MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kergonath | 2025-05-23 17:02:32+00:00
> base-10 numbering system

Having decimal numbers, it’s the best solution. Otherwise you’re bound to make mistakes scaling things up or down.

> a liter is not a cubic meter

Well, it’s a dm^3, close enough ;) Conversion is trivial, 1 m^3 is 1000 l. A cubic metre is a bit large for everyday use, but it makes sense e.g. when measuring water consumption or larger volumes. The litre also had the advantage of being close to 2 pints, so it already made sense as a unit when it was introduced. Contrary to hours with 100s.

> 'kilogram' is the base unit, not 'gram'

Yeah, this one is perplexing. It’s an annoying inconsistency on an otherwise beautifully regular system.
by stonemetal12 | 2025-05-23 17:03:29+00:00
> I am usually the one they pay to solve their problems.

In the context that doesn't really say a lot, they pay the floor guy and the architect to solve problems, just different problems.

>they are trapped in an institutional/corporate mindset (old patterns are most suitable, 'best practice', 'reliable, proven tech' and such)

While true, it is also correct. From their perspective Elixir is an exotic material, the next "one they pay to solve their problems" is not going to know how to work with it, scrap it, and start over. Therefore the Elixir solution isn't a good solution for them.

As a business man once told me, "I never saw a feature I liked so much that I was wiling to pay for it twice."
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-23 17:04:05+00:00
Well Elon Musk is definitely an extremist, and he's certainly a bald faced out liar, and he's obviously the tin pot dictator of the prompt. So you have a great point.

Poor Grok is stuck in the middle of denying the Jewish Holocaust on one hand, while fabricating the White Genocide on the other hand.

No wonder it's so confused and demented, and wants to inject its cognitive dissonance into every conversation.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 17:04:19+00:00
I'm unsure what a "proportional punishment" would look like, in context of a cartoon character suffering a cartoon fate in a cartoon factory.

Sure, the author didn't like the kids. They were wholly unsympathetic. Wonka didn't like them, either -- he waited until the very end to show partiality even to Charlie. The audience isn't expected to like them.

Projections, perhaps, but I would say we're looking at archetypes. Each child represented a particular type of moral excess -- gluttony, avarice, selfish intemperance of some kind. I'm saying they got "just desserts" because their fates aligned with those excesses. Augustus just gets immersed in the chocolate he coveted so much. Violet's impatience manifests itself physically as she became what she desired. Mike basically gets to be on TV for good in a miniature size. And Veruca, oh daddy's rich, haughty darling Veruca, is justly judged to be a "bad egg" on the very scales that measured wealth.

And Charlie managed to navigate the moral hazards and prove his mettle and take that hero's journey that purified him of minor faults. The point of the factory tour was not redemption, but a winnowing. The children had been led to the threshing floor and collectively given a final chance at redemption. Four of them individually failed, but Charlie, as an archetype, represents the redemption of all righteous dudes.

But Charlie had a destiny and didn't need to overcome the deadly sins of the other kids. His humble home was filled with righteous family members who encouraged his goodness. They prepared him to face evil influence when he went out into the world. All the other parents just egged on their stupid children's behavior on the tour. Charlie's weaknesses became his strength and salvation. Charlie's grandfather was a kindly mentor who saw he's good and refused to lead him astray. The other four families weren't merely weak, but thoroughly corrupt and blind to their own sins. They were already destined for perdition before they purchased their first chocolate bar.

