MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by teleforce | 2025-05-23 21:57:35+00:00
Most of these are great advises including the other posts in PhD metagame series.

Max should publish this in a book and it will probably sell by truckloads.

If I've to choose by ranking in usefulness, it will probably topic no. 4 is the best part "Don't Make Things Actually Work". Topic no. 3 is the second. This particular topic no. 5 is the third. Topic no.1 is the fourth. The topic no. 2 is the fifth ranking in usefulness but overall great advises nonetheless.

Perhaps the last one for the topic is when and how to wrap up the PhD research since research is a never ending endeavor.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-23 21:58:00+00:00
> And what does it do with that knowledge?

Notice how I talked about HPC, distributed systems, and cybersecurity in my comment?

> I'm not under the impression that AI people repurposed old crypto mines for anything

The crypto boom helped incentivize the scaling out of GPU design and fabrication, just like how video games helped with the first iteration in the 2000s.

There's a reason the concept of "dual use technology" has gained currency
by entropie | 2025-05-23 21:59:20+00:00
I use dired for a long time now and at first it felt a bit weird but not anymore. The ultimate killer feature is wdired [1] that make the dired buffer writeable and you can edit text/filenames/permissions like in any other emacs buffer and commit the changes with C-c C-c.

1: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Wd...
by selkin | 2025-05-23 21:59:44+00:00
I think I wasn't clear about the point I was trying to make, because your comment seems unrelated to it.

Pre-metrification there wasn't a French unit system, like we think about those today, where a meter in Paris is the same meter used in Limoges. The actual length of a ligne changed from one region to the next. There was no country wide standard of exactly how much a certain unit is. Such standards were regional, at best, sometimes the regions being as small as a single village.

This is one of the most important results of the French resolution: a consistent system of measurements, regardless of the units chosen for it.
by energywut | 2025-05-23 22:01:11+00:00
Are you asking for data on whether intolerance ore pejudice _exists_ in small towns in the US?

Well, I would have assumed that was well understood, but you know what? Here's some data that shows that rural communities do, in fact, have measurably higher prejudice against others (In this specific case, hispanic immigrants): https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1409896/FULLTEXT...

And here's a study demonstrating that outgroup identity, particularly in rural communities, can lead to worse outcomes including worse allocations of scarce resources: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09680-3...

If you want more data, there's plenty of research out there.
by teddyh | 2025-05-23 22:01:41+00:00
Like I frequently¹ advise²:

Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address.

Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are probably not in our target market.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499>

2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507784>
by rufus_foreman | 2025-05-23 22:01:47+00:00
>> my old friends and neighbors to point out that I could buy a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot in the country for what I pay in rent in the city. They fail to realize that not having to drive two hours each way to have fun is worth the 35% premium in housing for me

Good point. There's no possible way to have fun in a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot.
by tavavex | 2025-05-23 22:02:04+00:00
I agree as a Canadian. It feels like there's vastly more reporting on this than there are actual people fully supporting this movement. These things may be getting more coverage because they sound so outrageous and novel, but it's an unpopular idea even among Albertans. It also lacks anything that Quebec's once-mighty secessionist force had - no unified organization pushing for it, no vision for what an independent Alberta would be like, no cultural differences with the rest of Canada, no irreconcilable grievance with the federal government (outside of them not being conservative enough).

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of tension in Alberta - but as it stands, this movement is more of a way to voice discontent, rather than a serious plan to become a sovereign state. IMO, it's not worth a dramatic full-page treatment that paints this as a likely possibility - but foreign reporting on Canadian issues has often been very questionable.
by energywut | 2025-05-23 22:02:58+00:00
I think Vermont is, in my experience, perhaps more accepting of different identities. I've lived in small towns, and spent plenty of time in small towns. Some have a "don't ask/don't tell" or "live and let live" sense to them. As long as you aren't loud about your identity, you'll be left alone.

But plenty of places will absolutely run you out of town for having the wrong religion, race, or sexual preferences.
by spiderfarmer | 2025-05-23 22:03:07+00:00
None of the people who proclaim they do their own research do their own research. Yes, they use Google. Yes, they might read the conclusions to other people’s research. But not a single person uses the scientific method to determine whether their hypothesis is correct. So whenever someone says that they are doing their own research, I’ll just assume they are trying to confirm their own biases and beliefs, while trying to convince others they’re skeptical and unbiased.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-23 22:03:49+00:00
Ironically, I think this is a "blind squirrel finds a nut" situation.

When you're at the absolute bottom, you're not gonna make ends meet by playing by the rule and the enforcers generally leave you alone because you can't get blood from a stone. So for the people living on $400/mo running an unlicensed tamale stand or parting out cars or breeding pitbulls or whatever isn't as risky as it would be for someone making real money.

