MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wenc | 2025-05-04 22:56:39+00:00
Parquet files are already built for append only. Just add a new file.

This is a new paradigm for folks who aren’t in big data — the conventional approach usually involves doing a row INSERT. In big data, appending simply means adding a new file - the database engine will immediately recognize its presence. This is why “select * from ‘*.parquet’” will always operate on the latest dataset.
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-04 22:57:00+00:00
Mostly because they are proprietary in a community with an open philosophy, and for being successful doing that.

Most consumer-level 3D printers are derived from the RepRap project, which was about making a 3D printer that prints 3D printers. So if you want your own printer, find someone who already has one to print the specialized parts for you, add a few standard parts (screws, motors, etc...) and build your own, which you can then use to make 3D printers for others. You can then share designs, improve, etc... Totally in the open source spirit, of course, the software part is similarly open source, usually GPL licenced.

And this spirit is found in most of the consumer-level 3D printing world. With open source firmwares and slicers, easy to modify machines, and standard parts. I think one of the the companies that exemplify this the most is Prusa. They 3D print their printers using their own printers, and open source most for their work.

But then BambuLabs came along, and they have proprietary components, a proprietary firmware and a cloud-based system. Their slicer is open source, they don't really have a choice because it is based on GPL software, but they recently made it harder to use the forked version some people made (namely OrcaSlicer), and they did so via an automatic update. Of course people didn't really appreciate.

But maybe the worst part is that BambuLabs printers are actually really great and popular printers, for an affordable (but not cheap) price. And many people think that from now on, proprietary will become the standard.

If you don't care about that, then BambuLabs printers are maybe the best you can get. If you care, go with Prusa. If you are broke and don't mind getting a new hobby, go for something like an Ender3.
by ValdikSS | 2025-05-04 22:57:29+00:00
This is an open source project in a technical sense (source is open and the license is open), but not in a social sense (no free as in beer available source code, no public support for everyone). Source code, as well as firmware updates and support, are provided only to the customers.

When I sell the print server, I ask the buyer for the printer model, check its compatibility, and sell the device + guarantee that it would work for the buyer's printer. If it doesn't work properly, I'm first trying to debug remotely, and I could not fix it, I'm buying the same printer on flea market and debugging and fixing it until it works, and contribute the fix to CUPS/SANE/printer driver package.

In other words, I sell tech support in a package, and I just don't sell the print server if it's incompatible with the printer.

The goal of this project is to provide *ready-to-use, no-DIY device*, to improve the underlying software by directly contributing to it, for anyone to benefit from the fix. If you want to contribute to the printing stack and already know where to start, you should improve relevant projects, such as CUPS, SANE, printer and scanner drivers.
by photonthug | 2025-05-04 22:58:29+00:00
This is a great article, but it wants to be book. Very heavy on (interesting) background, then never getting around to reintegration / light on conclusions. I also think it lost the thread on the very interesting question that was posed at the start, and never really returned.

Why are aesthetics in media and elsewhere converging towards a homogeneous blob of everywhere-consistent, but meanwhile politics has exploded into a kind of anything-goes mess where there is consensus on nothing? (If the answer is supposed to be "protocols", I guess you can make that work but that feels like a non-answer, similar to how "money" as an answer kind of works but doesn't directly explain much.) Maybe the two things are even unrelated, but the effects are extreme and concurrent, so it seems unlikely to be a coincidence.. and I admit I am kind of expecting an answer along the lines of "same process/forces at different stages". And thinking along those lines, converging on complete consensus in political thinking sounds even worse than zero consensus, probably looks like an accelerating slide towards fascism.
by wenc | 2025-05-04 22:58:31+00:00
CSV is a pretty bad format any engine will choke on it. It basically requires a full table scan to get at any data.

You need to convert it into Parquet or some columnar format that lets engines do predicate pushdowns and fast scans. Each parquet file stores statistics about the data it contains so engines can quickly decide if it’s worth reading the file or skipping it altogether.
by rainsford | 2025-05-04 22:58:39+00:00
Since you asked further up-thread about the distinction between "democracy" and "populist", I want to point out that your comment is actually a pretty good example.

A little-d democrat might argue that the legal system not being immediately responsive to the expressed policy preferences of the majority of voters is anti-democratic. But a populist argument would add that this discrepancy is because judges as individuals are members of an elite class entirely separate from the common people because they're smart and went to school and stuff.

