MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rainsford | 2025-05-04 14:35:21+00:00
"Promoting diversity" only equates to "sacrificing performance" if you accept the premise that white men are by default the most qualified for everything. Or maybe to be slightly more generous, the premise is that the prior state of affairs where mostly white men were being hired was colorblind and based on merit, so anything else must be sacrificing merit based hiring.

I see no reason to buy that framing though and plenty of reason to think it's bunk. Even liberals can fall into the trap though, because policies to promote diversity are explicitly stated while it's been a bit (although not all that long in the grand scheme of things) since the biases that can lead to prioritizing white men are actually written down. That's how the "tradeoff" ends up in things like the FAA slides. It's unclear what factual support that slide had, but clearly the author just took it as a given, as do a lot of other people.
by gruturo | 2025-05-04 14:35:51+00:00
At 9600bps. Almost every device supported 115200 - that would cut it down to to 72 seconds. And as I mentioned - pictures were often small (20-30kbytes) back in the day - that's barely 1-2 seconds at 115200. And the later 4Mbps speeds would move that megabyte in 2 seconds flat.
by muststopmyths | 2025-05-04 14:35:58+00:00
Years ago, there was a site called movingscams.com where people reviewed moving services. It helped me find a mover for my own move down the West Coast. Turned out to be a really good outfit, honest and great customer service (refunded me a good chunk because they didn't deliver within the timeframe their salesperson had indicated).

There were a couple of big national movers in those days. Allied, Mayflower and I forget one other. The smaller one I used was a subcontractor for Allied (I think).

Sadly, that site seems to be defunct for some years now. Looks like they didn't make it through the Great Recession. :(

I miss those niche forums.
by toast0 | 2025-05-04 14:36:00+00:00
I think twin galaxies is firmly in the on hardware camp (although, the record setting in this example wasn't original hardware, the super gameboy isn't quite the same as an original gameboy).

For most records, there's three categories: tool assisted, emulated, and original hardware. TAS techniques are often hard to replicate with live human inputs, but emulator and original hardware records tend to converge but usually there's movement on the emulator record first.
by noah_buddy | 2025-05-04 14:36:15+00:00
Interesting story. Sadly, I don’t really believe this is the norm in missing person cases but it’s a nice thought that this woman was troubled in her marriage and was able to get out and start a new life.

I know many people will take issue with leaving kids, but frankly, a 20 year old having two kids is something we would balk at today by itself. Hard to imagine what that decision is like, but I can’t imagine there were effective remedial strategies for women complaining about their marriage in the ‘60s.
by mrangle | 2025-05-04 14:36:22+00:00
"Truth" in Education, understanding, and Press easily becomes "propaganda and lies" without the system blinking nor anyone being notified.

The only way to ensure the existence of truth is to give people a choice in what to believe. There are no wildflowers (truth) without also permitting weeds (lies). Certainly, no "organization to manage and protect" can be trusted to manage and protect truth.

The democratic ideal is that people are permitted to come to their own conclusions, given all arguments. Not that the arguments are institutionally restricted.

What happens when your ideological opponents suddenly come into control of the "truth police"?

Freedom to choose is the only protection, unless one's goal isn't democratic.
by timonoko | 2025-05-04 14:38:10+00:00
All had same type, they were pointers. VAR-section was anyways useful for testing that there was no errors in spelling of symbols. And array was a list. And strings were just list of numbers, with special symbol in front. It looked very professional, only error message were little bit incomprehensible and lispy.

Unlike competitors (whatever they were) it had garbage collector, incredibly useful in 64k machine.
by Diggsey | 2025-05-04 14:38:49+00:00
Why would it only be run once? The WHERE condition of the outer query is run multiple times: once for each row, so of course it can return TRUE multiple times.

For example:

DELETE FROM example WHERE id = (SELECT RANDOM(0, 100) FROM other_table LIMIT 1)

This could delete multiple rows in principle, since there may be multiple rows where the `=` expression is true.
by ryantownsend | 2025-05-04 14:42:30+00:00
In my view, DX should be renamed "Developer Convenience" as we all know that convenience is often a trade-off.

Please forgive the self-promotion but this was exactly the premise of a conference talk I gave ~18 months ago at performance.now() in Amsterdam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5felHJiACE
by rendaw | 2025-05-04 14:42:50+00:00
Arrg, s/lazy/async/.

Just to add some further qualification, I was fully prepared to learn something from the ground up, throw away all my preconceptions, and give some weirdness a try - including no string interpolation. I wanted to 100% replace bash, both as a shell and for scripting everywhere. I was exactly Elvish's target user.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-05-04 14:44:03+00:00
Flooding the zone is a strategy.

