MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by briandear | 2025-05-16 21:44:46+00:00
> it has been happening a lot more frequently.

Is that factual? Or has the media simply been covering it more due to their bias?

International Travelers Processed with Electronic Device Search

Fiscal Year Quarter Total Border Searches Conducted FY 24, Q1 10,937 FY24, Q2 11,273 FY24, Q3 12,090 FY24, Q4 12,658 FY25, Q1 12,092 FY25, Q2 12,260

(The U.S. 2024 fiscal year began on September 28, 2023)

To understand the scale, in FY25 Q2, there were 88 million entries.

So the assertion that 1) electronic searches are statistically meaningful and 2) they are increasing by any significance is just media-fed fear.

One ought to consider the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000 — the police do not even need reasonable suspicion of a crime to stop and search a person, their vehicle, or electronic devices. https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/07/04/without-suspicion/stop...

You can also be arrested in the UK for the crime of insulting someone. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18102815.amp
by marcoavantitec | 2025-05-16 21:45:03+00:00
Problem: With tracking habits, you need to check multiple times a day to mark them done. This task is monotonous to me, and I wanted to streamline this process.

Solution: I built OnTrack Goals Habits with Autopilot to help me to set my goals to build or break habits with Auto Check-Ins, “Mark only if Missed”. That’s it, only Check-In if you missed building or breaking of that habit.

You can view more information at https://pixolini.com/ontrack/
by mynameisash | 2025-05-16 21:45:10+00:00
> I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime,

> recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug

With respect, at two months, you're still in the throes of the learning curve, and it seems highly unlikely you've found a compiler bug. Most folks (myself included) struggled for a few months before we hit the 'joyful' part of Rust.
by w10-1 | 2025-05-16 21:46:24+00:00
First, I wouldn't give up on the work relationships. Even if you damaged them, it's good practice and good karma to try to make amends; people really appreciate others reforming, and they will take you seriously as a person if you do. And even if they balk, you tried, and you can leave with clean hands and new life lessons. But most of all, the regularity of work and home is a good basis for making other life changes. Unemployment changes economic and social and perhaps home context, making it mostly a time to hold things constant to balance the equation; any change is more forced than elected. Better to hold employment but start changing what you want.

Ok, not to duck the hypothetical, assuming you do leave (and to add to the other good advice here)...

We tend to focus on the things we can control, and things we understand; we stay in a context. A job change is a chance not to be stuck in that mode.

The biggest difference in work latitude is the overall need and value flow. It's just easier to be on a big river than a tiny stream, modulo competition. So consider the world in terms on value-flow and competition. E.g., tech value flows can be large but volatile, and competition includes outsourcing and automation on top of new grads. In-person health care services require long credentialing but then are protected by those credentials and the difficulty of automation; but because it's in-person, the value is hard to scale unless you're a rainmaker (i.e., a doctor). And so on.

A job change is also a chance to reset your life. Yes, try exercise and address some other self- and social-debt, but don't load yourself with obligations. The key thing is values, how you feel, and your liveliness relative to life. It'd be a good sign when there's a nice view, and you really feel it, without distraction from your psycho-social-economic context. When you discover your values, you pretty naturally start working on them and work isn't hard.
by asa400 | 2025-05-16 21:46:30+00:00
I'm not discounting your experience, or saying you're wrong or anything like that. I've been writing Rust for a while, and for me, that feeling went away. Lifetime/ownership problems used to run me over but it almost never happens anymore. I think Rust has a rather severe "hump" that a lot of people run headlong into, but it does get better, I promise you. You start thinking in ownership/borrowing terms and it just fades into the background at some point. Rust is easily my most productive language now. Again, not discounting your experience at all, it can be rough starting out.
by rowanseymour | 2025-05-16 21:46:37+00:00
I like having copilot suggest things < ~500 chars. I've discovered new patterns of doing things in go and Python and I've saved on a bit of typing. It really is just a better auto-complete for me. But anything longer than that and the cost of me spotting and fixing the problems in what it's suggesting starts to outweigh the benefit (unless I'm trying to write something super boilerplate).
by calrain | 2025-05-16 21:46:41+00:00
I used these all the time when rolling out Windows 3.1 and 3.11 for thousands of computers back in the early 90's.

