MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hedora | 2025-05-13 16:31:20+00:00
SARSv1 was very similar to COVID-19 (which was originally called SARSv2).

Under Obama, a team of US scientists working internationally (including in China) detected SARSv1 early enough to stop it from becoming a pandemic. That team had blocked other pandemics over the years.

Trump fired that team early in his first term, preventing the US from running the early response to COVID in China.

Here is a list of current epidemics the US is either intentionally not responding to, or where the response stopped working since Trump got in office:

- Measles

- Avian Flu

- Tuberculosis

- Screw worm

At least one of those is going to hit the US hard in the short term, and Trump’s intentional sabotage of our public health infrastructure will be to blame.
by jotjotzzz | 2025-05-13 16:31:21+00:00
I feel the same way! I left corporate and chose a non-profit where the mission aligns with doing something good. I suggest you do the same. You may not get paid as well, but if you choose carefully, some could pay decently. But at least you can wake up every morning and feel good that you're contributing to something good, not lining up $$ for corporate greed!
by throitallaway | 2025-05-13 16:31:52+00:00
I have a dedicated Windows 11 gaming laptop and I'm about at my breaking point of putting another drive in it to test out the games that I care about on Linux. Windows was tolerable to use just for gaming, but the hoops that you have to go through to do some things in Windows are ridiculous. Removing the Game Bar (and stopping Windows from bugging you about it afterwards) is way more difficult than it should be. Also the driver update ping-pong that happens with my Intel video card is maddening. I'll have the driver fully updated and functional, then Windows Update periodically decides to downgrade it to one that's ~2 years old (which breaks stuff.)
by stronglikedan | 2025-05-13 16:32:05+00:00
It's not a truck. It's for people who need more than a car, but less than a truck. A Cuck? (oh, wait...) A Truar? Either way, those specs are plenty for the average person that just wants to haul some stuff, or pull a small trailer, and not burn too much energy while doing it (or not doing it).
by MattSayar | 2025-05-13 16:32:15+00:00
Efficiency is critical to my everyday life. For example, before I get up from my desk to grab a snack from the kitchen, I'll bring any trash/dishes with me to double the trip's benefits. I do this kind of thing often.

Optimizing software has a similar appeal. But when the problem is "spend hours of expensive engineering time optimizing the thing" vs "throw some more cheap RAM at it," the cheaper option will prevail. Sometimes, the problem is big enough that it's worth the optimization.

The market will decide which option is worth pursuing. If we get to a point where we've reached diminishing returns on throwing hardware at a problem, we'll optimize the software. Moore's Law may be slowing down, but evidently we haven't reached that point yet.
by cletus | 2025-05-13 16:32:38+00:00
So I've worked for Google (and Facebook) and it really drives the point home of just how cheap hardware is and how not worth it optimizing code is most of the time.

More than a decade ago Google had to start managing their resource usage in data centers. Every project has a budget. CPU cores, hard disk space, flash storage, hard disk spindles, memory, etc. And these are generally convertible to each other so you can see the relative cost.

Fun fact: even though at the time flash storage was ~20x the cost of hard disk storage, it was often cheaper net because of the spindle bottleneck.

Anyway, all of these things can be turned into software engineer hours, often called "mili-SWEs" meaning a thousandth of the effort of 1 SWE for 1 year. So projects could save on hardware and hire more people or hire fewer people but get more hardware within their current budgets.

I don't remember the exact number of CPU cores amounted to a single SWE but IIRC it was in the thousands. So if you spend 1 SWE year working on optimization acrosss your project and you're not saving 5000 CPU cores, it's a net loss.

Some projects were incredibly large and used much more than that so optimization made sense. But so often it didn't, particularly when whatever code you wrote would probably get replaced at some point anyway.

The other side of this is that there is (IMHO) a general usability problem with the Web in that it simply shouldn't take the resources it does. If you know people who had to or still do data entry for their jobs, you'll know that the mouse is pretty inefficient. The old terminals from 30-40+ years ago that were text-based had some incredibly efficent interfaces at a tiny fraction of the resource usage.