There always being 1000 things to be outraged about makes the opposition more scattered. It's harder to form a cohesive response because each individual can only effectively react to a limited number of things at any given time.

This also points to one of the benefits of the right wing's media machine. The right also has many things to be outraged about at any given moment - Trump's movement is largely based on grievances. But the media machine is very effective at focusing the flock's ire in a small number of manageable directions. Those targets can shift day to day, even hour to hour, but the well coordinated machine keeps the flock from fracturing.

Alas, despite the claims of the right, there is no left wing media machine to compete with the right's.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-04 14:44:16+00:00
> The only way to keep getting good drugs that I know of is to keep in touch with friends on the latter path, but I don't really want to associate much with them.

It’s a lot easier to get drugs without connections than it used to be. A couple hundred bucks of Monero, the tor browser, and a DanceSafe testing kit with fentanyl strips is all you need.

> Where the responsible casual adult drug users at???

Quietly getting high and not broadcasting their drug use. There are a lot more than you think. I was recently surprised to find out that one of my childhood friend’s parents, who I had considered to be the most straight laced and/or puritanical family in the community, regularly drink magic mushroom tea that the church sound guy buys for them off the dark web. Once you include prescription medication, the number of people high on something on any given day approaches 100%. People be trippin balls, yo.
by margalabargala | 2025-05-04 14:44:53+00:00
What were some specific problems caused by this spending? Seemed to work quite well.

Up until our international image was destroyed two months ago, we were in a privileged position allowing deficit spending while the rest of the world absorbed the negatives.

Trump certainly doesn't have a solution, but I'm also not convinced he has correctly identified a problem. Nation-state debt from the country whose currency is the de-facto international standard for the world, is categorically different than your mortgage or your credit card debt.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-04 14:45:17+00:00
> Responsibly (test it first!). Not too much. Just a couple times a year.

MDMA fans will argue this on the internet, but MDMA use (even without polydrug abuse) is associated with cognitive deficits in memory and learning. There’s a lot of experimental evidence showing it has damaging effects on neurons.

The damage done by a drug like this wouldn’t necessarily be obvious or even at the level to pass the threshold of significance in a scientific study after one or a couple doses. However, there isn’t much debate even among drug users that taking MDMA frequently produces some profoundly debilitating effects on long-term users.

I think everyone should be aware that it’s very likely that each MDMA dose is incurring some level of damage that is either long-term or potentially permanent. A couple sessions at moderate doses might not produce strictly significant effects but it’s amazing how quickly people go from “a couple times per year on special occasions” to having 20-30 exposures over a decade or two, which starts putting them beyond even the inclusion criteria for most light use studies that were performed.

EDIT: Also note that using DIY testing supplies on your pills is great practice and necessary in the age of fentanyl, but it’s not definitive. The only real way to test is to ship some of your pills off to one of the groups that tests for free and wait months for the results. Pills can contain multiple substances. There is a problem right now where one of the “research chemical” manufacturers has produced a large batch of a compound that is normally used for lesioning (damaging) serotonin neurons in lab studies. It has recreational effects, though, so it’s being sold as a drug. There’s concern that vendors will start mixing it into pressed pills to cut them with an active substance.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-04 14:45:58+00:00
> Well, that's a huge unsubstantiated leap.

I suppose that might depend on how you read "preferring". As in "is what one would ideally like" then sure, it's a bit orthogonal. As in "is what one would decides to use" is what I mean in that we are willing to try and use technical automations over traditional means by nature of being here, even if a face to face conversation would be higher quality or an additional mailman would be employed.

> Also, it's not about "preserving traditional ways of completing work." It's just about recognizing that humans are much better at the vast majority of real world work.

While an interesting topic I'm not sure this really relates to why people are willing to teach a program how to do their job. It would be more "why people don't bother to", which is a bit of the opposite assumption (that we should if it were worth it).

The most interesting thing about recognizing humans are much better at the vast majority of real world work is it doesn't define where the boundary currently sits or how far it's moving. I suspect people will continue to be the best option for the majority of work for a very long time to come by our nature to stop considering automated things work. "Work" ends up being "what we're employed to do" rather than "things that happen". Things like lights, electricity, hvac, dishwasher, washer/dryer, water delivery & waste removal, instances of music or entertainment performances, and so on used to require large amounts of human work but now that the majority of work in those areas is automated we call them "expenses" and "work" is having to load/unload the washer instead of clean the clothes and so on.

So, by one measure, I'd disagree wholeheartedly. Machine automation is responsible for more quality production output that humans if, for anything, because of the sheer volume of output and use than being better at a randomly chosen task. On another measure I'd agree wholeheartedly - the things we define as being better at tend to be the things it's worth us doing which become the things we still call "work". Anything which truly has the majority done better (on average) by machines becomes an expense.
by spicyusername | 2025-05-04 14:46:28+00:00
can't really grow up and do drugs responsibly

This is a very naive, almost willfully ignorant, understanding of how addiction and drug abuse works.

