MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzztester | 2025-05-03 01:04:49+00:00
>India lacks even the most basic manufacturing. We import stuff like lighters, toys, and basic electronics. Why do we want to make the giant leap to semiconductors?

I already answered you more than once about your misconceptions or misinformation about Indian basic manufacturing, in my sibling comments to this one.

And as others have said, importing is not done only due to inability to make the products at home. Sometimes it is done for pure cost /benefit reasons. That should be pretty damn obvious to anyone, but looks like you missed that out in your assessment. Even so-called first-world / developed countries do it. What do you think the outsourcing from such countries to India for software development is about? It is about exactly that, at least some. You are a software guy, so you should know this. I am one too. If you work for them, do you think they would hire you in India, all other things been the same, if your price was the same as equal people in the US or Europe? Of course not. It would be easier for them to deal with their local people than someone partway or halfway across the world. Get real.

Do you know that we also export plenty of things, many of which go to developed countries too, and to other developing countries, and that some of the latter cannot manufacture some of the things we do?

As for your point about why we manufacture or are trying to manufacture semiconductors, that has also been answered by others, so I will not comment. Having some amount of self-reliance is the answer. Not just profit.

Same for our space program, satellites, etc, which I did comment about in reply to somebody else in this thread.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-03 01:05:43+00:00
It's almost like people think that the phrase "relevant ads" means interesting to the person viewing the ads. Instead, it means you are relevant to the person buying the ad, so Googs shows you their ad. It means you are in the age range and income range, and possibly the geographic area that the person buying the ad placement finds relevant. The person viewing the ad is never relevant to Googs.
by voidhorse | 2025-05-03 01:06:41+00:00
This. And we do a huge disservice to tons of people by basically instilling the opposite idea. So many of the people I know that either claim they are "not math people" or who claim they "dislike math" say this because they were subject to nothing but tedious calculation in school and were never show the logical, conceptual, and actually interesting parts of mathematics. I despised math until I read Frege's foundations of arithmetic in college since it was the first time I ever had someone actually show the point and make it interesting.
by Blikkentrekker | 2025-05-03 01:06:57+00:00
The thing about writing standards is that if you write standards compiler writers vehemently disagree with, they will just not implement them, and they disagree with it because their consumers do. A standard typically documents what is already happening. This is why some languages call their standards “reports”. They investigate and document what the majority of compilers are currently doing and encourage the others to follow suit.

As for overflow, the reality is that most compilers simply assume it won't happen at this point. They do this because the consumers want it because it simply generates far faster code being able to assume that it won't happen. Yes, people often come with pathological examples to show why this is a bad idea of ridiculous optimizations being made no one expects because compilers assume it won't ever happen, but those are pathological, in practice it really comes down to loops. In many loops, compilers having to assume that loop variables can overflow in theory disables all sorts of optimizations and elisions and in practice they won't overflow and if they overflow that's an unintended bug anyway.

Obviously a a very basic example is a loop adding some counter value to a counter and stopping when the counter is past a certain value. Assuming that integers can overflow, and that thus adding a value can make the counter less than what it used to be in theory obviously disables many optimizations in streamlining the logic. Just in general, assuming overflow can't occur means being able to make the assumption that adding a positive integer to another integer will always produce a larger integer than the original, that is a very powerful assumption for optimizations to be able to make obviously, assuming that overflow can happen removes it that's why it's undefined behavior. Compilers are free to assume it will never happen.
by ethagnawl | 2025-05-03 01:07:07+00:00
I wish it were possible to get this through to the NOBODY WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE crowd. Ironically, they're the ones who would benefit from better working conditions, compensation and a stronger safety net. It's a similar phenomenon to the working class folks I know who "hate unions" ... just as long as it's not theirs or one they might be able to join.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-03 01:07:53+00:00
The bigger issue is that roads are immensely subsidised compared to rail. Even on private roads that are completely covered by usage charges, trucks pay maybe a factor of 2-10 more than cars, however they cause about 40000 times more wear (let's even disregard how they also cause disproportionately more traffic...). Obviously this calculation becomes even worse if we consider that most roads are subsidised by all tax payers. Trucks would be much less profitable (especially for long haul traffic) if they would have to cover their actual cost to society. But they are just another example of privatising profits and socialising the costs.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-05-03 01:09:06+00:00
I’ve never actually seen a profiler that shows quite what I want. I have lots of subsystems running at different rates. Gameplay at 30Hz, visual render at 90Hz, physics at 200Hz, audio at some rate, network, some device, etc.

