MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neilv | 2025-05-18 16:49:37+00:00
> There is literally nothing you can't buy except. Love. Sorry to sound so trite, but it is nearly impossible to have a normal emotional relationship at this level. It is hard to sacrifice for another person when you are never asked to sacrifice ANYTHING. Money can solve all problems for someone, so you offer it, because there is so much else to do. Your time is SOOOO valuable that you ration it. And that makes you lose connections with people.

That, and being surrounded by fawning yes-people, and the drugs?

In the worst cases (and there are a few, currently), you decide that you should be in charge of everything, democracy is a mistake, and that you are the person to destroy it.

Who has time for love, when there's so much ego to give.
by MasterYoda | 2025-05-18 16:49:39+00:00
"From a side project in Amsterdam to powering AI at the world’s biggest companies - this is the story of Python. Featuring Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more, our upcoming full-length documentary traces Python’s slow-but-steady rise, its community-driven evolution, and the language’s impact on... well… everything."
by wat10000 | 2025-05-18 16:49:58+00:00
I’d have a phone number that customers can use to reach someone at my company who can help them, and put that phone number in places where customers can find it.

Which is what most companies actually do, including Apple. Uncontactable companies like Google aren’t the norm.

I understand and share the frustration that email and chat work poorly, but unfortunately that’s often how it is. If you need help, your best bet is usually to call. It doesn’t sound like this guy ever did that.
by Aeyxen | 2025-05-18 16:49:58+00:00
I understand your perspective as a marketer, but I think you're creating a false dichotomy. Yes, persuasion tech has stronger financial incentives, but that doesn't prevent beneficial applications from emerging simultaneously.

The "super tutor" isn't some distant fantasy - millions already use ChatGPT, Claude and similar tools daily for personalized learning. They're imperfect but genuinely helpful for programming, languages, math, and countless other topics.

Look at what happened with YouTube: millions of people transformed themselves into programmers, musicians, mechanics, and countless other professions through free video tutorials. Khan Academy revolutionized math education. Coursera and edX brought university courses to anyone with internet. This wasn't utopian thinking - it was practical technology solving real educational problems at scale.

What's different now is that LLMs enable the missing piece: personalization. The one-on-one adaptive experience that was previously limited to those who could afford human tutors at $50-100/hour is now available to anyone at negligible marginal cost.

Your skepticism about cancer applications too ignores the technological trajectory we've been on for decades. Just as YouTube and online platforms democratized education, technology has been steadily dismantling bottlenecks in medical research.

The human genome project initially cost $3 billion and took 13 years. Today you can sequence a genome for under $1,000 in days. This wasn't utopian thinking; it was technological progress following its natural course.

Think what LLMs will do here.
by jarrett-ye | 2025-05-18 16:50:26+00:00
What does the 'Free' mean in the name?

The algorithm (FSRS) supports reviewing in advance or delay. It's free for users to decide the time of review. And it will adapt to the user's memory.

Meanwhile, spaced repetition is one essential technology to achieve free learning.

FSRS runs entirely locally and has no risk under others' control.

source: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/free-spaced-repeti...
by baranul | 2025-05-18 16:50:28+00:00
While I do agree that C3 tries a bit harder to keep closer to the look and feel of C, it has arguably already veered too far away, in order to be modern. These changes can be viewed as unacceptable to many fans of C. C3 has taken on a very strong Odin and Jai flavor. Since that's the case, the argument for Odin, Jai, Vlang, etc... would be equally valid. If you are going to make a modern language, then their creators should not feel too restrained.

There are other C family languages that have a Pascal influence and didn't go OO crazy, not just Odin. So in that context, languages like Golang, Vlang, Jai, etc... are equally viable alternatives to look at.
by jonnyc23 | 2025-05-18 16:50:53+00:00
The Inner Game of Tennis (2022), reviewed by Bill Gates from his website, https://www.gatesnotes.com/. Well let's look at who Bill Gates is, by his bloodlines.

