MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-09 21:00:46+00:00
The SSC was an utterly failed project, and would have had difficulty finding the things that the LHC has found, partially because it had really bad Luminosity of the beam.

The program was famously badly run, with talented physicists utterly refusing to work with the administrators to keep a ballooning budget under control, and was an example of utterly failed project management. It used a magnet design that had numerous problems, including really severe project management oversights, like deciding to update the magnet design, and accidentally forgetting to update a significant portion of the magnets.

Killing the SSC was the correct call. It was going to cost over $12 billion just to build. The LHC eventually cost about $5 billion, and had much more success in the world of project management.

It's a lot easier to get science funding when you can demonstrate that you can manage a several billion dollar project, and don't fuck up basic things like accounting.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-09 21:01:10+00:00
> So, rather than writing > > @Test("Strip HTML tags from string") func stripHTMLTagsFromString() {...} > > we can instead write > > @Test func `Strip HTML tags from string`() {...}

Maybe I'm just really new at programming, but this seems like an absolutely bad feature, and the example actually perfectly proves it:

You really want to name a function "Hello World!" instead of helloWorld, just so your stack traces can pass a 5th grade English class exam?
by thenaturalist | 2025-05-09 21:01:20+00:00
Hey there, congrats on publicly launching this after your work over the past months!

Having followed the project for a while now, I really scratch my head when looking at your pricing.

The entire innovation of the past decade in database land has gone towards decoupling storage and compute, driving query engines (like DuckDB) and file formats (like Iceberg).

Yet you force-bundle storage and compute in your pricing while also selling a serverless product.

What's the reason behind that?

Why do it in the first place?

How does your pricing work?

The 40/ 500 compute hours I get are included in the spend limit per tier (i.e. max 160 additional hours in Starter etc.) or completely separate?

Why are there member constraints on a database product?

How does that factor into cost/ map to SDL / reasonable team setups of people operating analytics projects revolving around a database like yours?

I have never seen such a limit with any other vendor and esp. when you wanna get a hold in the market/ have people start using Hydra for the specialized role it can provide, having a 2 person limit for the minimum tier if I wanna PoC this would likely be a show stopper tbh...
by schmidtleonard | 2025-05-09 21:01:25+00:00
Money "wasted" by the NSF is far better spent than money wasted in, say, the Google Graveyard or any other monument to private malinvestment. This is because science has a value capture problem by design, making it systematically uninvestable by the private market, making opportunities plentiful -- and making it an archetypal example of a place where government investment has a role to play, because we can capture value as a country that is impossible to capture as a company.

The real scandal is that we don't do more of it: our global competitors do not share the same contempt for science that is increasingly infecting the USA, and slowing our jog as they pass us is the worst strategy I can possibly imagine.
by meling | 2025-05-09 21:01:29+00:00
Yeah, while I’ve seen some great libraries that follow the practice of minimizing their dependencies, I’m a bit annoyed with the amount of dependencies that docker will bring along [1]. I’ve been on the lookout for alternatives for my docker needs, but the state of podman, buildah and some others that I checked is similar. They all bring in roughly the same number of dependencies… if anyone knows of a stripped down Go lib that can be used to build from a Dockerfile, pull, and run a container, I would be grateful for any suggestions. Heck docker / moby isn’t even using go.mod proper.

[1] https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/vendor.mod
by m101 | 2025-05-09 21:01:44+00:00
I bet you quantum computing will go the way of Newtonian physics - wrong and only proven so by our ability to measure things.

It's as if Newton insisted that he was right despite the orbit of mercury being weird, and blaming his telescope.

Physics is just a description of reality. If your business depends on reality being the same as the model, then you're going to have an expensive time.
by TheTaytay | 2025-05-09 21:02:42+00:00
How much data is hitting your models/prompts? I am okay with you knowing about my schema, but a lot of warehouse data is sensitive data. I saw you have enterprise plans, and maybe that is my answer, but I’d love to know ahead of time if data/results are hitting your servers in addition to the code, or if it’s code-only.
by ProfessorLayton | 2025-05-09 21:03:20+00:00
>we want public transit to be exclusionary on a fee-basis to exclude people who generally will not be able to pay for it ...

Public transit should be free (Or very inexpensive) to anyone who wants to use it. It's better for the environment, people's wallets, and the transit system itself if it was disconnected from ticket revenue. BART can certainly do more to enforce cleanliness and making sure no one is doing drugs on the trains, but that also requires more funding.

>I also have no interest in subsidizing the people I know can afford to pay.

Cars are subsidized endlessly via roads, associated maintenance, and parking on public property that could otherwise be used for something more productive. Many people with decent paying jobs own multiple cars banking on the fact that they can use public property to store their personal car, so they're also casually freeloading.