I had expected that at some point the Web would be "solved" in the sense that there'd be a generally expected technology stack and we'd move on to other problems but it simply hasn't happened. There's still a "framework of the week" and we're still doing dumb things like reimplementing scroll bars in user code that don't work right with the mouse wheel.

I don't know how to solve that problem or even if it will ever be "solved".
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-13 16:33:03+00:00
The "old ways" are relevant again here. Just like in the old Progressive Enhancement era (the jQuery/Knockout era) to pass objects/arrays as attributes you use the special data- attributes and the `dataset` property. As the old ways suggest you probably still want to account for strings and serialize/deserialize via JSON for the most compatibility with things like static rendering, but many a jQuery script "upgraded" such things in-place.
by vel0city | 2025-05-13 16:33:28+00:00
Windows 3.1 wasn't checking WiFi, Bluetooth, energy saving profile, night light setting, audio devices, current power status and battery level, audio devices, and more when clicking the non-existent icon on the non-existent taskbar. Windows XP didn't have this quick setting area at all. But I do recall having the volume slider take a second to render on XP from time to time, and that was only rendering a slider.

And FWIW this stuff is then cached. I hadn't clicked that setting area in a while (maybe the first time this boot?) and did get a brief gray box that then a second later populated with all the buttons and settings. Now every time I click it again it appears instantly.
by Onawa | 2025-05-13 16:33:44+00:00
Please provide evidence of fraud in government funding. I have yet to see any real evidence of fraud from the DOGE reports, just contracts and projects that don't align with the current administration's world view and priorities.

Yes, scientists are human and there are certainly instances of scientific misconduct that take time to root out. In the grand scheme of things, funding for science generates many times its value in economic output.

https://g.co/gemini/share/816aa7510c1a
by neilv | 2025-05-13 16:34:38+00:00
Besides the tariffs added to buildout cost...

> Investors are also growing wary of an overcapacity spike. As Bloomberg notes, tech giants including Microsoft and Amazon have adjusted their data center strategies, in some cases pulling back on construction projects.

Is "overcapacity" concern here bundling up all the other effects of disruptions by the current administration?

And are there significant concerns about Stargate and OpenAI specifically, separate from those traceable to the administration or economy?
by noirscape | 2025-05-13 16:34:53+00:00
I did and they aren't convincing. The first is an argument of how a popular interpretation of a work still under copyright can subsume the fact the original work is in the public domain, using Alice in Wonderland as an example. (I also happen to think it's a particularly terrible example - if you want to make this argument, The Little Mermaid is by far the stronger version of this argument.) It also misidentifies Disney as the copyright boogeyman, which is a pretty common categorical error. (Disney had very little to do with the length of US copyright. The length of copyright is pretty much entirely the product of geopolitics and international agreements, not Disney.) Its an interesting argument, but not one I find particularly convincing for abolishing copyright, at most shortening the length of it. (Which I do believe is needed.)

The second one is the "just solve capitalism and we can abolish copyright entirely" argument which is... a total non-starter. Yes, in an idealized utopia, we don't need capitalism or copyright and people can do things just because they want to and society provides for the artist just because humans all value art just that much. It's a fun utopic ideal, but there's many steps between the current state of the world and "you can abolish the idea of copyright", and we aren't even close to that state yet.
by api | 2025-05-13 16:34:54+00:00
It did not take long after the Internet went mainstream for a borderline (or not borderline) malware industry to evolve around getting predatory crap onto peoples' computers. I remember uninstalling shit like "Bonzai buddy" and the various toolbars and other trash that would come with dodgy installers or sometimes on new installs if you bought a cheap machine.

Still, those computers were still PCs. They were still holdovers from the era when computers were mostly designed for their users, who were the customer. The old PC culture was very anti-spyware and pro-privacy, owing in part to the old cyberpunk/hacker ethos of the 1980s and 1990s. The political zeitgeist would best be described as "left-leaning libertarian" with a smattering of more radical ideas like anarchism.