Bill Gates, I thought he was just some lucky pioneering nerd, nope, not by looking at who he relates to. From this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cornell_(settler)

Background on this guy first:

"Thomas Cornell Sr (c. 1595 – c. 1655) was one of the earliest settlers of Boston (1638), Rhode Island (1643) and the Bronx, and a contemporary of Roger Williams and the family of Anne Hutchinson. He is the ancestor of a number of North Americans prominent in business, politics, and education."

A rundown of key relations of Bill Gates; He relates to founder of Cornell University, a signer of the declaration of independence, a war general representing Rhode Island, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, John Kerry and a prime minister of Canada. (And a few more in the quote).

The rundown is from this quote of the Wikipedia link above:

"Thomas Cornell is an ancestor to a number of prominent and notorious Americans: Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell University; William Ellery, signer of the Declaration of Independence; Ezekiel Cornell, a Revolutionary War general who represented Rhode Island in the U.S. Continental Congress from 1780 to 1782;[4] Bill Gates; Presidents Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon; First Ladies Elizabeth Monroe and Frances Folsom Cleveland; Senator Bob Graham; Secretary of State John Kerry; Amelia Earhart; Stockton Rush; Josh Rosen, NFL player; neuroscientist and self-described psychopath James H. Fallon;[5] and accused axe murderer Lizzie Borden, by way of Thomas Cornell (Jr.)'s daughter, Innocent, born to his second wife, Sarah Earle Cornell, after his execution.[6]"

"Cornell is also connected to distant Canadian lines, who settled north into Upper Canada, notably in Scarborough, Ontario and Markham, Ontario via William Cornell (1766–1860) from Rhode Island. He is also linked to Sir Robert Laird Borden, Prime Minister of Canada via Richard Borden's marriage to Innocent Cornell."

Yeah, not so lucky nerd. More like American blue blood. This shocked me. So now Bill Gates gives me deep state vibes, which makes his company Microsoft sit nice and cozy next to spook-vile Google.

This is no different to the J.P. Morgan family, both with continuous prominence tracing back to the 1600s in the UK.

"Miles Morgan was the son of lawyer and politician William Morgan, who would be elected a Member of Parliament in 1628." (In UK)

William Morgan was a politician and a senior lawyer in the King's Counsel, appointed by the Monarch.

"One of his sons, Nathaniel, continued the legacy of the Morgan name by becoming a powerful member of his small town. " (Now in America by 1636).

So yeah, Bill Gates... who would have thought!

Oh, and even more relations of prominent people through John Kerry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_family
by jszymborski | 2025-05-18 16:50:58+00:00
When I get nice separation with PCA, I personally tend to eschew UMAP, since the relative distance of all the points to one another is easier to interpret. I avoid t-SNE at all costs, because distance in those plots are pretty much meaningless.

(Before I get yelled out, this isn't prescriptive, it's a personal preference.)
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-18 16:52:17+00:00
It isn’t like I am invisible. Drivers routinely merge for a bus or ubereats vehicle or other obstruction. It is certainly safer than the alternative of not taking the lane and having these cars with the speed differential try and pass you in the same lane as you. This is what always happens unless you take up space and force the lane change to merge.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-05-18 16:52:21+00:00
It really is not. To see why not, imagine how you'd feel if you had a coworker who would come to work drunk (if they came at all). They would still be paid the same as you. Your only recourse would be to talk to this person as a "meeting of the peers", which they would proceed to ignore.

This was reality under the Soviet system, and was one of the main reasons it failed.

Now, I understand why I am getting all the cheeky responses and the downvotes. People are hurting. Capitalism in the US is currently failing under a different failure mode. The capitalists are relentless optimizers, even past the point where optimizing their metrics stops making sense. Their metric is "extract as much wealth from the populace as possible", and it's gotten to the point where the people are disillusioned, and very soon there will be nothing left to take.
by gchamonlive | 2025-05-18 16:52:47+00:00
I'd be surprised if it was indeed random, but the consistency is really surprising. I say this because I imagine that anyone that would be able to produce such text is a master scribe that put countless hours writing other works, so he's supposed to be very familiar with such structure, therefore even if he was going for randomness, I would doubt he would achieve it.
by amiga386 | 2025-05-18 16:53:20+00:00
I used to work for a telco equipment provider around the time everyone was replacing PDH with SONET. Telcos were gagging to buy our stuff, the main reason being basic hardware advances.

