MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by permo-w | 2025-05-18 03:54:03+00:00
my understanding of the justification for a special system is that it's inherently more fragile and more tempting to attack than other government services, which generally provide tangibly vital, life-preserving services, rather than less tangible artistic and cultural ones, and the particular form of the service lends itself to being funded in a way that wouldn't work for other more vital services

healthcare is possibly one of the few that could (i.e. does in other Western countries) work similarly, but people including me would undoubtedly despise it. most things need some kind of mandated funding otherwise they would fail and people would die, go homeless, not have a military or live tangibly worse lives, and mandated taxed funding is generally better because it relies more on those with broader shoulders

overall I personally reject your notion that there's some kind of subversive justification for it
What type of PC-configuration do you have?
by bolthid | 2025-05-18 03:54:17+00:00
Basic info. (2025)

50 Ghz. 64 GB RAM. 11 GB VRAM. (not including shared memory) 2 TB Diskspace. Gone are the days of Pentium 1. (2001)

100 Mhz. 8 MB RAM. 1 MB VRAM. 120 MB Diskspace.
by mmooss | 2025-05-18 03:54:57+00:00
Referring to the Osaifu-Keitai part of the article:

> A lot of this is thanks to FelicaDude (Reddit, Twitter), an anonymous internet stranger who disappeared a few years ago but seems to have a lot of knowledge about how FeliCa works. I can't verify any of this information, but it makes sense to me; and anyway, there's no way someone would lie on the internet, right?
by thepryz | 2025-05-18 03:55:06+00:00
It’s easy to suggest that this is the same scaremongering around media and new technologies occurred in the past, but I think that’s a mistake. The Internet, web forums, social media, etc. are different because of how people interact with them and because many of them use algorithms and dark patterns to manipulate and drive further engagement.

To make matters worse, malicious actors have demonstrably used them to manipulate public opinion and distribute propaganda. Studies around illusory truth have shown that familiarity can overcome rationality and critical thinking. IOW, no matter how much you know something to be a lie, if you hear it often enough, you’ll begin to believe it.

That’s all to say I think it’s important to be wary of how technology influences your life and consider how to cultivate balance in life that includes time away from devices to contemplate as well as to escape the machine.
by igregoryca | 2025-05-18 03:55:10+00:00
This aligns nicely with how things look in the "small-step" flavour of PL theory / lambda calculus.

In the lingo, expressions are evaluated by repeatedly getting "rewritten", according to rules called reduction rules. e.g., (1 + 2) + 4 might get rewritten to 3 + 4, which would then get rewritten to 7.

There are two sorts of these rules. There are "congruence" rules, which direct where work is to be done ("which subexpression to evaluate next?"); and then there are "computation" rules (as Pierce [1] calls them), which actually rewrite the expression, and thus change the program state.

"Strict"/"non-lazy" languages (virtually every popular general-purpose language? except Haskell) are full of congruence rules – all subexpressions must be fully evaluated before a parent expression can be evaluated. The important exceptions are special constructs like conditionals and indefinite loops.

For conditionals in particular, a computation rule will kick in before congruence rules direct all subexpressions to be evaluated. This prunes the expression tree, now in a very literal sense.

[1]: Benjamin C. Pierce, Types and Programming Languages (recommended!)
by jonahx | 2025-05-18 03:56:42+00:00
I feel this kind of critique, which I see often as a response to articles like this, is so easy as to be meaningless. How is one supposed to ever talk about general principles without using simplified examples?

Aren't you just saying "Real code is more complicated than your toy example"?

Well sure, trivially so. But that's by design.

> Perfect example is the "redundancies and dead conditions" mentioned: we're making the really convenient assumption that `g` is the only caller of `h` and will forever be the only caller of `h` in order to claim we exposed a dead branch using this rule...