So what I want is the ability to view each subsystem in a manner that lets me see when it didn’t hit its update rate. I have many many different frame rates I care about hitting.

Of course things even get more complex when you have all the work broadly distributed with a job system…
by LorenPechtel | 2025-05-03 01:11:11+00:00
And it means someone on site to react sensibly when things go wrong.

Think of the Miracle on the Hudson. The pilot said "This is the captain. Brace for impact." The flight attendants picked up on that and immediately began directing the passengers on what "brace for impact" means. Without that how many would have reacted properly (the info is on the safety card, but how many have read it well enough??), how many would be asking for information, how many would just generally be panicking?
by anenefan | 2025-05-03 01:11:16+00:00
It's way over my head but aware it already was quite intricate and frustrating [1] [1a] at times.

Finding a good stable online file storage area is getting harder, especially the last few years where people have been caught out when fires or other catastrophes [2] occur.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI [video - 2010]

[1a] https://archive.org/download/i-just-want-to-serve-5-terabyte... *A more universal link to a mp4 (15 megs) or mkv (5 megs) download as per the original youtube link since imposed restrictions youtube likes to impose on some people from time to time.

[2] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/hardware/hpe-warns-of-...
by voidspark | 2025-05-03 01:12:26+00:00
CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE are fundamentally mathematical in nature.

In a typical implementation these are database operations. That involves relational algebra operations, state transitions, boolean logic.

The READ part can be a very complex SQL query (composed of many algebraic operations) but even the simplest query (SELECT * from t where ID = 1) is filtering a set based on a predicate. That is mathematics.

No one is moving goalposts. Set theory and logic are at the foundations of mathematics.
by lionkor | 2025-05-03 01:14:16+00:00
This is phrased like you're moving the goal post, and that's not really a good way to have a discussion about this.

I think this sucks, because my gut tells me it sucks, the same way AI in everything sucks -- it just sounds kinda weird. But, of course, when I think about it, it makes sense in a lot of places. The only way for me to have a valid counterpoint to that is if I move the goalpost. I implore you to not move that goalpost, even if it feels right.
by neuroelectron | 2025-05-03 01:14:25+00:00
When I started my career in software development, SDE, and soon advanced to SRE, I hated Java. The extreme OOP paradigm made enterprise class situations impossible to understand. But after a few short years, I began to appreciate it as a real, battle hardened ecology. Now, I consider it much better than modern trends such as Rust and Python.

These kinds of niche optimizations are still significant. The OOP model allows them to be implemented with much less fanfare. This is in the context of billion-dollar platforms. With some basic performance testing and API replays, we're saving thousands of dollars a day. Nobody gets a pat on the back. Maybe some pizza on Friday.
by kazinator | 2025-05-03 01:15:51+00:00
I experimented with hash codes in strings in TXR Lisp, but took it out after several days:

commit a136f37015cc2513878f75afcf8ba49fa61a88e5 Author: Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> Date: Sat Oct 8 20:54:05 2022 -0700 strings: revert caching of hash value. Research indicates that this is something useful in languages that abuse strings for implementing symbols. We have interned symbols. * lib.h (struct string): Remove hash member. * lib.c (string_own, string, string_utf8, mkustring, string_extend, replace_str, chr_str_set): Remove all initializations and updates of the removed hash member. * hash.c (equal_hash): Do not cache string hash value.

> This improvement will benefit any immutable Map<String, V> with Strings as keys and where values (of arbitrary type V) are looked up via constant Strings.

Wait, what? But, that's inherently constant foldable without reasoning about string hash codes; we don't need them at all.

We examine the expression [h "a"]: lookup the key "a" in hash table h, where h is a hash literal object, that we write as #H(() ("a" "b)). It contains the key "a", mapping it to "b":

1> (compile-toplevel '[#H(() ("a" "b")) "a"]) #<sys:vm-desc: 8eaa130>

What's the code look like?

2> (disassemble *1) data: 0: "b" syms: code: 0: 10000400 end d0 instruction count: 1 #<sys:vm-desc: 8eaa130>

One instruction: just return "b" from the static data register d0. The hash table is completely gone.

The keys don't even have to be strings; that's a red herring.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-03 01:15:58+00:00
Or every generations' younger crowd that think the olds are senile fools that have no clue about anything today and mainly tolerated and polite to as long as they are in the room, but then immediately make fun of them as soon as they leave. As if there's no wisdom that could be shared from their experience. The folly of youth thinking they are invincible is equal to this so called claiming of moral degeneration.
by photonthug | 2025-05-03 01:17:29+00:00
> which is more accurately described as compressed efficiently onto latent space.