Telephone Exchanges / Central Offices have to be in the centre of the lines they serve, meaning some very expensive real estate, and datacenter-level HVAC in the middle of cities is very, very expensive.

They loved nothing more than to replace old 1980s switches with ones that took up a quarter to a tenth of the floorspace, used less than half the electricity, and had fabrics that could switch fibre optics directly.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-18 16:53:28+00:00
Because it's only INSERT not SELECT nor DELETE? Maybe you meant IMAP which does have APPEND <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3501.html#section-6.3.11> to insert a new message into a folder, and a bazillion SELECT options, plus of course DELETE

I still would call that crazy, because of the mental tax of explaining to every new employee "wait, you're using IMAP for what?" but if it works for you, then great
by deazy | 2025-05-18 16:53:29+00:00
Basically this is what I think it is,

Shared context that can act as independent shards of (mini) contexts, i.e Sub-global attention blocks or "sub-context experts" that can operate somewhat independently and then scale up or compose into a larger global attention as a paradigm for handling extremely long contexts.

Trying to see if this can be tested in some way at small scale, its worth a try if it can work, but requires some engineering to make it possible.
by foolswisdom | 2025-05-18 16:53:29+00:00
Because you don't want the other side (political party) to do the same thing. The US congress has relatively recent rules designed to actually prevent this from happening, and rather keep everything in reconciliation bills. Which obviously is a great way to hobble our legislative branch. But that's the point, no one wants the other side to try their hand at being a normal legislature. Which is part of why you end up with courts (and now the executive) wielding more power, because congress is effectively weaker and less nimble/responsive than it should be.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_%28United_State...>
by toast0 | 2025-05-18 16:54:27+00:00
I'm a big BEAM person, but python 3.0.0 was released december 2008. At that time, I believe OTP R12 was current, and it only gained SMP support in R11. [1] In 2008, I don't know that it would have been clear that the BEAM would be a good target. And I don't know how switching to BEAM then would have addressed what I think is the core issue python 3 was working on, unicode strings; BEAM didn't start taking on unicode until R13 and IMHO, is kind of on the slow end of unicode adoption (which isn't always bad... being late means adopting industry consensus with less of the intermediate false steps)

[1] https://erlang.org/euc/08/euc_smp.pdf
by us-merul | 2025-05-18 16:55:49+00:00
I’ve found this to be one of the most interesting hypotheses: http://voynichproject.org/

The author made an assumption that Voynichese is a Germanic language, and it looks like he was able to make some progress with it.

I’ve also come across accounts that it might be an Uralic or Finno-Ugric language. I think your approach is great, and I wonder if tweaking it for specific language families could go even further.
by vidarh | 2025-05-18 16:56:16+00:00
I clicked through hoping for something interesting and different, and got the same impression.

So... More plus influence.

I think the only thing listed that people with less money don't really "know about" is how much perspective changes with staff. You know people have people, but not necessarily how it changes things.

I'm on the very low end of that - I run a small DevOps consultancy and can, now employ a few people in low cost countries, and though I've managed large teams before, having unilateral ability to set people to work on things because I want them is a game changer, and it's hard to get used to asking for things instead of doing them.

The rest feels like things everyone knows, if not directly then from TV and movies.
by mlhpdx | 2025-05-18 16:56:56+00:00
On the producer side I’d expect to see change data capture being directed to a queue fairly efficiently, but perhaps you have some intermediary that’s running between the system of record and the queue? The latter works, but yeah it eats compute.

