MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ghaff | 2025-05-27 20:03:56+00:00
Yeah, for me, lightening the load is only about clothing to the degree that I've accumulated too much over time and there's a bunch I just don't wear. It's not recent purchases unless something just didn't work out for some reason.Having to basically move back into the house because of a kitchen fire though and some furniture definitely won't come back in because I had it essentially because I had it. But don't really use it effectively or it's too bulky.
by naet | 2025-05-27 20:04:24+00:00
I lived near UC Berkeley for many years and I would often take a random afternoon to drive around the student neighborhoods near the end of the term to snag a couple free things like air fryers, microwaves, or TVs for free. People would reliably leave them out on the curb for the taking as they packed up to head back home, since they weren't practical to take on a flight or long journey. I'm sure some people tried listing them on craigslist for a couple days when they started packing and then abandoned them instead when nobody bit, and some people probably didn't even care to go through that motion or waited too long to pack and realize they couldn't bring it.

Never went through the dumpster or got any "luxury" goods (probably wouldn't even recognize them if I saw them), but my wife did randomly bring home a pair of nice looking speakers that ended up being around $700 if bought new. I'm sure some wealthy international students do throw away some expensive stuff and not think twice about it. I actually did the opposite and tossed some of my own bulk items in a student dumpster once which was probably a violation of some kind although I didn't see any signs to say otherwise.

I saw some decently nice tvs or other things that could have potentially been resold by someone looking to do that, but I was only interested in taking something I would personally use.
by thechao | 2025-05-27 20:06:15+00:00
Just in case any else is wondering: there are only 83 right-truncatable primes (RTP) and that is it. There's two constraints that let you see this "immediately":

1. An RTP must start with {2,3,5,7,9}; and,

2. An RTP must end with {1,3,7,9}.

So, let's take the largest RTP (73939133) and try to "extend" it: there are only four possible extensions: 73939133[1], 73939133[3], 73939133[7], 73939133[9]. None of these are prime. This holds for the other 8-digit RTPs. Therefore, there is no extension to a 9-or-longer RTP. Thus, the list is exhaustive.
by skydhash | 2025-05-27 20:06:25+00:00
We have move towards higher abstractions, not natural languages. It looks like natural language because we name those abstractions from natural languages, but their semantics can be quite different.

Building a software was always about using those abstractions to solve a problem. But what clients give us are mostly wishes and wants. We turn those into a problem, then we solve that problem. It goes from "I want $this" (requirement) to "How can $this be done?" (analysis), then to "$this can be done that way" (design). We translate the last part into code. But there's still "Is $this done correctly?" (answered by testing) and "$this is no longer working" (maintenance).

So we're not moving to natural language, because the whole point of code is to ossify design. We're moving towards better representation of common design elements.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-27 20:08:57+00:00
> Basically, you won't need those things 99.99% of the time

That's kind of my point. If you don't need a language feature 99.99% of the time perhaps it is better to cut it out from your language altogether. Well unless your language is striving to have the same reputation as C++. In Python's case here's a compromise: such features can only be used in a Python extension in C code, signifying their magic nature.
by sgarland | 2025-05-27 20:09:22+00:00
> Database [anything]

Honestly, the author couldn't have chosen a worse example if they tried. RDBMS are so absurdly complex and have so many edge cases for everything, that they are my canonical answer to why it's a bad idea to have dev teams managing them, or designing schema. Disclaimer: I'm a DBRE.

Look at MySQL's ORDER BY [0], GROUP BY [1], and index merge [2] optimizations. Postgres' ORDER BY optimization [3] doesn't have nearly as many gotchas, but it more than makes up for it by having many more types of indices [4], as well as many types of operator classes within each of those. While you're at it, you should probably have a handle on collations [6], AKA "why did this ORDER BY do something odd?"

> You could learn about the data structures that represent the index

You mean a B+ tree (for standard types)? I would hope you covered that in DS&A already.

> about all the tricks that go into updating them efficiently

> But it will very rarely inform the database migration or query you’re writing.

I disagree. For example, if you didn't know that updating any indexed column in a Postgres table means the entire row is re-written (hope you haven't done anything silly, like storing medium-sized JSON blobs that aren't quite big enough to trigger TOAST), you would likely be much more cavalier with your indexing decisions.

I'm so very tired of the "I don't need to know how the things I use work" attitude. Do you need to be able to write your own database to effectively use one? No, of course not. Should you have read the official docs? Yes. You'll learn far more than from skimming random blogs and YouTube videos.

[0]: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/order-by-optimizatio...

[1]: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/group-by-optimizatio...

[2]: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/index-merge-optimiza...

[3]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/indexes-ordering.htm...