It was the mobile revolution that fully mainstreamed a computer as a device to spy on you and manipulate your dopamine system and only incidentally to help you. It didn't start this way, but that's where it went pretty fast.

Social media also rapidly went this way. It started as a way to stay in touch with your friends, and has evolved into a chum feed with a UI/UX modeled after a slot machine.

It's interesting to me how this shift has coincided with a shift away from liberal, libertarian, and small government conservative type ideas and toward every kind of authoritarianism. It's as if our politics echoes the permission and control structure of our computing devices, or vice versa. I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation goes-- maybe both ways.
by tristor | 2025-05-13 16:34:56+00:00
I am not saying the proposal is bad, I'm saying I automatically don't trust the authors because they use the term "latinx" in something that's theoretically intended to help the Latin American community. Additionally, the fact our funding climate is such that people feel they have to insert coded language for white academic elites into their proposals for them to be accepted for a grant is part of the problem in at least 3 layers, and probably more than that, of this very complex social issue.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-13 16:35:10+00:00
Who can act surprised? "Sparks of AGI" is what, 2 years old now? Meanwhile Masayoshi Son is promising AI "10,000 times smarter” than humans in a decade. It's a ruse by hardware manufacturers to bolster sales of niche IP. It's dumbfounding that corporate America, much less American politics, fell for the scheme.

Projects like this serve to create unattainable goals that practically hand peer powers a victory. Not because these peers are more powerful, but because they can define what they want and work towards a real goal and not handwavy vaporware nonsense.
by fads_go | 2025-05-13 16:35:29+00:00
given that my brother is a senior admin working in human resources at a federal agency, the answer may be much higher than you expect.

It's like any large org. Except it is probably one of the largest large orgs.

And seeing as these orgs need to provide regulated services to 330 million people, the nature of the beast is it must be a large org.
by lwansbrough | 2025-05-13 16:35:29+00:00
“I'm not going to agree with [Trump] on everything, but I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” - Altman

Probably should have stuck to his guns on Trump. Trump, serial liar and king of fraud, lies to these guys one time and they spontaneously develop amnesia and praise him. Naive and hilarious.
by xelxebar | 2025-05-13 16:35:37+00:00
> here's how you put someone into a box by looking at them

Heck yeah. If we're putting people in boxes, then I agree. That said, the author's characterizations sound much less absolute to me, like they're median estimates with implied wide error bars. That's similar to how I experience people, actually.

Does your intuition change if you assume that different framing?
by sleirsgoevy | 2025-05-13 16:35:38+00:00
The Linux kernel has even a way to determine whether the expression is compile-time, WITHOUT aborting compilation in either case.

The trick is this (copied vebratim from Linux):

#define __is_constexpr(x) (sizeof(int) == sizeof(*(8 ? ((void *)((long)(x) * 0l)) : (int *)8)))

Explanation: if x is a constant expression, then multiplying it by zero yields a constant 0, and casting a constant 0 to void* makes a null pointer constant. And the ternary expression, if one of its sides is a null pointer constant, collapses to the type of the other side (thus the type of the returned pointer will be int*, and the sizeof will match). And if x was not constant, then the lefthand side would not be considered a null pointer constant by type inference, the type of the ternary expression will be void*, and the sizeof check will not match.

With a few more clever tricks, it's even possible to implement a compile-time "type ternary expression", like this: TYPE_IF(2 * 2 == 4, int, long). This is left as an exercise for the reader.
by neonsunset | 2025-05-13 16:35:38+00:00
Only if you go out of your way to author a method with (Guid someGuid = default) argument. I've never seen it happen with Guids, if someone gives you default(Guid) - they did it on purpose, it's no different to explicitly setting `0` to an integer-typed UserID property.

If supplying Guid is optional, you just make it Guid?.

