MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by j1elo | 2025-05-03 22:58:56+00:00
It's not fun how the trend is to force everybody to have internet, as if it was an essential service like electricity or water. Some argue it is, but I'd say we're generally far from there. I wanted a console to play when I go to my out of town apartment where we don't need nor want to contract an internet line. And now it means I cannot even bring some cartridges with me and swap them as I please, because they are always requiring internet connectivity for everything.

What hasn't failed me is to hack my devices and use pirated versions of my content. Ironic that this method works much better. All games I want, locally, in a pack of SD cards I bring in my backpack, ready to install and play 100% offline at any moment in a train, a flight, a boat.
by Ekaros | 2025-05-03 22:59:38+00:00
There is lot less aircraft models as well. About 17 in current production(although more variants), 3 in planning, 26 "out-of-production" and some more historical.

In the end there is just not that many products overall.

Now compare that to amount of software being worked on. And number of companies involved just on buying bespoke ones or developing for own use...
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-03 23:00:15+00:00
I wish we saw more people hacking wildly on JavaScript proxies. Subtly quietly doing multiple-dispatch without most folks being much the wiser is so imminently within possibility in JS since 2016[1]. There's some really nice uses (Svelte) but I think in general our ambition to hack the JS runtime with proxies, to build cool meta-object-protocols, has been way way way way undermatched versus the potential about here.

[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=Proxy
by fiddlosopher | 2025-05-03 23:00:25+00:00
Pandoc developer here. Two comments: (1) to convert equations pandoc uses the texmath library, which I also wrote (https://github.com/jgm/texmath). Compiling texmath with `-fexecutable` will give you a standalone executable that just converts the equation (and doesn't add the `<p>` element or anything extraneous). Compiling it with `-fserver` will give you a webserver that converts equations. (2) Regarding the bug, note that it's not an empty `<mo></mo>`. There's an invisible U+2061 character ("function application") inside. We don't want to take that out, but it looks like putting the `<mi>` and the `<mo>` together in an `<mrow>` will also solve the problem. I'll fix this.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-03 23:00:57+00:00
> ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of GraphQL.

Everytime I hit the "should we use GraphQL" question in the last decade we balked because we already had fast REST like APIs and couldn't see a how it would get faster.

To your point it was more of a mish-mash than anything with a central library magically dealing with the requests, so there is more cognitive load, but it also meant we had much more control over the behavior and performance profile.
by yupitsme123 | 2025-05-03 23:00:58+00:00
The extreme opposite of zero foreign ownership would be full foreign ownerhship, ie. colonization. All your resources and wealth belong to a foreign nation.

If we agree that that's a bad thing, then it stands to reason that there's a certain point where foreign ownership becomes a bad thing.

I think China has done an excellent job of bringing in foreign investment while keeping those foreign investors from running amok.
by austhrow743 | 2025-05-03 23:01:02+00:00
One of the biggest “services” expenses, i think maybe the biggest, comes in the form of employees.

Afaik the EU is regulated much more heavily in that area than the US, like here in Australia.

It makes sense to me that some amount of the US’ economic advantage comes from their ability to more efficiently match employees with the work currently demanded by the market.
by sargstuff | 2025-05-03 23:02:23+00:00
Make use of a hacker space[1] / start a version of Home Brew Computer club [0] and/or other local area club affiliated with a professional organization / join,participate in a related professional organization subgroup activity(s)[2]

[0] : https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-happened-at-the-homebrew-...

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/personal-computers/17/312

[1] : https://hackerspaces.org/

[2] : a) https://www.acm.org/

b) https://www.ieee.org/ c) start a side project to keep/retain skills aka https://makezine.com/ d) "top 10" professional organizations : https://technologymagazine.com/top10/top-10-technology-associations
by Diggsey | 2025-05-03 23:02:23+00:00
> Every webapp built with something other than GraphQL ends up with an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of GraphQL.

Not remotely true. There are plenty of web apps that work just fine with a standard fixed set of API endpoints with minimal if any customization of responses. Not to mention the web apps that don't have any client-side logic at all...

GraphQL solves a problem that doesn't exist for most people, and creates a ton of new problems in its place.

The value of GraphQL is also its downfall. The flexibility it offers to the client greatly complicates the backend, and makes it next to impossible to protect against DoS attacks effectively, or even to understand app performanmce. Every major implementation of GraphQL I've seen has pretty serious flaws deriving from this complexity, to the point that GraphQL APIs are more buggy than simpler fixed APIs.

With most web apps having their front-end and back-end developed in concert, there's simply no need for this flexibility. Just have the backend provide the APIs that the front-end actually needs. If those needs change, also change the backend. When that kind of change is too hard or expensive to do, it's an organisational failing, not a technical one.