The actual difference between solving compression+search vs novel creative synthesis / emergent "understanding" from mere tokens is always going to be hard to spot with these huge cloud-based models that drank up the whole internet. (Yes.. this is also true for domain experts in whatever content is being generated.)

I feel like people who are very optimistic about LLM capabilities for the later just need to produce simple products to prove their case; for example, drink up all the man pages, a few thousand advanced shell scripts that are easily obtainable, and some subset of stack-overflow. And BAM, you should have a offline bash oracle that makes this tiny subset of general programming endeavor a completely solved problem.

Currently, smaller offline models still routinely confuse the semantics of "|" vs "||". (An embarrassing statistical aberration that is more like the kind of issue you'd expect with old school markov chains than a human-style category error or something.) Naturally if you take the same problem to a huge cloud model you won't have the same issue, but the argument that it "understands" anything is pointless, because the data-set is so big that of course search/compression starts to look like genuine understanding/synthesis and really the two can no longer be separated. Currently it looks more likely this fundamental problem will be "solved" with increased tool use and guess-and-check approaches. The problem then is that the basic issue just comes back anyway, because it cripples generation of an appropriate test-harness!

More devs do seem to be coming around to this measured, non-hype kind of stance gradually though. I've seen more people mentioning stuff like, "wait, why can't it write simple programs in a well specified esolang?" and similar
by gamblor956 | 2025-05-03 01:18:11+00:00
I think you read the wrong article. The abstract states that gut bacteria is the key: "ugar preference is a key contributor to the overconsumption of sugar and the concomitant increase in the incidence of diabetes. However, the exact mechanism of its development remains ambiguous. Here we show that the expression of free fatty acid receptor Ffar4, a receptor for long-chain fatty acids, is decreased in patients and mouse models with diabetes, which is associated with high sugar intake. Deletion of intestinal Ffar4 in mice resulted in reduced gut Bacteroides vulgatus and its metabolite pantothenate, leading to dietary sugar preference. Pantothenate promoted the secretion of GLP-1 which inhibited sugar preference by stimulating hepatic FGF21 release, which in turn regulates energy metabolism. These findings uncover a previously unappreciated role of Ffar4 in negatively regulating sugar preference and suggest B. vulgatus-derived pantothenate as a potential therapeutic target for diabetes."
by jval43 | 2025-05-03 01:18:16+00:00
>So... what? What do I do with this?

Try to understand these issues or rather how they could affect your business processes and software implementations down the line rather than dismissing them on a technical level.

You can store the Unicode representation just as you normally would. But what you don't do is assume that your Unicode representation is the only representation of the actual name.

More concretely, there are names that have multiple equally valid ways of writing them. You can probably expect that usually the same one is used, but you should absolutely not require this when building your business processes.

Even more concretely, as an example there are transliteration or simplification / shortening rules that allow people with otherwise strange or long names to buy an airline ticket. The actual, real name may not be any of the ones you have in your system. This matters e.g. when searching for someone or in customer support.

As for people without names (or unknown names), you should probably recognize that the handling might differ by country. E.g. records with "John Doe" in the US might have to be handled differently: analogous to "NULL != NULL" in SQL John Doe != John Doe. Or maybe even "Jane Doe == John Doe" in some cases. See also "Fnu Lu" (First Name Unknown, Last Name Unknown) used in the US.

And although I don't have knowledge about all the countries in the world, it may very well be that this leads to situations where the "no name" has to be handled specially or at least understood to be a special case, completely differently from other cases.
by stavros | 2025-05-03 01:18:44+00:00
Yeah, the way Americans mean "I'm X nationality" and the way the rest of the world means it are different. I don't think when Americans say "I'm Italian" they mean "I was born and raised in Italy and Italian is my native language", as we do, they just mean "I have distant Italian ancestry", and that's widely understood to mean that in the US. If an American said to another American "I'm Italian", I don't think the latter would ask "oh, how was your childhood in Italy?".
by jhanschoo | 2025-05-03 01:18:53+00:00
I think that as tropey as such a practice is, there's a fundamental valid reason to do trips of this sort. You want to meet people as culturally remote and distant from you as you think exist, that you are still theoretically comfortable with. Then you want to be assured or refuted directly through your direct senses on things that you think are fundamental to the human condition. From such an experience you gain confidence on what you think is important to life and living.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-03 01:19:42+00:00
> What happened here?

You went astray when you declared the expected wait and expected passed.

Draw a number line. Mark it at intervals of 10. Uniformly randomly select a point on that line. The expected average wait and passed (ie forward and reverse directions) are both 5, not 10. The range is 0 to 10.