But yeah, the advice here is generally out of touch.
Ask HN: AI Reading List
by TheAlchemist | 2025-05-23 22:05:06+00:00
In the thread about John Carmack presentation, somebody mentioned the reading list he got from Ilya which were crucial to understand what matters and the current state of the knowledge (at the time).

After some googling, it seems like this list is plausible, although not confirmed: https://github.com/dzyim/ilya-sutskever-recommended-reading?tab=readme-ov-file

What would an actualized list look today ?

I'm asking since I'm taking a similar direction to Carmack (with maybe 1% of his talent and skills, but hey it's all about the journey !) in that I don't intend to work on improvement existing models, which I also believe are a road to nowhere, but rather understand things from the ground up, and maybe figure out 'something different' at the end.
by selkin | 2025-05-23 22:06:49+00:00
> Good concurrency should make the code simpler to understand and reason about as it grows.

As an ideal.

But you can only go so simple once you have a piece of data that is read at the same time by many, while also maybe mutated by at least one. And as simple you can get version 1.0, as software grow, it gets new features which necessitate more interactions with that data, which makes synchronization more complex.
by turtleyacht | 2025-05-23 22:08:28+00:00
> all of your work would now be irrelevant

Wouldn't prior papers be cited as known avenues to rule out? The older papers would turn up in searches.

With AI, are we no longer reverse-engineering the learning model to retrieve specific heuristics?

It may conserve power to convert the simulated solution from the prompt to a set of analytic calculations, maybe.
by riffraff | 2025-05-23 22:08:37+00:00
I experienced something similar and would posit that small communities accommodate diversity more easily, because you get to know the people, it's no longer "the homosexuals" or "the immigrants" or "the jews", it's "John who works at the coffee shop ".

Clearly this breaks down at a certain size, and it may still suck for people on the minority side tho.
by Veserv | 2025-05-23 22:08:38+00:00
Well, if you have a Google L5 making ~365k [1] then it would need to make them ~2.2% more productive overall to be worth it when just considering direct pay. If we consider a Google L3 at ~187k then it would need to make them ~4.2% more productive overall.

This, of course, ignores employee benefits and overhead which usually amount to ~100% extra costs over direct pay. So that is now ~1.1% and ~2.1%, respectively.

And that ignores the fact that you need to pay people less than they produce to be profitable which probably drops us down to ~0.5% and ~1.0%, respectively.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

edit: Incorrectly linked to product designer instead of software engineer levels.
by greatgib | 2025-05-23 22:08:43+00:00
Honestly, this is a nightmare.

I understand that it might not look so in a first instance, but the whole idea is that you will own nothing and they will have control on everything you do.

You don't have anymore your own computer with your own code editor, compiler and co free to do whatever you want for life.

It's the same kind of thing as what happened with the Adobe suite that become fully SaaS even if it looks more subtile because at first the subscription looks "free".

What is fun to see is that people forgot where we come from, the good old world of mainframes with IBM in control of expensive and exclusive software.

And more recently with the original visual studio (desktop) that was expensive, totally bloated and restricted to Windows. But a strong requirement for any professional.

And then, gcc, gnu, linux, open source code editors and SCM ... Free Software disturbed everything. Everyone could develop and compile on his own computer. On his own term, corporate control free.

And then Microsoft started to be in panic mode, until they started to apply again the old rule book of embrace, extend, and extinguish...

We approach the last phase now, they start to have again a major dominance and control in the essential developer tooling space directly or indirectly...

So beware...
by riehwvfbk | 2025-05-23 22:09:10+00:00
Those other things you mention are also "tracks". Getting a shitty fast food job is done not due to any kind of aspiration but simply because it's the default thing to do.

Imagine not being able to get a shitty fast food job because you are disabled. Or just moved to the US and speak too weird and don't have anyone to vouch for you.

Ditto for hanging out with the neighborhood kids. This assumes that you are one of them, and not a victim/target for them.
by garciasn | 2025-05-23 22:09:11+00:00
It’s a 600 ft home with electricity at 0.04kWh. As someone who owns a 400 sq ft uninsulated cabin in MN, with rates closer to 4x that, I can tell you it’s about $100/month to heat it with electricity.

I guess, if the math holds, you would be paying around $50/month to heat it in the winter months.

E: changed kW/h to kWh per the nice commenter who suggested as much below.
by throwanem | 2025-05-23 22:10:50+00:00
Now, ironically given I'm for all serious purposes an English monoglot, you're speaking my language. Give me lakh and crore! Give me weights and measures where I can feel the history. Just like my mad 5,280-foot (1,360-yard) mile, which I love.

