MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by magicnubs | 2025-05-19 15:48:19+00:00
I wonder what everyone else thinks about this claim made by the article:

> The enduring strength of a state-dominated Chinese system that can pivot, change policy and redirect resources at will in service of long-term national strength is now undeniable, regardless of whether free-market advocates like it.

The writer claims that a command economy gives them an advantage over a free market economy. Top-down production targets and price controls didn't really work for the Soviet Union, but maybe the more immediately-available and granular data available nowadays makes it feasible? The US already has a way to encourage production through various methods (e.g. subsidies). It seems to me the real difference is not the economic system, but that the Chinese government is less beholden to existing interests (that aren't the CCP). The US seems to often be unable or unwilling to accept the temporary pain of a big change, even if it would be better off in the long-term.
by zahlman | 2025-05-19 15:48:22+00:00
> For example, while researching new monitors today, I told Gemini...

You told an agent, not just an LLM.

> And this is already not hype, it's reality anywhere Waymo operates.

Some beg to differ; see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0 .
by peatmoss | 2025-05-19 15:48:42+00:00
As someone else mentioned, pine trees aren't a great material. But apart from that, giant monoculture forests are not excellent. Old growth forests host a degree of biodiversity and ecological function that tree farms generally don't.

Lab / barge-cultured wood products could potentially have really great materials properties that the natural stuff doesn't. Plywood is super useful stuff, and the best is made from more layers. The orientation of the wood fibers is flipped 90 degrees from layer to layer to give its strength in multiple dimensions. The more perfectly uniform the grain of each layer, the better quality the plywood. Voids and grain runouts create a locally weak spot or cosmetic issues. Weak spots generally don't correspond through layers, and the material generally isn't pushed to its theoretical limits in application. And cosmetically, better quality plywood reserves the highest quality layers for the outermost visible layers.

Baltic birch plywood is considered The Good Stuff and is made by essentially peeling a tree that grows pretty straight and pretty uniform. But you can imagine growing a seamless sheet of plywood that is even more perfect. Maybe one or two layers of fibers running one direction, before the next layer is encouraged to flip orientation. The platonic ideal of plywood, without needing to peel trees and stick layers together with glue.

And again, if we get freaky with the cell cultures, you can imagine cool properties where layers take up minerals from sea water that help with e.g. rot resistance or fire resistance. Or even freakier, maybe we figure out how to incorporate synthetic or lab cultured spider silk with our plywood, giving it truly novel material properties.
by bunderbunder | 2025-05-19 15:49:01+00:00
> Traditional analyses often fall into two camps: statistical entropy checks or wild guesswork.

I'd argue that these are just the camps that non-traditional, amateur analysis efforts fall into. I've only briefly skimmed Voynich work, but my impression is that, traditionally, more academic analyses rely on a combination of linguistic and cryptological analysis. This does happen to be informed by some statistical analysis, but goes way beyond that.

For example, as I recall the strongest argument that Voynichese probably isn't just an alternative alphabet for a well-known language relies on comparing Voynichese to the general patterns for how writing systems map symbols to sounds. That permits the development of more specific hypotheses about how it could possibly function, including how likely it is to be an alphabet or abjad, and, hypotheses about which characters could plausibly represent more than one sound, possible digraphs, etc. All of that work casts severe doubt on the likelihood of it representing a language from the area because it just can't plausibly represent a language with the kinds of phonological inventories we see in the language families that existed in that place and time.

There's also been some pretty interesting work on identifying individual scribes based on a confluence of factors including, but not limited to, analysis of the text itself. Some of the inferred scribes exclusively wrote in the A language (oh yeah, Voynichese seems to contain two distinct "languages"), some exclusively wrote in the B language, I think they've even hypothesized that there's one who actually used both languages.