So I don't know how you perceive proportionality, but I agree with the commenter upthread -- all seemed to get precisely what they deserved.
by curt15 | 2025-05-23 17:04:35+00:00
As a long-time Linux user, I also find it ironic that after years of Linux nerds basking in the "superiority" of their package managers, Homebrew on Mac OS has eclipsed them all in terms of universality and ease of use. For example, compare the install instructions for kubectl:

Linux DEB/RPM (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl-linux...):

1. sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg

2. curl -fsSL https://pkgs.k8s.io/core:/stable:/v1.33/deb/Release.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/kubernetes-apt-keyring.gpg

3. sudo chmod 644 /etc/apt/keyrings/kubernetes-apt-keyring.gpg # allow unprivileged APT programs to read this keyring

4. echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/kubernetes-apt-keyring.gpg] https://pkgs.k8s.io/core:/stable:/v1.33/deb/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list

5. sudo chmod 644 /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list # helps tools such as command-not-found to work correctly

Mac OS (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl-macos...):

1. brew install kubectl
by tzs | 2025-05-23 17:05:24+00:00
> On top of removing the tax credit, the bill introduces a $250 annual fee for electric vehicles and a $100 fee for hybrids, which they claim is to fund road repairs traditionally supported by gas taxes.

That's clearly a lie. If the motivation was for EVs to pay their share of road funding the fee would be quite a bit less than $250.

The federal gas tax is $0.184/gallon. The EV is equivalent to the gas tax on just under 1860 gallons. For the average ICE driver they would need to be driving over 35k miles a year to use that much. That's 2.6x what the average ICE driver does per year.

And it will get worse over time because they have indexed the EV fee to inflation. The gas tax is not indexed and has not been updated since 1993.

If this really was about just fairly sharing road maintenance they would have either:

1. set the EV tax to around $90 and either started indexing the gas tax too or made the EV tax non-indexed, or

2. raised the gas tax to $0.41/gal (where it would be now had it been index starting in 1993) and indexed going forward, and set the EV to that times the amount of gas an average ICE would use driving the average amount people in the US drive per year, which comes out this year to around $210.
by anildash | 2025-05-23 17:05:26+00:00
I get it, we’re all sort of running into the brutality of the descent into authoritarianism at different times and in different ways all the time, we’ll be out of sync with our respective senses of whether we can process it as grief or absurdity or anger or fatigue or whatever at different times. I don’t fault anybody for feeling my tone is off if they’re not in the same mindset at the point when they’re reading.
by jajko | 2025-05-23 17:05:48+00:00
Last time I was backpacking in India and wanted to go to Kashmir (2008), violence just flared up badly after long period of peace and was outright told not to head up north from Amritsar. I've read few articles how tourists in Srinagar (our goal) were all gathered by army in barracks and flown away.

Makes sense from Indian army point of view. I wouldn't expect its easy to even get there, especially if westerner, we stick out of crowd properly even when skin tone may be similar, clothing is obviously very different. There is a reason why those prices are so low. Maybe nothing happens, maybe something does. Flying is probably safest, if one ignores the possibility of ground-air or air-air missiles, intentional or not.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-23 17:05:57+00:00
The jetstream moves north and south over the US in somewhat predictable ways each year. But the molecules in the jetstream never stop flowing, and the jetstream tends to diverge after it reaches the Atlantic ocean. Sometimes it does another tight lap around the artic circle, sometimes it veers down towards Africa, sometimes it splits and goes both ways:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aerial_Superhighway.ogv

The jetstream blows at around 110 mph, and Earth's circumference at mid-northern latitudes is around 12500 miles, so it takes 12500/110=114 hours or just under 5 days for the jets to complete a lap around the planet, assuming we choose a molecule that doesn't take a diverging path on that lap. That's 73 laps per year, so 2000 years is nearly 150,000 times that the faster parts of the atmosphere have circled the globe, twisting, breaking, and reconnecting paths the whole time.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-23 17:06:08+00:00
This is almost a "spherical cows" level gross over simplification. If you weren't defending it in other replies I'd think you were satirizing people who only have book learning and no real world experience.

