MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by verisimi | 2025-05-10 13:15:49+00:00
> When we talk about "democratic government" how close is it to the Athenian democracy?

Indeed. Rather than each citizen voting on each issue, we have 'representative democracy' where 100,000's (perhaps millions) elect one person to vote and represent them for all those decisions. Arguably modern 'democracy' is far closer to 'slavery' than 'Athenian democracy' in its implementation, especially when you consider the forcible extraction of (~40-50%) of wealth (tax).
by jasoneckert | 2025-05-10 13:16:41+00:00
> Prices for those in the US (like me) just tripled due to import tariffs (ordering the 32 GB model went from $400 to $1500).

This was the biggest takeaway for me in this post. In the past, to experiment with a particular piece of new hardware, we had to a) obtain the hardware, and b) obtain or create software for it. With a) fast becoming out-of-reach for most people, this puts a dampener on b).
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-10 13:16:42+00:00
Isolation is for idiots.

It is simply untenable for a prosperous, relevant, modern society.

Using isolation as a negotiating threat is equally idiotic. It's the economic equivalent of threatening to shoot yourself in the foot.

What does economically shooting yourself in the foot look like?

Product shortages, bare shelves, higher prices, crashing equity markets, declining investment, inflation eating away at your savings --- all entirely self inflicted and coming soon to a WalMart near you.
by thebruce87m | 2025-05-10 13:17:53+00:00
> FSD in its current form is a decade ahead of these.

FSD is still only level 2.

Honda and Mercedes are the only two companies to sell level 3 capable cars, but these are only level 3 under certain limited conditions.

You may be correct that the level 2 performance of FSD is ahead of the level 2 performance of any other car, but I don’t think we can call Tesla king until they also match the level 3 performance of these other cars under those conditions.
by chrisjj | 2025-05-10 13:17:56+00:00
"Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension WebGL Water Made by Evan Wallace

This demo requires a decent graphics card and up-to-date drivers. If you can't run the demo, you can still see it on YouTube.

Interactions: Draw on the water to make ripples Drag the background to rotate the camera Press SPACEBAR to pause and unpause Drag the sphere to move it around Press the L key to set the light direction Press the G key to toggle gravity Features: Raytraced reflections and refractions Analytic ambient occlusion Heightfield water simulation * Soft shadows Caustics (see this for details) * * requires the OES_texture_float extension * requires the OES_standard_derivatives extension" on Android Chrome.
by 0thgen | 2025-05-10 13:18:31+00:00
"You can control the people of the entire world with computers. Their socialization, their education, their culture, their employment, the very flow of money, all of it is controlled by computers. It's easier than ever and you don't even need to commit violence. The lash is no longer literal but economic."

This feels like it rests on a belief that "nudging" and subliminal messaging are actually effective. The evidence on that stuff is pretty weak, and the evidence we do find has small effect sizes.

The reality is more likely that the "online world" is insanely complex and hard to control. Even with a tech oligopoly, the number of players and interests groups in massive. If companies had the power to completely control the entire world and every aspect of life, they would have (assuming they had the incentive, which I'm sure you believe they do).
by stephc_int13 | 2025-05-10 13:18:42+00:00
While I agree with some of that criticism, I think that the main point (the infinity of digital space vs the finite land) is flawed.

The power structure is not really about land or space (be it digital, finite or infinite) it is about people and how difficult it can be for them to move elsewhere.

Techno feudalism is a lot less about datacenters and network bandwidth than it is about captive users and content producers.

And this is why this analogy, although imperfect, is relevant.
by dgb23 | 2025-05-10 13:18:53+00:00
Free markets are wonderful, but they require free agents to participate in them. That includes consumers and workers. Noam Chomsky even described Amazon as a totalitarian employer once I think.

I find it distasteful to use the ideal of free markets to defend large, oligopolistic corporations, their atrocious business practices towards consumers, workers and partners and their irresponsible treatment of the environment.

