MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nkurz | 2025-05-24 15:30:45+00:00
Good points. I also heat with wood in a northern clime, and this seems accurate. I'm a little confused by the units and the costs, though. I cut my own, so I'm not sure how much a tandem truck holds, but am I right that your $1500 CDN load of sawlogs ($1100 USD) is enough for several years of heating? My quick search suggests that a tandem load might be around 12 full cords (44 m^3), and thus be enough for 5 years for you. Is this about right?
by lambda | 2025-05-24 15:31:08+00:00
The amount of exposure to reliably fully erase it, and the amount to flip one bit, are likely different. Flip the wrong bit and you can easily cause a crash. Yes, if you wanted to be sure to clear every bit you'd need that 20 minutes of exposure, but I wouldn't be surprised if flipping a single bit or a few of them was much easier.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-24 15:31:36+00:00
> But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.

I wouldn't phrase it exactly this way, but this is an important point that I really struggle to get across. I regularly see proposals and such that are very challenging to reason about because of their writing. But when I ask for terms to be more rigorously defined, or for the document to be reordered into a more principled structure, some people seem to have a strong instinct that I'm just being difficult for the sake of it. I still remember one guy who insisted that I need to make a specific technical criticism or sign off, and absolutely refused to accept the answer that my structural feedback was intended to help us reason about the technical details.
by castillar76 | 2025-05-24 15:31:41+00:00
I was genuinely taken aback by visiting a restaurant website last night that was only served over HTTP. (Attempting to hit it with HTTPS generated a cert error because their shared provider didn't have a cert for it.) These days, I'd gotten so used to things just being over HTTPS all the time that the warnings in the browser _actually worked_ to grab my attention.

It's a restaurant that's been here with the same menu since the 1970s, and their website does absolutely nothing besides pass out information (phone number, menu, directions), so they probably put it up in 2002 and haven't changed it since. It was just a startling reminder of how ubiquitous HTTPS has gotten.
by dartharva | 2025-05-24 15:34:38+00:00
If you were to make a newcomer trying to break out of Windows ecosystems use Ubuntu, he'll be more put off and probably left with a bad taste for Linux in general. There is a reason distro recommendations nowadays mostly converge on Mint or Fedora, but never Ubuntu. Ubuntu is worse than even Windows 11, and that's saying something because the bar is practically underground at this point.
by aapoalas | 2025-05-24 15:35:26+00:00
It's more a problem of support and backwards compatibility. JSON and parsers for it are so ubiquitous, and the spec completely lacks any versioning support, that adding a feature would be a breaking change of horrible magnitude, on nearly all levels of the modern software infrastructure stack. I wouldn't be surprised if some CPUs might break from that :D

JSON is a victim of its success: it has become too big to fail, and too big to improve.
by jasonjayr | 2025-05-24 15:36:02+00:00
IMHO, being an island on the Pacific rim, I think Japan has had centuries of "Well, that structure was lost to [insert natural disaster here], guess we'll have to rebuild". Whereas, Europe has "Its amazing that this structure has lasted through [insert any number of man made disasters, wars or disputes], we should see how much longer it can survive"
by avianlyric | 2025-05-24 15:36:12+00:00
> People tend to overcomplicate things with K8S. I have never once seen a massively distributed IoT system run without a TON of headache and outages with k8s

I don’t dispute that. I’m simply saying that people overcomplicating their K8s setup isn’t evidence that you can’t build simple K8s setups with simple networking. It’s just that requires people to actually think about their k8s design, and not just copy common k8s setups which are usually geared towards different workloads.

> that are usually using some type of TCP connection that is not HTTP, and trying to shove it into an HTTP paradigm costs more money and more complexity and is not reliable.

What has HTTP got to do with k8s? There’s absolutely nothing in k8s that requires the use of HTTP for network. I’ve run plenty of workloads that used long lived TCP connections with binary protocols that shared nothing with HTTP.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2025-05-24 15:36:21+00:00
It is not clear at all from the course description what that course teaches:

"An introduction to the vast diversity of life from prokaryotic forms to the eukaryotic vertebrate mammals. This course introduces the beginning biology student to all the major groups of organisms and to their fundamental taxonomic relationships."