Sure, some use-cases might warrant the flexibility that GraphQL uses. A book tracking app does not.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-05-03 23:03:16+00:00
> sel4 is very limited in scope and extending that to a semi-usable OS (that uses ""proven"" C) is expensive time and money wise.

Everything that has to meet a high criteria of safety is like this, yes. For the exact same reason unsafe exists in Rust and completely inescapable, because automatic correctness checking beyond the most trivial static analysis doesn't actually come for free, and it imposes intense design restrictions that make a lot of things very time consuming to do.

> Citation needed

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/dlNtH7RRrGA/m/Sw...

You will never find a single point in the multiple archives of Linux's git history where a clean break point occurred and the kernel was greenfielded with the express intent of replacing its design abstractions with ones more appropriate and ergonomic for formal analysis. If you'd like to express further skepticism, feel free to try and find that moment which never happened.

Participation of large, well recognized corporations does not imply the kernel isn't a mess of technical debt. It actually implies worse.
by wonderwonder | 2025-05-03 23:03:47+00:00
Who cares? The Mayans are dead. Civilizations rise and fall. Today we all agree what is attractive or not. The hot girl in the club is always attractive. I don’t care what the fringe likes. We don't have to celebrate or respect what other cultures found acceptable. The Aztecs sacrificed and ate children, the world was better off after they were gone. I don't have to respect their culture or what they found attractive or examine the nuances of why "actually their child sacrifices were ok"

I'm going to confidently continue to find attractive what I find attractive and 95% of the world agrees with me. I celebrate the rise of the current global culture.

I’ll leave it to you to lament the end of foot binding and blackened teeth.
by otsukare | 2025-05-03 23:03:52+00:00
Yes, and alongside formatting challenges, PDFs commonly only include the glyphs from the font that are actually used in the document.

So if you had PDF with "Hello World" on it, you could feasibly change it to "Hello Hello", but wouldn't be able to change it to "Goodbye World" (as the glyphs for "G", "b", "y", and "e" are not included in the PDF)

Sure, you could do a bit of detective work to figure out which font it was from the glyphs or something and lookup and insert new glyphs into the PDF, but I can't imagine a generic PDF editor being capable of doing this for you.

Some editors get around this but just straight up switching the font(s) for the whole PDF, so they'll look different after saving.
by korkoros | 2025-05-03 23:04:19+00:00
My experience has been that data generalists should stay away from geospatial analysis precisely because they lack a full appreciation of the importance of spatial references. I've seen people fail at this task in so many ways. From "I don't need a library to reproject, I'll just use a haversine function" to "I'll just do a spatial join of these address points in WGS84 to these parcels in NAD27" to "these North Korean missiles aren't a threat because according to this map using a Mercator projection, we are out of range."

DuckDB is great, but the fact that it makes it easier for data generalists to make mistakes with geospatial data is mark against it, not in its favor.
by mcv | 2025-05-03 23:04:32+00:00
Good article. Good, clear way of thinking about this. I have some different thoughts, though.

For one, most organs can't even be donated during life. Paying people for them is useless, because they're dead. But an approach that has always appealed to me, is to give people who are registered as donor preference when they need a transplant. And that means people unwilling to donate their organs when they die, are also less likely to receive one.

Children should be exempt from this of course; they can't make these decisions yet and should always get preference, but I've always wondered why someone who doesn't want to donate their organs, should have a right to receive an organ.

It feels more just that people willing to help others, should also be first in line to receive help. It's a practical application of the Golden Rule. And this system would also mean that rich people are just as likely to register as donors as poor people, without any money needing to be involved.

Blood and kidneys are different of course, because they can be donated while you're still alive. I personally struggle to imagine donating my own kidney while I still need it. What if something happens to my other kidney? So people who have donated a kidney should absolutely be first in line to receive one should their remaining kidney give out.

As for blood, paying for it makes sense to me. You don't cripple yourself long term, you're not giving anything up permanently. Lots of work is less healthy than donating blood. Paying people for backbreaking work that will likely cost them their health is grosser than paying them for blood donations. And if poor people are more likely to make use of this, I have no problem with giving poor people an extra way to make money.

Although we should definitely ensure sufficient living standards for everybody so nobody would sell body parts out of desperation. That is still the grossest thing.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-03 23:05:54+00:00
In general, it's just wild to see Google squander such an intense lead.

In 2012, Google was far ahead of the world in making the vast majority of their offerings intensely API-first, intensely API accessible.