At the limit the failure of your statement obvious. If instead of a thick walled wood tube hundreds of feet tall this structure were an orders of magnitude wider cylinder of thin plies the same height it wouldn't even be able to hold itself up, it would flop over, tear and all fall down under its own weight if not from manufacturing variances then from the wind and differential expansion/contraction from the sun and if by some miracle it survived that it would flop over

The material has to support itself and tolerate undefined small (relative to the main load) loads in other directions as well as point loads from fastening it to whatever you are using it to bear the loads of, going all in on "large and thin" fails to optimize for this for more or less the opposite reasons that going all in on "solid" does.
by pc86 | 2025-05-23 17:06:29+00:00
> Ms. Livingston graduated around when I did. I can't think of anything that I (or she) did to launch a career, either pre- or post-graduation that would be applicable to someone graduating today.

Really? Not a single thing? Not "work hard," or "be curious," or "be willing to fail or be wrong?" Those aren't genetic qualities, they can be taught and they can be learned.

I don't know when you graduated but I've been working professionally for nearly 2 decades now and I heard the same thing when I graduated - about how it was so much easier just 5, 10, 15 years prior, how I was in for a real battle, how I had an insurmountable amount of debt given my earnings prospects. And yes it was hard but I survived - I could have made smarter decisions to make it easier, I could have made worse decisions and ended up a barista in my late 30s. On a systemic level it might be harder now, it might not be. But they will survive as all previous generations have and will continue to.

There seems to be a bimodal distribution in people 20-30 years post-college discussing today's graduates. It's either "these kids are so lazy noboDY wAntS To WorK ANYMore just have a firm handshake" nonsense, or "these children will be wage slaves forever and it is undeniably the fault of capitalism/AI/Musk/whatever boogeyman."

I think it was hard when I started out. I think it's probably a little harder now. That doesn't mean it's any more of a "dog eat dog capitalist slugfest" than it was 10, 20, 30 years prior.
by tim333 | 2025-05-23 17:08:52+00:00
I was curious why they are attacking Harvard. I'm a Brit so not very up on US stuff. Googling came up with:

>The right-wing conspiracy behind Trump’s war on Harvard

>Back in 2021, far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who supports abolishing American democracy and replacing it with a dictatorship...

>...“the real power centers” in the US — the elite media and academic institutions exemplified by “Harvard and the New York Times” — would fight back.

>“That’s right,” Yarvin agreed. “That’s why, basically, you can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past the start of April.” https://www.vox.com/politics/409600/trump-harvard-rufo-yarvi...

Not sure if that is what's behind it?
by dinfinity | 2025-05-23 17:08:53+00:00
Yeah, no ill intent towards Neuralink was meant.

It was about the sheer intractability of trying to upgrade extremely legacy wetware signaling at 100m/s to a level anywhere near the speed of light which modern inorganic stuff operates at. Even if we manage to solve the incredibly hard physical problems you mention, the mismatch on the signaling level is still 6 orders of magnitude. Compared to that challenge digitally recreating an entire human brain is almost trivial. Digitally creating something similarly potent is far easier still.

People use those images of the future as proof that we can't reliably predict it, but a lot of them were made by people who didn't understand physics, psychology, economics, etc. very well or just didn't care; they were just making a pretty, evocative picture. The reality however is that we can predict and have predicted aspects of many things based on what the limits of this universe are.

I would argue for instance that the speed of light being a maximum is directly responsible for the convergent (biological) evolution of eyes.
by valine | 2025-05-23 17:09:04+00:00
I think it’s helpful to remember that language models are not producing tokens, they are producing a distribution of possible next tokens. Just because your sampler picks a sequence of tokens that contain incorrect reasoning doesn't mean a useful reasoning trace isn’t also contained within the latent space.

It’s a misconception that transformers reason in token space. Tokens don’t attend to other tokens. High dimensional latents attend to other high dimensional latents. The final layer of a decoder only transformer has full access to entire latent space of all previous latents, the same latents you can project into a distribution of next tokens.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-05-23 17:09:48+00:00
You may be right. And it’s even possible that the flatpak developers believed you were right.

And it mah still not have been the right decision because when it comes to products like Flatpak there are a lot of considerations beyond just what the best technically correct choice is.

