MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JCattheATM | 2025-05-21 17:20:29+00:00
What do you mean stand on the shoulders of giants?

I'll tell you what...you stand on the shoulders of people who literally instigated and fought for change, and certainly didn't fight or work to keep a status quo that still had so many problems.

> I'm not sure why you feel the notion of conservatism has a hierarchy of goals.

Where did you get that from?

> Finally I think that arguments that conservatism is dangerous are mostly based on the fact

Like it or lump it, in the US at least, it is linked to people that do have dangerous attitudes, not caring about climate change, arguing against socialized health care or welfare benefits, trying to take away rights from minorities...just a constant flood of immoral, uneducated hateful stuff that only ever hurts.
by iLemming | 2025-05-21 17:20:37+00:00
> my personal opinion that first impressions matter.

It certainly often does, but there also examples where maybe it's not the biggest issue? git, vim, LaTeX, ffmpeg — they all find their users despite being so demonstrably bad with "the first impression".

Besides, I feel here you're talking about Emacs-the-text-editor, while what I'm rather babbling about Emacs-the-lisp-machine. You see, my point is, people talk about Emacs-the-text-editor all the time and keep arguing if it's "modern enough" or "outdated", "archaic" or "useless". The same way it can be rationalized as Emacs-the-web-browser, Emacs-the-email-client, Emacs-the-IDE, Emacs-the-version-control-system, etc. Of course, anyone who learned how to operate a decent email client perhaps wouldn't ever see a point of suddenly switching to Emacs-the-email-client, unless they could look at it from my POV — a Lisper's point of view. Because the email client aspect of it has been thoroughly imbued with Lisp, it makes it extremely appealing terrain for me — I can with relative ease erect my creations on top of it, limited maybe only by the boundaries of my imagination, rather than technical limitations.

If only it was possible to convince an entire generation of programmers of unthinkable elegancy and pragmatism of Lisp, wouldn't that be great? Imagine a world where "every programmer knows some Lisp" is the norm, rather than the current assumption that "every programmer is familiar with Javascript, SQL, and Bash" – which, in reality, is almost universally not the case.

That is the essence of my plea — it isn't so much about Emacs itself, but about the widespread ignorance of coders who dismiss Lisp as an idea. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't even be here, discussing the reasons why Emacs is so unpopular.
by nknj | 2025-05-21 17:20:40+00:00
one additional difference between chat and responses is the number model turns a single api call can make. chat completions is a single turn api primitive -- which means it can talk to the model just once. responses is capable of making multiple model turns and tool calls in a single api call.

for example, you can give the responses api access to 3 tools: a vector store with some user memories (file_search), the shopify mcp server, and code_interpreter. you can then ask it to look up some user memories, find relevant items in the shopify mcp store, and then download them into a csv file. all of this can be done in a single api call that involves multiple model turns and tool calls.

p.s. - you can also use responses statelessly by setting store=false.
by alex-moon | 2025-05-21 17:20:56+00:00
Hence "community energy" - you do it with your neighbours - this model has worked in Scotland before - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-16/rebel-cities-t... - here is one from earlier this year - https://www.thenational.scot/news/24993445.local-groups-bid-... - and recent changes in planning legislation mean we should be seeing more of these in England in the near future - https://communityenergyengland.org/pages/community-wind
by sensanaty | 2025-05-21 17:21:04+00:00
People, specifically managers and C-levels, are being sold on this crap on the idea that it can replace people now, today as-is. Billions upon billions of dollars are being shoved in indiscriminately, toothbrushes are coming with "AI" slapped on somehow from how insane the hype bubble is.

And here we have many examples from the biggest bullshit pushers in the whole market of their state of the art tool being hilariously useless in trivial cases. These PRs are about as simple as you can get without it being a typo fix, and we're all seeing it actively bullshit and straight up contradict itself many times, just as anyone who's ever used LLMs would tell you happens all the time.