There isn't a lot of popular awareness of this work because it's not terribly sexy to anyone but a linguistics nerd. But I'd guess that any attempt to poke at the Voynich manuscript that isn't informed by it is operating at a severe disadvantage. You want to be standing on the shoulders of the tallest giants, not the ones with the best social media presence.
by rcarmo | 2025-05-19 15:49:16+00:00
As a bilingual Portuguese/English speaker who essentially spends most of his waking hours working in English but switching back when I leave my home office, I have been very much annoyed by this since the dial-up days.

Infuriatingly, there was a train of thought at one time that used website analytics as a justification for either setting the default language of a site or trusting an external third-party like IP addresses databases (often just relying on the free, unmaintained stuff that broke after 3 months as the Internet expanded).

Then came the browser geolocation prompts, etc. -- and most people, lacking a basic understanding of how HTTP works, preferred chunks of JavaScript they could "see" to HTTP header information they didn't understand, to the point where that got codified as "best practice".

It also doesn't help that most CMS frameworks completely fail to make use of that information and pass it down the stack, or that people have turned to doing SPAs (which _can_ just use navigator.language, but just do a search in any framework's source code and see how often that is used).
by rayiner | 2025-05-19 15:49:37+00:00
Granite Rapids is also a better example because it's an enterprise processor with a huge monolithic die (almost 600 square mm).

A key distinction, however, is latency. I don't know about Granite Rapids, but sources show that Sapphire Rapids had an L3 latency around 33 ns: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/5th-gen-emerald-rapids-cpu.... According to the article, the L2 latency in the Tellum II chips is just 3.8 ns (about 21 clock cycles at 5.5 GHz). Sapphire Rapids has an L2 latency of about 16 clock cycles.

IBM's cache architecture enables a different trade-off in terms of balancing the L2 versus L3. In Intel's architecture, the shared L3 is inclusive, so it has to be at least as big as L2 (and preferably, a lot bigger). That weighs in favor of making L2 smaller, so most of your on-chip cache is actually L3. But L3 is always going to have higher latency. IBM's design improves single-thread performance by allowing most of the on-chip cache to be lower-latency L2.
by johnfn | 2025-05-19 15:49:48+00:00
I'm curious if anyone here can answer a question I've wondered about for a long time. I've heard Zod might be in the right ballpark, but from reading the documentation, I'm not sure how I would go about it.

Say I have a type returned by the server that might have more sophisticated types than the server API can represent. For instance, api/:postid/author returns a User, but it could either be a normal User or an anonymous User, in which case fields like `username`, `location`, etc come back null. So in this case I might want to use a discriminated union to represent my User object. And other objects coming back from other endpoints might also need some type alterations done to them as well. For instance, a User might sometimes have Post[] on them, and if the Post is from a moderator, it might have special attributes, etc - another discriminated union.

In the past, I've written functions like normalizeUser() and normalizePost() to solve this, but this quickly becomes really messy. Since different endpoints return different subsets of the User/Post model, I would end up writing like 5 different versions of normalizePost for each endpoint, which seems like a mess.

How do people solve this problem?
by fragmede | 2025-05-19 15:49:56+00:00
I'd ask if you were new to the Internet, but no one would believe the answer of a liar.

Of the 261 words in your comment (archived at https://archive.is/Vfx9Z#selection-161.6-184.0), none of them mention that you see it as "grotesquely flagrant consumption", so reads like the meme about the temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-19 15:50:04+00:00
> If they were actually hiring they could have easily shifted existing workers into those.

I wouldn't assume that it's appropriate to shift people in a layoff to new roles within a company. I remember, when working at Intel, that some people were given opportunity (and preference) to apply to internal roles before being asked to leave.

That being said, not everyone is a good fit to transition to open roles. Other times, a certain amount of headcount turnover is healthy. (I personally felt like a lot of Intel's woes were due to the organization being too insular; and a certain amount of turnover would have helped them.)
by thederf | 2025-05-19 15:50:12+00:00
About a year ago I did the same migration: Obsidian to self-hosted Directus.

My main reasons were:

- Straightforward queries. I have a lot of structured data in my notes and lesson plans, and being able to work with SQL was ideal.