And give me also the precise rational tenths-and-tens units, too, of course, for when we need accuracy more than soul. I work in thou all the time! All I've really been saying is, there's a place in the world for both ways of doing things. Why's everyone else so hellbent on having exactly one or the other?
by emmanueloga_ | 2025-05-23 22:11:19+00:00
I like it! Suggestions:

* Clarify relationship with https://hckrnews.com/

* Don't put the settings in localStorage, use URL params. That has a lot of usability improvements including being able to share the state, bookmark it, and heads up the current state. Use Rison [1] for the URL params to make it nice to read.

* The settings overview is too terse. What does something like "Timeline, Top 20, Day, Comments"? Maybe you could turn that into a concise natural language sentence.

--

1: https://github.com/kou64yama/rison2?tab=readme-ov-file
by jmtulloss | 2025-05-23 22:12:05+00:00
The kids that fall into this bucket talk about it a lot (when they’re successful). The vast majority of successful people in America (for some definition of success) did not drop out, and the vast majority of drop outs do not find this type of mainstream success.

This is not to say that dropouts without that kind of success aren’t happy. I do believe that America does afford a lot of leeway for people to be happy and comfortable in non-traditional life paths. They’re just not the ones being discussed din this comment.
by Alupis | 2025-05-23 22:12:05+00:00
I recently called this (and other Microsoft behavior) out as being "fake" open source. The comment was highly controversial with quite a battle of up and down votes - so clearly not everyone agrees.

In my opinion, Microsoft wants the good vibes and PR that comes with open source, but they don't actually want to be open source. Its why many people still don't trust them in this arena.
by orzig | 2025-05-23 22:12:06+00:00
The author mentions they’re just about to have a baby, and it’s notable that they don’t talk about the quality of the schools. Even if they homeschooled, I imagine they want their kids to have some friends, and they didn’t talk about how that would work without a car. Once they get a car, they might get a little bit unlucky and live an hour away from their kid’s closest peer. I hope they get along!
by philsnow | 2025-05-23 22:13:15+00:00
My ideal agenda has certain things showing up wayyy before they actually happen, like anything that I need to buy gifts for. However, I don’t want to see “take out the trash bins” until day-of (maybe unless I’m going to be out of town the day the bins go out! Maybe I should see that the day before I leave.)

All of these things are trivial in Remind, a tool from yesteryear that still pretty much works.

I don’t really use remind anymore though, partly because it’s terminal-centric and sometimes there are days when I... when I don’t look at a terminal at all. There, I said it.
Anyone got into YC while on F-1 visa? Need visa tips
by geboss | 2025-05-23 22:14:08+00:00
I’m an F-1 grad student in the US (finishing May 2026) and and I'm looking into YC. I’m trying to understand if YC accepts founders currently on F-1 status and how the visa piece works. If you got into YC while you were on an F-1 visa (or perhaps right after on OPT), I’d genuinely love to hear about your experience. Specifically:

- How did you navigate the visa process for the program and beyond? - Any advice on making it work?

I know there’s general advice out there, like “if you get into YC and grow your startup, you can apply for an O-1 visa for extraordinary ability.” While that’s helpful down the line, I’m really hoping to hear from folks who’ve been in my current position—balancing F-1 restrictions as a student while pursuing YC. I’d deeply appreciate real stories, whether it’s your own journey, a friend’s experience, or even something you’ve closely observed. For example, what steps did you take right after acceptance to stay compliant with F-1 rules? Did you transition to OPT or another visa during/after YC? Any unexpected hurdles or practical tips for making it work as a student founder? I’m all ears for specific, grounded insights and would be so grateful for your help as I navigate this path!

Really appreciate you sharing any insights!
by mrandish | 2025-05-23 22:14:18+00:00
> intended to contrast with narrow AI

I've thought for a while that the middle letter in AGI ('General' vs 'Specific') would be more useful and helpful if it were changed to Wide vs Narrow. All AIs can be evaluated on a scale of narrow to wide in terms of their abilities and I don't think that will change anytime soon.

Everyone understands that something is only wide or narrow in comparison to something else. While that's also true of the terms "general' and 'specific', those are less used that way in daily conversation these days. In science and tech we make distinctions about generalized vs specific but 'general' isn't a conversational term like 50 or 100 years ago. When I was a kid my grandparents would call the local supermarket, the 'general store' which I thought was an unusual usage even then.
by bobthepanda | 2025-05-23 22:15:10+00:00
Japan, Korea, and China kind of did this, but not via direct wage and salary controls. Window guidance is the informal practice where government/finance officials tell banks which industries to prefer for loans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_guidance

It only really works where capital markets are undeveloped or heavily restricted; and it does starve out the rest of the economy, which is bad for the not-chosen-few (e.g. South Korea's chaebols) and can also backfire if you end up being bad at picking winners.
by janzer | 2025-05-23 22:15:36+00:00
Just a clarifying note, Craig Reynolds is the original researcher for Boids, and he did have a Java applet implementation in the above page. But the original Boids simulation was from 1986, almost a decade prior to Java applets.