On the consumer side the duty cycle drives design. If it’s a steady flow then a polling listener is easy to right size. If the flow is episodic (long periods of idle with unpredictable spikes of high load) one option is to put a alarm on the queue that triggers when it goes from empty to non-empty, and handle that alarm by starting the processing machinery. That avoids the cost of constantly polling during dead time.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-18 16:57:22+00:00
The maps I see show somewhere just below 4 kWh/m^2/day for much of Pennsylvania.

https://www.altestore.com/pages/solar-maps-for-the-usa

The desert southwest is only at most around 6 kWh/m^2/day, mind you.

This is horizontal irradiation; a PV module tilted properly would receive more effective hours per day. Also, half the solar intensity for twice as long would enable inverters to be downsized, even if the average kWh/m^2/day were unchanged.
by amarcheschi | 2025-05-18 16:57:39+00:00
I knew a son of two entrepreneurs with a ~30m yacht, they own a (ex) monastery they use, either for parties, events, or as a residence

They have Miele appliances, but having "same appliances" doesn't make justice to the fact that there are deeper differences. Yes, they're status goods, but I think one's life might greatly improve by being very wealthy - even if your life can still be shitty as a wealthy person
by beyarkay | 2025-05-18 16:57:43+00:00
(author here) I agree that novices have an advantage in that they have few assumptions:

> Something you can do independently (and possibly it’s best done without expert supervision), is exploration of the field. You know nothing, and have no biases about what may or may not be useful. Any time you come across something that feels like it has some depth to it, such as a well-written essay series or a deep technical dive, you need to invest heavily into it. As a novice, your one advantage is that everything is new and nobody expects you to be fast. Because of this, you can afford to spend the time to learn as much as possible.

I'm not sure that it's correct to characterise an expert by the lack of this though. I think it's correlated, but not all experts are so rigid.
by yorwba | 2025-05-18 16:58:19+00:00
I feel like from a habit-forming perspective Anki would benefit from a fixed-time mode instead of varying the number of reviews. The default daily maximum is 200 reviews per deck, I think, but it's hard to tell whether that's too little or way too much until you've hit that level.

If you could set a study time of say 30 minutes, then when you skip a day, you could just do your usual 30 minutes and maybe only get through 50% of the scheduled cards, but you could slowly catch up over the next few days. And if on the contrary you run out of reviews for today, you could carry on with some scheduled for tomorrow until you've hit your target time.

FSRS can handle off-schedule reviews just fine, I think, so it should be able to accommodate such a rhythm where you don't always review cards on exactly the optimal day.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-18 16:58:38+00:00
I love hearing "watch out for" stories, because I feel that allows me to be extra vigilant about some aspect when running my own PoC

That said, my suspicion about any such aggregation project like that is that context is everything and trying to capture "this sucks" for all the input criteria which produced that outcome is going to be a wall of text that few will write and even fewer will read (ahem, LLM "tl;dr it for me" aside)
by gowings97 | 2025-05-18 16:58:54+00:00
If you pay them, they will come. No is going to work in a plant making $20/hr. There are no shortage of people trying to get into unionized / Big 3 US automotive OEM plants making $60-70K base, $100K if you work at a plant making an in-demand vehicle that's running three shifts/overtime, but those are only a handful of those right now.

You really are missing the forest for the trees with respect to cheap stuff from Asia and completely gutting our capacity to manufacturer from a national security standpoint, and totally ignore what effect the gutting has had on manufacturing in the other 50% of the Country living outside of metro areas.

It's nerd-sperging - "I want cheap shit but I don't want to think about the externalities like hundreds of thousands of people that live outside of metro areas overdosing on opioids because their way of a middle class life has been destroyed or national security, because I discounted / ignore them because I life in a perfect world where I just type on a keyboard all day and get paid more than 95% of Americans and I want a perfect EV."

Yeah I'm sure the Chinese will sell you cruise missiles when the time comes.
by skydhash | 2025-05-18 17:00:18+00:00
Debugging can be a joy when dealing with a single system. Not so much when dealing with things like microservices where every combination has a possible failure scenario related to that bug. And because of the deployment strategy, you can't easily test that combination in isolation. Also no tests for each service, only full integration tests that takes a while to run.