It's more like a genetic lottery. If you didn't get the right set, there is no such thing as responsible use, only abstinence or destruction.

The challenge for society is how to grapple with this genetic inequity.

Zero tolerance would probably be best for everyone, at the expense of the entertainment of some. It would also be impossible to legally enforce and seems to result in abusive policing and organized crime.

Laissez-faire would fix the above problems, at the expense of those genetically predisposed to addiction, which is a significant percentage of society, and which has been shown to have horrible social side effects in terms of crime, mental health, child abuse, and mortality.

It's a hard problem.
by timmg | 2025-05-04 14:47:17+00:00
> So you just ask a supercomputer to find the lowest cost solution for 99.99% electrical coverage without using any carbon sources.

Sure... but my expectation is that that 90% solution would include an unreasonable amount of storage (assuming you want most/all renewables). I guess was my point.

> It's quite possible -- over the previous 30 years we've never had an hour where there was no wind & sun anywhere in Europe.

But "some" wind or sun is not enough to support the whole grid.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-04 14:49:07+00:00
> Once you include prescription medication, the number of people high on something on any given day approaches 100%

100% of people are not on prescription drugs. Most prescription drugs do not have euphoric or “high” producing effects.

Even among drugs with recreational effects, people who take them as directed at therapeutic doses will not be “high” when using them regularly. The person who has taken the same dose of Adderall daily for ADHD for a decade isn’t buzzing and getting things done like someone taking their first 10 doses they borrowed from a friend. The chronic pain patient on a stable dose of a opioid is certainly not feeling a buzz, just temporary relief from their pain. The recreational effects are short lived.

We need to stop this false equivalence between people taking medication and people being “high”.
by mitjam | 2025-05-04 14:49:07+00:00
I think you're right: Agents are at first just an LLM wrapper (app, can even be a Spreadsheet).

For me, the question of which protocols are used to communicate with the environment (MCP et al) ist just one and not even the most interesting question. Other questions uncover better, why agents are "a different kind of software" and why they might vastly change how we think of and use software:

- Stochastic not deterministic (evals/tests are crucial, creating reliable systems is much harder)

- conversational not forms (changes how we write software, and what we need to know for great UX)

- modalities, especially voice, change how we use computers (screens may become less important),

- batch with occasional real-time vs interactive might change how we feel that software works "for us"

- different unit economics (inference costs are significant compared to traditional run-time costs) change how software can be marketed

- data-driven capabilities on every level may change value chains and dictate how agents can work (if data is the moat, will agents need to "go to" the data owner and will be closely guarded of what they can extract/use?, much more than just traditional AAA)

- agents can be implemented in a way that they get better "themselves", because LLMs can be trained with data - will model providers capture most of the value of specialized vertical solutions? Is code less valuable than data/LLMs in the end?

- human-agent-relationship: By definition, agents act on someones behalf. This may again change how we interact with services/websites/content. Currently our personal systems are just like terminals. Will our interactions with services/websites etc. be mediated by "our" personal agents, or will we continue to use the different services, directly (and their agents, too)? Depending on that, the internet as we know it might change dramatically - services must deal more with agents than to humans, directly.

Bottom line: Agents are just an LLM wrapper, but they have the potential to dramatically change a lot of things around software. That's what's interesting about it, in my view.
by klik99 | 2025-05-04 14:49:15+00:00
I thought AI was supposed to make people more productive with less time? Shouldn’t AI companies be dog fooding?

In seriousness, I get startups require 7-day weeks - from the founders, who have enough equity that makes it worth it. I did that, for years, with a family. It was rough and we never exited, but I don’t regret it since I believed in what I was building. But if you’re VC funded and saying you need 7 day work weeks from employees you’re giving fraction of percent of equity, you’re exploiting people. Hire more people, make a bigger ask.

As I said I regret nothing about my experience in the startup world, but I’m so happy to be at a company that truly respects work life balance.
by MaximosMK | 2025-05-04 14:49:58+00:00
Hi HN,

I often found myself wanting to convert large text files (like book chapters or long articles) into audio using the excellent open-source Piper TTS engine. Handling very large inputs directly can be a bit tricky, and I wanted a smoother workflow.

So, I built this project: 1. A simple Flask/Gunicorn API server (`server/piper_api.py`) that wraps the Piper executable. 2. A PySide6 GUI client (`client/piper_api_gui.py`) that interacts with the server.