Not really. He's just saying that when you push conditional logic "up" into one place, it's often more readable and sometimes you might notice things you otherwise wouldn't. And then he created the simplest possible example (but that's a good thing!) to demonstrate how that might work. It's not a claim that it always will work that way or that real code won't be more complicated.
by mmooss | 2025-05-18 04:00:10+00:00
> we just don't respect transit systems as much because we think of them as gifts we give to the poor/mentally ill/homeless.

> And then a lot of Americans have an anti-gentrification ideology ("rent-lowering gunshots"

I think the ideology is in the parent comment. I ride lots of public transit and don't hear or see these things. The largest American public transit system, in NYC, certainly isn't seen as a gift other than by New Yorkers to themselves.

FWIW, I've seen American transit systems that let people board without even being asked to pay. I've seen plenty of bus drivers wave through people who couldn't pay. On one bus a teen boarded and walked straight to their seat. The bus driver, in an authoritative parental voice, kept summoning them to the front. There they lectured them: It's ok, but you need to talk to me first.
by bsder | 2025-05-18 04:02:01+00:00
> I never in a million years would have guessed microcontrollers & power efficient small chips would see so little change across a decade of time

It's because the software ecosystem around them is so incredibly lousy and painful.

Once you get something embedded to work, you never want to touch it again if you can avoid it.

I was really, really, really hoping that the RISC-V folks were going to do better. Alas, the RISC-V ecosystem seems doomed to be repeating the same levels of idiocy.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-18 04:03:28+00:00
> If you haven't realized, but banks only insure accounts up to $250k.

If your bank isn’t politically connected enough. See Silicon Valley bank failure.

If your money is at BoA/JPM/Wells Fargo/Citi/US Bank/etc, I’d bet the $250k limit turns out to be fictitious and all depositors get bailed out.
by bmitc | 2025-05-18 04:04:47+00:00
I think it's just an intractable problem at this point. There's probably millions of physicists on Earth. Everyone working in a company knows just how hard it is to get even hundreds of people to agree and read and understand the same things.

The fact is, there are just too many people doing too many things. When any technical paper sounds like gobblygook to even people in the same field but in a different specialty, it's no surprise this happens, especially when coupled with the modern pressure to scientifically publish and modern "journalism" trends.
by KPGv2 | 2025-05-18 04:04:48+00:00
> Because then you are calling middleware_caching_auth_broker() from 37 places

No you aren't. You aren't really calling it from anywhere. The framework you're using, which you aren't writing, is calling the registered middleware.

The topic here is complexity for the code structure because it's called from 37 different places. A registered middleware doesn't run into that issue because it doesn't get called anywhere that "code structure complexity" matters.

Your reasoning is isomorphic to "I'm calling a bit shift millions of times because I have written some code in a programming language." Technically true but not what we're talking about here.
by mmooss | 2025-05-18 04:07:14+00:00
I was talking to someone about some existing bicycle road infrastructure that ran through several neighborhoods, rich and poor, in a large city. They said when it first was built, some people in the rich neighborhood objected because they said criminals would use it to come to their neighborhood. (The city is mostly on a grid, including this neighborhood, making the whole idea absurd anyway.)

I had long ago pointed out to them that much of the bike infrastructure connects wealthy neighborhoods with wealthy neighborhoods.
by notnullorvoid | 2025-05-18 04:08:33+00:00
Compelling? It's freaking terrible, instead of pausing execution to be resumed when a promise is resolved they throw execution and when the promise is resolved the whole execution runs again, and potential throws again if it hits another promise, and so on. It's a hacked solution due to the use of a global to keep track of the rendering context to associate with hook calls, so it all needs to happen synchronously. If they had passed a context value along with props to the function components then they could have had async/await and generator components.
by NaOH | 2025-05-18 04:09:04+00:00
Previous and related:

How Ancient Roman Concrete Was Able to Last Thousands of Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39212710 - Feb 2024 (5 comments)

Why was Roman concrete so durable? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34280239 - Jan 2023 (277 comments)

Mystery of Roman Concrete Unraveled - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34353330 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)

The Mystery Finally Solved: Why Has Roman Concrete Been So Durable? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34456323 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)