Those aren't your entrepreneurial ventures that participate in a free market. They are established institutions that can exert extreme power in economic, legal and political terms.
by xg15 | 2025-05-10 13:19:41+00:00
> What if we considered API endpoints to be remote function calls?

What if we considered API endpoints to be part of the frontend applications instead of remote interfaces?

I fear every 5-10 years, a new generation of devs discovers those questions, are awestruck at what they believe to be fundamental insights - and then go on to reinvent RMI.

I would argue like this: "Stringly typed" systems inside a single process are an anti pattern. It's nonsensical for a process to write a constant string into memory, only to verify, character by character, that it's in fact that same constant string in later parts of the program. There are almost certainty other organization schemes that would make the program more type safe, more safe from bugs, less memory intensive and more performant.

(Even in those situations, "string typing" can be acceptable technical debt if switching to such an alternate system would be very costly or work-intensive. You can still follow the "one good deed every day" pattern and try to reduce the string typing step-by-step whenever you're working on those parts of the code anyway.)

BUT: "String typing" on network boundaries (or even just general IO boundaries) is something completely different: There, your underlying data model are strings (of bytes, not of ASCII chars/Unicode chars/whatever else) and every attempt to model a more "truthful" representation on top of it is essentially a fiction. This fiction is often very useful, but I'd always keep in mind that it is an abstraction, and provide an "escape hatch" that lets you easily map back to the wire format representation. Because that is what's relevant when you have to debug issues or investigate security vulnerabilities.

Also: Never ever try to abstract away a network or IO boundary. Many have tried and it usually ends in tears.
by verisimi | 2025-05-10 13:20:48+00:00
Feudalism has a negative connotation for sure, but again isn't that just a branding issue? The existing system is not great, imo. I think one can argue that the feudalism of the past had a far milder impact on individuals and was far less forceful than the governance of the present day. It is not possible to opt out of either system, but the level of resource extraction in the present system (40-50%) seems far higher than in feudal times.
by plastic3169 | 2025-05-10 13:21:24+00:00
I’m in the middle age slump. There is more talk around me about death. Some of our parents died in their 50s and this perspective of ’this might be the last decade’ is creeping in. Yet the same person talking might have still one of their grandparent alive!

I am not so interested in the short life. I am happy today so don’t know how else to prepare for that. I keep worrying about living to a 100. Not very likely, but likely enough to be a risk worth consodering. If I am still to live for 50+ years I can’t start hating everything new that is happening. I probably need to do more learning. Need new friends and cant’t solely live the family life. More sports and active life than before. Retirement is not even on the horizon in this scenario.
by Kon-Peki | 2025-05-10 13:22:26+00:00
At that time, the Straits of Magellan were “controlled” by Spain and it would have been extremely difficult to sail through undetected.

Plus, it’s like sailing through a maze where if you touch the wall you die. You really should have someone that’s been through it many times before. Even in modern times, they require local pilots to guide ships.
by ionwake | 2025-05-10 13:22:48+00:00
Apparently if being the perfect size allows for this: Gravitational lensing verification during a solar eclipse relies on the Sun being just barely covered to observe the bending of starlight near its edge.

If the Moon were significantly larger than the Sun:

The Moon would block not just the Sun but also the surrounding starlight, making it impossible to observe the light bending around the Sun’s edge.

As a result, Einstein’s prediction of light bending around the Sun, famously confirmed during the 1919 eclipse, would not have been observable.

I used chatgpt i ahve no idea wat it means

EDIT> previous comment i made was unhelpful because i forgot how to read
by ikt | 2025-05-10 13:24:09+00:00
just quickly your website doesn't have https so it says that the site I'm going is insecure:

> Secure Site Not Available

> You’ve enabled HTTPS-Only Mode for enhanced security, and a HTTPS version of businessbooksandco.com is not available.

I was legit taken back for a second wondering what I just clicked on

But cheers, I just realised how far we've come if yours was the first site in years? that I've seen this on
by 0thgen | 2025-05-10 13:25:41+00:00
I guess one difference is, the factory workers pushed towards engaging in brutal labor actually had it rough.