[4]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/indexes-types.html

[5]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/indexes-opclass.html

[6]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/collation.html
by czarit | 2025-05-27 20:09:43+00:00
It is absolutely accepted in microeconomics, where one can assume that preferences are exogenous to the model (that is: not affected by changing the model's variables).

In macroeconomics it is not so simple, because the effects of a higher price for labor are felt all over the economy, leading to feedbacks that might increase overall employment. The Ford wage increase to increase demand for Ford's products is often cited - because there is a multiplier effect from economic activity even a single firm can theoretically benefit from handing out more money to its employees.

There are also arguments from near term versus long term. In the long term, economies with no access to very cheap labor feel more pressure to robotize production, leading to higher productivity and more production overall, and also might lead to a better educated workforce by simply excluding below-minimum-wage productive labor from getting any jobs, and therefore push some of them to school. Those are short term costs that have proven to lead to long term gains.

But I do also think it's not very common to assume that higher minimum wages will lead to a net increase in employment. It is more common to argue that it will lead to a better outcome (for some definition of good) in the aggregate, _even if_ it might lead to some unemployment.
by lordnacho | 2025-05-27 20:11:32+00:00
Anecdote from the trading floor.

I used to sit on a trading desk, the kind with loads of guys sitting next to each other and about 8 screens each. Lots of noise, except when it got quiet. When it did get quiet, someone would shout down the squawk box that they had "heard from the stable boys" about some horse that was on form.

You couldn't not bet on this horse. Everyone did it, and everyone got fleeced, every time.

One day, my boss decides he's had enough of this crap, and he goes "no, I ain't doing it, I lose my lunch money every fkn time, screw this".

Horse comes in at 30-1, everyone is paying him a visit asking about what champagne to buy that day.
by godelski | 2025-05-27 20:11:54+00:00
Honestly, this has confused me too [0]. Replies to your comment also seem to highlight this, being overly defensive of a position rejecting academia. Don't get me wrong, it's got lots of issues (I'm quite vocal about this too, even with my name associated), but they also do a lot of good.

What's most baffling to me is the rejection of research and theory (depth in knowledge). Claiming that the work isn't impactful. But that's like saying the ground you stand on doesn't matter...

I'm absolutely astounded this is such a common opinion among programmers and CS people. We're literally building the largest companies in the world and bringing about the information revolution and AI revolution on technology that isn't even 100 years old. It's rapidly getting better because of research and we're not waiting for a hundred years of return on investment here.

It's anti-intellectualism. Often spewed by those trying to prove their own genius, demonstrating the opposite. CS of all people should be able to recognize how complex even the simplest things are. For fuck's sake, we can't even get timezones right lol. We need to balance depth, not ignore it or reject it (I don't think the author argued that btw)

It feels excessively myopic. And honestly, the major problem with academia is the same myopia!

| How do you manage genius? You don't - Mervin Kelly (Bell Labs) | What I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field. - Donald Knuth

I could quote a hundred more from a hundred fields.

I think we have this weird image in our heads that researchers do nothing and if left to their own devices will just waste time and money. I write with my pocket computer that sends signals across the world and into space, passing through machines moving so fast their clocks disagree. Our science isn't taking centuries to benefit from. It rarely ever took decades.

Yet historically most science was done by the rich who had free time. Sure, we're moving faster now but we also have several orders of magnitude more scientists. Our continued growth doesn't mean we've become more efficient.

We seem to be really bad at attributing the causes of success. We're fixate on those at the end of a long chain of work. I mean even NVIDIA depends on TSMC, as does Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. And TSMC is far from the root. I'm not trying to say how the economics should all fall out but its at least a helpful illustrative target to look at the biases in how we think.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44110055
by skydhash | 2025-05-27 20:13:37+00:00
Code is ossified design. The whole problem is coming up with the design and dealing with both essentials and accidental complexities. Writing the code is routine work. The only difference from other design works is that we often go back and forth as we can start coding as soon as we want.

It's like how building an house is pretty much logistic and repetitive works. Designing an house is complex enough that you requires a degree and years of experience before you're trusted to do it well.
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-27 20:13:45+00:00
It doesn't define a lot of things; treason's the only crime defined, for example, but we knew a whole bunch of others existed on day one.

It does clearly imply a difference between "natural-born" citizens and naturalized ones, and that citizens and residents/people/persons aren't the exact same thing.

The choice to use "citizen" in some spots and "person" in many others seems very deliberate.
by chasil | 2025-05-27 20:13:48+00:00
Here is a free recording of a piano performance of the Art of the Fugue by Kimiko Ishizaka:

https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/album/j-s-bach-the-art-o...

This artist also has a free recording of her Goldberg Variations available:

https://opengoldbergvariations.org/

Her bandcamp page also has the Well-Tempered Clavier, and two of her own albums:

https://kimikoishizaka.bandcamp.com/
by aappleby | 2025-05-27 20:14:28+00:00
I've seen dozens of AI generated scam ads for quilts, leather goods, backpacks, etcetera.