It all changed in such a tectonic shift. The Google Plus/Google+ era was this weird new reality where everything Google did had to feed into this social network. But there was nearly no API available to anyone else (short of some very simple posting APIs), where Google flipped a bit, where the whole company stopped caring about the rest of the world and APIs and grew intensely focused on internal use, on themselves, looked only within.

I don't know enough about the LLM situation to comment, but Google squandering such a huge lead, so clearly stopping caring about the world & intertwingularity, becoming so intensely internally focused was such a clear clear clear fall. There's the Google Graveyard of products, but the loss in my mind is more clearly that Google gave up on APIs long ago, and has never performed any clear acts of repentance for such a grevious mis-step against the open world, open possibilities, against closed & internal focus.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-03 23:05:56+00:00
2023-24 models couldn’t be relied on at smaller levels thanks to hallucinations and poor instruction following; newer models are much better and that trend will keep going. That low level reliability allows models to be a building block for bigger systems. Check out this personal assistant done by Nate Herk, a youtuber who builds automations with n8n:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZP4fjVWKt2w

It’s early. There are new skills everyone is just getting the hang of. If the evolution of AI was mapped to the evolution of computing we would be in the era of “check out this room-sized bunch of vacuum tubes that can do one long division at a time”.

But it’s already exciting, so just imagine how good things will get with better models and everyone skilled in the art of work automation!
by omneity | 2025-05-03 23:06:35+00:00
Yes. There's a scoring and filtering pipeline first, whereby I try to automatically check for the quality of the correction using a custom multilingual embedding model, madmon[0] and language identification model, gherbal[1]. Above a certain similarity threshold it goes into the training dataset, below it it's flagged for human review. This is mostly to stave off the trolls or blatant mistakes.

For the continuous training itself, yes I simply continue training the model from the last checkpoint (cosine lr scheduler). I am considering doing a full retraining at some point when I collect enough data to compare with this progressive training.

Apologies for the poor links, it takes a lot of time to work on this let alone fully document everything.

0: https://api.sawalni.com/docs#tag/Embeddings

1: https://api.sawalni.com/docs#tag/Language-Identification
by ourmandave | 2025-05-03 23:07:12+00:00
While the incentives are a step forward, officials caution that hiring alone won’t resolve the deeper problems.

The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old.

An announcement regarding technology upgrades and infrastructure improvements is expected next week.

Haven't they been trying to modernize air traffic control since forever?

I wonder what announcements they're going to make.
by OrvalWintermute | 2025-05-03 23:09:14+00:00
The US can easily fill in gaps by taking the Special Operators Combat Controllers (CCTs) who are actually all certified Air Traffic Controllers.

Furthermore, the Air Force could additionally take the Terminal Air Control Party (TACPs) - think of them as a Radio/Strike guy that coordinates Air Strikes, that accompany tactical platoons and cross train them into Air Traffic Control, further augmenting their ability to perform this role.
by drabbiticus | 2025-05-03 23:10:00+00:00
> Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).

Do they?

The first two results on Google for "government vs private efficiency" are https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/publicati... and https://www.epsu.org/article/public-and-private-sector-effic..., which both suggest that it is a myth that companies are inherently more efficient than government.

It's also worth mentioning that governments and companies inherently must operate differently. Governments are not set up to recoup investment; in fact, proponents of small government (as opposed to no government) generally recognize that the role of government is to assist in preventing "tragedy of the commons" by funding initiatives and programs that fundamentally do not make sense for a single market player to address. I.e. government helps when there isn't a good path for a single market player to see a good/reliable economic and market-competitive return from their investment.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-03 23:10:18+00:00
Agreed

The article was a good story. Strange though that people cherish these Mao pictures and put them on display. I like Andy Warhol but putting Mao up seems like putting a picture of Hitler on your wall. And no, this isn't Godwin's Law. The comparison seems to fit given he's one of the top 3 mass murders of all time

https://www.heritage.org/china/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zed...

https://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/who-kil...
by Kuyawa | 2025-05-03 23:10:29+00:00
This is the closest we can do today:

-- index.html <html> <body> <script src="header.js"></script> <main> <h1>Hello includes</h1> </main> <script src="footer.js"></script> </body> </html> -- header.js document.currentScript.outerHTML = ` <header> <h1>Header</h1> </header>` -- footer.js document.currentScript.outerHTML = ` <footer> <h1>Footer</h1> </footer>`

Scripts will replace their tags with html producing a clean source, not pretty but it works on the client
by balnazzar | 2025-05-03 23:10:53+00:00
Not true. It performs 20-30% better than a RTX A6000 (I have both). Except it has more than 10 times the VRAM. For a comparison with newer Nvidia cards, benchmarks say it does substantially better than a 5070ti, a bit better than a 4080, and a bit worse than a 5080. But once again, it got 30 times the vram amount of the mentioned cards, which for AI workloads are just expensive toys due to lack of vram indeed.
by perching_aix | 2025-05-03 23:11:21+00:00
Maybe this is a generational difference, but I really don't like handwritten anything. Something being handwritten doesn't evoke anything inside me - if anything, it only brings frustration, since having to decipher someone's handwriting (especially mine) can be no mean feat. There are also countless examples of cards and such with blatantly printed-on signatures, and there are signature plotting machines (autopens [0]) that further make automated signatures impossible to tell apart.

