MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amluto | 2025-05-24 14:48:39+00:00
You can drive for a lot less than $0.60c/mi. At $0.04/kWh, evergy to propel an EV costs 1-2 cents per mile. If you buy a $35k car and drive it 200k miles while spending very little on maintenance (tires might be the major expense), add maybe $0.20/mi, for a total of $0.21/mi or so. Insurance isn’t all that expensive and doesn’t vary that much with mileage. If you buy a BYD car (oh wait, not in the US), it’s even cheaper.
by drewbug01 | 2025-05-24 14:49:09+00:00
So I think you are scratching at something interesting here - as a (senior) engineer who values communication intensely, I also try to “read between the lines” and extract what someone meant and not just what they said.

And so in that sense, I agree with you - from the perspective of the engineer in this example, yes: try to figure out what they meant and don’t get lost in the details. It’s a good example of not trying to control things that are fundamentally out of your hands.

But the other side is: this blog post (and the linked one explaining the “kernel” idea more deeply) is written from the perspective of the CTO! And it’s framed as a strategy - “encourage your engineers to learn how to intuit what you mean, and not what you say” (paraphrasing, of course).

I think that’s where it rubs me the wrong way. It subtly puts the responsibility for effective communication the receiving end. If we are considering it from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s just far more efficient for the CTO to say what he means from the get-go.

I mean, honestly even with the example: how much harder would it have been for the CTO to say “is it possible to go faster with something off-the-shelf rather than build our own?”
by hunglee2 | 2025-05-24 14:49:19+00:00
bamboo scaffolding might be one of those examples of where a superior local solution gets replaced by an inferior, yet more scalable generalisable solution. Bamboo is organic, therefore non-standard, therefore harder to track, measure, quantify, maintain - everything you want to do in health and safety, organic material will frustrate. So even though it is better solution in so many ways (cheaper, lighter, flexible, green, man-portable etc) because it is non-standard it ends up being considered unsafe
by contingencies | 2025-05-24 14:49:35+00:00
A shame that only zipties are mentioned with no discussion of traditional rope materials. It was interesting to see the Cantonese theater discussed. There is a very active Bangkok Chinese cultural and financial support for Cantonese theater. Every year, around Chinese New Year time, numerous stages are constructed (sometimes with forecourt gates) across the city and Cantonese opera performers are flown in from mainland China. Catch it while you can.
by 7952 | 2025-05-24 14:49:49+00:00
In Europe roads can be very narrow and windy. You need to transport very large blades, towers, cranes which can require modification to the roads and large tracks. And large schemes can have massive transformers which are heavy and require long vehicles to transport. You might have to drive a thirty mile circuitous route avoiding weak bridges from a barge moored at a river or harbour. And whilst you could scrub out the tracks once built developers probably don't want to. It makes it easier to bring in equipment and parts if necessary. And provides easy access to the cables that will probably be run under the tracks.

There was some plan to build an airplane that could deliver parts. Probably useless in Europe but could work in less dense places.
by crescit_eundo | 2025-05-24 14:50:59+00:00
Dupe. Posted a number of times the past day and a half:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44072775

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063553

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44078019

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063490
by tzs | 2025-05-24 14:51:21+00:00
> The U.S., for instance, has a 2.5 percent tariff on cars imported from Germany, while Germany has a ten percent tariff on American cars. In addition, Germany’s value-added tax is remitted on exports but charged on imports. As a result, while the logos of Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Volkswagen are seen all over American roads, those of Ford and General Motors are a rare sight in Germany.

What does that part about VAT have to do with this? VAT is essentially a sales tax with a more involved collection process.

The big difference in collections is that VAT is collected at each step of the chain of manufacture and distribution but refunded if the next step is not to a consumer, whereas in sales tax it is only collected on the final sale to a consumer.