You would just pick any icon that seemed relevant, with a focus on not choosing the same icon for two different applications.

Computer GUI's were so new then that people didn't really care if the icon was 100% correct or not.

Sometimes for big applications I would draw up an icon and then use it, but mainly try to stay on moricons.dll or any dll's that came with the application that might contain icons.
by iamwil | 2025-05-16 21:46:57+00:00
> But it doesn’t really help me know anything new.

Pursue that, since that's what LLMs haven't been helping you with. LLMs haven't really generated new knowledge, though there are hints of it--they have to be directed. There are two or three times when I felt the LLM output was really insightful without being directed.

--

At least for now, I find the stuff I have a lot of domain expertise in, the LLM's output just isn't quite up to snuff. I do a lot of work trying to get it to generate the right things with the right taste, and even using LLMs to generate prompts to feed into other LLMs to write code, and it's just not quite right. Their work just seems...junior.

But for the stuff that I don't really have expertise in, I'm less discerning of the exact output. Even if it is junior, I'm learning from the synthesis of the topic. Since it's usually a means to an end to support the work that I do have expertise in, I don't mind that I didn't do that work.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-16 21:47:30+00:00
This is why communist / soviet countries were declining. Most people get confused how can anyone label what happened in those countries as decline, they build factories, they catapulted peasants, serfs into city dwellers, they made huge scientific progress. Those people do not realize that soviet countries did it after it was done in west. For example Large Panel System building so pervasively used in communist block was invented and used 50 years before in England. Inventiveness was limited only into areas that the regime deemed necessary. And even those areas were not free to pursue scientific method, having go back and forth between photos, books and letters from relatives, from west + back and forth between "government ideologist" responsible for "right" way of thinking made any effort to move human endeavor into higher levels impossible.

https://www.socialismrealised.eu/normalistion-everyday-life/
by fredoralive | 2025-05-16 21:48:26+00:00
Python runs on other operating systems, like NT, where AIUI processes are rather more heavyweight.

Not all use cases of Python and Windows intersect (how much web server stuff is a Windows / IIS / SQL Server / Python stack? Probably not many, although WISP is a nice acronym), but you’ve still got to bear it in mind for people doing heavy numpy stuff on their work laptop or whatever.
by elric | 2025-05-16 21:48:30+00:00
The whole core team is amazing. Gosling wanted a language that was practical from a development POV. Over the years, it's been refined into a language with a fair amount of mechanical sympathy on top of the development experience. Thanks to folks like Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz.

I have no love for Oracle the big bad company. But I am deeply greatful they've managed to keep that group moving forward.
by brudgers | 2025-05-16 21:48:50+00:00
Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall

1. None of the significant references in that sentence have any relationship to the experience of young adults in Kansas.

2. The phrase "lately over" would be struck by any 21st century American editor.

The author calling the prose "a masterpiece" reflects a huge pile of cultural assumptions about literary quality.
by hervature | 2025-05-16 21:49:41+00:00
Conversely, preclearance at Pearson royally screwed up my TN visa after claiming that the other ports of entries were doing it wrong. I have received multiple TN from HOU and, in general, I like the CBP at HOU. EWR was always friendly as well in my opinion. I personally prefer getting my TN at land border crossings because they tend to take the "gather all the facts" approach vs. airports have a procedural approach that feels highly dependent on the agent you get. My most recent TN was I-129 which I think is a waste of money but if someone else is paying for it and you have the luxury of waiting in the US, then it's a seamless experience.
by westurner | 2025-05-16 21:50:09+00:00
From "Show HN: We open sourced our entire text-to-SQL product" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456236 :

> awesome-Text2SQL: https://github.com/eosphoros-ai/Awesome-Text2SQL

> Awesome-code-llm > Benchmarks > Text to SQL: https://github.com/codefuse-ai/Awesome-Code-LLM#text-to-sql
by strken | 2025-05-16 21:50:11+00:00
I think Allen is arguing that, if the beached officers were either on full pay and forced to accept postings by law, or no pay and forced by poverty, they would not be able to reject commissions. They would thus be forced to accept adverse postings that were bad for the navy as a whole.