It's unclear whether the current system bring "horrible conditions" that need addressing. I don't want 9000 email providers, and the centralization of platforms has probably made life better. The argument that it crushes innovation might be true, but the number of "startups" that seem to gain large amounts of VC funding is quite high (they must be innovating something).

My gut reaction is generally "centralization / monopolies = bad", which is probably the feeling of a lot of people here. But we should actually ask ourselves whether the natural tendency towards centralization actually makes sense economically, especially since many aspects of the internet (communication, email, AI, compute time, etc) are all looking more like "utility" markets (where naturalistic monopoly formation has long been accepted by economists).
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-05-10 13:26:05+00:00
SingularityForge AI News Edition 008 – Analysis of 17 key AI developments (May 10, 2025) Our latest edition covers significant technical advancements, including:

· MIT-DeepMind's quantum-inspired algorithm for accelerating matrix operations

· NVIDIA's cloud service for AI training on Blackwell architecture

· Apple's development of custom chips for AI-powered smart glasses

· OpenAI's updated Codex CLI architecture with three autonomous modes

· Anthropic's research on "thought tracing" for LLM interpretability

· Stanford-Berkeley study on hallucination patterns across major models

We also examine IBM's intent-based UX framework, Microsoft's Copilot integration in File Explorer, and the EU's proposed certification framework for AI in critical infrastructure.
by diggan | 2025-05-10 13:26:16+00:00
Go to your local gardener and ask for plants that repels cats/has scents cats don't like and plant them where you notice they use as a bathroom. Some people plant plants with thorns/prickles too, which seems to help a bit after the cats learn it hurts.

Most obvious solution otherwise is to have a fence if you don't have one already.
by kiisupai | 2025-05-10 13:27:19+00:00
Evgeny Morozov wrote a lengthy critique of the term in 2022, having it used it himself some time back:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii133/articles/evgeny-moroz...

The core argument he makes is that the modes of exploitation are still capitalist at its core and what we have right now is just another form of it. The techno-feudal framing can be used to draw certain analogies between the past and the present, but that would risk both simplifying and masking the root causes of these processes.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-10 13:27:21+00:00
Let's just say I'm pissed about the Mini 3 Pro's controller. Has an USB-C host and client port but isn't capable of actually using them for anything relevant, and the built-in wifi is rotten. Zero way of extending the drone's functionality by writing one's own apps/scripts - but the cheaper N1 that just uses a phone, there's hacks for it...
by tomrod | 2025-05-10 13:27:32+00:00
The Mad King Trump wants all the trappings of North Korea, with military parades and silencing of political dissent.

Ignores Congress (impoundment), ignores SCOTUS (Abrego Garcia), corruptly enriches himself from his position (Meme coin), cuts social programs (numerous), encourages stochastic terrorism (numerous), and expresses sentiments fully divorced from reality or otherwise distracting from heinous and corrupt actions.
by jpc0 | 2025-05-10 13:27:35+00:00
I would love to ask some hard questions of this solution.

Lets say I have a very simple workflow.

Camera and CG in -> conversion to RGB/YCbCr -> compositing -> pass to broadcast encoder

Conversion and compositing can be done at scan line speeds using conventional hardware, so latency is at most a frame. With an asynchronous workflow this is not possible anymore, let’s pretend the network infrastructure isn’t an issue and is operating perfectly with low latency, I don’t need cots hardware on the processor because without some sort of DMI even NIC -> GPU is several frames of latency, the GPU then needs to do the processing, then you again need to GPU-> NIC.

I then need to reorder frames at the receiving device, the stream encoder. Because its async, frame 2 might arrive before frame 1. So now I need a buffer there.

I do not see how this doesn’t add significant latency to the path even in the most simple setup. Add internet services like AWS and your latency shoots of to tens of frames before you even hit the media encoder.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-05-10 13:29:03+00:00
>artificial intelligence startup hoping to introduce a product that can be used in medical testing and other settings... blood testing.