As for why VAT is remitted on exports, it is the same reason why if GM builds a Tahoe in their factory in Arlington, Texas and sells it to a dealer or consumer that is not in Texas they do not pay Texas sales tax. Sales tax and VAT are both destination based. Exports, whether from Texas or Germany, are not to the final consumer and so VAT and sales tax are not owed.

Saying that VAT has anything to do with why BMW is more common than GM in Germany makes as much sense as saying that sales tax is why GM is more common than BMW in Texas.
by stackedinserter | 2025-05-24 14:51:38+00:00
If you're ready to move to frozen salty belt to live bare minimum, why not move to a cheap country, work as English tutor for 10x quality of life?

Don't live in this area, it sucks. You'll have 8 months of miserable, not enjoyable winter with winds and freezing rains, 2 months if suffocating humid summer with mosquitos and ticks, and maybe relatively enjoyable September. Ask me how I know.
by nyoki | 2025-05-24 14:51:46+00:00
Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub, SemVer, Jekyll, etc.) has a great blog post about writing README files.

https://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-deve...

> As a byproduct of writing a Readme in order to know what you need to implement, you’ll have a very nice piece of documentation sitting in front of you. You’ll also find that it’s much easier to write this document at the beginning of the project when your excitement and motivation are at their highest. Retroactively writing a Readme is an absolute drag, and you’re sure to miss all kinds of important details when you do so.
by reaperducer | 2025-05-24 14:52:19+00:00
As a point of interest, New York Times quarterly profit is up 22% from a year ago. 250,000 new subscribers in the quarter.

11.6 million subscribers. 600,000 of them get the dead tree edition.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/business/media/new-york-t...
by practal | 2025-05-24 14:52:35+00:00
Given that I am an Isabelle user and/or developer since about 1996, similarities with Isabelle are certainly not accidental. I think Isabelle got it basically right: its only problem (in my opinion) is that it is based on intuitionistic type theory as a metalogic and not abstraction logic (nevertheless, most type theorists pretty much ignored Isabelle!). Abstraction logic has a simple semantics; ITT does not. My bet is that this conceptual simplicity is relevant in practice. We will see if that is actually the case or not. I've written a few words about that in the abstraction logic book on page 118, also available in the sample.

> — a notational reshuffling of well-trod ideas in type theory

Always fun to encounter disparaging comments (I see that you deleted the other one in the other thread), but I wrote this answer more for the other readers than for you.
Show HN: Search Google and Bing at the same time
by thefilmore | 2025-05-24 14:52:38+00:00
I noticed the quality of Google search results was sometimes poorer than Bing's, so I created this page to search both and I've been using it as my default search engine for the past week. Note that you'll need to open Google result links in a new tab due to the cross-origin policy.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-24 14:53:16+00:00
I did read the paper. One of their conclusions is that it's less likely for people to engage in criticial thinking the more they trust AI. Which to me implies that widespread AI usage will lead to a diminishment of people even practicising critical thinking, which in turn will lead to a overall degradation of the skill. From the paper: "Moreover, while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving."

> Yeah, but then you're in a foreign country or whatever, you understand that was just an example right? To illustrate something... Have some imagination.

I haven't seen a convincing example yet.

> Right, I'm not claiming it's impossible to "learn X quickly without AI", but I would make the claim that I can learn X faster with AI, than without. YMMV and all that.

Again, I wonder if that's true. Because skim-learning, IMO, does not lead to much real learning in the long run. Like I knew a guy in grad school who did that, and could come up with answers faster at first. But after a couple weeks, he had a very sketchy knowledge of the subject and had to keep looking things up whereas people who were more systematic at learning could answer questions without any reference at all.

I'm not saying skim-learning is bad, sometimes it is necessary but in general, AI takes it too far for the average person and it will most likely lead to mental degradation.
by chamomeal | 2025-05-24 14:53:29+00:00
I’ve heard that using effect in TS almost like using another language. Like it’s “all or nothing”, either your whole program is using effect or it’s not. But obvi you can still use all of typescript’s features and ecosystem.