Mechanistic insights into the durability of ancient Roman concrete - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36842712 - July 2023 (1 comment)

Why Ancient Roman Concrete Outlasts Our Own (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366911 - Nov 2021 (67 comments)

Why Roman concrete is stronger than it ever was, while modern concrete decays - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25690803 - Jan 2021 (7 comments)

A chemical reaction in ancient Roman concrete makes it stronger over time (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580920 - Mar 2020 (64 comments)

How Did the Romans Make Concrete That Lasts Longer Than Modern Concrete? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15544128 - Oct 2017 (3 comments)

New studies of ancient concrete could teach us to do as the Romans did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14690329 - July 2017 (74 comments)

Ancient Roman Concrete Is About to Revolutionize Modern Architecture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5883443 - Jan 2013 (23 comments)
by TMWNN | 2025-05-18 04:10:32+00:00
IBM did give up on marketing OS/2 by the late 1990s (and the PC division arguably did so around the time Windows 95 came out), but I am not aware of IBM explicitly telling new and existing customers that Windows is the way forward for existing systems.

A slightly different way of answering your question is that sometime after the PS/2's launch, IBM began explicitly noting that its software and peripherals were compatible with non-IBM computers. PC DOS 5.0 might have been the first. <https://np.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1jleun5/ni...>
by 20after4 | 2025-05-18 04:11:09+00:00
Several other factors probably pushing the bean counters:

* Real estate in high-traffic areas, especially in malls (do those still exist?) can be extremely expensive. * With retail stores, shoplifting is the business's problem, after the switch to ecommerce, a lot of theft is shifted to being the customer's problem (porch pirates) * Customer service staff in the store are likely more expensive than outsourcing call centers and now AI is well on the way to cutting out most of those jobs.

So while I doubt they completely overlooked the value of a physical presence, they probably calculated that it's an acceptable tradeoff.

I think Apple does a really good job at blending their physical stores and their online business into a very seamless experience. Not many companies can operate at that level of excellence. Although I have many complaints about Apple's business practices, however, their retail stores and customer service experience are not among them.
by shawnb576 | 2025-05-18 04:11:37+00:00
100% this

I noted below that I have recently moved from US to Australia

The Chinese cars are taking over here: it’s a product people want at a price they like

GM wants to monetize yesterday’s market, and are just going to fall farther behind.

When these cars eventually come in, EV mandate or not, the US car companies will get crushed
by landl0rd | 2025-05-18 04:11:41+00:00
The law purports to give the feds that power. I believe the Constitution has been grossly twisted to federalize that which the feds have no authority to do. Social welfare is one of those things.

Defense per-state would disrupt the concept of a nation and the feds' ability to operate internationally. This is the same as borders and foreign policy. If anything localities are better able to understand the needs of their neighbor than the feds.

I have this view about small fed because I do not trust government. Any government. The damage a local government can do is necessarily less and the layers of government above it that can check that damage are more.

Redistribution is not the basic purpose of a state. It was not a founding principle of our state. It is discretionary spending in the literal use of the word if not in that of the budget committee. In this case the feds are spending $500 on housing and $4,000 on pokemon toys.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-18 04:11:43+00:00
We tried the "nice" approach with the EU of polite patron-to-client instruction. The EU failed to play ball. We tried this with many countries. They failed to play ball. So there is no reason to continue costing the American citizen money for their benefit. An "alliance" where you mostly just help the other person is closer to parasitism.

I do not believe any politician cares about America or her citizens. I do not believe harris cares about America or her citizens. Politicians seek power.
by vunderba | 2025-05-18 04:13:16+00:00
From the paper:

> a variable-length training approach is adopted, with training durations ranging from 2 to 8 seconds. This strategy enables our model to generate 720p video clips with flexible lengths between 2 and 8 seconds.