To be fair, I don't think offering default(T) by default (ha) is the best choice for structs. In F#, you have to explicitly do `Unchecked.defaultOf` and otherwise it will just not let you have your way - it is watertight. I much prefer this approach even if it can be less convenient at times.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-05-13 16:36:28+00:00
I was such a bad developer that I realized I had to automate the re-running of parts of the system to find the bugs.

Of course, the code I wrote to exercise the code I wrote had bugs, but usually I wouldn't make offsetting errors.

It didn't fix all the problems I made, but it helped. And it helped to have the humility when trying to fix code to realize I wouldn't get it the first time, so should automate replication
by donnachangstein | 2025-05-13 16:36:33+00:00
> Windows LTSC builds don't have Microsoft Store preinstalled

No, it's not that it isn't "preinstalled", the Microsoft Store is literally not supported on LTSC, by design. LTSC was never intended to run the Store. The original use case for LTSC was for ATMs, industrial control equipment, hospitals, and the like, where IoT wasn't appropriate, where you needed the ability to run full desktop applications.

> Microsoft offers no official way to re-enable it.

Yeah that's because the Store was never supposed to run on LTSC. It's not supported. Why would they offer an official way to re-enable it? The whole point of LTSC is that it doesn't include the store.

If someone cobbled together an ugly hack to shoehorn it in, by definition it could break at any time.

Which it has.

There is no customer for this.
by fragmede | 2025-05-13 16:36:42+00:00
Fun fact: That slogan is only half of the story. Smuggling was prolific in those days, with John Hancock and Samuel Adams were among them. They were involved with smuggling cheaper Dutch tea and the Sons of Liberty were protecting their own economic interests. Aka those taxes would ruin their smuggling business because the Tea Act of 1773 would let the British sell their tea for cheaper than the smugglers, and the protests were because that threatened their ability to sell their smuggled, but more expensive Dutch Tea.
by solardev | 2025-05-13 16:36:46+00:00
Thanks, I appreciate that!

FWIW, unfortunately, I think the problem is a two-headed one, and maybe reversed for viewers vs creators. Creators want as many people to see their work as possible. But viewers have to sift through a graveyard of 95%+ junk videos to find the 5% worth watching. AI (or Google/TikTok/etc. in general) acting as gatekeeper in between isn't great, but not having any metrics/summaries/descriptions for videos would be even worse.

In this particular case, I get that this particular creator might've had a point to make, but the description and summary were so cheekily written (to make a point, I guess) that I had no idea what it was about.

The creators who I do follow typically make long-form educational videos with a lot of nuance; I wouldn't want to rely on even the best-written human summary for those. But there are many, many videos for which I'd prefer a 1-sentence summary over 3 minutes of intros and jokes, a 45-second sponsorship, and a gradual dramatic buildup before getting to the point.

Not sure what the long-term solution is.
by alxlaz | 2025-05-13 16:36:48+00:00
> some people I see DMs from and go "well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".

Pre-emptively, I'm not saying anything below applies in your case :-).

A mismatch in the threshold of "they should already both know and have internalized" is where much of the friction in high-stress organisations comes from.

I see a lot of people expecting, as the parent post put it, "a clear set of steps that can be burned down [to get to a good result]", but entirely oblivious to the fact that the people they expect it from:

1. Don't have the organisational authority to organise it -- they can do "their part" but they can't tell people on whose work they depend what to do.

2. Don't have access to the same task-specific information as the person who expects it of them, and don't know who to ask because teams are heavily compartmentalised and/or hierarchical.

3. Don't have access to the same kind of organisational information as the person who expects it of them.

Much like responsibility, deflecting blame comes from above. In my experience, what the parent poster says is true: people who are bad at what they do and try to make it someone else's problem is probably the most common source of stress. But it is also my experience that the middle leadership layers of companies where this is a chronic problem is almost entirely populated by managers who try to make everything other people's problem, and whose teams end up having to deflect everything by proxy whether they want it or not.