"This vast diversity exists because that's the way God made them" is perfectly compatible with that description.

Also, from the description of an event held April 11, 2025:

"Are the special creation of Adam and Eve and the evolution of humans over millions of years compatible? 100 years after the Scopes Trial, the debate continues."

So "they actually teach a course on evolution" seems to fall well short of a full description of exactly what they teach there.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-24 15:36:33+00:00
...I find it a bit surprising that Paul Graham of all people, writing in May of 2025, managed to get through this entire essay without mentioning LLMs.

Because I think LLMs provide a clear counterexample to his thesis. They are quite good at the craft of writing--not perfect, but probably much better than the median human--and they are just as good when the content is true as when it's false. This quality ruins a lot of my heuristics for evaluating whether writing is trustworthy, because LLMs are so good at bullshitting.

So while I agree that for humans, writing that sounds good tends to also be logically correct, that clearly isn't inherent in all writing.
by shiandow | 2025-05-24 15:36:33+00:00
That is amazing. My main doubt would be how future proof this is. Does it wrap numpy? Or something equivalent? Does it require continuous development to keep up?

Also I both understand the need for declaring the matrices up front and think it's a bit of a shame that it is not seamless.

Here are some (ill-advised?) alternatives:

X, Y, Z = dp.Slots() with dp.Slot() as X: ... import dp.Slot as new X = new['i','j'] = ... X = dp['i','j'] = ...
by kaushalvivek | 2025-05-24 15:36:38+00:00
I feel the essence here is -- iterative writing improves both the prose and the core point.

When you write well, you iterate. When you iterate, you improve both the prose and the core point -- because you crystalize ideas further.

This makes improvements in these seemingly perpendicular directions counterintuitively correlated.

Ironically I found this specific PG essay uncharacteristically obtuse. This could have been much shorter.
by cootsnuck | 2025-05-24 15:36:47+00:00
It sounds like he has a very "zero-sum" type of mindset and views most people around him as potential competition instead of potential collaborators. Scarcity mindsets taken to extremes make people focus only on what they can lose. If I'm being charitable, maybe your friend has been struggling with things behind the scenes? But honestly it sounds more like a personality thing.

And all of that being said, none of us are perfect. I would hope your friend has at least some redeeming qualities, something you enjoy about him. Otherwise, it sounds like, at least lately, your friendship with him has been taking energy and peace from you and giving you...what? (And I say that not to mean friendships are only about "gaining" something, but they are meant to be mutually supportive with some ebbs and flows.)
by slt2021 | 2025-05-24 15:37:23+00:00
a lot of text with very little value. Typical executive talk.

the hard truth is that most of the time executives are really absolutely clueless and have only shallow understanding of whats going on inside the tech.

and their usual levers are mostly just distributing resources: more resources to this org, fewer resources to that org. and another level is high level program management: checking the milestones, schedules, and timelines. thats it
by Verdex | 2025-05-24 15:37:24+00:00
This sounds like a hypothetical person, unless you have a particular PM who is willing to donate some time and their LLM account to run the experiment for us.

Also Im picking the problem. I have a few in mind but I would want to get the background of the person running the experiment first to ensure that the problem is something that we can expect to be hard for the person.
by scrozart | 2025-05-24 15:37:25+00:00
Lots of good answers here about part of your question: is it hype or not? In that it likely isn't going away, and is becoming a valid force multiplier, it's not.

However, this question is better answered by asking yourself what you're interested in. Do you _want_ a deeper understanding of AI/ML? If so, jump in. If you're not genuinely interested it'll be an interminable slog, and you'll revert to doing whatever you actually want to do eventually.

Nothing wrong with continuing to develop web/full stack apps while leveraging the new tools; that's also quite interesting.
by luispauloml | 2025-05-24 15:38:21+00:00
There are two sentences in this essay that I couldn't understand. Can someone help me?