I'd like to see it benched against FramePack which in my experience also handles 2d animation pretty well and doesn't suffer from the usual duration limitations of other models.

https://lllyasviel.github.io/frame_pack_gitpage
by ksec | 2025-05-18 04:15:09+00:00
This is nothing about ARMv9 the ISA but much more about their new CEO Rene Haas. Arm has always been pricing their design on the lower end, bundling GPU and other designs IP. I have long argued since they enter 64bit era their performance profile and profits does not align well especially when comparing to AMD and Intel.

Even with the increased pricing the Cortex X5 / X925 and upcoming X6 / X930 they are still pretty good value. Unless Apple has something big with A19 / M5 the X6 / X930 should be competitive with M4 already. I just wish they spend a little more money on R&D for the GPU IP side of things.

Hoepfully we have some more news from Nvidia in Computex 2025
by mgh95 | 2025-05-18 04:15:16+00:00
> Push it too far, and the only alternative you're going to get is having to look over your shoulder everywhere you go, living in constant fear that someone will pillage your property and threaten your personal safety.

But that's the thing: is Social Security a safety net or is it welfare? If it's a safety net, means testing (can at least in principle) preserve the safety net aspect.

If it's welfare, you're transferring wealth from people currently working to those retired, many of whom are much more comfortable than those paying the tax. Why are we transferring wealth to those with more from those who must work?
by cameldrv | 2025-05-18 04:17:11+00:00
This is the paradox. The computer knows the best route, better than you do, most of the time. But, you are not in control anymore. You are not the one making the decisions, figuring out where the turn is, and whether you want to turn there or at the next intersection. All I can say is, try leaving your phone at home for a day and get where you're going without it. You'll probably get there a few minutes later, but it will feel completely different.
by TZubiri | 2025-05-18 04:19:09+00:00
That something can be context if you feed it as input to the LLM and that output will be input, is true for everything in an LLM. So you are not really conveying any meaning with that definition of MCP. MCP is an API layer between LLMs and SaaS applications, designed to provide vendor neutrality for the LLMs. Nothing to do with the context window, which is a specific variable measured in kTokens

It pays to be precise when speaking and studying, and it pays to develop a precise language on nascent technologies when we comunicate about them.

This reminds me when I was studying chemistry and I thought they were pedantic for the way they used the word salt. Or when I studied chess and I called every bishop and knight attack to the f6 pawn the fried liver, instead of the specific sequence of moves that we call the fried liver. Or when I thought that the arm forearm distinction was pedantic in medicine

Science demands precision in communication, feel free to steal a well defined term and use it to mean something else that already has a different sign to denote it. But I'm not playing
by thangalin | 2025-05-18 04:19:40+00:00
My cross-platform, FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1], does something similar[2]. Pressing Ctrl+Space inserts the nearest matching variable into the text.

[1]: https://keenwrite.com/

[2]: https://youtu.be/CFCqe3A5dFg?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...
by billylo | 2025-05-18 04:20:13+00:00
I added a Practice Mode in my speech-to-speech translator app 3PO. It allows you to practise talking with chatGPT and gets assessment score on your accuracy.

Topic is preset. (chatGPT plays the role of a travel guide to help you find places to go in Holland (for Dutch))

https://3po.evergreen-labs.org
by throwaway17_17 | 2025-05-18 04:22:18+00:00
I will admit it is probably just some internal biasing from some unknown origin, but I always tend to think of server programming as a part of systems programming. To your mind, what keeps it out of the systems programming umbrella? I am not super certain about how programmers in your area break up the constituent parts of a server’s code, so maybe I’m thinking more along the lines of the ‘framework’/libraries your code is executing within.

Is this more of a ‘server programming is not systems programming because we are just implementing the logic of what gets served’ vs. my assumption that server programming includes the how does the server connect to the world, cache things, handle resource allocation, and distribute/parallelize the computations required to serve data back to the user?
by conradev | 2025-05-18 04:22:45+00:00
Isn’t there some dynamic at play where STM will put one of these on a board, that board becomes a “standard” and then it’s cloned by other manufacturers, lowering cost? (legality aside)

STM32H5 in 2023 (M33): https://newsroom.st.com/media-center/press-item.html/p4519.h...