Living in a car-dependent world significantly drives up housing costs for everyone in the region. Many of BART's stations are surrounded by and zoned exclusively for single family homes with a lawn and a garage, which is ridiculous.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-05-09 21:03:25+00:00
I have already mentioned that, but such a grandiose waste of money is terrible.

We pour billions in these accelerators without any hope of using the findings. At the same time other branches of science (even physics) are scrapping some money around.

CERN is a fabulous place (I did my PhD there so yes, shitting my old bed), but this is the fabulous of a First Class or private jet flight around the world without any consideration for others.
by joshuamorton | 2025-05-09 21:04:00+00:00
> (I thought in general fare-enforcement costs meaningfully more than systems lose in evaded fares)

This is generally true for active fare enforcement, since you have to pay employees to do enforcement, there's appeals processes, and some people just don't pay the fine.

If the new faregates result in some more people (lets say 1%!) paying for trips (less freeriding), that's directly 1-2 million per year. If they also increase real-ridership, that's additional income. To make the cost back quickly you do need a significant increase (10-15%), that's not totally out of the question, though it's probably not only due to faregates.
by oldprogrammer2 | 2025-05-09 21:04:19+00:00
Iran is on the tariffs list because of Trump's maximum pressure policy (an official National Security Memorandum) against Iran. This is coupled with Trump's willingness to get Russia to cooperate in the ceasefire.

I'm not claiming his administration's logic is 100% sound, only that there is an explanation that doesn't assume the rather farfetched theory that Trump is an agent for Russia.

I'm not particularly well-versed in this area, but searching for the topic on Google easily found this information on sites such as Wikipedia, WSJ, Newsweek, and whitehouse.gov.
by kion | 2025-05-09 21:04:46+00:00
IMO any system where taking a dependency is "easy" and there is no penalty for size or cost is going to eventually lead to a dependency problem. That's essentially where we are today both in language repositories for OSS languages and private monorepos.

This is partly due to how we've distributed software over the last 40 years. In the 80s the idea of a library of functionality was something you paid for, and painstakingly included parts of into your size constrained environment (fit it on a floppy). You probably picked apart that library and pulled the bits you needed, integrating them into your builds to be as small as possible.

Today we pile libraries on top of libraries on top of libraries. Its super easy to say `import foolib`, then call `foolib.do_thing()` and just start running. Who knows or cares what all 'foolib' contains.

At each level a caller might need 5% of the functionality of any given dependency. The deeper the dependency tree gets the more waste piles on. Eventually you end up in a world where your simple binary is 500 MiB of code you never actually call, but all you did was take that one dependency to format a number.

In some cases the languages make this worse. Go and Rust, for example, encourage everything for a single package/mod to go in the same file. Adding optional functionality can get ugly when it would require creating new modules, but if you only want to use a tiny part of the module, what do you do?

The only real solution I can think of to deal with this long term is ultra-fine-grained symbols and dependencies. Every function, type, and other top-level language construct needs to declare the set of things it needs to run (other functions, symbols, types, etc). When you depend on that one symbol it can construct, on demand, the exact graph of symbols it needs and dump the rest for any given library. You end up with the minimal set of code for the functionality you need.

Its a terrible idea and I'd hate it, but how else do you address the current setup of effectively building the whole universe of code branching from your dependencies and then dragging it around like a boat anchor of dead code.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-09 21:04:59+00:00
It just seems to me that this is the exactly wrong way to solve a programming problem. If the problem boils down to "I want some variables (almost always test function names) to be more human readable", the solution should never be "hey let's add this feature to the core language and make identifiers use any ASCII string! I dunno, maybe I'm wrong here and being overly critical. But to me it just screams "Swift has lost the plot."
by pixelready | 2025-05-09 21:05:10+00:00
I’m all for creative disruption, but what worries me is when I see a pattern of stable employment being displaced by algorithmically mediated gig work and viral entertainer lotto tickets. This is a dangerous trend in general, but the US is especially poorly positioned because of its lack of strong safety nets. When the foundation of your economy is hollowed out to make it ever more top-heavy, you’re destined for collapse.
by afavour | 2025-05-09 21:05:28+00:00
There’s a level of self fulfilling prophecy here: people don’t use Swift off Apple platforms because there isn’t a critical mass of people using Swift off Apple platforms.

But that said it can be frustrating. A lot of the documentation and tutorials you find out there assume you’re on an Apple platform where, e.g. Foundation APIs are available. And the direction of the language, the features being added etc, very clearly serve Apple’s goals.

(Side note: IBM was an early adopter of Swift off-platform but then stepped back: https://forums.swift.org/t/december-12th-2019/31735)
by mrbluecoat | 2025-05-09 21:05:36+00:00
Odd that the linked https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/15/graphcore-second-generatio... article has way more details (and picture) than the official website announcement. Cool tech, though, even if it takes $300 million to become profitable. Also odd the linked page is from 2020. Did this just come out of stealth or is there another reason it's showing up as news today?
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-05-09 21:07:03+00:00
> I don't think you know what authoritarianism is. Military interventions in foreign affairs are a completely orthogonal issue.