This... literally sounds like another Theranos. Bizarre and comical.

Is this based on solid R&D, patents, and proof of concept? Or is it more hot air?

>Partner... Luminar

Luminar spent massive amounts of money on in-house tech with no revenue, then ran out of money, shut it all down and outsourced it, diluted shareholders to zero, and the CEO extracted hideous amounts of cash, became one of the richest youngest CEOs of all time, and bought a massive mega millions house in Austin from the shareholder capital. Maybe that's the objective? Well if so, at this point one truly can blame the investors.
by nothercastle | 2025-05-10 13:29:13+00:00
Energy star like CAFE for cars was well intentioned but ended up driving all sorts of undesirable design practices to hit the ratings. Manufacturers especially in the high end chase the highest rating and design appliances that do a poor job of cleaning to hit the low water use target. In the end we all end up eating a bunch of unwashed detergent to save a gallon of water or using 10 gallons to pre and post rinse. That being said a lot of these problems could have been updated into the standard instead of killing it but industry groups didn’t allow that so now it’s going to die and everyone losses.
by kibwen | 2025-05-10 13:29:19+00:00
We don't need to speak in hypotheticals, we can just look at the glob crate: https://crates.io/crates/glob

213M downloads, depends on zero external crates, one source file (a third of which is devoted to unit tests), and developed by the rust-lang organization itself (along with a lot of crates, which is something that people tend to miss in this discussion).
by RainbowcityKun | 2025-05-10 13:30:30+00:00
- Cells work like this because DNA is under constant attack from mutations. - Mutations most commonly arise during cell replication.

It's fascinating to realize that the "messiness" of DNA isn't a bug, but a feature—a side effect of evolution's raw material supply chain.

Mutations, repeats, transposons, and imperfect repairs all contribute to a noisy genomic landscape. But it's exactly this noise that enables biological diversity. No mutations, no variation. No variation, no selection. No selection, no evolution.

The genome is not a blueprint—it's a living, adapting scratchpad. Messiness is the canvas on which nature paints diversity.
by Xeoncross | 2025-05-10 13:32:04+00:00
> A large stdlib solves the problems the language is focused on

That's part of it, but it also solves the problem of vetting. When I use a Go stdlib I don't have to personally spend time to vet it like it do when looking at a crate or npm package.

In general, Go & Rust packages on github are high quality to begin with, but there is still a pronounced difference between OS packages and what is approved to be part of the language's own stdlib.

It's nice to know thousands of different companies already found the issues for me or objected to them in reviews before the library was published.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-10 13:32:07+00:00
Yeah - but I'm more bothered by it being some quotes here & there, from a huge body of work. Clever & creative "characters" can say all sorts of things, for little reason beyond showing that they're clever & creative, enjoy the reactions, and can get away with it.

Too, there's the "anything's better than a well-born straight white man" bias in most of modern academia, and The Guardian's audience. Saying "Henry James was straight" would sell about as well as "2 + 2 = 4".

The Guardian's final 2 paragraphs acknowledge that the case is weak:

> But the book that made all the difference was published in 1990. Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became the bible for gay studies and queer theory in universities. It proposed an entire new way of reading James as a gay writer whose efforts to remain in the closet gave him his style and may, in fact, have been his real subject, all the more present for being secret and submerged.

> Kosofsky Segdwick’s argument is dense and brilliant, and, at times, far-fetched and unconvincing. But it removed James from the realm of dead white males who wrote about posh people. He became our contemporary. Thus James’s artistry, his skill at creating scenes and drama, his sly sexuality, his wonderful prose style, his genius with form and tone and structure, make him a subject of fascination not only for ordinary readers but also for students and teachers of literature, and indeed for many, if not all, of the novelists who have come after him. James’s dying words – “Tell them to follow, to be faithful, to take me seriously” – continue to resonate a hundred years after his death.
by stego-tech | 2025-05-10 13:32:16+00:00
The long and short of it is Embracer has spent its entire existence as a consumption entity, buying every IP and studio it could get its hands on, with the intention of being a gaming publisher juggernaut. This was all done on ZIRP-era credit.