1. "An essay is a cleaned up train of thought, in the same way dialogue is cleaned up conversation"

I thought dialogue and conversation were the same thing. What is the difference between them besides one being a cleaned up version of the other?

2. "If for some bizarre reason the number of jobs in a country were fixed, then immigrants really would be taking our jobs."

What does this even mean? Is it an exemple or an analogy? It sounds like at this point in the text there should be an analogy, but this sentence sounds like an example. So, which one is it?

Also, did anybody else got confused too?
by ajross | 2025-05-24 15:39:21+00:00
Well, I mean, sorta? This is the point where, indeed, rational discussion can happen. In the real world, VATs and tariffs are both taxes collected at the point of trade. The distinction is just about what boundary constitutes a "trade" and what accounting is done to determine the "value" of the trade. But they're close cousins and do most of the same thing and can be used for most of the same policy purposes.

But again, that's not what's happening in US policymaking right now. They don't want tariffs, they want "Tarrifs!", and splitting hairs over the precise definition isn't going to change their mind.
by qsort | 2025-05-24 15:40:06+00:00
I think the intended implication goes the other way:

"But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too."

In this sense it's similar to "Who speaks bad, thinks bad and lives bad. Words are important!" by Nanni Moretti in Palombella Rossa.

Hopefully that's not too much italianposting for the international audience :)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-24 15:43:18+00:00
"Chrome and android are just nice to haves, but Google would still be a monopoly without them."

Being a monopoly is not unlawful.

"... the possession of monopoly power will not be found unlawful unless it is accompanied by an element of anticompetitive conduct."

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/131153/verizon-communi...

Google's anticompetitive conduct occurred mainly through agreements concerning web browser defaults.

Controlling default settings in web browsers via these agreements will be prohibited. It stands to reason that controlling default settings by distributing its own web browser will, too.

"Maybe off topic, but Ive always found strange people who comment on Google's monopoly by focusing on chrome."

As such, it is not strange that proposed remedies targeting Chrome were submitted and have been a focus of online commentary.
by anonymousiam | 2025-05-24 15:43:50+00:00
Back in the late 70's, I made a rotary phone dialer for my HP41C calculator. I connected a NC reed relay to the piezoelectric beeper and put the NC contacts in-line with my telephone line. I used "synthetic programming" (undocumented opcodes) to get the short duration beeps needed for the dialing pulses. I could enter a name (alphanumeric!) and it would look up and dial the phone number.

About 10 years ago, I met a guy named Keith Jarrett at my company. As I was about to ask him if he was the Keith Jarrett who wrote a HP-41C Synthetic Programming Manual, he interrupted me and said, "No, I'm not the musician. Everybody asks me that." So I finished my question and he was very happy and surprised, because he was the author of the book I had read 35 years prior.

https://picclick.com/HP-41-Synthetic-Programming-Made-Easy-b...

https://www.hpmuseum.org/prog/synth41.htm
by dasil003 | 2025-05-24 15:43:51+00:00
I tend to agree with you, but there’s another saying: “play to your strengths”, because people don’t all have the same potentials. I think it’s healthy to always strive for self improvement, but going with the grain of one’s personality is easier and likely to land in a better place. That’s the message I take from “be yourself”, but I have to admit that it does ring a bit hollow when one is young and hungry.
by kijin | 2025-05-24 15:44:29+00:00
Yeah, since they use so much bamboo, it might be feasible to grade the pipes by thickness and/or some other objective measure of strength. Heck, they probably already do, informally.

As for imperfections, the bamboo masters seem to know how to (over)compensate for them, i.e. they build the scaffolding to withstand several times the expected load. As would any good engineer.
by ajross | 2025-05-24 15:44:50+00:00
With all respect: to pretend that a "historical overview lecture" delivered on 6 May 2025 by a well-known conservative business pundit[1], before the Heritage Foundation, on the subject of "Tariffs in American History" ...

... is somehow completely objective and obviously unrelated to the giant shitstorm of contemporary US tariff policy is just laughable, sorry.