- A web app was much more reliable than Obsidian's third-party sync platforms.

- I could extend Directus to do all sorts of other things. I eventually built my wedding planner and website backend on the same Directus instance that holds my notes.

(I also built a set of scripts on my Hackberry Pi that let me write text files on the go that saved to Directus)

The biggest disadvantage is that the writing and saving experience isn't as fluid.
by tocs3 | 2025-05-19 15:50:19+00:00
How is the architecture of a lisp machine different that "normal" computers. I did the first half of the NAND to Tetris course and thought it was super interesting. Since, I have been thinking about using the HDL from the course to play with other computing ideas (a turing machine, cellular automata, one instruction set computers). I have never really found anything about how a lisp machine would be different in terms of hardware though.
by codingbot3000 | 2025-05-19 15:50:47+00:00
If you like nuclear, ask yourself the following questions:

- Would you want to raise kids living close to a plant? (with higher likelihood of childhood leukemia etc.)

- Would you want to live close to a nuclear waste processing plant such as Le Hague or Sellafield, with all the incidents?

- Would you want to live close to a nuclear waste disposal site?

- Would you want to pay much more for electricity than would be possible using cheaper sources than nuclear, either directly, or hidden through taxes (as in France)?

- Do you want your country to import uranium from countries such as Russia or Niger, and depend on them?

If you can answer all these questions with a clear yes, continue to promote it. If not, please don't!
by dekhn | 2025-05-19 15:51:28+00:00
There's a big dynamic range in pine. For example, I work with everything from big-box-store lowest-cost pine lumber (2x4s) to kiln-dried select pine.

The low quality stuff is full of knots, warped (with very high variable humidity- some beams weigh 2x other beams). The high quality stuff is.... not as nice as maple, but certainly it's dense, uniform, and doesn't warp. From what I can tell, it's because they select the high quality stuff, then kiln-dry it and mill it.

Also if you inspect cheap 2x4s, there are often some higher quality pieces (few knots, straight-ish, not too wet) which you can then trim and plane to get decent wood.

But yeah, pine is sort of an industrial product grown fast at scale.
by satvikpendem | 2025-05-19 15:52:02+00:00
Zod 4 looks good but even with their latest improvements, ArkType is still an order of magnitude faster. Sometimes for the sake of backward and syntax compatibility, it is difficult to make something much faster than a fully greenfield newer library. We recently did an analysis of all these types of tools for our project and decided to go with ArkType for partially this reason, the other was TypeScript ergonomics felt nicer.
by bmn__ | 2025-05-19 15:52:26+00:00
What I wanted to transport is the following idea: attacking a channel owner (who is most likely innocent and did nothing wrong) with a metaphoric sledge-hammer when a more gentle and precise tool will do is not a great way to conduct oneself in society. vintermann and clan have a feed now without content that bothers them, but at the cost of lowering the channel owner's reputation in the eyes of the operators of Youtube, with the effect of slashing recommendations for the videos of the channel owner at large and his earnings. That's not nice, we should be considerate of the consequence of our actions. Does this make sense, do you understand this perspective?

This behaviour rankles me, I think is on the same level as the misuse of the feature "report this as spam (to some upstream entity/3rd party)" for e-mail messages that are not actually spam.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-19 15:53:01+00:00
TypeScript's insistence on being a static checking/compile time only system is such a sad wound to the whole ecosystem. I don't want TypeScript to be a runtime checker, but I want it to export useful usable type data for classes, functions, objects. TypeScript feels like the best source of truth we have, but instead so many of the attempts to reflect on what we have are all going it alone, having to define their own model and their own builders for describing what stuff is. You've mentioned 5 major areas where reflection is a core part of the mission, and each of these have multiple implementations.