For example, based only on your comment, basically every other OS does it the same way Flatpak does it. So if the Flatpak developers had done it the technically correct way like you suggested, it may have been enough of a burden for app developers, especially multiplatform app decelopers, that they wouldn’t have used Flatpak in the first place.
by tecleandor | 2025-05-23 17:09:50+00:00
Nothing for, really, we were forced to. The company I work for got acquired by a way bigger company that was using tf cloud already, and they forced us in. It took two years of raging price increases from Hashicorp until we convinced them to move to Spacelift.

Hashicorp, even after huge discounts, wanted around 200-300K a year (I think the original offer was like 400 or 500k).

Spacelift is around 60-80K, I think, and we have more features, more runners, they fail less, and everyone is happier.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-23 17:09:52+00:00
I can't speak to the UK but in the US things like electrical towers and highway signs mostly go to tubular construction for labor cost reasons.

Tube gets manufactured in a facility specializing in doing it in a low labor way (rolling or whatever). Flanges get welded on, they get slapped on cribbing and trucked to you and then assembled with minimal labor.

Contrast with the lattice. Cheaper material inputs, a whole bunch of cheap channel with holes punched as needed, but all that punching, and then all that bolting, takes way more labor, a lot of it can be done cheaply, but it adds up, and when it does get to site there's more pieces to pick and connect, etc.

Basically the more expensive material saves you quite a bit of human labor at each step. Same reason huge rolled steel and welded tubes displaced riveted construction.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-23 17:10:03+00:00
From what I can tell, it literally is a holdover from the FORTRAN days when IBM machines used a sign-magnitude integers, so truncating division was an obvious choice for hardware dividers; and then nobody dared to change the semantics of neither the hardware nor the programming languages for some reason, and it carried all the way forwards to nowadays.

I am fairly certain that restoring/non-restoring unsigned binary division algorithms can be made to do signed division that would round down with minimal change that is not "divide the absolute values and then fix the signs", and for algorithms used in high-speed division hardware the choice of rounding doesn't really matter.
by lovich | 2025-05-23 17:10:21+00:00
Well in the past couple of years all the EM roles I’ve gotten or been offered have come with expectations that not only am I managing 1-2 teams, I used to be a senior engineer right? I should be doing 20-40 hours of technical work and have a deep understanding of every single piece of work every member of my team does to the point that I understand it better than themselves.

Needless to say there’s not enough hours in a week for that and I’ve yet to see a company that did more than pay lip service to employee development before immediately asking why the new project hasn’t shipped already
by quotemstr | 2025-05-23 17:10:25+00:00
People said the same thing about "APIs" 10-15 years ago when they were a craze. Everything had to be an API! Doesn't matter whether it made sense to not. It's going to change the world! We're going to have San Francisco events with microbrews for APIs! Everyone's going to publish API frameworks! Let me make api-blog-blog.blogger.blog!

Blah. Bay Area Tech regularly goes through these bursts of baseless enthusiasm for rehashes of existing technology. Is MCP useful? Yeah, probably. Is the current froth based on anything but SF-scene self-licking-ice-cream-code social cred? No.
by xeromal | 2025-05-23 17:10:53+00:00
I've often felt this way about some of today's complaints. I grew up in area like what was mentioned in this article and I long for the day I can go back there. I would in a heartbeat if my partner shared the same mentality as me.

I don't really see a point in living a big city with the remote job I have and that many others have if I can live in a smaller area that still has humans but much cheaper way of living. Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available services but I see those same people decry how much the food costs and also that they have no friends and can't find someone to date. My thoughts aren't as articulate as I'd like them to be but I guess I'm ultimately trying to say is if I'm going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper.
by jsnell | 2025-05-23 17:11:56+00:00
It's not just that nobody makes money providing a free and open API. It's that to operate such an API you'll basically need unlimited resources. No matter how many resources you throw at the problem, somebody will still figure out a way of exhausting those resources for marginal gains. MCP will just make the problem worse as AI agents descend on any open MCP servers like locusts.

