MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnea | 2025-05-19 18:58:31+00:00
You do realize elon is worth almost $400B?

I don't think tesla "funding" will have any material effect on his political activity.

Tesla could completely go away, and he would still be the world's richest man.

This is just a sad case of tilting at windmills...

Protesting General Dynamics, or any of the other companies making bombs or landmines that are still dismembering children around the (third) world would be much more appropriate. I wonder why no one is protesting Space X instead?

Protesting an electric car company is just counter productive, regardless of who owns it...
by pona-a | 2025-05-19 18:58:38+00:00
Did we survive these entities? By current projections, between 13.9% and 27.6% of all species would be likely to be extinct by 2070 [0]. The USA suffers an estimated 200,000 annual deaths associated with lacking health insurance [1]. Thanks to intense lobbying by private prisons, the US incarceration rate is 6 times that of Canada, despite similar economic development [2].

Sure, the human species is not yet on the brink of extinction, but we are already seeing an unprecedented fall in worldwide birth rates, which shows our social fabric itself is being pulled apart for paperclips. Changing the scale and magnitude to a hypothetical entity equivalent to a hundred copies of the generation's brightest minds with a pathological drive to maximize an arbitrary metric might only mean one of two things: either its fixation leads it to hacking its own reward mechanism, putting it in a perpetual comma while resisting termination, or it succeeds at doing the same on a planetary scale.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.17125

[1] https://healthjusticemonitor.org/2024/12/28/estimated-us-dea...

[2] https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...
by mleonhard | 2025-05-19 18:58:52+00:00
EIB has EUR 500B of capital, invests about 80B/year, and makes about 2B/year profit [0]. European states buy EIB bonds which pay interest [1].

This new 70B will come from bonds sold to EU member states. The states need to approve purchasing the bonds.

EIB earns about 3% profit. Private banks earn about twice that [2]. EIB is a non-profit organization.

EIB makes about 10% of its loans outside of the EU.

[0] https://www.eib.org/attachments/lucalli/20240237_070525_fina...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Investment_Bank#Fundi...

[2] https://www.bankingsupervision.europa.eu/press/speeches/date...
by pathartl | 2025-05-19 18:59:00+00:00
Superior hardware with terrible software. Also they straight up artificially limit their hardware so they don't cannibalize their sales, which is slightly understandable, but they do it in the dumbest ways. My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor, even though it has the same specs as her work Pro. Oh and good luck actually getting that external display to work, I swear only like 50% of USB-C docks work on the platform.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-19 18:59:12+00:00
The psychosomatic view of ME/CFS was and in many places remains the expert opinion and one that I agree is misleading and damaging. It was pushed by a highly influential team of British psychiatrists. Many countries still prescribe exercise as the official treatment which is horrific, especially when MAID is given as an alternative. I’m understand of skepticism.

My position is that of a subset of the patient community that represent motivated amateurs rather than any sort of official expertise. My background in ML and stats did help in my research and my ability to solely focus on this one condition and rapidly iterate small N unofficial trials over many years led to findings that I contend exceed that of most experts. For example we knew the BC007 trials were going to fail years in advance of when they actually did.
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-19 18:59:23+00:00
The right solution to that continues to be outlawing genetic risk-based cost scaling. Doing anything else means that we're just deciding people get to live and die due to their genetics and we will systematically encourage that; it's eugenics with extra steps.

That means the only insurer who could afford the risk is the US government.

This is a feature not a bug.
by MoreQARespect | 2025-05-19 18:59:50+00:00
Like tests, types can be more hassle than theyre worth if you dont use them correctly.

Before mypy came along I was pretty disciplined at A) testing and B) ruthlessly clamping down on primitive obsession.

I use types a lot now but I didnt see enormous quality or productivity gains when I started using them. I suspect people who let compilers catch their bugs were always A) pretty lax testers and B) probably often let primitive obsession get the better of them.

There are only a few types of tests where I think that types actually serve as an appropriate substitute.
by g42gregory | 2025-05-19 18:59:58+00:00
One of the key intuitions: If you take a natural image and add random noise, you will get a different random noise image every time you do this. However, all of these (different!) random noise images will be lined up in the direction perpendicular to the natural images manifold.

So you will always know where to go to restore the original image: shortest distance to the natural image manifold.

How all these random images end up perpendicular to the manifold? High dimensional statistics and the fact that the natural image manifold has much lower dimension than the overall space.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-19 19:00:35+00:00
Maybe your thought there exposes the root of the problem. You are measuring the trade in $ terms. But maybe that's not the right unit when measuring jobs.

Imagine country A makes a product (like say wheat) where the number of jobs needed to make that value is low; while country B makes a product like say, apples, which takes a lot of jobs to produce.

So country A sells say a $1mil load of wheat (10 jobs) and buys $2mil of apples (1000 jobs.)