There is the old TypeScript type emitter, reflect-metadata, which would provide some type information at runtime, but it targets very old decorator and metadata specifications, not the current version. I don't super know how accurate or complete it's model really is, how closely it writes down what typescript knows versus how much it defines its own model to export to. https://www.npmjs.com/package/reflect-metadata

We are maybe at the cusp of some unifying, some coming together, albeit not via typescript at this time, still as a separate layer. The Standard Schema project has support from I dare say most of the top validation libraries. But extending this to API definitions, ORM tools is in extremely early stages. https://github.com/standard-schema/standard-schema?tab=readm...
by wannabebarista | 2025-05-19 15:53:03+00:00
For years, I used Trello for taking notes and tracking my reading/research. The feature I cared most about was being able to reference notes in other notes and have lists of notes. It turns out that Trello is an awful tool for this because their database doesn't scale well to large boards.

I built a bare-bones alternative where each "card", e.g. book or paper, is a JSON file. This was motivated by parsing the bloated Trello export file into individual files.

I tinkered with this until I came across Obsidian. I used a version of this tool[0] to parse my Trello export into markdown files. It's still not perfect and continually requires tinkering to do what I need, but my present setup is infinitely better than the prior. r.e. another comment: I can imagine using this setup in twenty years and am happy to pay for Sync.

[0] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/t2md-a-tool-to-migrate-trello-to...
by indigovole | 2025-05-19 15:53:09+00:00
With yet another exciting new release of something reaching the top of HN, I would just like to urge devs to put a description of the project they're actually releasing and a link to the page describing the project in the release announcement.

These announcements could be a valuable touchpoint for you to reach a whole new audience, but I can't remember a single one that starts with something like "exciting new release of NAME, the X that does Y for users of Z. Check out the project home page at https:// for more."

Quite often, the release announcement is a dead end that can't even take me to the project! In this case, the only link is a tiny octocat in the lower left-hand corner, AFAICS.
by keybored | 2025-05-19 15:53:11+00:00
I don’t get it. The linked article says that sitting for a long time makes the brain shrink, controlling for exercise. You say that everything is degenerating. That’s obviously correct but a red herring, no? We could say that the issue is not lack of exercise for people who age but rather that they age. No, because exercising will help fight against the degeneration.

> But since we have more fixes for physical degeneration than mental degeneration, we see most sedentary people kept alive through medication and constant surgeries well into their 80s and 90s while there is nothing much to reverse whats happening to the brain.

Doesn’t regular exercise help the brain as well as the rest of the body? The brain is part of the body.

Now in addition the OP says that sitting is bad for the brain. Controlling for exercise.

> Having worked for a while at a hospital, I feel people who really haven't lead active lives or are just naturally less active or don't like too much activity fall into this trap, where the medical system will keep them physically alive for few decades longer than in the past. They need to be told this could be a trap. Instead we keep them alive, let their brains degenerate and study them like lab rats.

Since the article is about sitting and controlling for exercise I’m gonna assume this means sedentary people as in having been sat on their ass a lot. Irrespective of exercise level.
by yard2010 | 2025-05-19 15:53:11+00:00
This looks really exciting. I'm sold. I'm planning to migrate to BetterAuth from Firebase Auth in the next few months, how does the two compare? Personally I'm happy with Firebase (migrated from Workos which was so frustrating and lacking in many aspects, or in other words a huge mistake when picking), not so happy about the vendor lock and the vendor itself.
by zahlman | 2025-05-19 15:53:11+00:00
> It's that, at every step along the way, there were a group of people who doubted that cars could do that thing

...Can you cite that?

> And then the thing we said they can't do changed to something else.

...And they were the same people?

> We are undeniably continuing to make progress

Where did anyone deny this?

> To suggest things are slowing down

Where did anyone make this argument?

The quote from TFA:

> but the hype has promised completely autonomous cars reliably zipping about in rush hour traffic.

The author did not restrict that to SF, and is presumably referring to "hype" that "promised" this globally.
by yourusername | 2025-05-19 15:53:23+00:00
It don't think it is fair to characterize plattenbau as "Cheap, low-durability and unsafe". Many of these buildings have lasted for 65 years already and are plenty safe if no bombs are going of nearby. If you're actively being shelled almost no house is safe be it wood framing, brick or a modern glass skyscraper.
by throwanem | 2025-05-19 15:53:47+00:00
Why bother archiving a comment whose edit window has closed? What on Earth do you imagine to be going on here? Your account is twice the age of mine. Do you not know how this website works?

