MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by metalman | 2025-05-19 16:32:44+00:00
what maters is time to escape befor "total involvement", or confaguration, steel contributes nothing to a fire, fire cant climb or follow it, and it acts as a heat sink, vs wood, which is fuel. All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that. Add in modern fire suppresion and fighting equipment and the current situation is quite secure vs/vs fire. edit, another factor is comunication and road infrastructure, where the recent fire storm in California, destroyed many many wooden structures, but the loss of life was exceptionaly low compared to other firestorms in less developed countrys. woods great, love the stuff, have a lot of wood, live in a wooden house and heat with wood, but there is essentialy no way that can be done with a thousand people in a huge building, so steel, which I also love and work with. Everything in it's place.
by Aeyxen | 2025-05-19 16:33:19+00:00
Bravo to the Vaev team for championing unrestrained technological exploration!

The choice of C++ is bold.

Despite the security concerns often highlighted, modern C++ with smart pointers, and RAII patterns can be just as safe as Rust when done right. Vaev’s security model should focus on process isolation, sandboxing techniques, and leveraging modern C++ features to minimize vulnerabilities.

Super excited to see such raw innovation and courage in tackling a colossal task often monopolized by juggernauts like Chromium.
by ashoeafoot | 2025-05-19 16:34:03+00:00
Germany is old, and paying its pensions from however the taxed economy is currently running. And its addicted economically to russian gas. The piggybank is spent, the "make belief can come true by the power of surplus money" philosophy ran out of steam as idealistic projects have to be payed for by holding back on the pensioner feeding trough. The generation that bend it all to their will finally ran out.
by cubefox | 2025-05-19 16:34:19+00:00
It's nice that this contains a comparison between diffusion models that are used for image models, and the autoregressive models that are used for LLMs.

But recently (2024 NeuIPS paper of the year) there was a new paper on autoregressive image modelling that apparently outperforms diffusion models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02905

The innovation is that it doesn't predict image patches (like older autoregressive image models) but somehow does some sort of "next scale" or "next resolution" prediction.

In the past, autoregressive image models did not perform as well as diffusion models, which meant that most image models used diffusion. Now it seems autoregressive techniques have a strict advantage over diffusion models. Another advantage is that they can be integrated with autoregressive LLMs (multimodality), which is not possible with diffusion image models. In fact, the recent GPT-4o image generation is autoregressive according to OpenAI. I wonder whether diffusion models still have a future now.
by anotherpaulg | 2025-05-19 16:34:39+00:00
I wish Anki could dynamically adjust the new cards introduced each day, based on whether you get them right or wrong on first viewing.

Getting 10 new cards that I happen to already know is easy. That's very different than getting 10 new cards that I get wrong, and therefore need to memorize.

I'd love to have 2 settings like:

- Max number of new card fails, say 4 - Max number of new cards, say 20

After 4 fails on new cards, Anki would stop showing new cards for the day. But if they're all easy, I might get up to 20 new cards in a day.

Fancier versions could use a decaying average of new card fails from the last few days. Those recently memorized cards are more challenging during review.
by typpo | 2025-05-19 16:34:43+00:00
Nice work! This is like a much better version of Ancient Earth[0], which I made ~10 years ago using GPlates[1]. I like your approach of rendering the map itself from data, which makes it continuous, rather than just wrapping map textures around a globe.

[0] https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240

[1] https://www.gplates.org/
by msteffen | 2025-05-19 16:36:14+00:00
> The bytes.Reader should really implement Peek. I’m pretty sure the reason it doesn’t is because this is the only way of creating read only views of slices. And a naughty user could peek at the bytes and then modify them. Sigh. People hate const poisoning, but I hate this more.

When I was a Google, a team adjacent to ours was onboarding a new client with performance demands that they could not realistically meet with anything resembling their current hardware footprint. Their service was a stateless Java service, so they elected to rewrite in C++. Now, Java has some overhead because of garbage collection and the JVM, and they hoped that this might move the needle, but what happened was they went from 300qps/core to 1200, with lower tail latency. Literally 3x improvement.