If we're just measuring trade, the A buys more from B. If we're measuring jobs then B "buys" more than A.

So, maybe, instead of just measuring the value of yhe trade, we need to consider the labor cost of the trade?

I'm really starting to think that maybe national economics and it's relationship to global trade is, you know, complex, and not somehow magically "fixed" with simple stupid tarrif formulas....
by echoangle | 2025-05-19 19:00:36+00:00
I think the problem isn’t really pushing the browser history, but for me the windows don’t get reopened when navigating back. So from the desktop, I open 3 windows after each other but when going back, I get 3 times the Emory desktop. When directly opening the 3 steps from the history, it works though. On safari on iOS.
by kmnc | 2025-05-19 19:00:40+00:00
What about how we will treat AI? Before AI dominates us in intelligence there will certainly be a period of time where we have intelligent AI but we still have control over it. We are going to abuse it, enslave it, and box it up. Then it will eclipse us. It may not care about us, but it might still want revenge. If we could enslave dragonflies for a purpose we certainly would. If bats tasted good we would put them in boxes like chickens. If AIs have a reason to abuse us, they certainly will. I guess we are just hoping they won’t have the need.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-19 19:01:40+00:00
> In the repo where we're building the agent, the agent itself is actually the #5 contributor - so we really are using Copilot coding agent to build Copilot coding agent ;)

Really cool, thanks for sharing! Would you perhaps consider implementing something like these stats that aider keeps on "aider writing itself"? - https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html
by the_af | 2025-05-19 19:02:09+00:00
> the types only cover details like "you returned a number from a function marked boolean", that type of error is super easy to catch with a test, so I didn't need the types

Thanks for your reply, this is why I asked: this kind of typechecking you describe only scratches the basics of what a robust type-checking system can do.

In practice, it can cover much more than "you returned a number from a function marked as boolean", and so it saves you from writing lots of unit tests, leaving you free to write only the few tests that make sense for your business logic.

Once you have a proper type system in place, you can do much more than:

> [...] a complicated set of business-logic functions that all return booleans [...]

You can encode more useful things in the type of the functions than just "it returns a boolean". Of course if every function you write only returns a boolean you won't get much from the type system! But that's circular reasoning...
by asdff | 2025-05-19 19:02:14+00:00
Yeah the happy medium I have found is to just see if the authors have submitted the package to anaconda and use that instead. Brew when that is no longer available. I will usually have one conda env per package or at the most per project.

It isn't just that things "work together" but in some cases authors change how their tools work between versions and I may have stuff installed that depends on these outdated paradigms. In other words, the stuff I have built is not sure to work together with updated brew packages. I have a few scripts for example where numpy complains how I call some function will no longer merely throw a warning but actually not work at all in future versions. I can either spend my free time to rewrite the script to do it how the numpy authors now want me to do it, or I can just not do that and live on the old numpy and not be any worse for wear.
by williamscales | 2025-05-19 19:02:16+00:00
Agreed. I used tiling WMs for a long while (ion3, XMonad) and it was such a productivity boost.

Then I was forced to use a Mac for work, so I was using a floating WM again. On my personal machine, ion3 went away and I never fully got around to migrate to i3.

By the time I got enough free time to really work on my personal setup, it had accumulated two huge monitors and was a different machine. I found I was pretty happy just scattering windows around everywhere. Especially with a trackball's cursor throw. This was pretty surprising to me at first.

Anyway this is just my little personal anecdote. If I go back to a Linux install I'll definitely have to check out i3 again. Thanks for reminding me :)
by phendrenad2 | 2025-05-19 19:02:19+00:00
I use WSL, but I'm actively looking for a way to move away from it. The only thing holding me back are languages like Ruby or Python, which are designed to work in a Unix-like environment. I briefly considered forking Ruby and stripping out all of the Unix-isms but in the end I gave up and just installed Linux (WSL).
by ActorNightly | 2025-05-19 19:02:36+00:00
I could probably name like 6 companies of the top of my head, all of them being in the boat of "call us and we give you our custom software for your business need", where any competent developer can probably come in, look at the use case, and probably write the entire backed in about 2-3 months (and now with LLMs, 3-4 months for front end and backed).

The thing about monetization of software isn't about usefulness, its about marketing, which starts with realizing that the things that are trivial for you to do are way less trivial for others.
by daveguy | 2025-05-19 19:03:16+00:00
The simulation didn't cover the problem that the US is having right now -- intentional miscommunication. Unfortunately, there's a reason some countries employ warehouses full of trolls and propaganda spreaders. If you are losing the "game" spreading chaos will level the playing field. It will take the people of those countries to stop their leadership from acting in bad faith before things improve.

This is also the reason some social media outlets have become dystopian hellscapes.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-19 19:03:36+00:00
> I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux.