I will say, this no longer appears to me to qualify for the name I suggested a few minutes ago. Oh, the statement remains false, only I now no longer believe you competent to defame. Have you had a meal today?
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-19 15:54:09+00:00
"Outlook (New)" (aka "One Outlook") is React Native with a full Chromium webview, and the transition from out-of-the-box Windows-provided "Outlook Mobile" (Windows 8-10) to "Outlook (New)" has mostly completed, but the transition from Outlook (Classic) (aka "Bloated Corporate Outlook") seems somewhat stalled because a few big corporations have extensive plugins and cranky IT admins. (Also Outlook Mobile had a better than IE11 support and also has been Chromium on most platforms, it is "Outlook (Classic)" that continues to haunt us all with its ancient Word-based micro-browser fork of IE.)
by mamcx | 2025-05-19 15:54:17+00:00
We can debate the first usage (small type for storage/cpu optimization) but the other 2 are actually good examples of natural keys!

Note the quotes:

> Every software project needs to represent the reality of the business he is embedded in...

> Such database needs to be designed to properly reflect reality. This can’t be automated, since the semantics of the situation need to be encoded in a way that can be processed by a computer.

Having the business need to share an ID, not give internal information, make some data opaque, use a 'arbitary' id to share as 'textual pointer' to the actual data, etc are valid natural keys.

What is wrong is just add a surrogate key just because, when the fact is that a natural key (to the domain, the business, the requirements) is the actual answer.

I discover this fact when doing sync. The moment I get rid of UUIDs and similar and instead keep data-as-natural things become MORE clear:

ulid: 01H6GZ8YQJ code: A1 name: A

ulid: 01H6GZ8YQK code: A1 name: A

ulid: 01H6GZ8YQJL code: A1 name: A

// All same, obscured by wrong key

vs

code: A1 name: A

(ie: The actual data and what I need to model a sync is NOT the same. Is similar to how in 'git' your code is one thing that is clearly distinct to the internal git structures that encode the repo)
by jfengel | 2025-05-19 15:54:35+00:00
It's always good to gain wider perspective. But those "ancient moral theories" existed in a time and place with which we have little familiarity, making them hard to adapt. And worse, their adapted forms already have outsized presence in our current world-views. They're often treated as if they were universals.

I'd argue that we'd do better considering a wider range of moral theories from a diverse set of current cultures. Asian, African, and South American moral thinkers get short shrift in popular culture (as do native North American ones). Some of those theories also have ancient roots, but on a very different basis from the European ones we have a hard time escaping.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-05-19 15:54:41+00:00
And where are all the libertarians?

It's why I view contemporary libertarians as a farce. They were all up in arms, screaming at about having to wear a mask to keep others alive, but here we have people building an administrative state placing itself itself to be fully above the law able to impose any rule or action desired without consequence -- and not peep.

Maybe I'm just not understanding the distinction (and am open to being corrected) but the level of hypocrisy is just incredible to me.
by aidenn0 | 2025-05-19 15:54:50+00:00
I recently unearthed something that I thought was 20 years old when someone asked me about it. I checked and it was only 14 years old based on mtime (thought I suspect I started the project nearly 20 years ago). Another project I unearthed for a different reason was only 13 years old by mtime (again, it was started before that). I must concede that I haven't actually recently compiled and used anything that was untouched for 20 years.

I should note that the first program I wrote that was actually used for a purpose (it calculates energy based on an internal stopwatch and then typing in values from a volt and ammeter, for a science project in 1992) still works in qb64 today.

The second program I wrote that was actually used for a purpose assumes a parallel-port printer on DOS that uses a fairly old version of PCL, and was written in 16-bit C, so probably won't work today.