All are of the form "After 40 years my poor business is closing" plus a link to a generic online shop selling drop shipped goods from China at a 300% markup.

I report them all. They never get removed.

There are even Facebook groups for people who fell victim to the scams - Google 'Vantique' to find out more about the quilt scam.

The apathy by Facebook really puts me off using their platform, it feels like the dirty underbelly of the internet is taking over.
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 20:14:28+00:00
> I was referring to the discussions which happened under the question independetly of answers

Oh, you mean the comment section, which is explicitly by policy not for extended discussion (and in fact, actual moderators have a template message that they can use when moving those comments to a chat room in bulk, which says so in about as many words).

The purpose of this section under a question is to determine and address issues with the question - by telling you what to fix if you need to fix it, by making sure you're understood so that someone else can fix it, etc.

> and usually there was no answer

It is explicitly against policy to attempt to answer a question in the comments. That's why there are actual answers labelled as such; it's why comments are limited in length and formatting capability; and it's why, when you open the comment submission form, the placeholder text in the text field reads

> Use comments to ask for more information or suggest improvements. Avoid answering questions in comments.

Moving on:

> or just one which recommended to not ask the question

Yes, because questions that aren't fixable shouldn't be asked, and questions that can be fixed should be.

> I neither care much whether the people who blocked my questions are called admins or moderators or whatever, the outcome is the same.

Your questions were not "blocked"; other people were simply prevented from answering them until you fix the question. You are given a minimum of 9 days to do this before automatic deletion, and you can still petition for undeletion.

If you don't care about a site enough even to use or understand its basic terminology, why should that site try to accommodate you?

> I used the site as intented.

No, you clearly did not, based on your demonstrated lack of understanding of basic principles of how the site works.
by PlunderBunny | 2025-05-27 20:14:30+00:00
The plastics used aren't a mystery - the outer parts of the posts (the bit that's exposed) are made from milk bottles. The resulting product is something that is useful to me and to the other people that buy it. Without it, I'd buy a treated timber post, which also has an environmental cost (different trade-offs). Is it down-cycling when the resulting product is more useful that the products it was composed of?
by FeepingCreature | 2025-05-27 20:14:44+00:00
It kind of reminds me of the solar power chart that one institute made where every year they predict that growth will definitely flatten from here on out and every year it fails to do so.

I don't have any reason to expect LLMs to be flattening or for the technology to be capped out. In fact, I have a lot of reasons to believe the opposite such as the plethora of papers and proposed techniques that haven't even been attempted at scale. (QuietSTaR my beloved, you will have your day.) It just doesn't look like a mature technology, rather the opposite. So my baseline assumption, on that evidential basis, is that number keeps going up, and if this prediction results in a strange-looking future then that says more about my taste than about the prediction.
by MrDarcy | 2025-05-27 20:15:09+00:00
> how often do you really want to explore the docs in a specific version?

All the time. It's inevitable. If you ever sell software in the tools / configuration / package management space to "the enterprise" (which I think you do) then some of your biggest customers are going to be stuck on old versions. They'll need to easily select the version they're running if only to figure out how to upgrade to the version you want them to be running.

Edit: To clarify and drive the point home, in a previous life I was at a startup that sold something like Glasskube to enterprises. Version 3 of our software was significantly more performant and had some desirable features compared to version 2. Many of our largest paying customers literally called us up and asked us for help upgrading them. In that situation it was invaluable for our own CEO and pro services team to pull up version 2 docs side-by-side with version 3 docs, pull up a copy of the customer's code, then plan the migration for them step by step. This resulted in both revenue from the professional services and revenue from the license expansion as the customer scaled out on version 3.

So, versioned docs aren't just for customers, they're also for you, your developers (who may need to patch an old version or develop a migration tool), and your service delivery team.
by coldtea | 2025-05-27 20:15:26+00:00
>Can you point me to a single example of internet discourse from the last 30 years where a human used an em-dash unironically?

Thousands upon thousands.

>I'm looking for an example of human created discourse online. The crux of the allegation is that normal meatbag humans don't use an em-dash when conversing with one another online

Meatbag humans whose education failed them don't. Other humans did and still do, from Usenet to Substack, and from Slashdot to Hacker News.

Here's a random PG essay sprinkled with 23 em-dashes:

https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

Here's a post from idlewords, 13 of them:

https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

Here's the current top HN post, 13 of them:

https://aaronson.org/blog/square-theory

57 in this antipope post - many by Charlie, equally many in the comments:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/12/storm-c...

And those are genuine em-dashes, the character.