The populist argument here is an unnecessary rhetorical flourish. The platonic ideal spherical judge of uniform density rules entirely based on laws that by definition do not immediately change based on the results of elections. The idea that judicial rulings may at times oppose popular opinion as expressed in the most recent election should be taken as a given when the system is working as intended, whether that's democratic or not, rather than as evidence of ideological opposition from judges as individuals. But in populist framing, everything must be in terms of elite opposition to the common people, so arguments about the inherent inertia of the legal system are insufficient.

Populism vs democracy aside, I'd also argue that at least in the US, the federal judicial branch is no less democratic than the legislative or executive branches. There are plenty of avenues for the voters to change the outcome of legal decisions. They can vote for representatives who will change laws, Presidents who will nominate different judges to the bench, and there is even a democratic process to amend the Constitution. Of course none of those processes are quick or obtainable with a simple majority at a moment in time, but by that standard the legislative and executive branch don't fare much better. Voters can choose the President, but they only get to do so ever four years regardless of how they feel about the President's actions at any point in those four years unless they can meet the incredibly high bar of impeachment and conviction. There's a distinct lack of responsiveness there as well.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-04 22:58:44+00:00
The blog author has a great multi-part series on just this topic: https://acoup.blog/2022/06/03/collections-total-generalship-...

Large scale coordination during pre-modern warfare was effectively impossible. The battlefields would often stretch for hundreds of meters or even a few kilometers and it was too chaotic to see anything once in the heat of battle. Generals could issue some local commands, especially if they were at the head of a cavalry charge, but only the officers and bannermen leading a small formation could exert any real control over their soldiers. A general signaling ranged combatants is just unrealistic.

Your second point is spot on. Infantry formations don’t generally charge the way we think of charges - they were rather slow, controlled forward movements with weapons and shields lowered. otherwise the first soldier to trip or take an arrow would take down the entire formation. No one ever really pitches battle with their infantry starting in range of the other army’s archers so there’s never really a clear opportunity for a volley.

Cavalry charges are a bit of a special case because they’re especially vulnerable to archers, but they’re also the group most capable of avoiding volley fire. Cavalry charges don’t run into soldiers, they train for coordinated feints so they can quickly change direction unlike infantry. When attacking cavalry, archers generally want to have random fire to increase the chances of bringing down a single horse, which often causes enough chaos to break the charge.
by throw0101b | 2025-05-04 23:00:14+00:00
This paragraph has really stuck in my head:

> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
by p_ing | 2025-05-04 23:00:23+00:00
That's based on User Agent, an inaccurate measurement only consisting of those machines visiting a particular site.

https://my.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS53061925

This is the shipment by vendor. There's no way macOS could make up 25% market share with 2024 shipment data.
by arctutorials | 2025-05-04 23:00:28+00:00
I built AIAppsOK to solve a problem I was facing - finding quality AI tools in the rapidly expanding ecosystem. The site provides a structured directory of AI applications across categories like productivity, development, creativity, and business. Each listing includes:

Quality ratings based on consistent criteria Integration capabilities Pricing transparency Real user reviews Use case examples

The goal is to help both technical and non-technical users quickly find reliable AI tools that actually solve their problems, without wasting time on solutions that overpromise and underdeliver. Would love your feedback and suggestions for improving the directory! https://aiappsok.com
by leereeves | 2025-05-04 23:01:05+00:00
Unfortunately most of the research cited there was in "resistance-trained" individuals (and one in nurses, who are far from sedentary). The meta analysis also included at least some research on active individuals. And the author is a bodybuilder and fitness coach.

The one study of overweight individuals mentioned found no adverse side effects but only lasted six months, which may not be long enough for clinical effects to become obvious.

Also, the author overlooked gout entirely.

Based on all that, I'm not convinced it is safe for sedentary individuals.

I think the author should have written:

> As long as you are highly active and have don’t have pre-existing kidney issues...
by MarcoDewey | 2025-05-04 23:01:24+00:00
I believe that I have unintentionally misled you. When I say "unbiased oracle" I am talking specifically about the test oracle being unbiased by how the software was implemented. ie. Black Box testing.