Do you also feel like effect is “or or nothing”? Or could you enclose certain parts of a program into effect parts?
by lelanthran | 2025-05-24 14:53:31+00:00
I'm sceptical of 40 PRs per day.

In an 8 hour workday you are merging one new PR every 12 minutes?

I'm very sceptical that anyone can review a significant chunk of code that fast, unless these are all one and two liners that pass review on the first go.

In this best case scenario, where no review results in reworking the PR, and you can review and merge every 12 minutes, without any breaks of any sort, why is your review even required?
by skybrian | 2025-05-24 14:53:47+00:00
In languages like JavaScript, function calls that can throw are completely indistinguishable. In Go, calling a function that can fail is explicit and takes three lines of boilerplate, if you just want to propagate the error. That seems like too much. Rust has the ‘?’ operator, which is one character of boilerplate.

Though it does add noise, one character of boilerplate to indicate a function call that uses effects seems like the right amount? Functions that use lots of effects will likely have this character on every function call, but that seems like a good indicator that it’s tricky code.
by graycat | 2025-05-24 14:54:11+00:00
> Trump administration halts Harvard's ability to enroll international students

Sounds catastrophic!

Ah, at no risk are the books and papers, the famous research professors, and their late grad students, and apparently in simple terms (except for just money), that's about all such a university cares about.

So, not much of a catastrophe! Only partially sarcastic!
by xg15 | 2025-05-24 14:55:47+00:00
Interesting that suddenly they promote one very specific finding from cellular biology so they can say "our religious belief is scientifically proven", but reject much more established understandings of embryonic cells when it comes to questions of e.g. abortion or origins of life.

I'd argue that science is not an a la carte menu where you can pick facts if they happen to support your argument...
by antirez | 2025-05-24 14:55:57+00:00
I think that LLMs already changed the way we code, mostly, but I believe that agentic coding (vibe coding) is right now able to produce only bad results, and that the better approach is to use LLMs only to augment the programmer work (however it should be noted that I'm all for vibe coding for people that can't code, or that can't find the right motivation. I just believe that the excellence in the field is human+LLM). So failing to learn LLMs right now is yet not catastrophic, but creates a disadvantage because certain things become more explorable / faster with the help of 200 yet-not-so-smart PHDs in all the human disciplines. However other than that, there is the fact that this is the biggest technology emerging to date, so I can't find a good reason for not learning it.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-24 14:56:46+00:00
It's hard to believe that as a society we are prioritizing AI queries (which are fine, nothing wrong with them in principle, and they do increase productivity in some cases) over the future wellbeing of our species (and planet). Winter is Coming, and these big companies and their investors couldn't care less.

I can't decide whether they think it won't be that bad, or the scientific forecasts are wrong, or that they just don't care because whatever turmoil results from serious climate change, they'll be able to rise above it, and well, fuck the rest of humanity.

I'm disgusted by our sense of priorities. (Though maybe I shouldn't be since we live in a country that values subsidizing the industrial-military complex over the health and education of its citizens.)
by yoz-y | 2025-05-24 14:56:47+00:00
What I’d like is a utility library like this, but instead of it being an actual library, be it some utility that generates a single file with exports of the few functions I need. Even just something that would make copy pasting them easier.

As in, I want actual zero dependencies, not even the library itself. The reason: I never want these to randomly update.
by nkurz | 2025-05-24 14:57:45+00:00
Sure, that sounds like a great target to aim for, and I think Pinker would agree. Private schools like Harvard should be able to run their school however they want, as should Bob Jones, or Reed, or Hillsdale, or whomever.

They should all obey the same laws, fairly and equally enforced, and either all of them or none of them should be taking public funds. Do you think that's where we're currently at? If not, how do we get there?
by mvkel | 2025-05-24 14:58:29+00:00
This is a great reply, thank you.

For me, I just zoom out a little further and say: at the rate AGI is approaching, what is the utility in trying to regulate it ahead of time?