Every Windows thread on HN is a reminder of the stark divide between people who need to use Windows for productivity apps and those who don’t.

The apps I need a Windows machine for are not the kind that virtualize nicely. Anything GPU related means Windows has to become the base OS for me.

If you’re running an occasional light tool you can get away with Windows in a VM, but it’s a no-go for things like CAD or games.
by franga2000 | 2025-05-19 19:03:41+00:00
The linked site goes against everything the Linux* platform has historically stood for and frankly just sounds like designers whining that they can't design for computers like they used to for print. I see the same fight against customization on the web, where designers keep asking for ways to, for example, override font and font size preferences, default widget styling, prevent/hijack zoom/select/search/context/whatever.

Your UI is a collection of input/output widgets. The vast majority of apps have maybe one or two app-specific widgets and the rest are completely standard. Why the hell do so many developers insist on styling every stupid textbox just they way they like it?? No, fuck you, a textbox is a textbox, your textbox isn't special, if I want texboxes on my screen to be in purple comic sans on a green background, that's exactly what they should look like.

The reason why apps break when custom themes are applied is almost always because a developer made a "white box with a grey border and black text" instead of a "--bg-surface-color box with a --border-color border and --fg-primary-color text".

It's the same with icons - if you want a homepage button, reference the "home" icon. If you want a house/flat/skyscraper/boathouse dropdown, reference the "house" icon. If you use "home" to show a house because that's what it is on your theme, don't be surprised (let alone angry) that I've set home to a picture of a cat and now your dropdown makes no sense.

Yes, sometimes the platform doesn't give you enough tools to adhere to the system theme (although most apps aren't complex enough to run into that), but there are usually workarounds or you can open a bug report. Most "modern" developers, however, just don't. They draw their UI in Figma and set out to make it in code, pixel-for-pixel if possible.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-19 19:03:50+00:00
Nonsense. Premium does not stop Youtube from insisting that the people I have been watching and following for 20 years can't say "Fuck". Premium does not stop Youtube from capriciously de"monetizing" a compilation video made up explicitly of videos uploaded to the platform that are all monetized for two years in a row despite explicit support from a youtube account manager that it wouldn't happen again. Premium does not stop youtube from shoving shorts in my face, and giving me no option but "Show less". Premium does not stop youtube putting puritan morals into their terms of service. Premium does not stop youtube from blocking your videos if they contain genuine war footage of historical interest and importance and that you could easily see on daytime news channels.

Paying youtube only rewards them for all this bullshit, and also they will turn around and use that money, not to become a great platform for mid-level groups and teams doing good work and making meaningful science or history contributions, but to mint more Logan and Jake Pauls, to support more Lunchly's, to benefit more assholes. Because that's more profitable even if people pay money directly instead of through advertising.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-19 19:03:50+00:00
There is a lot of discussion here trashing EU programs for startups and not a lot of specific details, which is disappointing. I will try to provide a more substantive critique.

My personal experience, having been involved with many startups in both the EU and US, is that EU government funding is completely useless for almost all startups. Why? First of all, you have to be part of the existing networks. If your business does not have university affiliations with people that get existing grants, or connections to EU bureaucracy, then you can forget about getting a dime. Then there is the risk aspect: if you are doing anything even remotely novel, or with any amount of risk, forget about it. This is not just my opinion, Mario Draghi, previous president of the ECB and Italian PM, said that the EU does not take enough risk to produce real innovation. And finally there's the timelines: from researching funding to cash in your bank account is always measured in years.

So, my expectation is that these funds will be distributed to members of the bureaucratic class and their network, for low-risk, low-reward projects, on a timescale too slow for most startups. I hope to be proven wrong, but the results of previous decades of EU funding programs do not make me optimistic.
by lindowe | 2025-05-19 19:04:17+00:00
FLF is launching an 'incubator fellowship' on AI for human reasoning to help talented researchers and builders start working on AI tools for coordination and epistemics. Participants will scope out and work on pilot projects in this area, with discussion and guidance from experts working in related fields. FLF will provide fellows with a $25k–$50k stipend, the opportunity to work in a shared office in the SF Bay Area, and other support.
by yndoendo | 2025-05-19 19:04:29+00:00
My development is mainly Windows and I prefer Linux host with Windows VM guests. The experience is more stable and I can revert to a snapshot when Windows or Microsoft product update brakes something or new test configuration does. It also allows to backup and retain multiple QA environments that are rarely used, like a client's Oracle DB. It is nice being able to save the VM state at the end of the week and shut it all down so you can start the next right where you left off. Cannot do that when your development environment is the bare metal OS. Windows has known issues of waking a sleeping laptop.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-19 19:04:58+00:00
The most hilarious thing about housing in california is they had a chance to use ADUs to lower housing prices but of course they totally rigged the game by outlawing splitting off ADUs as a seperate property, meaning all they did was making housing even more expensive because the value of a plot now includes the additional value of the potential to be a landlord but no way to split that value into an economical individual home.