They were able to reject commissions because they weren't technically employed by the navy while unassigned. Officers could turn down a posting and still draw half pay, and in fact they kept their half pay during retirement.
by mncharity | 2025-05-16 21:50:18+00:00
Wayback of the Sloan School seminar page shows him doing one on February 24, 2025. I wonder how that went.

I miss google search's Cache. As with the seminar, several other hits on MIT pages have been removed. I'm reminded of a PBS News Hour story, on free fusion energy from water in your basement (yes, really), which was memory holed shortly after. The next-ish night they seemed rather put out, protesting they had verified the story... with "a scientist".

That cassyni talk link... I've seen a lot of MIT talks (a favorite mind candy), and though Sloan talks were underrepresented, that looked... more than a little odd. MIT Q&A norms are diverse, from the subtle question you won't appreciate if you haven't already spotted the fatal flaw, to bluntness leaving the speaker in tears. I wonder if there's a seminar tape.
by onepremise | 2025-05-16 21:50:35+00:00
Certainly :) Immigration is actually directly related to how CEOs and VC intend to change the landscape for all things government related, and democracy as a whole. There is very much a subjective intent to tear down the rule of law, the rights that safeguard Americans as a whole, starting with immigration. IT's an entry point, a target to whittle away basic rights of the average American. Peter Thiel touches on this need for a tech revolution in his paper "The Straussian Moment", https://www.hoover.org/research/peter-thiel-straussian-momen..., who also funded JD Vance's rise to VP. These guys love the concepts written in Sirrivassan's book "the Network State", and want to replace our current government with distributed monarchies. Sirrivassan, Thiel, Andresen, and Curtis Yarvin actually have a documented plan to achieve this which is being executed, to a "T", which involves attacking immigration, not just as a distraction so they can attack the courts directly, but also cause it's part of their vision. Curtis Yarvin's writings include pointed attacks on immigration, both as a policy and as a reflection of deeper systemic problems. He uses immigration as an example to argue for the failure of democracy and to advocate for his preferred model of authoritarian governance. He also frames immigration debates as distractions from what he sees as the real issues-namely, the incompetence and self-serving nature of current elites and institutions.
by idle_zealot | 2025-05-16 21:51:28+00:00
Things that are utterly lost in modern software design: information density, and even more importantly, consistency. It feels like every interface wants to tuck features away offscreen to be accessible only by scrolling, swiping, or behind a "flow" of several screens, each of which may have a surprising popup, redirect, call-to-action, or totally different layout owned by another team. The swipe/scroll accessible features aren't indicated in any way, you either have to know about them a priori or be tutorialized. What elements are clickable/tappable and their interactive areas are often unclear. Input types are represented inconsistently (checkboxes vs radio selectors, drop downs, sliders). Button locations for standard actions are shuffled from screen to screen. Even basic OS features on Android phones are like this. How do you access quick settings? Well, you pull down the notification shade all the way from the top of the screen with a swipe, which mostly shows your notifications but also reveals some buttons and knobs. Then you swipe down again, which this time doesn't pull down a shade, but transforms those knobs into a different set of more expansive knobs and sliders and also hides your notifications. Oh, also that first slide down might not work and only serve to temporarily show the OS status bar, if the screen you're on right now is set as immersive or something. In that case you need to do one swipe down to reveal the status bar, then quickly follow up with another for the mixed-use kindof-notification pulldown, then a third time to transform that into the screen where you can change your brightness.

I want a new design language that places consistency above all else. I should be able to accurately predict what a tap or swipe is going to do based on the information on my screen. I do not want things to pop up unexpectedly or change positions or hide themselves without my input. Computers are tools, and their users need to be able to develop mastery of them. The current thrust seems to revolve around ensuring constant surprise and novelty.
by arp242 | 2025-05-16 21:51:47+00:00
When I last benchmarked Redis vs. PostgreSQL for a simple k/v cache it was about ~1ms for PostgreSQL to fetch a key, and ~0.5ms for Redis. Faster, but not really noticeably so. I haven't benchmarked SQLite, but I would be surprised if the numbers are substantially different.