The supposed magic, omnipotent tool that is AI apparently can't even write test scaffolding without a human telling it exactly what it has to do, yet we're supposed to be excited about this crap? If I saw a PR like this at work, I'd be going straight to my manager to have whoever dared push this kind of garbage reprimanded on the spot, except not even interns are this incompetent and annoying to work with.
by pjmorris | 2025-05-21 17:21:34+00:00
> If the $450 of value was so easy to extract, why wouldn't China simply assemble it in their own country and take the whole pie?

As someone else pointed out, they do, under various odd brand names.

You make what seems like an obvious point. However, The iPhone is assembled in China for the ballpark cost you mention, and sells for double the $450 price you mention... so they must have reasons to not take the whole pie.
by westurner | 2025-05-21 17:21:46+00:00
Notes re: CFD, Navier Stokes,

"Deep Learning Poised to ‘Blow Up’ Famed Fluid Equations" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31049608

https://github.com/chennachaos/awesome-FEM4CFD?tab=readme-ov...

>> Numerical methods in fluid mechanics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_methods_in_fluid_mec...

jax-cfd mentions phiflow

jax-cfd > Other awesome projects: https://github.com/google/jax-cfd#other-awesome-projects

PhiFlow: https://github.com/tum-pbs/PhiFlow/

We had a monochrome green aerodynamic simulation app literally on floppy disks in middle school in approximately 1999 that was still cool then. IIRC various keyboard keys adjusted various parameters of the 2d hull that was tested to eventually - after floppy disc noises - yield a drag coefficient.

TIL that the teardrop shape maximizes volume and minimizes drag coefficient, but some spoiler wings do generate downward lift to maintain traction at speed.

A competitive game with scores and a leaderboard might be effective.

...

Navier-Stokes for compressible and incompressible fluids, but it's a field of vortices with curl so SQG/SQR Superfluid Quantum Gravity / Relativity has Gross-Pitaevskii for modeling emergent dynamics like fluidic attractor systems in exotic states like superfluids and superconductors and supervacuum.

TIL the mpemba effect says that the phase diagram for water is incomplete because one needs the initial water temperature to predict the time to freeze or boil; those have to be manifold charts like HVAC.

There's a Gross-Pitaevskii model of the solar system; gravity results in n-body fluidic vortices which result in and from the motions of the planets and other local masses.

/?hnlog "CFD" :

From "FFT-based ocean-wave rendering, implemented in Godot" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41683990 :

> Can this model a fluid vortex between 2-liter bottles with a 3d-printable plastic connector?

> Curl, nonlinearity, Bernoulli, Navier-Stokes, and Gross-Pitaevskii are known tools for CFD computational fluid dynamics with Compressible and Incompressible fluids.

> "Ocean waves grow way beyond known limits" (2024-09) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631177#41631975

Also, recently I learned that longitudinal waves in superfluids (and plasmas) are typically faster than transverse standing waves that we observe in fluid at Earth pressures.
by philosophty | 2025-05-21 17:22:00+00:00
This is a sign of OpenAI's weakness.

Altman is desperately trying to use OpenAI's inflated valuation to buy some kind of advantage. Which is why he's buying ads, paying $6.5 billion in stock to Jony Ive, and $3 billion for a VSCode fork created in a few months.

Almost anything makes sense when you see your valuation going to zero unless you can figure something out.
by ygjb | 2025-05-21 17:22:06+00:00
Meta Ray Bans and Googles Project Aura are products that I absolutely want, but absolutely don't want to buy them from either of those companies, or any company as invasive as they are.

It's long past time for enhanced privacy regulation in the North American market because these products are going to be wildly invasive as people depend on them to mediate their experience with the world. I don't know what the right answer, and I am very much aware that building products like these that don't focus on monetizing user interaction and advertising would likely mean that they are priced out for lower income users, but I hope someone smarter than me can figure it out :S
by opwieurposiu | 2025-05-21 17:22:40+00:00
If you like Mitochondria stuff, This book about the Krebs cycle and how it was discovered is pretty good: https://nick-lane.net/books/transformer-the-deep-chemistry-o...