I know distributed systems can be a pain to reason about, but I think every node should be capable of being tested in isolation, at least to be able to partition errors (either the node, or the distributed nature of the system)
by Muromec | 2025-05-18 17:01:04+00:00
>I did, and it’s really not very convincing at all. It uses an example where a terror group in Japan was able to injure thousands of people with a chemical attack, and act as if this is… not a particularly effective outcome?

Yes, it isn't effective outcome in terms of meeting their objective

> It also doesn’t get into detail with concepts like dropping a bomb right in the middle of a firefight knowing it literally cannot harm your own troops

That's a video games logic, it doesn't work like that in practice. Even civil grade riot control tear gas grenade is pretty traumatic because it still explodes to disperse the gas (source : implied first hand knowledge). That and warfare is messy, which means half the time half the protective gear will be destroyed from the usual exploding and shooting happening, gas gets carried away by the wind in a random direction, etc, etc.
by minimaxir | 2025-05-18 17:01:51+00:00
A point of note is that the text embeddings model used here is paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 (https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/paraphrase-mult...), which is about 4 years old. In the NLP world, that's effectively ancient, particularly as the robustness of even small embeddings models due to global LLM improvements has increased dramatically both in information representation and distinctiveness in the embedding space. Even modern text embedding models not explicitly trained for multilingual support still do extremely well on that type of data, so they may work better for the Voynich Manuscript which is a relatively unknown language.

The traditional NLP techniques of stripping suffices and POS identification may actually harm embedding quality than improvement, since that removes relevant contextual data from the global embedding.
by never_inline | 2025-05-18 17:02:16+00:00
Thanks for the clarifications. Good if you mention the background in the medium post. Otherwise it reads like a PoC demo.

5. How did you handle java local and global ref lifetimes in rust callee? Was it assumed that java caller owns all the refs and freed after the rust computation returns? Or did your calls mostly involve byte buffers and primitive types? That latter is a sweet spot but not always feasible.
by Gareth321 | 2025-05-18 17:02:46+00:00
Agreed. Every time I sign up for services I imagine how I would fare if I lost access to everything from this company. It's why I ended up de-Googling my life. The horror stories of people losing access to their Gmail accounts led me to purchase my own domain and migrate all my accounts with that email across. That ended up being a multi-year project, but now if my host ever cuts off access to my emails, I can be back online within an hour.
by tsumnia | 2025-05-18 17:02:54+00:00
Mastery by George Leonard touches on some of this; learners can fall into 3 categories during the learning process: Dabblers, Obsessives, and Hackers. Each one has strengths and weaknesses, but the core philosophy is that "mastery takes time". After 2-3 years of practice, you know all the moves in a school of martial arts, or all the chord progressions for an instrument. But its the "after" where you either continue to refine or move on to the next skill.

Anything advertising that you can learn X in Y days isn't addressing that "after" period. Once you've learned the skill, you need motivation toward applying it, which in turn refines your skills. Conversely, becoming hyper fixated can be detrimental to overall skill. "Jack of all trades, master of none" HOWEVER the rest of the quote goes "but often times better than a master of one"

Sometimes you gotta slog through the boring bits to progress.
by beyarkay | 2025-05-18 17:02:54+00:00
(author here) I'm not sure I agree. I certainly think that screen sharing is better than nothing, but remote screen sharing is a strict subset of what you can do while in-person. Working remotely means there's some higher bar for quickly bugging a colleague, since you have no idea if they're casually reading their emails or if they're in deep focus.

I can't describe how many times I've been saved days of work because a senior casually asked what problem I was working on as we both waited in line for a coffee, and they were able to point me in the right direction. As described in the essay, the novice doesn't know when to ask for help.

There are other, tangential, reasons to prefer remote work over in-person, but I don't think there's any reason why remote work would be better at educating novices.