Of course Redis can do other things than just a k/v cache, and at scale you just want to offload some load from your main SQL server. But for "small" use cases my conclusion was that Redis doesn't really add anything. OTOH it's also not especially difficult to run so it also not a big problem to use it, but by and large it seems superfluous.
by orange_puff | 2025-05-16 21:51:48+00:00
I used to think this way too. Here are a few ways I've tried to re frame things that has helped.

1. When I work on side projects and use AI, sometimes I wonder "what's the point if I am just copy / pasting code? I am not learning anything" but what I have come to realize is building apps with AI assistance is the skill that I am learning, rather than writing code per se as it was a few years ago.

2. I work in high scale distributed computing, so I am still presented with ample opportunities to get very low level, which I love. I am not sure how much I care about writing code per se anymore. Working with AI still is tinkering, it has not changed that much for me. It is quite different, but the underlying fun parts are still present.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-05-16 21:52:00+00:00
Nothing impacts Postgres insert performance more than index updates during insert.

If it is possible to take your table offlkine for the insert then you'll get 10 to 100 X speedup by deleting all the indexes first then recreating them.

You should also ensure you set all the Postgres session variables to have enough memory and workers on the job.

WAL writes during inserts have a massive impact on insert performance too so you can look at setti8ngs like synchronous_commit and checkpoint_timeout. Creating the table as UNLOGGED will also disable WAL writes for that table giving a massive speedup.

Also, recreating your indexes sequentially can be faster than doing them in parallel and look out for CONCURRENTLY in index creation - its positive is it allows DB operations during index creation but its negative is it is much slower and risks failure.

Probably something along the lines of this - which also show how to set default workers for a table so you don't need your queries to keep setting that Postgres session variable.

DO $$ DECLARE table_name TEXT := 'your_table_name'; -- Replace with your table name schema_name TEXT := 'public'; -- Replace with your schema data_file TEXT := '/path/to/your/data.csv'; -- Replace with your data file path index_info RECORD; index_sql TEXT; BEGIN -- 1. Store existing indexes for later recreation CREATE TEMP TABLE index_definitions AS SELECT indexname, indexdef FROM pg_indexes WHERE schemaname = schema_name AND tablename = table_name; -- 2. Drop all existing indexes (except primary key) FOR index_info IN SELECT indexname FROM pg_indexes WHERE schemaname = schema_name AND tablename = table_name AND indexdef NOT LIKE '%PRIMARY KEY%' LOOP EXECUTE 'DROP INDEX ' || schema_name || '.' || index_info.indexname; RAISE NOTICE 'Dropped index: %', index_info.indexname; END LOOP; -- 3. Optimize PostgreSQL for bulk loading (non-sysadmin settings only) -- Memory settings SET maintenance_work_mem = '1GB'; -- Increase for faster index creation SET work_mem = '256MB'; -- Increase for better sort performance -- WAL and checkpoint settings SET synchronous_commit = OFF; -- Delay WAL writes as requested SET checkpoint_timeout = '30min'; -- Less frequent checkpoints during load -- Worker/parallel settings SET max_parallel_workers_per_gather = 8; -- Increase parallel workers SET max_parallel_workers = 16; -- Maximum parallel workers SET effective_io_concurrency = 200; -- Better IO performance for SSDs SET random_page_cost = 1.1; -- Optimize for SSD storage -- 4. Set parallel workers on the target table EXECUTE 'ALTER TABLE ' || schema_name || '.' || table_name || ' SET (parallel_workers = 8)'; -- 5. Perform the COPY operation EXECUTE 'COPY ' || schema_name || '.' || table_name || ' FROM ''' || data_file || ''' WITH (FORMAT CSV, HEADER true)'; -- 6. Rebuild all indexes (using the stored definitions) FOR index_info IN SELECT * FROM index_definitions LOOP index_sql := index_info.indexdef; RAISE NOTICE 'Recreating index: %', index_info.indexname; EXECUTE index_sql; END LOOP; -- 7. Drop temporary table DROP TABLE index_definitions; RAISE NOTICE 'Data loading completed successfully'; END $$;
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-16 21:52:02+00:00
First off, most indoor ranges don't allow shotgun target loads and slugs are $$$ so people don't typically shoot them indoors.