Why? Probably a lot of reasons, but the general consensus was: Java has no const, so many of Google’s internal libraries make defensive copies in many places, to guarantee immutability (which is valuable in a highly concurrent service, which everything there is). This generates a huge amount of garbage that, in theory, is short-lived, rarely escapes its GC generation, and can all be cleaned up after the request is finished. But their experience was that it’s just much faster to not copy and delete things all over the place. Which you can often avoid by using const effectively. I came to believe that this was Java’s biggest performance bottleneck, and when I saw that Go had GC with no const, I figured it would have the exact same problem
by Centigonal | 2025-05-19 16:37:03+00:00
(I haven't been hands-on with Fabric (I've used ADF and PowerBI pre-Fabric), and I work for a company that sometimes works with Fabric competitors, so I am biased.)

From our experience with customers, Fabric feels like a rebrand of existing Azure services, plus a few new beta services that Microsoft is aggressively selling to their customers as fully baked. I've heard two customer stories this year where they migrated ETL to Fabric and then had to scramble to migrate again because of latency or reliability issues.

I suspect Fabric will be pretty dang good a few years from now, and that it's probably a great option today for users who accurately understand its strengths and weaknesses, but I think the way some MS sales teams are selling the platform to customers right now is dishonest and harmful.
by christophilus | 2025-05-19 16:37:07+00:00
I know nothing.

But this is an interesting acquisition. Capital One strikes me as a pretty well run org.

Why would they want Discover, who notoriously targets the low end of credit card custom? My guess is that this gives them the ability to increase margins by owning the entire payment layer all the way through distribution. If they slash the fees charged to merchants, this could make them quite a powerhouse.
by trinix912 | 2025-05-19 16:38:14+00:00
> EU people can deal with their own taxes the possible tax savings are well worth the extra paper work for an EU worker so i'm sure they would be willing.

Several companies have been taking this approach recently, requiring you to set up a "small one-person business" (replace with whatever it's called in your specific EU country) which is a long and costly bureaucratic process so that you can pay a shit-ton of taxes while getting less net salary than if they would just pay the taxes for you (like any other EU employer). They give you 0.75x the money they themselves would spend to employ you while covering the taxes, tell you to deal with it yourself, and wrap it in cellophane with "hey but you're saving so much on the taxes!". Of course completely ignoring that you, the employee living in your EU country, are the one who actually benefits from them.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-05-19 16:38:28+00:00
6/7 years for staff (at a FAANG) is exceptional, I have personally never seen it. From what I have seen staff eng tend to be around 10 years of experience at the low end.

> have more offices in Europe

This has been hashed a million times:

1. Time zones 2. Lack of candidates building FAANG scale systems 3. Employment laws are hostile to employers

That being said, I have seen a lot of recruitment in Poland lately. It may not be glamorous though as people in Poland are expected to work with some amount of overlap with US time zones, so you are going to have to be working until 9pm most days.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-19 16:38:31+00:00
Probably because the drivers have to support it as well, I guess.

https://www.khronos.org/news/permalink/nvidia-provides-openg...

Also on desktop side, Windows on ARM, and UWP don't have that great support for anything beyond DirectX.

There is a compatibility pack and another one Angle based, but they haven't been updated in a while.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-19 16:38:57+00:00
> I take the American perspective on free speech as nearly a theological imperative

Is this the one where books get pulled from school libraries if they mention the existence of gay people?

(as I argue lower down, the US has a whole bunch of restrictions on speech that it avoids dealing with by saying "not speech" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44029515 )
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-19 16:39:01+00:00
> Now, why doesn’t bytes.Reader implement Peek? It’s just a byte slice, it’s definitely possible to peek ahead without altering stream state. But it was overlooked, and instead this workaround is applied.