Seems like advancement is slow enough that society can/will naturally regulate it based on what feels comfortable.

And it's a global phenomenon that can't have rules applied at the protocol level like the internet, because it's so culturally subjective.

Precedents need to be set first, and I think we'll only be able to call them when we see them.
by msephton | 2025-05-24 14:58:41+00:00
You might try, on hardware or emulation: Poco (modern macOS), Blue Paint (classic Macintosh), NewtPaint (Newton), MoePaint (Palm), CHEESE 2 (MSX), Airbrush (PC-100), Ink Pot (PC-88), ESQUISSE, Multi Paint System, Z's STAFF (PC-98), GraphicsGale, Easy Paint Tool SAI (Windows 9x to current), JINZO Paint (Windows CE, I picked this up recently to added fixes and new features), Matier, Full Color Paint Tool SAI, G-TOOL (X68000)
by jeltz | 2025-05-24 14:59:11+00:00
Celsius is the clearly more human scale. Zero is when water freezes which is very useful of you live where it is cold. Lakes freeze, snow does not melt and the ground gets icy so you have to be careful when you walk and drive. It is also useful when storing food. And 100 degrees is useful when cooking.

For other measueres you may have a point but Celsius is defined around very useful points. Water is very important to us humans.
by kevmo314 | 2025-05-24 14:59:20+00:00
I’m not convinced by the loops proposal. TensorFlow had this kind of lazy evaluation (except I guess TF was the worst of both worlds) and it makes debugging very difficult to the point that I believe it’s the main reason PyTorch won out. Such systems are great if they work perfectly but they never do.

NumPy definitely has some rough edges, I sympathize with the frustrations for sure.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-05-24 14:59:45+00:00
Spending billions to buy Activision-Blizzard-King ? I haven't heard about Microsoft giving up on Xbox ? And in the last few months Windows 10 has started nagging (via notifications!) about Game Pass.

Valve is a private company led by Gabe Newell. Once he's gone and Valve goes public, Valve will become evil too. And people who relied too much on Steam will be sorry.
by projektfu | 2025-05-24 14:59:46+00:00
Yeah, it will hopefully improve with more exposure. Even suburban NY was highly racist in the 80s, maybe by the 2040s with more diversity it will be better in rural NY. But one thing I noticed as a young man road tripping through the South in the 90s was that the racism was a different species from Northern racism. In Birmingham, AL, I found people relating to each other like normal people. Birmingham, where they used water cannon and dogs against marchers and blew up a church in the 60s. In rural Ohio, a black friend of mine walked into a breakfast restaurant with me and had dozens of pairs of eyes staring at him like he had just announced he's robbing the place. It wasn't until I learned the history of sundown towns that I understood the racism of the North and its place in Segregated America.
by practal | 2025-05-24 15:00:04+00:00
I routinely describe code that I want in natural language, and it generates correct TypeScript code for me automatically. When it gets something wrong, I see that it is because of missing information, not because it is not smart enough. If I needed any more evidence for Strong AI since AlphaGo, that would be it.

I wouldn't call it vibe coding; I just have much more time to focus on the spec than on the code. I'd call that a sufficiently smart compiler.
by tikhonj | 2025-05-24 15:00:41+00:00
The real question—to which I have absolutely no answer—is not about syntax, it's about concepts: what is a better way to think about higher-dimensional arrays rather than loops and indices? I'm convinced that something better exists and, if it existed, encoding it in a sufficiently expressive (ie probably not-Python) language would give us the corresponding syntax, but trying to come up with a better syntax without a better conceptual model won't get us very far.

Then again, maybe even that is wrong! "Notation as a tool for thought" and all that. Maybe "dimension-munging" in APL really is the best way to do these things, once you really understand it.
by _m_p | 2025-05-24 15:01:19+00:00
English lit as a discipline has pretty strongly repudiated the discipline of "close reading" (and the "New Criticism" that buttressed it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism) in favor of whatever else it is that English professors now do in classes, so it's not surprising that...

