the self-evident error of their ways. I don't think this is likely to happen.