When I first looked at Go, it seemed to have far too many layers of abstraction on top of one another. Which is so ironic, considering that's one of the main things it was trying to fix about Java. It ended up becoming the thing it fought against.
by crazymalhavoc | 2025-05-19 16:39:59+00:00
The Wirecutter Reviews folks regularly look at sleep masks and I've used a few that they recommend though I can say from experience ones that have velcro straps on the back as opposed to being fitted to your head can be problematic from a comfort point of view if you normally sleep on your back.

I use the Nidra ones primarily as I can blink without my eyelashes catching the mask

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-sleep-mask/

Another wrap around option with audio are the SleepPhones, while not designed to go over your eyes they work well that way and before switching to the Nidra and A20 ear buds that was my primary headset for about a decade.

https://www.sleepphones.com/

As to audio specifically, the Anker A20 work well even if you are a side sleeper

https://www.soundcore.com/products/sleep-a20-sleeping-earbud...

Notwithstanding the above, blackout blinds are awesome as long as they extend above and below and past the sides of the window frame. Can be quite low cost from places like Costco.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-19 16:40:22+00:00
Don't understand why people find tests important but not types.

There's two popular ways to verify your programs. Types and tests. Types are EASIER then tests and types COVER more then tests.

The ideal thing is to use both, but why spend so much time on unit tests over types is beyond me.

Note that integration tests are a different beast. Why? Because you need to test things that aren't covered by either unit tests or types. In unit tests you mock out things that are external like IO, databases, and the like. In integration tests you need to test all of those things.

Integration tests are THE most important thing to use to verify your program because it's an actual test to see if your code works. But unit tests vs. types? Types win.

When I code. I never write a single unit test. Just types, and integration or end 2 end tests. It doesn't hurt to write a unit test and it's actually better. But the fact that I'm confident my code works without it shows the level of importance.
by themaninthedark | 2025-05-19 16:40:33+00:00
It does however increase the risk.

If blockade from China will cut power after the 11 day storage runs out then your are out of power completely.

If blockade from China cuts 90% power after 11 days, then you still have power of emergency operation.

This is assuming that China would not be attacking the power plants in either scenario, which is reasonable given the premise that China wants to take over not destroy Taiwan.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-19 16:40:55+00:00
Yes, exactly, a person with $5 million liquid can afford to buy maybe 1 luxury home. Sure they probably already own a home, but 2nd homes are not uncommon luxuries.

As a reminder you said “almost anything highend / luxury becomes a commodity.”

Or look at this way: $5 million throws off $200k/year (pre-tax) with a “safe” pull rate of 4%. Ok so now you want to buy a luxury car, that’s over $100k. You’ve spent most of your annual income on one car. Hardly a commodity!

$5 million is enough to sustain an upper class income in most metro regions. But a long way from commodifying luxury.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-19 16:41:03+00:00
"I can't imagine" does a lot of heavy lifting these days. A couple of years ago I couldn't imagine Russian troops bivouacking at Chernobyl or attacking Zaporizhzhia with drone strikes.

It is easy to call Putin a reckless dumbass and say that Xi is much more rational, but the two leaders have gone out of their way to put on a conspicuous show of friendship and shared interests.
by BigglesB | 2025-05-19 16:41:39+00:00
My super talented friend Ian is currently (and for the rest of this week) live streaming himself painting a triptych of portraits of Elon Musk. He's currently just getting started on the first painting but will also be chatting to various people along the way inc Rosie O'Donnell who I believe will be joining in the next hour or so.

It's all in aid of "Free Our Feeds", a campaign to "keep social media open, people-powered, and billionaire-proof", which they've so far raised over $100k for out of their $500k target
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-19 16:41:56+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43966948

I'll make the same remark I did last time this was posted here (it's been submitted 3 times in one week):

The author starts with this:

> I conclude with two implications of this idea: the necessity to accept other people’s preferences without judgment and the importance of finding an environment rewarding your style.

And follows it with these two things:

> Type theory maximalists should give up their aura of moral and intellectual superiority and accept that they need therapy just as badly as everyone else in the industry (if not more).