The short answer is: First you have to murder a pigeon to extract fresh breast muscle cells. Then you put those cells in a manometer which uses columns of water to measure respiration via tiny changes in gas volume. From there you can add various things like citric acid and see how that affects respiration.

So figuring out mitochondria required murdering a large number of pigeons. Their breast muscles have some of the highest rates of respiration known, many times better then ours.

Reading this book inspired me to attempt to improve my mitochondrial health. So far the only stuff that seems to make a difference is NAD+ and Creatine.
by nickthegreek | 2025-05-21 17:22:43+00:00
It's also an argument to protect the rights of the actual owner of the site. I'll put whatever I want on my website, and you can come to or not. I don't need a bill of rights that limits my freedom of expression. I will present my voice in any fashion I see fit on my website.

Use a browser that allows you to modify the content in a way that presents the content you want. That's the boundary you have to play with. My computer gives the information I want to your computer. Your computer does what it wants with that information.

If your OS doesn't allow you to use a browser of your choice, then that is the restriction you attack. Not mine.
by tetha | 2025-05-21 17:22:45+00:00
> Scaling this up further... I want senior management that is in tune with the unique advantages of different parts of the org, and who then use that knowledge to make better decisions about direction. We can go in direction A, B, or C... that group over there is great at A, so let's pick that and give it to that group. Some see Conway's Law as a sort of "doom", but I've seen it used to the org's advantage with this kind of thinking.

This is something I'm pushing towards in our overall platform - I'm kind of trying to identify both related things, as well as things of similar necessary velocity or lack of velocity and try to put these into a team or into teams close together. If a team has a large mismatch of velocity between their topics, it tends to be straining, tbh.

For example, frontend teams or teams largely fronting AI features with little persistence to manage want to and need to be fast. These guys want to be able to throw stuff at a wall and see what it sticks, or they want to react to shifting trends very quickly. All good and well. It's valid practice in the right situation.

On the other hand, we're a team handling databases, long term archiving, hardware acquisition and management. Handling these correctly is a direct plug keeping customers lawyers down. Yet,sometimes lead time of hardware purchases, racking, configuration, qualification and full utilization can be a quarter of a year. Note that this doesn't apply to standard requests like restores, database provisioning and such. We can stand up necessary standard persistences for new applications within hours if necessary, or a day or two usually.

In the past, we had these different velocities mixed up in teams and it was a mess and frustration for everyone. We were in the middle of larger storage migrations that require some care, and suddenly there's a sales-project crashing in with an ASAP tag preempting everything else. Or a frontend dev suddenly had to do capacity planning for a CI cluster. Overall silly.

Now the projects requiring planning, capacity estimations, budgets and honestly, old-school project planning are in our court and the dev-teams can rely on that and run free and wild however they want. It's much more effective for both sides.
by qubex | 2025-05-21 17:22:47+00:00
It was outcompeted two decades ago. Friendster, Google+, Orkut… they were all outcompeted by the Facebook juggernaut, and even that has become stale in absence of real competition as younger generations have migrated to Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and others.

Friendster was early to the game but it died, and it died for a reason. Let it rest.
by ebrilhante | 2025-05-21 17:23:32+00:00
Very good point! I was so focused on building and eager to share the codebase that I ended up cutting corners on the documentation

I did describe some of the details in this post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/forge-scalable-secure-multi-t...

Fortunately, I’m working on proper documentation this week — it's finally getting the attention it deserves.

Thanks for the nudge!
by 65 | 2025-05-21 17:23:45+00:00
I'd really love to see the combination of all the good things of social media coming together.

Groups with voting like Reddit. Sub groups like Discord. Friend feeds like old Facebook. IM like Discord. A disappearing posts feature like Instagram/Snapchat. Events and things to do in certain areas like S'More. A revamped phpBB forum style in groups. Etc.