Then why did you cite them as the reason for China's authoritarianism becoming a problem?

> Iraq was briefly a liberal democracy until the US military pulled back out and a theocratic regime took over again by force.

You know the CIA funded the Taliban, right? We also installed Saddam Hussein.

> Vietnam was a well-intentioned but bungled attempt to stop the spread of communism.

Why is this a good thing? See previous question about "Why does the US get to unilaterally decide which forms of government are acceptable?"

> When the US lost and pulled out the country turned into a one-party dictatorship.

Or, if you were not on the U.S.'s side in this, you might be phrasing that more like: "When the U.S. pulled out, their puppet government collapsed immediately."

> The fact that these interventions ultimately failed doesn't make the attempts any less noble, though you can certainly make the case they were foolhardy to even try.

I would say they were both foolhardy and ignoble personally.

> Or perhaps if you're a pacifist you could argue any military intervention, even in the defense of human freedom, is immoral.

No pacifist would argue that.

> I have mixed feelings on that subject myself, but it's ridiculous to compare anything the US did in recent history to what China or Russia are currently attempting or threatening to attempt.

You can quibble about numbers and equivalence all you like. I'm not saying China is unambiguously good. I'm saying they are not guilty of anything the United States is not also guilty of and so the moral condemnation from said United States rings incredibly hollow and hypocritical. It feels more like the United States is upset that another country is beating it at the game it designed.

If I had my personal way, Xi Jinping and every president still living would be tried for the war crimes they are most definitely guilty of, along with dozens of other leaders from the so called "developed" world. A man can dream.
Show HN: Noti – Notes and reminders that live in your notification center
by ajs808 | 2025-05-09 21:08:06+00:00
I made a dead simple and ultralight iOS app that lets you send quick notes or reminders to yourself as instant notifications. It is so minimal that your notes aren’t even saved in-app, they exist only as notifications.

This isn’t meant to replace heavyweight tools like Todoist, but instead to complement them. I still use Todoist for big projects and deadlines, but I find that smaller, ephemeral tasks benefit from a different paradigm.

Sometimes I need a lightweight, persistent reminder without managing due dates, priorities, and inboxes.

Sometimes I just want to jot something down and not forget about it immediately.

There’s no sign-up, no scheduling, and no payment. Just type, hit submit, and the message instantly appears in your notification center. That’s it.

Would love any feedback!
by chgs | 2025-05-09 21:08:25+00:00
Sofie drives the matrix (black magic videohub for small ones like the 120 squared, but ours are 1000+ which black magic won’t do), the audio mixers, the video mixers, the graphics and by machines (Caspar), etc. your mixers don’t need that many inputs - a typical one might be 24 or 32 inputs with a few ME banks.

All these devices use standard protocols, or it’s just a new plugin for sofie ti drive it.

Of course increasingly the industry is using 2110 on spine and leaf networks rather than SDI. I don’t know if there any COTS mixers aside from the vmix/obs level, I believe some 2110 controllers will provide video matrix style interfaces. Nmos seems challenged in this area from what I hear.
by paddy_m | 2025-05-09 21:08:34+00:00
This looks like many LLM assisted data projects which help and are flexible, but aren't repeatable and aren't fast enough to be interactive. Nao is a good execution of the concept.

I built Buckaroo as a data table UI for Jupyter and Pandas/Polars, that first lets you look at the data in a modern performant table with histograms, formatting, and summary stats.

Yesterday I released autocleaning for Buckaroo. This looks at data and heuristically chooses cleaning methods with definite code. This is fast (less than 500ms). Multiple cleaning strategies can be cycled through and you can choose the best approach for your data. For the simple problems we shoudn't need to consult an LLM to do the obvious things.

All of this is open source and extensible.

[1] https://youtube.com/shorts/4Jz-Wgf3YDc

[2] https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo

[3] https://marimo.io/p/@paddy-mullen/buckaroo-auto-cleaning Live WASM notebook that you can play with - no downloads or installs required
by saratogacx | 2025-05-09 21:09:13+00:00
I'm in total agreement, TM does wonders. Even if you don't remember all of it you get a gist of what's gong on and can find things (or read them) faster.

In Claude I put in a default prompt[1] that helps me gain context when I do resort to asking the LLM for a specific question.