It's not explicitly rude but depending on the exact circumstances it's kind of pushing it to shoot 12ga and full power rifle rounds at indoor recreational ranges. Like don't do it on Saturday morning when it's busy and everyone is their with their wife or kids or whatever. Anything with enough concussion to be obnoxious to other shooters is sus.
by deepsun | 2025-05-16 21:54:18+00:00
My opinion on that is the projects scale. Typically people came from a 10+ year Java project of 100+ engineers, to a greenfield advanced hello-world -- of course it's going to feel better and more productive.

Also, as open-source folks say, "rewrite is always better". It also serves as a good security review. But companies typically don't have resources to do complete rewrites every so often, I saw it only in Google.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-05-16 21:55:59+00:00
Actually arXiv is moderated and if policies are violated they may even withdraw* a paper themselves, if it wasn't declined to be published in first place. Regarding policies, it's mentioned that a "submission may be declined if the moderators determine it lacks originality, novelty, significance, and/or contains falsified, plagiarized content or serious misrepresentations of data, affiliation, or content."

*Note that this creates a new version lacking any download which also becomes the default but any previous ones are still available.
by ttoinou | 2025-05-16 21:56:17+00:00
Wow thank you I do not understand everything written and didn't take time to do so (and can't even find reference 23 paper on Brent stability), but I was thinking we don't necessarily need a new algorithm, we could tweak existing ones.

For example swapping columns and rows before applying a product, so that accuracy is best kept (then reswapping back at the end of the operation). It seems to me the Strassen-like algorithm choose arbitrarily some elements of the matrices over others to make their temporary sum-products variables, so we could exploit this asymmetry (not sure if it's the correct word here) to choose which elements are to be chosen
by fosterfriends | 2025-05-16 21:56:18+00:00
++ Kind of my whole thesis with Graphite. As more code gets AI-generated, the weight shifts to review, testing, and integration. Even as someone helping build AI code reviewers, we'll _need_ humans stamping forever - for many reasons, but fundamentally for accountability. A computer can never be held accountable

https://constelisvoss.com/pages/a-computer-can-never-be-held...
by johnisgood | 2025-05-16 21:57:37+00:00
I saw ".len" somewhere, I think I did mention it in my comment[1]. :)

Thank you for updating the docs!

[1] Oh, apparently I did, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43954980, I quoted what I read in the documentation (?, may have been just on some part of the website) which included ".len", it is said somewhere as such: ".len or .elements returns the number of enum values".
by gamblor956 | 2025-05-16 21:58:21+00:00
At a previous job, one of the executives spent most of his day playing Facebook games (i think Farmville was still big at the time), and another watched porn on his work laptop.

At my current and last job, the (operational and finance) executives spent most of their days in meetings. The legal and HR executives spent most of their days browsing the internet.
by btickell | 2025-05-16 21:59:08+00:00
Thought I'd weigh in here as well, I believe Gibbs sampling is being used as a way to approximate the expectation over the model distribution. This value is required to compute the gradient of the log likelihood but integrating the distribution is intractable.

This is done in a similar way as you may use MCMC to draw a representative sample from a VAE. In the deep learning formulation of a neural network the gradient is estimated over batches of the dataset rather than over an explicitly modeled probability distribution.
by ttoinou | 2025-05-16 21:59:22+00:00
I get your point, neural networks could be some kind of black boxes and how the sequence of operations evolves might not be so dependent on the accuracy of each operations -- at least, it would be a good intuition to believe "accuracy at each step matters" but it's not rigorously proven ? We could empirically check this by training a neural net and adding some random noise at each step