Way more people, in posts, comments, etc. use en-dashes and hyphens as em-dashes (just because they don't know how to quickly insert proper ones, or aren't aware there's a typographic distinction, but do now the use of dashes for parenthetical statements and asides.
by blibble | 2025-05-27 20:16:00+00:00
> But I've just never heard anyway complain about "noobs" installing deb packages. Ever.

it is literally in the debian documentation: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

> One of the primary advantages of Debian is its central repository with many thousands of software packages. If you're coming to Debian from another operating system, you might be used to installing software that you find on random websites. On Debian installing software from random websites is a bad habit. It's always better to use software from the official Debian repositories if at all possible. The packages in the Debian repositories are known to work well and install properly. Only using software from the Debian repositories is also much safer than installing from random websites which could bundle malware and other security risks.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-27 20:17:20+00:00
Recalling key words and where or how to find out more has been my "superpower" when it comes to programming.

I can do this since I love reading about all sorts of random topics, a lot which pop up here, and while I seldom recall the details, I can recall enough to know when it might be relevant and how to find it again.

Sooo many diverse topics has suddenly cropped up at work, where everyone else is fairly stumped but I can say "I'm sure I've heard of this before" and with a few minutes have found back the resource which details the solution, or something to that effect.

Thus I too prefer getting blasted with info when starting a new job or new project, so I can recall the relevant key words when they pop up.
by gxpcellators | 2025-05-27 20:17:38+00:00
A Good Clinical Practice Quality Management System (GCP QMS) is a structured framework that ensures sponsor companies maintain compliance with global regulatory standards throughout a clinical trial's lifecycle. Regulatory bodies such as the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration), ICH (International Council for Harmonisation), and EMA (European Medicines Agency) emphasize the critical role of a robust QMS in safeguarding subject safety, data integrity, and ethical conduct in clinical research.
by danhodgins | 2025-05-27 20:17:53+00:00
Fight fire with fire.

Use AI to determine potential essay topics that are as close to 'AI-proof' as possible.

Here is an example prompt:

"Describe examples of possible high school essay topics where students cannot use AI engines such as perplexity or ChatGPT to help complete the assignment. In other words - AI-proof topics, assignments or projects"
by bigyabai | 2025-05-27 20:17:58+00:00
Nvidia dominates training moreso than inference, and mostly because of their hardware efficiency and not entirely because of CUDA. To dominate Nvidia, you have to beat their TSMC investments, beat their design chops and match their software support. The shortlist consisting of companies that can do that reads "Apple" and nobody else, which is exactly the sort of captive market Nvidia wants to conquer.

OpenCL has been pretty handy for inference on older cards, but I'd argue it's relevance is waning. llama.cpp has Vulkan compute now which requires a smaller featureset for hardware to support. Many consumer devices skip OpenCL/CUDA altogether and delegate inference to an NPU library.
by GreenWatermelon | 2025-05-27 20:18:00+00:00
I guess we will have to rely on extra-net signals: Meta clues from the real world.

For example, the website creator doesn't seem to be looking for profit, nor did they add much oin terms of personal info that would point to him looking for internet clout.

The FAQ page comes across as genuine and, as another commenter put it, whimsical.

It's also all self hosted, and on a unique domain, while mass-content-farmera prefer prefer the zombified audiences of Tiktok and Facebook.

All those signals combine into a high probability of everything on the site being genuine.
by hollandheese | 2025-05-27 20:18:27+00:00
>don't know that they necessarily know how any better than the administrators.

If someone is doing something day in and day out, they do gain knowledge on what works and doesn't work. So just by doing that the professors typically know much more about how people should be taught than the administrators. Further, the administrators' incentives are not aligned towards insuring proper instruction. They are aligned with increasing student enrollment and then cashing out whenever they personally can.
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-05-27 20:18:59+00:00
It's known as one of the toughest schools to have ever existed. The dean who set the tone for the last few decades recently left and the current generation of student don't seem to appreciate the 'rigor' so we'll see if it stays that way.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2023/06/30/no-longer-the-plac...
by al_borland | 2025-05-27 20:19:24+00:00
I went to school in a more rural area. In high school we had the option to spend half the day at the vocational school in the next town over learning the trades. Our senior year they also had an assembly to tell us all that statistics were against us in college and only 15% would graduate, so we shouldn’t try.

My nephews are about to enter that same high school about 25 years later. From what I’ve gleaned, they still have the program for vocational training. I think the kids went on a field trip there is middle school.
by gnabgib | 2025-05-27 20:19:42+00:00
Related: They want to climb Everest in a week using an anesthetic gas (3 points, 13 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988039

Use Xenon gas to climb Everest in a week? (12 points, 27 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43837865

Climbers using xenon gas to climb Everest (107 points, 4 months ago, 145 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705180