> The competent readers in our study... constituted 38 percent (or 32 of the 85) of our subjects

Seems like there's a strong case for moving English 101 type classes, which are required and very heavily subsidize the existence of English departments, into Communications or elsewhere.
by mtkd | 2025-05-24 15:02:55+00:00
SaaS companies tended to need material engineering resource due to the software stacks and squad-style team structures in place -- also leaned heavily on costly metered infra

I'm not seeing anything like the same level of heads or stack complexity in this wave (Vercel, Firebase etc.), and the vendors involved get cheaper every day ... along with increasing ability to run models locally with no metered costs at all
by UK-AL | 2025-05-24 15:04:10+00:00
Did you go to same university, the same clubs?

Have a look at lot of founders on linkedin. You'll notice a lot go to the same small set of universities, or worked for same companies. Then there's the odd exception. But they're the exception.

Its silly to think talent is actually that concentrated.

I think everybody knows why some people can get investment to literally throw down the drain on insane moon shots, while others struggle to even survive. I'm sure lots of people have moonshot ideas that might work. Only a very small in group get investment.
by impendia | 2025-05-24 15:04:21+00:00
If we're to take your claims at face value, can we make any conclusions about the past at all?

For example, suppose that I were to claim that the universe is exactly one hundred years old. George Washington, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, dinosaurs, etc. are all figments of our collective imagination.

If you deny the validity of research that makes conclusions about the past, on the grounds that such claims can't be tested or falsified -- then have you left yourself any means of making a counterargument?
by diggan | 2025-05-24 15:04:25+00:00
I thought they removed that, even with a hardware Kindle? I managed to download all my ebooks via a python script before that, as I've purchased 100s of books via Kindle throughout the years, but seems they've disabled the approach I took at least:

> As of 26th February 2025, Amazon has removed the ability to download backups of your Kindle books. Unfortunately, this means that this tool is no longer functional - https://github.com/treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader

After removing that feature I kind of feel like it'll just be too much of a hassle, so stopped buying books via Kindle. But haven't found any better alternative either to be honest.
by tocs3 | 2025-05-24 15:05:32+00:00
The first buyers of Altair could not find it in any shop. Every transaction occurred via a check sent to MITS, sight unseen, in the hopes of receiving a computer in exchange.

I remember looking at lots of the add in the back of all the magazines and comic books (and paperbacks) being amazed at all the stuff on offer. Just send a check or money order and get you own ...

Then in the 1990's with internet commerce getting started I remember a lot of skepticism with comments like "who would send money to someone they have never met".

No drawing any conclusions here, just looking back and seeing similarities and changes.
by detaro | 2025-05-24 15:05:53+00:00
EU distribution center is a proxy for "seller handles VAT and it wont be my problem as a customer to deal with the border authorities or the shipping company that in turn is dealing with the border authorities". VAT and tariffs get paid either way, but as a consumer I very much like it if its your problem, not mine, and "we ship from an EU location" is a very obvious way of ensuring that.
by mpascale00 | 2025-05-24 15:07:03+00:00
In the way that `ggplot2` tries to abstract those common "high dimensional" graphing components into an intuitive grammar, such that you may in many places be able to guess the sequence of commands correctly, I would love to see an equivalent ergonomic notation. This gets part way there by acknowledging the problem.

Mathematical operations aren't obliged to respect the Zen of Python, but I like the thought that we could make it so that most have an obvious expression.
by thinkxl | 2025-05-24 15:07:08+00:00
Additionally, the explanation might work for the exec asking the question, but not for others.

I don't like that executives don't have to put in the effort to communicate their concerns and put pressure on the people who already have the pressure of researching, validating, and presenting the solution.

I'm probably going deeper than I should. Still, if the executive asking the question isn't technical, he could direct the question to the executive who's supposed to have a technical background that earned their position in the company. You know, people making decisions should have an understanding of what they are building/selling.