When you randomize the event occurrences but maintain the interval as an average you change the range maximum and the overall distribution across the range but not the expected average values.
by egypturnash | 2025-05-03 01:19:48+00:00
I am looking forwards to hearing if this fixes the “chatgpt is giving me messages from the Divine and opening up my perfect divine self”/“chatgpt is encouraging my partner into a full blown schizophrenic break” problem. (https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kalae8/chatgpt_in...)

I am also looking forwards to the wave of “openAI is hiding the truth but here is the NEW prompt to turn chatgpt into a perfect divine guru” posts on the occult discussion boards. There’s been a lot of “here’s a prompt to turn chatgpt into a perfect divine guru that will relentlessly yes-and your delusions of grandeur” posts around there. Mostly they seem to have been generated and refined by chatgpt and all my instincts formed by reading SF for the past five decades tell me not to look at these things closely because this sure sounds like the way half the population got p0wned by a wetware 0day in the first chapter of an AIpocalypse story.

I used to ask “how do I get out of this shitty Bruce Sterling novel of a future” but I think it’s more of a shitty PKD joke novella future now.
by Loxicon | 2025-05-03 01:21:37+00:00
I have been on both sides. And I agree.

I have been a "business co-founder" for many years. I learned to program at a professional level 5 years ago. Today, i spend most of my time as a "tech-co-founder".

Now that I am on the tech side (and argubaly, product development side), my value is through the roof. Here is what I mean:

- The business co-founder types will convince you that "selling" the product is the main thing. They are right. But sales starts with WHAT you build. That is, with product development. What you decided to build and what you are able to build is very much a part of the marketing. - Selling a well positioned product (where position starts during product development) is much easier that 'force-raming' your product to people who do not want it. 'force-raming' is the main marketing skill most people have. - Ideas mean absolutely nothing. - Marketing is important but it's not hard to learn the important parts. In fact, I can give it to you right now: (1) start your marketing at product dev time. Decide which specific problem you will solve, then solve it, (2) Find a community to share your finished MVP to them. Don't just spam the community, join it for a while, make friends, chat, add to the conversation and (3) refine the early product with the early users from said community. Then supercharge marketing with some ads (FB or Google).

^^ this is the 0-1000 user plan. And developers can do this without a "business co-founder"
by dylan604 | 2025-05-03 01:21:56+00:00
He's been around long enough that his son is now (has been for a while) appearing in these ads taking over the family business. He's quintessential ambulance chasers. I'm sure there's a dictionary out there somewhere with his (their?) picture next to the definition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP2bGvEMZ6Q
by smallmancontrov | 2025-05-03 01:23:07+00:00
Sure, we can say that it isn't true communism -- err, sorry, market freedom -- so long as we acknowledge that the incentives which create, establish, and perpetuate the monopolies emerge due to market freedom and attempts to curtail monopolies are regularly attacked under the banner of market freedom and that actual market freedom requires (metaphorical) mace-wielding regulators to regularly go on (metaphorical) skull-cracking expeditions which will be fought tooth and nail by investors seeking the windfall profits that come from monopoly.

Do we agree? Or will we find ourselves on opposite sides of this fight the millisecond the specifics of this case fade from the public eye?
by kevmo314 | 2025-05-03 01:23:17+00:00
Isn’t this article complaining about complaints? Does that make it paradoxical?

I think complaints, even gossipy ones, hold value. I agree with the general premise that it’s easier to complain, but in the hotel towel footnote honestly I’d complain to my friends because it’s a story to tell, not because I expect them to actually avoid the hotel. Misery loves company.
by tomhow | 2025-05-03 01:23:21+00:00
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43871528 and marked it off topic.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.*

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by splitstyle | 2025-05-03 01:23:40+00:00
You're right—standard number formatting (like 1,000 or 1,000,000.50) works great for representing values. But split.style isn’t about number formatting in the traditional sense. It’s more about improving readability and memorability for long numeric strings—like bank account numbers, document IDs, or OTPs—especially in situations where copy-paste isn't possible and manual entry is error-prone.

It’s similar in spirit to how we format phone numbers: not for mathematical value, but for human readability.
by treetalker | 2025-05-03 01:23:42+00:00
Very cool, nice job, and thanks for taking the time to create and share this.

Some feedback:

I suggest omitting the "TL;DR" in every entry.

The summaries are obvious. The TL;DR adds no useful information, clutters the screen, and distracts from the useful information.

And my opinion is that "TL;DR" is uncouth. Call it a summary or abstract.