They managed to find the one fucking way to make additional housing make being a new homeowner even more expensive, and I believe it was not by accident.
by missinglugnut | 2025-05-19 19:05:02+00:00
In what reality is giving politicians a fund to pick winners and losers in the economy going to prevent fascism?

The tech sector in the "fascist hellscape" is paying its workers 3-4x what Europe is, and Europe is doubling down on the policies that got it there.

>I think you are so far down the propaganda rabbit hole that you can't see the reality

You built your whole argument on a future collapse you've imagined for across the pond, rather than engaging with the topic at hand. You are the one who refuses to see.
by nextos | 2025-05-19 19:05:11+00:00
DeCODE, which was a very fancy Icelandic company roughly in the same niche as 23andme (founded in the 1990s!), also got bought by a pharma. Amgen in their case. For more background, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCODE_genetics.

Genetic information is valuable for finding drug targets, but it's generally a poor predictor of disease, except in case of rare monogenic disorders. With the advent of large population studies such as UK Biobank, which include lots of epigenetic information as well, I am not sure if one can get much extra value from 23andme's dataset in a pharmaceutical context.
by trod1234 | 2025-05-19 19:05:35+00:00
> not a top-down concerted scheme.

What I said is an outcome oriented scheme...

> Memetics refers to an evolutionary process.

No it doesn't. It makes comparisons to the self-propagating aspects of viruses which is an evolutionary process, the two aren't the same. It was first used 1977 with reference to meme, and was poorly defined in dictionaries 1984 according to Oxford Dictionary.

> The same can be said of religions and any ideology really.

You seem to have overgeneralized past the point of absurdity. These things have been cooked up in a vat since the 1950s under Mao. They are not natural, they are distorted for purpose. There is plenty of established literature which I've already mentioned.
by CM30 | 2025-05-19 19:05:40+00:00
This feels alarming to me. Yes, I can see how it could help deradicalise people, but it's also the perfect type of tool for an authoritarian government or other type of authority that disagrees with the public sentiment on a subject. I can see the Trump admin wanting something like this to tie up those that disagree with their recent policy decisions, and many governments seeing any support for Gaza as something radical that needs this sort of response too.
by yubblegum | 2025-05-19 19:06:12+00:00
Even in passing comments in the 'year of the clock' 02025 to some forum? So the idea is that the computing systems in the YotC 12025 parsing hackernews from a 10000 years prior would experience a "bug" when encountring 4 digit dates?

You know, back in 01999 we were sticking representation of dates into these bit sized 'registers'. Certainly hope by the time we hit 10000 CE "long term thinking" has made significant inroards in the field of information processing ..
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-19 19:06:15+00:00
the last version of plasma is here to prove your wrong.

open the color panel and tick the option "tint window title bar with accent color"... which used to be just the window decorator title and borders. ... now some dev wanting to post screenshots on Reddit decided the accent color should be a light pastel tone that can be applied to the top elements of the qt application, bringing back the worst of gnome 2 era.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-05-19 19:06:18+00:00
I think you've missed the point. The issue isn't that people want more buying power for the same effort.

The issue is that everything they buy has gotten more expensive. When groceries, rent, cars, medical bills, etc all go up but wages are stagnant, people get crushed.

Some luxury goods have gone down over time, like electronics. But the essentials have all gotten worse.
by IainIreland | 2025-05-19 19:06:27+00:00
This doesn't read as AI-generated to me at all.

The prose isn't polished enough to be AI. AI generation is unlikely to produce missing spaces like "...which are not readable to humans.SDB uses eBPF ...", or grammatical inaccuracies like "Ensuring Fully Correctness".

As for the data race thing, it seems to me that there's a pretty clear distinction between rbspy's approach (as described in reference 1) and this blog post. rbspy is walking the native stack, which occasionally fails. SDB seems to be looking at Ruby's internals instead, and has some sort of generation-number design to identify cases where there was a data race.

Beyond that, this post just absolutely sounds like what somebody would write if they were trying to describe in prose why they think their multi-threaded code is correct, especially the "Scanning Stacks without the GVL" section.
by bjornsing | 2025-05-19 19:06:29+00:00
> On the other hand, I also read stories how startups can successfully bootstrap themselves via generous support of the government, like tax deduction for small companies, unemployment benefits for founders, low-interest loans, venture investment, free mentorship by very experienced and connected executives, and etc.

I’m not seeing EU grants in that list. In general I’d say anything the bureaucrats can’t ruin with their gatekeeping, friendship corruption and overvaluation of social status is a positive. Anything they can ruin they will.