I don't think I made the point very clear in the blog (I will rectify that), but I am saying that because LLMs are so easily biased by their prompting that they sometimes perform better when doing black box testing tasks than they do when performing white box testing.
by hynco | 2025-05-04 23:01:37+00:00
Kittl.com | Design | AI/ML Engineer | Onsite or Remote | LONDON, BERLIN | Full time | https://www.kittl.com/

Kittl is an advanced design platform, think Figma for graphic design. As AI/ML Engineer you leverage a professional product environment to build AI empowered workflows and integrations for a large userbase. More info here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/kittl

Team & culture:

• originally started off from HN, low ego, high integrity, hard working

• 100 people of which 75% product and engineering. Multiple team onsites per year

This IS for you if:

• You like creativity and/or design

• You want to have strong impact in the industry

• You prefer working hard and making pragmatic decisions that keep the team shipping quickly

This is NOT for you if:

• You'd rather rest & vest

• You being right is more important than the team being right

If interested, please send me an email to nh(at)kittl.com. Put the code "d48b8eb9a99bc7HN" into the subject line to confirm that you have read the above. Thank you
by eric_cc | 2025-05-04 23:02:43+00:00
You’re describing an extreme so let me counter with a different “what if” extreme: If , every day, you use a wheel chair for five minutes and run for several hours followed by 200 squats then your legs will not atrophy. My point is that writing papers is only one way to work your mind and using llm’s for this does not indicate how you use your mind overall.
by jjk166 | 2025-05-04 23:03:46+00:00
What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows with a single digit probability of being killed or disabled, I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. Even with modern firearms, most shots fired are not killing enemy combatants, they are suppressing fire that pin down professional soldiers, making it difficult to complete their objectives, and certainly slowing them down. Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and jump on the archers, but again if you are just some guy who has never so much as seen a battle before, I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Throw in the fact that archers can't maintain a high rate of fire for long, and the archers are almost certainly either armed for melee combat, or defended by soldiers who are, and it makes some real sense to try and get the enemy to waste shots while you are at long range, and conversely for the archers to hold their fire and wait until the enemy gets closer. There would also undoubtedly be a large variety in strategy depending on who you're fighting.

For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-04 23:03:55+00:00
The nobility were involved in military campaigns. The wealthy always being completely insulated from danger in war is a modern thing. When we talk about our historical sources being limited, it's because they focused on things like battles and military strategy, precisely because it is interesting to the wealthy people who support historians.

The things we don't know about are irrelevancies (to wealthy people), like almost any normal aspect of a common persons normal life. Really the only way you can find out how normal people lived and spoke is through records of trials.

edit: I mean, when to start firing is not a decision that the archers are going to get to make on their own. It's not folk wisdom.
by palata | 2025-05-04 23:05:32+00:00
> This kind of "perf review" hacking works ~everywhere

I don't have tons of examples, but in my experience:

* This worked in toxic environments. They deserve it.

* This doesn't work in a functional environment, because they don't have those bullshit metrics.

If you have to rely on those tricks, it's time to look for another job.
by quantadev | 2025-05-04 23:05:55+00:00
Exactly right. The "start simple and add the complexity where and when it’s needed" is a badly flawed way of thinking, in web apps, because once an app becomes too big to manage without BOTH a framework AND a type-safe language (TypeScript) then it you realize everything you've done up to that point must be reworked line by line, which costs you weeks, and you have to retest everything, and will make mistakes as you try to fix the mess. It's a mess that's easily avoided, just by using a framework from day one.

You can't just switch horses in the middle of the stream. You have to ride back to the ranch, saddle up on a different horse, and restart your entire journey on a better horse.
by theturtletalks | 2025-05-04 23:07:28+00:00
AI has changed how we learn by making the process of improving work much easier. Normally, learning involves writing a draft, finding mistakes, and fixing them over time. This helps build critical thinking. AI, trained on tons of refined data, can create polished work right away. While this seems helpful, it can skip the important step of learning through trial and error.

The question is: Should we limit AI to keep the old way of learning, or use AI to make the process better? Instead of fixing small errors like grammar, students can focus on bigger ideas like making arguments clearer or connecting with readers. We need to teach students to use AI for deeper thinking by asking better questions.

We need to teach students that asking the right questions is key. By teaching students to question well, we can help them use AI to improve their work in smarter ways. The goal isn’t to go back to old methods for iterating but change how we iterate altogether.
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-04 23:07:51+00:00
The music player isn't the only thing interfacing with those files. Backups do. Network file shares do. Pendrives, dedicated music players, and children's toys that can load music do. The player changes over the years (winamp, VLC, amarok, clementine, jellyfin, etc.). Sometimes "apps" go wonky and the only way to fix them is to "clear user data", which is opaque, and you'd rather control that/be more selective.