We both know what this is.

[1] The presentation might have fooled you, but John Steel Gordon is absolutely not an "economist" or "historian" in any professional sense.
by AstroBen | 2025-05-24 15:45:34+00:00
Status is relative to who's doing the judging.. and everyone views things differently. I'd argue you don't have much of a choice whether you're low or high status in some people's eyes. Whether you feel it regularly heavily depends on who you surround yourself with

Your career = your social status is a very American point of view

Eat meat and vegans will look down on you

Ride a bike for transport in America and you're poor, do it in Europe and it's normal

Nomads will judge you on your experiences and travel, not your career. Wealthy CEO thats invested everything in their work but never left their home country? Low status

Go out on your own and take a risk of starting a business in Asia and people will be confused why you'd do that vs the safe path

Invest a tonne of energy into making money and anti-consumerist folk will laugh

Skinny? Better bulk up lest the bodybuilders see you as low status.. but wait, if you bulk up people will judge you for being vain. Shit

The status game isn't winnable. Best thing you can do is surround yourself with people of similar values
by 7bit | 2025-05-24 15:46:22+00:00
What do you think about empty strings being falsy in most languages including js?

Null/undefined is a better choice, but there's many occasions where you do not have the power of choice. For example with document.querySelectorAll, which returns an empty array if nothing is found. The simple thing to do is to just check for it's length or just iterate over it's nodes, but still. I prefer empty arrays being falsy.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying one is better than the other. I just prefer how it works in other languages like Python. But I still would rather work with the JS language properties, than import a library that changes how I test for empty arrays.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-24 15:47:31+00:00
This is my "hot take" as well.

My genuine question--outside of programming-related use-cases (which are remarkable), what has come out of the generative AI "boom" that's a profitable product, or has a viable path to profitability?

What "business transformation" has happened in the private sector as a result of "agents" or whatever? What companies look promising (don't say another VSC fork)?
by mnahkies | 2025-05-24 15:48:51+00:00
I'm not sure if you're implying that very small language models would be run in your raspberry pi example, but for use cases like the time series one, wouldn't something like an LSTM or TiDE architecture make more sense than a language model?

These are typically small and performant both in compute and accuracy/utility from what I've seen.

I think with all the hype at the moment sometimes AI/ML has become too synonymous with LLM
Show HN: F2 – Cross-Platform CLI Batch Renaming Tool
by ayoisaiah | 2025-05-24 15:49:12+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm excited to share f2, a command-line tool I built for fast and flexible bulk renaming of files. It's cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows), executes a dry-run by default, supports undo, and provides great flexibility in file renaming with several built-in variables and Exiftool integration.

I hope you find it useful!
by geerlingguy | 2025-05-24 15:51:10+00:00
Every even numbered Pi model had some kind of interesting quirk requiring a hardware change to 'fix':

- Pi 2 had the camera flash reboot issue - Pi 4 had improperly implemented USB-C charging circuit, causing many PD adapters to not power it[1]

(I still have and use both of the original models — the hardware flaw was only a problem in certain circumstances.)

The Pi 5 has it's funky 5V / 5A requirement (though 5V / 3A works fine if you're not using high power USB accessories, if you have a decent power adapter), but it's otherwise not had any hardware-level odd quirk on the scale of Pi 2/4.

So the question is: what will it be on the Pi 6?

[1] https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/exploring-the-raspberry-pi-4...
by pulseman22 | 2025-05-24 15:51:21+00:00
I work in AI, in consulting and teaching and building stuff, and I subscribe to hundreds of newsletters. Initially, they all went to my main inbox, but then I moved them to a separate folder and eventually to a dedicated email address. Additionally, there are podcasts, YouTube channels, and more. Every day, I encounter at least 100 pieces of content that I simply can't consume because I'm only human.

To address this, I've automated many steps and created agents and AI stuff arranged in a pipeline that reads, processes, and condenses hundreds of pages every morning into a 2-minute, plain-text summary without any gimmicks.

This is work in progress, constantly changing.