And good monetization practices, e.g. selling ad space on groups or on keyword searches.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-21 17:23:51+00:00
> apparently some people with fatigue diseases have damaged mitochondria (eg, Dianna Cowern aka ThePhysicsGirl who has had a terrible long COVID illness)

In these conditions it’s more likely that mitochondrial dysfunction is part of the chain of events leading to the fatigue, not necessarily the root cause of the condition.

Also I have to tread very lightly on this topic to avoid giving the wrong idea: Be a little cautious when taking statements about Long COVID and ME/CFS from individuals, as it’s not uncommon for people to present hypotheses as more concrete than the research suggests. With all due respect to Dianna Cowern, some of her past updates on the topic have blurred the lines between conjecture and fact and she’s collaborated with at least one Long COVID / ME/CFS organization that is known for having members that are sometimes less than scientific about their personal theories. It’s a very difficult and complex topic and it can be hard for patients to stay on top of all the different directions the research is looking.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-21 17:24:19+00:00
Walking certainly seems a lot less intimidating than running though. There's a general expectation that running involves particular footwear and clothing, but you can go for a walk wearing whatever you want. It's a lot easier to persuade someone who doesn't exercise to go for a walk.

Personally, I hate running, but love cycling. If I'm in two minds about whether to go for a cycle, I think to myself "I'll just start off and if I don't feel in the mood I can just come back after 5 minutes".
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-21 17:24:36+00:00
>I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality

Your manager understands it. Their manager understands it. Department heads understand it. The execs understand it. The shareholders understand it.

Who does it benefit for the laborers to refuse to understand it?

It's not like I hate my job. It's just being realistic that if a company could make more money by firing me, they would, and if you have good managers and leadership, they will make sure you understand this in a way that respects you as a human and a professional.
by sylm | 2025-05-21 17:24:52+00:00
In the workshop "From heavy load to lightning fast", Shu Zhao, CMO at @wavespeed_ai, broke down how to handle over 2M daily AI inferences, without losing speed. Upscale Conf is an event for all creators, technologists, and innovators. It's where bold creative minds connect to explore, debate, and show how technology can be used to achieve digital masterpieces.
by ebrilhante | 2025-05-21 17:24:54+00:00
About boot times:

Pod on an existing node (node already running other pods): ~1 minute Fast startup — just schedules the pod and initializes the runner.

Pod requiring a new node (via Karpenter): ~5 minutes Includes provisioning the node, joining the cluster, and launching the pod.

EC2-based cold start (no warm pool): ~5 minutes Similar timeline — launch instance, bootstrap the runner, and register it.

Warm pool (EC2 or pod): Instant Pre-provisioned runners pick up jobs immediately.
by judge2020 | 2025-05-21 17:24:55+00:00
Using a user account to do this is still considered risky since any automated API usage by a non-bot user is against TOS, and they have heuristics (maybe now ML-based heuristics) for banning accounts for 'things that "don't look like what our official client does"'[0].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25215415
by thomastjeffery | 2025-05-21 17:25:06+00:00
Curation instead of moderation.

The worst thing about running a content hosting platform is moderation. You will fail at it, and that failure will hurt people. Even worse, you replace success with victory.

The first move is to let your users help, by giving them the power to moderate their own spaces. Of course, as every web forum (and subreddit) has proven, this isn't a perfect solution. Even the best moderation can never be enough. Moderated spaces become echo chambers that war with one another. That's because power will always be abused for rent seeking. In the case of moderation, that means moderators abusing their authority to monopolize engagement; and narrative converging into dualist team-speak.

So what if we eliminate the hierarchy? Instead of letting a moderator decide what content shouldn't be seen, let users collaboratively decide what content they want to see.

Every published interaction is an attestation. It can be the presence of content itself, or it can be something about content. That might be a category, a logical assertion, an opinion, whatever. By providing a subjective attestation about some content, we can empower users to use boundaries to find content that is interesting, and avoid content that is undesirable. Users could choose the curated lists they trust, and collaborate on consensus.