I don't really care how the player stores its metadata (the secondary indexes it makes after the scan), but I don't want it mucking with the original data, which I've had and will continue to have far longer than the player. Files in a known format (e.g. .flac) offer a standard, common interface for storing that data that's easy to organize and exchange across computers.

Google drive also shows what a world where people don't use folders looks like: I can never find documents at work without a link even when I have an idea of what I'm trying to search for. Folders at least push the user to do some organization. GDrive happily encourages you to do none.
Analysing existing Metabase dashboards with ChatGPT?
by hynco | 2025-05-04 23:08:11+00:00
Like many of us I have a bunch of Metabase dashboards, eg showing product or traffic data.

Does anyone have a good way, to analyse existing charts/or dashboards (multiple charts in a row), with ChatGPT, just getting a direct report for anomalies for instance?
by cwalv | 2025-05-04 23:08:19+00:00
> However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow.

Learning is not just a function of aptitude and/or effort. Interest is a huge factor as well, and even for a single person, what they find interesting changes over time.

I don't think it's really possible to have a large cohort of people pass thru a liberal arts education, with everyone learning the same stuff at the same time, and have a majority of them "suck the marrow" out of the opportunity.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-04 23:08:41+00:00
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. They would definitely mention their command over a cavalry charge (usually fellow nobles or knights depending on time period and polity) but archers were generally lower status, even though they were better trained than some farmer-soldier from a distant retinue.

During Roman times they were mostly auxiliaries that contemporary authors generally ignored. Even in later battles like Agincourt where we have better sources and the longbowmen were decisive, more seems to have been written about their field fortifications against cavalry charges than their ranged tactics.

I think his arguments on the formations and draw strength are compelling enough, I’d just caution reading too much into absence of evidence when dealing with the low level details.
by yesco | 2025-05-04 23:08:43+00:00
> Based on what i know i do not believe that the latency imposed by the frame rate of the cameras is a limiting factor on self-driving car performance or safety.

This is would be pretty tangential to the discussion so not sure why you are bringing it up? Did you think my post was illustrating that camera based self driving cars were infeasible? Also it appears you are mistaking framerate for latency, something I specifically warned about in my post... I don't really know what to say here.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-04 23:09:03+00:00
Riot Games is a morally bankrupt and extremely profit-driven company. If they're not abusing Vanguard to provide MSS actors access to user's machines (free VPN to cover your tracks!), then they're mining data from your computer - perhaps for market research or to sell to adtech.

As a player of some of their games - they not only don't care about their players, but have a deeply abusive relationship with us.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-04 23:09:24+00:00
We had a town hall type of thing recently with some of our investors, and some of the answers they gave were hilarious, if it weren't so depressing that those people are the ones with most of the money in this world.

The worst was the answer to the question "How can we utilize AI to greater effect in our work?". A nice open-ended question where they had a beautiful opportunity to show off how knowledgeable and forward thinking they are, right? Especially considering they're the ones behind the massive AI push our product has gone with as of late.

"You can ask it to write emails for you!" Was the one and only thing these multi-milli/billionaires could come up with. Our core product itself is literally an email interface, and we have an AI email generation feature built in...

I had to turn my webcam off because I genuinely laughed out loud at that response for how insanely elementary and useless it was as an answer. It also showed me these people do literally nothing other than answer emails - and even then they're too bloody lazy and give so little of a shit they can't even do that part themselves.
by justaj | 2025-05-04 23:10:17+00:00
The biggest i3wm issue I still have is that I can't just do the equivalent of "Hey spawn this window over there with these dimensions"

No, I have to first specify a window with some regex which will "swallow" the application window name and if I want to specify other dimension parameters well good luck.

It's also frustrating to have an unexpected reboot, and not being able to restore all the containers and their windows.

Though perhaps most of these are X11 limitations and are not present on Sway?
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-04 23:10:29+00:00
ITERATE still breaks when you use `count` inside it, the built-in CL function. If they ever address that problem I'll get back to use it but having a time bomb in my programs isn't something I like.

Trivial example of breakage:

(iter (for i from 1 to 10) (print (count i some-sequence)))