The only stable option, I think, is going to be pay-per-call RPC pricing. It's at least more viable to do then it was for Web 2.0 APIs, since at least the entity operating the model / agent will act as a clearinghouse for all the payments. (And I guess their most likely billing model is to fold these costs into their subscription plans? That seems like the best way to align incentives.)
by bluGill | 2025-05-23 17:12:07+00:00
don't ask me - I'm just a messanger who doesn't believe the full message. I've long supported more immigration

what disney does should be their own business. However when a competent person is not allowed to do a job because the government wants a different minoity that hurts me. at best it means that projects are more expensive because there is less competition, at worst someone incompetent is hired and we get junk.
by khasan222 | 2025-05-23 17:12:12+00:00
Meh, maybe I'm standing too close to the problem, Idk. It is always frustrating trying to use a tool, and it not work though. I know it's free and all, but then I feel like helping people make good contributions is paramount in maintaining and fixing bugs.

Clearly the comma thing is a bug, it's the lack of wanting to fix it actually that is a bit disheartening, and why I think it is a deadish repo
by JCattheATM | 2025-05-23 17:12:26+00:00
Oh, I mean the US specifically. I'm optimistic the other western powers won't go down the same self-destructive path the US has chosen, largely because they have much better public education pre-college, and much more accessible higher education.

I expect even China and India to start improving drastically in all the ways that matter as the US continues to downlside.
by klimeryk | 2025-05-23 17:12:44+00:00
ReCalendar supports loading any ICS file - but since you ultimately generate a PDF for the whole year, it will just load the events present at that moment in the calendar (see https://github.com/klimeryk/recalendar.js/issues/11#issuecom...). So it's good for quickly loading all the holidays in a given country or if you have some long-term recurring events. But it's not feasible to keep on syncing the calendar every day.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-05-23 17:12:45+00:00
> AI doesn't grow (as it is today), it's stuck on the low-junior level mostly. This might change, but currently there are no signs for this.

This is such a bizarre take. The entire history of AI is of growth, to say nothing of the last few decades, or even the past few years. To say that there are no signs that AI grows is, if nothing else, counter-proof that humans don't grow from generation to generation. We make the same logically fallacies that we did millennia ago.
by nihakue | 2025-05-23 17:12:47+00:00
This is such a bonkers line of thinking, I'm so intrigued. So a particular model will have an entire 'culture' only available or understandable to itself. Seems kind of lonely. Like some symbols might activate together for reasons that are totally incomprehensible to us, but make perfect sense to the model. I wonder if an approach like the one in https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language... could ever give us insight into any 'inside jokes' present in the model.

I hope that research into understanding LLM qualia eventually allow us to understand e.g. what it's like to [be a bat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F)
by dang | 2025-05-23 17:13:03+00:00
This is the kind of comment that the newest HN guideline is designed to discourage:

"Don't be curmudgeonly." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What counts as being curmudgeonly? Here's one heuristic: if a comment is flying close to the planet "Everything is worse than it used to be," then it probably is.

There's also this one, btw: "Please don't fulminate." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by daemonk | 2025-05-23 17:13:40+00:00
At a higher level, MCP seems wants to enforce a standard where no standard exists. I get that the low level technical implementation allows AI to utilize these tools.

But there doesn't seem to be any standardization or method in how to describe the tool to the AI so that it can utilize it well. And I guess part of the power of AI is that you shouldn't need to standardize that? But shouldn't there at least be some way to describe the tool's functionality in natural language or give some context to the tool?
by jeffbee | 2025-05-23 17:13:55+00:00
It makes a certain amount of sense and I myself bought a little place way out in the hinterlands of Michigan for similar economic reasons ... but I live in Berkeley because subjecting your children to life without opportunities for art, culture, education, sports, friends, etc is cruel. So if you're white, or just don't care that your ethnicity is absent, and if you have no children, and also don't mind living in a car-dependent place where the public transit to the nearest major city is a minimum of 15 hours with 3-4 transfers, then sure Massena NY is dope.