AI has already changed stuff. I have already seen several related examples of distasteful AI use in corporate settings. One example was management promising that feedback received during a townhall will be reviewed, only to then later proudly announce that they AI-summarized it. I'll readily admit that doing that is actually a very sensible use of AI, just maybe the messaging around it should have been a bit less out of touch. Another example was my coworker expressing his gratitude to the team, while simultaneously passing the milestone of producing more than 10 consecutive words of coherent English for the first time in his life. He was awfully proud of it too.

And to finish it off, talking to real human beings on the internet is increasingly miserable by the day. Without going too far off into the weeds, let me give you a practical, older example. I've participated in a Discord server of a FOSS project, specifically in their support channels, for a couple years - walked away a very different person, with great appreciation for service workers. I'm sure the people coming there loved being able to torment, I mean ask help from, real human beings. By the end, this feeling was very much not reciprocated. I was not alone in this either of course, and the mask would fall off of people increasingly often. Those very real human beings looking for help were not too happy either, especially when said masks fell off. So it was mostly just miserable for everyone involved. AI can substitute in such situations very handily, and everyone is honestly plain better off. Having to explain the same thing over and over to varyingly difficult people is not something a lot of people are cut out for, but the need is ever present and expanding, and AI has zero problems with filling those shoes. It can provide people with the assistance they need and deserve. It can provide even those with that help that do not need it, nor deserve it. Everyone's happier.

We've concocted a lot of inhuman(e) systems and social dynamics for ourselves over time. I have some skepticisms towards the future of AI myself, but it has a very legitimate chance of counteracting many of these dynamics, and restoring some much needed balance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen
by throwaway48476 | 2025-05-03 23:12:02+00:00
One of the biggest problems with ATC hiring is that location assignments happen after trainees pass the academy. A lot of the academy graduates quit when they get an assignment they don't like. It's not like the military where they can force people. The trainee pay also sucks so the prospect of getting sent somewhere undesirable and then barely being able to afford it just isn't attractive. If they would hire based on location like they used to graduates wouldn't quit as often.

The other big problem is Obama changed the hiring test from testing intelligence to testing personality in a bid to increase diversity. There was a lawsuit over this. The effect was academy failure rates soared and because class sizes are fixed there was a shortfall in the number of graduates making it to towers to train.
by jedberg | 2025-05-03 23:12:40+00:00
The limits are there to limit corruption.

If managers could set arbitrary salaries, the employees could just agree to cut their manager in on 10% of their raise.

This probably happens outside of government, but it's just the private org who loses money, so it's up to them to stop it. But in the case of the government, it's the taxpayers who lose.
by monero-xmr | 2025-05-03 23:12:49+00:00
Then the question is, “how do we prevent politicians from hiring their family and friends on excessive salaries”?

Then it’s, “how do we quantify success without the profit motive for something society needs, but doesn’t earn a profit”?

Then I would conclude, the solution is a small government with a hyper-competitive process for providing public services, with actual democratic feedback on the success of such provided services with teeth to remove bad private sector contractors.
by quantadev | 2025-05-03 23:12:59+00:00
Well any non-framework interactive app that ever reaches the point of being "bloated" is necessarily a train wreck, regardless. You can have massive apps that use a framework, and has a good design too. However if you have a massive app without a framework then it's absolutely guaranteed to be a dumpster fire. So frameworks help manage bloat, but lack of frameworks fails completely once the project is large.
by metalman | 2025-05-03 23:13:17+00:00
AI is creating a now, that is dull, productive, borring, predictable, profiable, and alluring in a smug snide gotcha kinda way. Which would be fine, except that it is doomed to be self referential and will force a universal adoption, rendering the whole thing a fancy spambot that consumes 25% of the worlds energy budget. And the statement "like it or not" keeps some very uggly company in it's assosiations. clumsily written by someine with a phone useing one finger, and zero reconsideration or evaluation of whatever it is I just wrote hope you like it:)
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-03 23:13:41+00:00
Past discussions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42636195 - 3 months ago, 10 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31808269 - 3 years ago, 169 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2108463 - 14 years ago, 11 comments