Principles

-Less is more -Deliver the content that maximizes [information]/[content] -Read in 2-3 minutes -Insanely simple, reduce cognitive load at all costs -Each character in the message needs to fight for its survival

Free, of course.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-24 15:51:28+00:00
Just tried it on mobile—works very nicely. One thing you could consider would be the ability to upvote a post from the hcker news page (ie you click on a link and read the post and then you come back to hcker page (close other tab) and want to upvote it but don’t necessarily want to go to the commments page. You’d have to be logged in to HN already, I presume. Not sure if this is even possible, just mentioning FWIW
by bensonperry | 2025-05-24 15:51:29+00:00
Completely agree. And I think a lot of roles frame this as "part of the job", something always unavoidable. But if I was an exec and my team was spending half their time trying to read between the lines of my poor communication, fixing that would be priority #1; what an enormous waste of time for people who I (ostensibly) hired for their other skills!
by noworriesnate | 2025-05-24 15:51:33+00:00
One common leadership trend is to give minimal feedback like “this is not cool” and rely on competent people directly under the executive to guess what that means.

Competent people can often lead themselves in the right direction, especially with the use of copious after-meetings in which everyone tries to interpret the executive’s feedback.

After all, the executives are busy and hard to get access to.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2025-05-24 15:52:28+00:00
For comparison's sake, here is a description of a more typical Evolutionary Biology course:

"Emphasizes the fundamental evolutionary concepts that provide explanations for the diversification of life on Earth. Specific topics include the evidence for evolution, adaptation by natural selection, speciation, systematics, molecular and genome evolution, and macroevolutionary patterns and processes."
by cootsnuck | 2025-05-24 15:53:10+00:00
You could be right. It could also be that if your friend was supportive and was excited for you that you would still be motivated to succeed.

I have a feeling that you're striving in spite of the lack of support, not because of it. And also that your own creativity and persistence is able to turn lemons into lemonade. So whatever your friends gave you, you'd take it and make it work.

I'd say all of that is the complete opposite of what people do that are destined to fail.
by idlewords | 2025-05-24 15:53:19+00:00
Reading Graham's essays on writing always puts me in mind of the videos where Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA), or a Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice (https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226).
by gcmeplz | 2025-05-24 15:56:40+00:00
The types look great on remeda, but one thing that looks intriguing about SuperUtilsPlus is the focus on being tree-shakeable. Lodash's lack of tree-shake-ability is a drawback to using lodash on the frontend.

edit: the types on remeda look great though! If I were doing a backend-only NodeJS project, I'd be super tempted to test it out.
by dogtorwoof | 2025-05-24 15:57:34+00:00
Thank you for sharing, still wiping the tears from my eyes. If there was ever a reminder to (try) enjoying the small, “mundane” moments of life every day it’s the part below.

“There was so much I still wanted to do. I fantasized about the smallest, most mundane things—waking up in bed, getting in my car, waiting at a red light, grabbing coffee, working. I wanted to do it all again, every day, forever and ever.”
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-24 15:57:38+00:00
Regarding affordable housing, I don't really think the main goal of technology is the improvement of life any more. It may have been in the early days, or at least that could have been the intention of the earlier inventors, but now it's about optimizing technological growth. And with regard to housing, it's probably much more optimal for housing to be expensive so that people fight hard to use and develop new technology to keep up with the costs.

After all, if we were more collectively oriented, we could theoretically come up with a future where we work very little and have a stable society, but human beings are just in a massive game of endless iterations of the prisoner's dilemma which is powering the development of new and mostly needless technologies.
by cootsnuck | 2025-05-24 15:58:12+00:00
You're probably not wrong. I'm lucky and most of my guy friends are happy in each other's successes. There definitely can be an under current of something though (almost feels like skepticism) sometimes.

But to be fair, I've felt that vague "skepticism" at my own successes from some of my gal pals too. But at the same time, my friend group that's mostly women will definitely gas each other up more and seemingly show more genuine interest in each other's successes and genuine sympathy in each other's setbacks.