Objective truth does not exist. Everything written is subjected to a specific perspective. By using boundaries instead of rules, we can accommodate this reality as a first class feature of the system. Friends aren't journalists anyway, so the goal of interaction was never objectivity to begin with.

By reframing interaction this way, we can have conversations instead of debates; and even if you do want to debate, you can leverage attestations to actually argue constructively.
by mrandish | 2025-05-21 17:25:06+00:00
> swapping CPUs would be the easiest task.

My point was not that PA RISC wouldn't have the horsepower to emulate a 68K computer. My point was that Commodore fully emulating the Amiga architecture well enough to play highly-optimized games (which heavily leveraged the complex interactions of the Amiga's co-processors) would be extremely challenging (not due to speed but complexity) and that I was skeptical they would have managed to do it (especially given their depleted resources and software bench). I've discussed this with Amiga engineers who worked at Commodore and they were skeptical of that plan at the time, so I don't think my skepticism is unjustified.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-21 17:25:23+00:00
Hard to answer.

First: What are your real goals?

I think you should look at governance; your incentives; and the incentives that you provide to your users. The incentives should ultimately bring you (and your users) to your goals.

Personally, I'm disappointed with the "for profit" model of social networks. I think they should behave differently, either like democracies, community centers, or like a church. Specifically, decisions about "what the product is" need a lot more control from the users themselves.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-05-21 17:25:44+00:00
FWIW, walking 30 minutes a day is hugely beneficial. Even when I wasn't eating as healthy, my 30 minute walk would keep me maintained and healthy. I would just walk and BS with a friend for 30 minutes.

Walking is a low calorie burn which is sometimes more beneficial when you're out of shape. One theory is that your body doesn't go into fight-or-flight. Running might be too stressful, which might cause an excess cortisol response, which can increase fat storage (especially belly fat), suppress recovery, cause muscle breakdown, so overdoing running when out of shape can backfire metabolically. Not because it's ineffective, but because the body is overwhelmed by the perceived "emergency."

Anecdata, simply walking more was the magic solution for me.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-21 17:25:45+00:00
It doesn't. Its scripts were mostly written ~5 years ago. It's a show based on and returning to the roots of the darker sides of WW2 politics that have been in the roots of Star Wars since its origins in the 1970s. If you think these politics are new to the franchise, you haven't been paying attention.

The more depressing and more accurate question is why are the darkest parts of WW2 politics suddenly "contemporary" again?
by chickenbig | 2025-05-21 17:26:01+00:00
> Yes. The grid needs to be expanded by 1.5 - 2.5x no matter what to electrify society and industry.

It is unclear that the grid needs to expand by that much if energy is consumed close to where it is produced, or if energy can be consumed at a less variable rate.

> It also not like the current renewable supply will stop existing.

There are examples of generation technologies getting dropped from the grid (by bans).

> Not because they inherently are expensive.

Before the crunch CCGTs were perhaps $1B/GW ($.7B/GW to $1.15B/GW for peakers according to Lazard 2024). So the $1B for backup isn't enough.
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-05-21 17:26:22+00:00
There is an interesting analogy that my Analysis I professor once said: The intersection of all valid examples are also a definition of an object. In many ways this is, at least in my current understanding, how ML systems "think". So yeah it will take some superposition of examples and kind of try to interpolate between those. But fundamentally it is - at least so far - always an interpolation, not an extrapolation.

Whether we consider that "just regurgitating Stackoverflow" or "it thought up the solution to my problem" mostly comes up to semantics
by jchallis | 2025-05-21 17:26:30+00:00
Tom Lehrer's tribute to Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel is magical. Absolutely worth the 4 minutes to listen to a woman who seduced most of the most creative men in the German-speaking world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L35IiVHZBTk&t=13s
by dns_snek | 2025-05-21 17:27:55+00:00
I really don't think most people could fool an experienced and diligent professional, emphasis on diligent. An assessment should be more than a box ticking exercise where the patient is just asked to recite a list of symptoms without any further inquiry, especially for students who present a higher risk for feigning symptoms, but I don't know how rigorous the testing really is in the US.