The original paper, published in 1987, is "Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model"[1]. The implementation was done in Lisp on a Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine.

Edit: One quite interesting paragraph from the paper regarding performance:

The boid software has not been optimized for speed. But this report would be incomplete without a rough estimate of the actual performance of the system. With a flock of 80 boids, using the naive O(N²) algorithm (and so 6400 individual boid-to-boid comparisons), on a single Lisp Machine without any special hardware accelerators, the simulation ran for about 95 seconds per frame. A ten-second (300 frame) motion test took about eight hours of real time to produce.

Once again, amazing how far hardware has advanced.

1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37402.37406
by financltravsty | 2025-05-23 22:15:46+00:00
Buddy, the entire world is being hollowed out by globalism and a financial race to the bottom vis-a-vis labor costs. Your entire way of life is predicated upon no one invading the country, global supply chains remaining intact and usable, and a lack of war -- as soon as that changes your way of life disappears.

That gas station in the article? Gone once the corporation that owns it deems it a frivolous expense no longer worth the upkeep. Now what are you going to do? Find a job at the diner? Ok, how sustainable is that -- the town is not growing, the economy is dying, and the incomes are stagnating.

The author made his way by hitchhiking and vagabonding after leaving his folks' home. Guess what, surviving like that relies on civilization's infrastructure remaining viable and maintained -- it's leeching off others work and toil to selfishly sustain oneself without giving anything back.

And what about how the author currently sustains himself? Is it by humbly working at the gas station? No, he maintains a substack and social media presence to pay all his bills. He's an entertainer larping as an outbacker. He's an older Christopher McCandless -- developmentally arrested and antisocial.

It's not about fashion or luxury or "buying a life," it's about securing a means of self-sustainability, managing risk, and being a part of the growing world around you -- and not recoiling from it, shutting one's eyes, and pretending everything will be alright (tell that to anyone whose nation transitioned into communism -- hah!).
by a-priori | 2025-05-23 22:15:47+00:00
My point is that legally the First Nations have the right to not consent to the separation of provinces from the country. Of course, it's always possible for parties to act illegally...

If Alberta did unilaterally declare independence (which would be illegal according to Reference Re Secession of Quebec [1998]), the First Nations have the right to call upon Canada to defend their treaty rights under the "peace and good order" terms of the treaties.

If Canada did grant Alberta independence without First Nations consent, or Canada refuses to defend their treaty rights, they would have a claim that Canada had violated their rights to self-determination under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) which Canada ratified in 2021. But UNDRIP is a non-binding resolution, so I don't think they'd have a case with the ICC or ICJ (even assuming it had jurisdiction).
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-23 22:15:56+00:00
> Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent Asian grocery store and figured out how to make some pretty good bulgogi....

This is the move. My partner and I are Asian and we participate in Asian community things in the Bay. A lot of asians that came from less urban areas made their own food sourced from the high quality but unknown-outside-the-community Asian grocery store!
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-23 22:17:15+00:00
With scientific research especially the gate keeping is insanely counter-productive.

Imagine if Wikipedia had a paywall for each article… but you had to pay to a different organisation for each vaguely related set of pages. Some requiring recurring subscriptions and minimum spend so you can’t cancel.

Worse, the people demanding the payment aren’t even the operators of Wikipedia and they charge the article editors for the privilege of publishing on their platform!

You can have government funded research at a government funded university and then both the researcher and the students at that same university have to pay to have the research published and accessed!

But not too many pictures please and they can’t have color, that’s expensive, you see?

Raw data hosting? No way! Do that yourself.

Versioning, backlinks, ongoing feedback, comments, etc… don’t even ask! Do you think this is the future!?

Meanwhile the largest collaboration of human minds on the planet takes place on GitHub and is almost entirely volunteers working for free and giving away their work for free for everyone to fork and build on. And comment, contribute, and extend.

Science as it is today is a tyre fire and it is almost entirely the fault of rent seeking middlemen with misaligned incentives.
by TMWNN | 2025-05-23 22:17:22+00:00
I meant Western Design Center; Western Electric, as I alluded to, wasn't producing CPUs for anyone outside AT&T c. 1980. But WDC isn't appropriate as an Intel peer, either, because back then it was just two people in a kitchen in Arizona (and still was, when Apple went to it for the 65816).

Better would have been AMD, Nat Semi, or TI.
by ketzo | 2025-05-23 22:17:33+00:00
I mean, at some point this is a way-too-abstract point with no real answer

But being in therapy and alienated from your life, but rich, is not comparable to being actually poor, to not being able to provide for the people you love, to not being able to meet your basic needs. I’m sorry, but it’s just not.

Let alone the fact that, trust me, lots of poorer people are alienated from their jobs/lifestyle too! They just can’t afford the therapy!