>> Haskell will still be used in 20 years, because there will always be people looking for a productive way to weaponize their autism.

So much for "without judgement".
by biker142541 | 2025-05-19 16:41:57+00:00
There are problems we absolutely should be thinking ahead 8000 years to solve for (or help mitigate)– climate change, species protections, sustainability, etc.

Call me skeptical, but reformatting dates for a "bug" in 8000 years seems extraordinarily silly. To think humanity will likely be using the same time measurement systems, computers that operate remotely similarly to ours today, same written/spoken languages, etc is laughable. 8000 years ago, the entire world's human population was roughly equal to that of London today and still just figuring out agriculture.
by BeetleB | 2025-05-19 16:42:25+00:00
Basic stuff. Dijkstra's algorithm, union find, etc.

I will note that some cards are basic: A simple recall. Other cards ask for me to reproduce the whole algorithm (a violation of SR methodology).

All cards that take a long time to answer are stored in a separate deck, which I go through only when I know I have the time to dedicate.
by mindslight | 2025-05-19 16:42:31+00:00
Three major online-first banks was clearly just way too much competition. This merger fixes the situation down to the "token two" where they only have to compete on marketing rather than anything relating to actual features like product offerings, fees, website usability, customer service, etc. Now they can switch to shameless extraction mode like the regional and national brick-and-mortar banks.
Show HN: Buzzcut – Make Your Apartment Buzzer Smart
by aphrx | 2025-05-19 16:42:52+00:00
Most apartment and condo buildings still rely on phone-based intercom systems. A visitor buzzes, your phone rings, and you press 9 to let them in. But if you miss the call or aren't home, you're out of luck. There's no easy way to grant remote access or see who’s coming and going.

Buzzcut turns these buzzers into smart access systems. It lets you unlock your building door from anywhere, share temporary access links with guests or delivery drivers, set auto-unlock rules during certain times, and keep a log of buzz-ins. No hardware changes are needed—just link your buzzer to a virtual number managed by the app.

It’s built with Flutter (iOS and Android support), a Python backend, Firebase, Twilio for virtual numbers, and RevenueCat for subscriptions. Group access control makes it easy to share access with roommates or family members.

This started as a solution to a personal problem and is now being tested in a few buildings in Toronto. Still early, but looking for feedback, testers, and ideas.

Would love to hear what you think.
by iLemming | 2025-05-19 16:43:12+00:00
Neovim is a text editor. You can't compare Emacs with just a text editor. Just like you can't compare Emacs with a browser, music player, note-taking app, email client, etc. Emacs, first and foremost, is a Lisp REPL, with an embedded text editor. Without deeply understanding and respecting this aspect it is difficult to appreciate what Emacs could be, what you can do with it.

Imagine this — one morning I was watching my colleague showing me a bunch of things over a Zoom video, and I didn't feel comfortable interrupting him with "wait, don't scroll away, I didn't get that, allow me to read it", "hold on, I'm taking notes", etc. I sacrificed my lunch break to write a small Elisp command that runs tesseract to OCR the image in the clipboard. Now, I don't even have to ask my colleagues for explanations or tell them to share the url they are currently browsing — I can just grab it with a couple of keystrokes to make a note. And that's just one, single, isolated example. It cost me twenty minutes of my time. Twenty minutes of investment that paid itself many times over already. And I have tons of similar examples.
by kbknight | 2025-05-19 16:43:35+00:00
This is the way. Unit testing has become a cargo-cult where silly tests are written that don't prove anything works, are not used to guide the architecture (the original promise of "London School testing" was that all these little unit tests would drive good architectural decisions), and don't protect against regressions on changes because they have to be re-written every time the code changes in even the most trivial way anyway.
by matvore | 2025-05-19 16:43:54+00:00
It is sorted FIRST by radical and SECOND by stroke order. This is roughly equivalent to the Unicode codepoint sort if you stay in the basic multilingual plane. The order also puts literary chinese afer wu Chinese, which breaks with a pure stroke-count sort:

中文 - 中 = 丨 + 3 strokes

吴语 - 吴 = 口 + 4 strokes

文言 - 文 = 文 + 0 strokes

日本語 - 日 = 日 + 0 strokes

粵語 - 粵 = 米 + 7 strokes
by canucker2016 | 2025-05-19 16:43:57+00:00
I would love a virtual assistant that could handle the tasks a human personal assistant does. VA would be available 24x7, would perform consistently regardless of time of day/how long they've been running/awake, would know/ understand my particular habits/preferences.

Maybe there's some bespoke software firm that does provide such a service for rich-enough people. Of course it'd have to run mostly locally/on-premises - none of this cloud stuff/monetizing my behaviours to bump their revenues.
by hinkley | 2025-05-19 16:44:25+00:00
Java has a little const. Strings are immutable. You can make objects with no mutations, so you can make read only collections fairly easily which is usually where const becomes a problem.

But then you have for instance Elixir, where all functions are pure, so mutating inputs to outputs takes a ton of copying, and any data structure that is not a DAG is a gigantic pain in the ass to modify. I lost count of how many tries it took me to implement Norvig’s sudoku solver. I kept having to go back and redesign my data structures every time I added more of the logic.

[edit to add]: DTOs exist in Java because some jackass used the term “Value Object” to include mutation despite large swaths of the CS world considering VOs to be intrinsically const. So then they had to make up a new term that meant Value Object without using the concept they already broke.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-19 16:44:26+00:00
> Give them time and relevant experience, and they will arrive at the same conclusions:

What does this say about DHH then? He's got decades of experience yet ripped TypeScript out of his codebase angrily, preferring the foggy mystery that is dynamic types. Is he a legitimate outlier? If not, then wouldn't you have to conclude he's just a really bad programmer?
by bglazer | 2025-05-19 16:44:31+00:00
Apparently, the article for David Woodard, an American composer and conductor has been translated into 333 languages, including Seediq, a language spoken in Northern Taiwan by about 20 thousand people.

I am absolutely baffled as to why this is the case. I have to imagine some kind of "astroturfed" effort by Woodard or a fan to spread his name?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David%20Woodard
by jaoane | 2025-05-19 16:44:37+00:00
> Drawing on the current geopolitical landscape, Calviño sees the uncertainty generated by US President Donald Trump's economic policies as an opportunity for Europe.

The opportunity of wasting the hard earned money of the citizens she means.

Have they considered doing useful stuff like removing regulations, lowering taxes, fixing the immigration mess, etc? You know, what actually made America an innovation hub.

This will end the same way it always does every time the EU gives away money to economic sectors they are jealous that the US have and they don’t: a select few will fill their pockets with nothing to show for it.
by olex | 2025-05-19 16:44:42+00:00
> Once Copilot is done, it’ll tag you for review. You can ask Copilot to make changes by leaving comments in the pull request.

To me, this reads like it'll be a good junior and open up a PR with its changes, letting you (the issue author) review and merge. Of course, you can just hit "merge" without looking at the changes, but then it's kinda on you when unreviewed stuff ends up in main.
by cyberax | 2025-05-19 16:45:03+00:00
> They won't affect your phone or laptop, but transformers along the longer ranges of the grid are unprotected.

They actually are. Protection against lightning strikes and atmospheric electricity is a part of the design for the high-voltage lines.

CMEs might cause enough additional load on the lines to cause them to trip if they are close to failure already, and this is well-recognized and can be mitigated by load-shedding early.
by boomskats | 2025-05-19 16:45:04+00:00
My buddy is at GH working on an adjacent project & he hasn't stopped talking about this for the last few days. I think I've been reminded to 'make sure I tune into the keynote on Monday' at least 8 times now.

I gave up trying to watch the stream after the third authentication timeout, but if I'd known it was this I'd maybe have tried a fourth time.