I think this is part of the nuance that's lacking in the parent post. It's very hard for someone to work significantly above their organisation's level.
by jerf | 2025-05-13 16:37:07+00:00
If you're using steam, the ProtonDB website [1] has a feature where you can easily hook it up to your Steam account and get a full accounting of your entire collection on one screen.

I don't want to overpromise anything, but ProtonDB is if anything conservative; I find things working better than expected more often than I am disappointed by a listing now. Games with heavy anti-cheat for online multiplayer are often not a good bet, and really old stuff is sometimes not very well supported (although even so, surprisingly well), but Linux gaming quietly snuck up when nobody was looking and one step at a time has become something where I fairly casually just expect games to work in Linux now, without me having to do much more than poke Steam to use Proton manually sometimes.

[1]: https://www.protondb.com/
by saubeidl | 2025-05-13 16:37:12+00:00
I can't help but think this fixation on ever-bigger data centers with ever-more compute is a very American approach.

It's the same line of thought that gave us jumbo refrigerators, muscle cars and supersize meals.

In the American mind, bigger = better.

That that's not necessarily the best way to better results has been demonstrated by the Deepseek shock.

I do wonder if more foundational research would be a better investment.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-05-13 16:37:20+00:00
Didn’t think of this, actually makes sense! Though I feel like if it’s that kind of meeting, the presenter would be fine allowing screen caps. And if they’re not, it’s more effort for them to copy and paste into chat, you still get the URL/message in the end. I still don’t get why people are enraged about this.
by jsheard | 2025-05-13 16:37:32+00:00
I'm sure the tariffs don't help, but might the fact that they're asking for Half A Trillion United States Dollars also have something to do with it? They already had one of the biggest funding rounds in history and that was an order of magnitude smaller than this, now we're talking about capital on the scale of upper-end national GDPs for a company which still isn't profitable and has no real moat to speak of. They may as well cut to the chase and ask for all of the money in the world.
by karmakaze | 2025-05-13 16:37:58+00:00
I'm not "in the field" though I like to read about and use LLMs. This video "How DeepSeek Rewrote the Transformer [MLA]"[0] is really good at explaining MHA, MQA, GQA, and MLA with clear visuals/animations and how DeepSeek MLA is 57x more efficient.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VLAoVGf_74&t=960s
by 1123581321 | 2025-05-13 16:38:48+00:00
Don’t shut yourself in with a less healthy body because you’re worried about one of the Internet’s meme topics. It would take less than an hour to google/call/visit a few local gyms to learn which have better customer service. I recommend the local YMCA if you’re in the US. Your membership is reciprocal nationwide now, too.
by ashvardanian | 2025-05-13 16:38:50+00:00
> Per an analysis by TD Cowen cited by Bloomberg, hiked prices for server racks, cooling systems, chips, and other components could contribute to overall build cost rises of 5-15% on average.

I can agree that infrastructure generally has much lower margins than software businesses, but I don't know of any mega-projects that wouldn't turn out costlier during construction, and 15% is hardly something that stopped them.
by cush | 2025-05-13 16:38:59+00:00
How could you possibly know that you know more than them about anything without knowing them? It's all assumptions

It's actually like thinking that the most influential musicians in history are somehow not qualified to step up and discuss the licensing and legal implications of LLMs, having spent half a century battling similar corporate forces, and warning the industry how history likes to repeat itself.

Get over yourself bud
by vel0city | 2025-05-13 16:39:15+00:00
Yeah, I play around with retro computers all the time. Even with IO devices that are unthinkably performant compared to storage hardware actually common at the time these machines are often dog slow. Just rendering JPEGs can be really slow.

Maybe if you're in a purely text console doing purely text things 100% in memory it can feel snappy. But the moment you do anything graphical or start working on large datasets its so incredibly slow.

I still remember trying to do photo editing on a Pentium II with a massive 64MB of RAM. Or trying to get decent resolutions scans off a scanner with a Pentium III and 128MB of RAM.