The key feature is that the client automatically splits large text files into smaller chunks (sentence-like segments), sends these chunks to the API server to be processed in parallel (using Python's `ThreadPoolExecutor`), and then combines the resulting WAV audio snippets back into a single file. This makes synthesizing long texts much more manageable and faster than doing it sequentially.

The tech stack is Python, Flask, Gunicorn, PySide6, and Requests. It's all open source on GitHub.

Happy to answer any questions or hear feedback!
by edweis | 2025-05-04 14:50:46+00:00
If you are interested in the topic, you can check the autobiography of the biggest manufacturer of LSD in history: "The Rose Of Paracelsus" by William Leonard Pickard [1].

It is both poetic and fascinating. It's not an easy read but I recommend it.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28930020-the-rose-of-par...
by mistrial9 | 2025-05-04 14:51:20+00:00
In the United States 100 years ago, there was a real political concern about the spread of socialist revolution, with labor unions in the center of that. There was a premeditated action through politics and business in the USA to remove socialist union leadership, and build strong hierarchical management that was politically predictable. Many of the eager candidates for this kind of structure were Mafia-connected. When actual organized crime had the opportunity, multiple family fortunes were built on control of Unions. This is very well documented but the language that is used will vary by source.

Essentially the USA made a political choice to negotiate with and on occasion criminally prosecute Mafia-related leadership in national labor unions, instead of "allowing" the uncertainty of committed socialist labor leaders.
by ninkendo | 2025-05-04 14:51:43+00:00
Malloc and free aren’t handled by the operating system, they’re handled in user space.

Underneath malloc is mmap(2) (or in older unices, setbrk), which actually requests the memory. And with delayed/lazy allocation in the OS, you can just mmap a huge region up front, and it won’t actually do anything until you write/read to the individual pages.

Point is, you only need one up front call to mmap to write to any page you want.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-04 14:53:32+00:00
> The point of AI isn't to make workers more productive, it's to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.

Well, that's what the bosses think. Same way "hybrid" work plans just became a backdoor policy for RTO. But "the point" of AI is just to generate text, regardless of how the subtext around it changes.
by __jl__ | 2025-05-04 14:53:46+00:00
Only problem is that the genai API at https://ai.google.dev is far less reliable and can be problematic for production use cases. Right around the time Gemini 2.0 launched, it was done for days on end without any communication. They are putting a lot of effort into improving it but it's much less reliable than openai, which matters for production. They can also reject your request based on overall system load (not your individual limits), which is very unpredictable. They advertise 2000 requests per minute. When I tried several weeks ago, I couldn't even get 500 per minute.
by toast0 | 2025-05-04 14:54:00+00:00
> Do you mean it is not analog and latency is higher as a result?

Digital teleophony doesn't imply significant latency. PRI calling (T1/ISDN) is digital, but the sampling delay is minimal, and it's sent one sample at a time, so there's no packetization delay.

VoIP tends to run a codec with sampling/encoding delays, and tends to be at least 20ms packetization, and then you have a jitter buffer and probably input and output buffering too.
by tln | 2025-05-04 14:56:05+00:00
The article asks about includes but also about imports ("HTML cannot import HTML ") which this is very directly.

This feature was billed as #includes for the web [1]. No, it acts nothing like an #include. TBH I don't see why ES modules are a "replacement" here.

Personally I would like to see something like these imports come back, as a way to reuse HTML structure across pages, BUT purely declaratively (no JS needed).

#includes where partially formed HTML (ie, header.html has a <body> open tag and footer.html has the closing tag) isn't very DOM compatible.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20181121181125/https://www.html5...
by ryao | 2025-05-04 14:56:09+00:00
We should add those planets to the official list too. Gauss considered Ceres to be a planet and I believe him over living astronomers.

The motivation for this dwarf planet nonsense was to try to keep the official planet list small so children could memorize them with ease, but that is absurd. We do not remove countries from the map to make it easier for children to learn geography and there are over 100 of them.
by anonymars | 2025-05-04 14:56:17+00:00
I don't think it's a wild take to think that poor socioeconomic upbringing could result in worse performance. One doesn't need to think this is a result of melanin content

I believe one of the comment threads on the post summed it up best. There's an issue with the water pressure, and we're attempting to fix it by mucking about with the faucet rather than upstream at the source (https://open.substack.com/pub/tracingwoodgrains/p/the-full-s...)

The author provided various footnotes backing up his assertions

> Why not ditch it altogether? Simple: the test worked. It had “strong predictive validity,” ... On average, people who performed better on the test actually did perform better as air traffic controllers, and this was never really in dispute. When they tested alternative measures like biographical data, they found that the test scores predicted 27% of variance in performance, while the “biodata” predicted only 2%. It just didn’t do much.9

See also e.g. https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1754214242956235132