GD32F5 in 2024: https://www.gigadevice.com/about/news-and-event/news/gigadev...

STM32N6 in 2025 (M55): https://blog.st.com/stm32n6/

i.e. it takes some time for new chips to hit cost targets, and most applications don’t need the latest chips?

I don’t know a lot about the market, though, and interested to learn more
by dlubarov | 2025-05-18 04:27:29+00:00
I wouldn't necessarily say that the State of Palestine is not a real state, but it just isn't a state whose territory includes Gaza under any reasonable interpretation, despite what some international lawyers say. It's unprecedented to say "we deem the actual (sort of) elected government illegitimate, and deem this other entity as the rightful government" when that other entity has never controlled, administered, or been popularly supported in the territory in question.

I'm not sure what you mean about the ICC relying on Israeli claims about Hamas? If the ICC wanted to go after Hamas leaders, aside from the questionable jurisdictional argument, is seems like the easiest case. There's no question that Hamas leaders were involved in taking hostages, for example, which is just one of many war crimes the ICC could prosecute.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-05-18 04:27:50+00:00
There are two ways to solve this:

1: Earn more and spend less

So this number goes up:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSGDA188S

2: Print more money

So this number goes up:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE
by tmpz22 | 2025-05-18 04:27:51+00:00
Canada failed to play ball when they joined us in Afghanistan and died alongside us? When they took in our jets on 9/11?

How deep do you think I have to look to find dozens (or hundreds) of strong examples of the EU and other western allies "playing ball"?

We seem to be focused a lot on Qatar and Saudi Arabia as our "good" allies.

I don't blame you for falling for the rhetoric of a populist candidate willing to say and do anything, claim victory if it works, and ignore and bury it when it doesn't. It's easy. You're not the first in history to do it, and you won't be the last.
by mgh95 | 2025-05-18 04:28:40+00:00
> Social security is self-funded. It has literally no impact on the deficit or our ability to pay off debt. By statute.

There is a very real problem that social security is project to be no longer solvent in 2035. (see here: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL33028) It may require either transfers from the general budget or structural changes to remain solvent.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-05-18 04:29:44+00:00
Interest rates will fall but beyond that it's very non-obvious what will happen. Money becomes a hot potato? Cashflow-generating assets get bid up to extreme valuations? Speculative assets like crypto gets carried along for the ride? An increase in private borrowing, the money supply, the velocity of money, and inflation?

On the other hand, the government debt interest burden goes down, which means a slowdown in the growth of the base money supply (even while borrowed money increases). Perhaps this slows long-term inflation, but that in turn might mean inflation driven by growing private debt and speculative malinvestment swings well past equilibrium and turns into a bubble that pops into eventual deflation.
by opello | 2025-05-18 04:29:48+00:00
I'd assume from the earlier meaning of "thesaurus" which comes from "treasury," or as it exists in my mind, treasure chest.

> The meaning "encyclopedia filled with information" is from 1840, but it existed earlier as thesaurarie (1590s), used as a title by some early dictionary compilers, on the notion of thesaurus verborum "a treasury of words." The meaning "collection of words arranged according to sense" is attested from 1852 in Roget's title.

from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/thesaurus
by danparsonson | 2025-05-18 04:30:16+00:00
> ...it was well understood that people were still visiting stores so that they can inspect items before purchase.

You have all the pieces but you're not putting them together.

Bricks and mortar stores cost money just to exist - rent, rates, staffing, etc. - and that's why they can't compete on price with online stores, which can just be giant warehouses with shipping. The online arms of some physical stores can benefit from the same economies as totally online businesses, leading to cheaper prices online even for companies with a physical presence.

How can a physical shop make any money if they are just treated as a gallery for browsing before the buyer heads to Amazon to get the item 10% cheaper? It's not bean counting, it's basic economics.

How the fuck are you supposed to know what you're buying, indeed - patronise physical businesses because you recognise the value in their existence, and understand that that's worth paying an additional premium for.