They then proceeded to run it into the ground. Waves of layoffs and studio closures, mismanagement, and a credit crunch that ultimately debilitated the company.

In other words, from the outside anyway, it looks like a classic Private Equity layup and cashout.

Do not trust the Embracer Group.
by thrance | 2025-05-10 13:32:56+00:00
Material forces. The wealthy have a vested interest in dismantling the state, welfare programs, regulations, etc. Just so they can get more wealth through exploiting the workers.

Hence why they spend billions on propaganda tools like Fox News or influencers (Joe Rogan, Tim Pool...) propping up increasingly right-wing presidents. So far they've been successful: Raegan, Bush & cie. have been slowly but surely making things easier for the wealthy and harder for the workers.

Republicans have always used right-wing populism to get their ways (Blaming migrants, blaming LGBT, blaming leftists). Notice how pro-businesss policies are the only consistent trait between GOP presidency.

Trump is a turning point, he is the first one to do right-wing populism for its own sake instead of simply being pro-business. This is fascism. Here is my preferred definition of fascism if you seek one [1].

Trump is no singular phenomenon, you can compare him in some ways to previous or contemporary fascists: Putin, Mussolini... They all have in common a support from the oligarchy, and a hatred of minorities and leftists.

Until we fix the power imbalances of our democracies and rid it of all money's influence (easier said than done), we will suffer through fascism every 80 years or so. The time it takes for new oligarchs to emerge and accumulate the wealth necessary to dictate politics again.

[1] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
by phendrenad2 | 2025-05-10 13:35:02+00:00
Who cares. Maybe now I can get a washing machine that actually washes my clothes. You'd think at the $1,100 price point, a washing machine should actually work, even with the strict Energy Star standards, but everyone on Reddit suggests switching to a LITERAL commercial washing machine (Speed Queen). Famously-liberal Reddit is suggesting switching to a LOUD, WASTEFUL washing machine because it actually works. I think that says a lot about the current state of things.
by whatshisface | 2025-05-10 13:35:03+00:00
>Hasn't defence spending steadily increased for quite a long time now?

Not as a percentage of GDP. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

The administration has expressed a desire to destroy several other countries over the last year. Iran, Denmark's autonomous territory Greenland and Canada stand out for being explicitly named, and China for being a career target of important advisors. Iran out of all these is singled out by congressional support and a history of military action in the region. In conclusion, the administration most likely wants to invade Iran.

https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-there-will-be-bombi...
by foldr | 2025-05-10 13:35:56+00:00
I think the far-fetched part of Segdwick's argument is the claim that James's sexuality is an interpretative key to his work. That James was sexually interested in other men to some extent is pretty obvious. That does not necessarily make him 'gay' or 'bisexual', as those are all anachronistic labels (as indeed would be 'straight'). But it's certainly an aspect of his character that his family wanted to hide after his death.
by zahlman | 2025-05-10 13:35:57+00:00
Argument parsing is absolutely the kind of thing where I'd reach for a third-party library if the standard library didn't provide (and in Python's case, maybe even then - argparse has some really unpleasant behaviours). When you look through library code, it might seem like way more than you'd write yourself, and it probably is. But on a conceptual level you'll probably actually end up using a big chunk of it, or at least see a future use for it. And it doesn't tend to pull in a lot of dependencies. (For example, click only needs colorama, and then only on Windows; and that doesn't appear to bring in anything transitively.)

It's a very different story with heavyweight dependencies like Numpy (which include reams of tests, documentation and headers even in the wheels that people are only installing to be a dependency of something else, and covers a truly massive range of functionality including exposing BLAS and LAPACK for people who might just want to multiply some small matrices or efficiently represent an image bitmap), or the more complex ones that end up bringing in multiple things completely unrelated to your project that will never be touched at runtime. (Rich supports a ton of wide-ranging things people might want to do with text in a terminal, and I would guess most clients probably want to do exactly one of those things.)