[1] Your role is to provide technical advice in developing a Java application. Keep answers concise and note where there are options and where you are unsure on what direction that should be taken. Please cite any sources of information to help me deep dive on any topics that need my own analysis.
by ClaireGz | 2025-05-09 21:09:17+00:00
The content of the data is never going to the models, unless you specifically grant access. Our server only store embeddings of your codebase and data schema. The content of the data is only accessed locally by your computer. When you ask our agent to run a query for you, it will execute it on your warehouse, then ask you for permission to read the result. If you don't allow it, you'll be able to preview it locally without sending it to the LLM. The enterprise version is for your if you want to be sure the prompts and context you send to nao don't go through a public LLM endpoint and get trained on.
by jezek2 | 2025-05-09 21:09:29+00:00
The biggest advantage is non-technical: it has universal adoption in the browsers from early on, esp. on Apple devices. That was NOT an easy task to achieve. I do believe the previous attempt with asm.js was able to help there to ease the idea for the browser makers.

And technically it's quite well done. The only thing that is missing is thread support, but due to complexities I totally get why it wasn't done and it was a right call. There are workarounds and it will be added eventually, some forms of it exist already.
by uticus | 2025-05-09 21:09:34+00:00
structural typing is a good step - but afaik there's no way to distinguish between different types that have the same structure but different context - a "truth.right" will be different from a "direction.right", but it's up to the dev to keep that straight.

duck typing is what ruby does without sorbet or rbs, it portrays nothing about how the code bits interact at the boundary. if a "dog" is passed in but a "cat" is expected, things will work just fine until runtime when the cat is asked to bark. (saying as someone who is a big fan of ruby overall)
by chgs | 2025-05-09 21:10:39+00:00
> Computers are fast enough now that once you can get the signals into a machine, many of the special functions that previously required dedicated hardware can now be run in software?

I’m a big fan of the Richard Cartwright view of asynchronous signal processing

https://creativecow.net/matrox-video-announces-nab-2023-line...

But I don’t think it has the traction isn’t deserves. Too many people in the industry are still wedded to ptp timing their packets to arrive in the same 30us windows.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-09 21:10:49+00:00
> Washington, on the other hand, traditionally respects market forces and opposes government-led industrial policy.

The US government is now essentially in the thrall of free riders.

The free rider problem is exactly what government is supposed to handle for a society, but US culture is now so degenerate that free riders are glorified, and the concept of contributing to the success of your society is widely regarded as oppression.

Paying taxes. Getting vaccinated. Being a public servant. Pro-social activities of this nature are reviled by a huge fraction of the populace, and there are huge media machines which cater exclusively to this free rider mindset.
by skydhash | 2025-05-09 21:11:06+00:00
From my point of view, the issue stems from developers wanting to control distribution. Fine if it's for your own usage, not really if you're planning for others to use it. You will find the most convoluted build system just because they have a pet platform they want to specially support making it hell to do anything on others.

It could be better, but the current solutions (npm, go, python,...) favor only the developers, not the maintainers and packagers.
by sunrunner | 2025-05-09 21:11:08+00:00
I agree that some amount of friction when including third party dependencies is a vital thing to push people to consider the value versus cost of dependencies (and license review, code review, channel subscriptions are all incredibily important and almost always overlooked), however how should this work for transitive dependendencies? And the dependencies of _those_ dependencies?

The dependency trees for most interpreted or source-distributed languages are ridiculous, and review of even a few of those seems practically impossible in a lot of development environments.
by keeda | 2025-05-09 21:11:44+00:00
Given the current administration is slashing so many programs it's clear there is a lot of language in many grants that has "DEI" or DEI-adjacent language. What is not clear is:

1) This is "forced" due to any government policy.

2) Any such policies could be attributed only to the Biden administration, or even any single administration.

I was curious so I stalked the PI in the linked grant, who happens to be female. Here is a relevant link, 3rd or so on Google: https://www.montana.edu/news/22806/montana-state-mathematics...

Burroughs said Davey stands out not just for her mathematical prowess but also for her commitment to students in all levels of study. Davey is co-director of the department’s Directed Reading Program, which pairs undergraduate students with graduate student mentors to read and discuss books on mutual subjects of interest over the course of a semester.

“It’s a way for us to connect graduate student mentors with undergraduates, who then see what math can look like outside the classroom,” Davey said.

...

A portion of the funding from the CAREER grant will enable Davey to extend her support to young mathematicians across the country. She will organize and conduct a summer workshop in Bozeman open to 40 upper-level graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from around the nation, particularly those from underrepresented groups. Cherry noted the outreach effort coincides with the college’s long-term goal of better serving underrepresented communities in the state.

So:

1. From that it does seem she is personally invested in making her subject more approachable.

2. The college itself has a goal of encouraging such outreach.

3. In case you think the university itself was influenced by the government policies, here's a "DEI" program from its website that started in 2016: https://www.montana.edu/provost/d_i.html -- if you browse around the site there are even more programs going farther back.

Additionally, I'm personally aware of "DEI" policies in universities going back more than two decades now, long before the term "DEI" was even coined.

Seems highly likely that the language in the grant was more due to the researcher's personal preferences and the institution's policies than anything any government policies.