MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2025-05-19 05:51:28+00:00
The 100K is a big problem.

The library doesn't even approximate a substitute. Maybe you are a genius, but almost everyone needs teachers. Even experts need people to teach them new things, to mentor them, etc. They also need labs and equipment.

Also, the library you need for real reasearch is not free. It only exists in academia. Your local public library doesn't give you access to nearly the same resources, nor the essential reference librarians. (Maybe the NY Public Library? Does that have JSTOR, for example?)
by microtonal | 2025-05-19 05:51:29+00:00
Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device.

Also, Obsidian supports free iCloud sync if you are a Mac and iOS user. I know that's only a subset of users, but a nice option to get Obsidian to sync on the phone if you are in the Apple ecosystem.

Also, they have a cheaper Sync plan now that is $4 per month.

I can't really be bothered that Sync would cost up to 1000 in ten years. If you use Obsidian daily, it had an immensive value and it's cheaper than most services out there.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-19 05:52:27+00:00
The "natural ID" for people design reminds me of a story from a state department of education: They had two students, both named John Smith Jr. They were identical twins and attending the same class.

They had the same birth date, school, parents, phone number, street address, first name, last name, school, teachers, everything...

The story was that their dad was John Smith Sr in a long line of John Smiths going back a dozen generations. It was "a thing" for the family line, and there was no way he was going to break centuries of tradition just because he happened to have twins.

Note: In very junior grades the kids aren't expected to memorise and use a student ID because they haven't (officially) learned to read and write yet! (I didn't use one until University.)
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-19 05:53:43+00:00
This takes an overly simple view of what domains can look like. There are data models that necessarily violate these principles, and they aren’t all that rare.

Some examples:

> A relation should be identified by a natural key that reflects the entity’s essential, domain-defined identity

In some domains there is no natural key because the identity is literally an inference problem and relations are probabilistic. The objective of the data model is to aggregate enough records to discover and attribute natural keys with some level of confidence. A common class of data models with this property are entity resolution data models.

> All information in the database is represented explicitly and in exactly one way

Some data models have famously dual natures. Cartographic data models, for example, must be represented both as a graph models (for routing and reachability relationships) and as geometric models (for spatial relationships). The “one true representation” has been a perennial argument in mapping for my entire life and both sides are demonstrably correct.

> Every base relation should be in its highest normal form (3, 5 or 6th normal form).

This is one of those things that sounds attractive because it ignores that it requires no ambiguities about domain boundaries or semantics, which doesn’t exist in practice. I bought into this idea too when I was a young and naive data modeler. Trying to tamp out these ambiguities adds an unbounded number of data model epicycles that add a lot of complexity and performance loss. At some point, strict normalization is not worth the cost in several aspects.

In almost all cases, it is far more important that the data model be efficient to work with than it be the abstract platonic ideal of a domain model. All of these principles have to work on real hardware in real operational environments with all of the messy limitations that implies.
by lemming | 2025-05-19 05:56:05+00:00
The code behind this was posted a while back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43739456), but this project now has a nice easy to use UI. Here's the accompanying video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ42uIVGFA4.

I'm not affiliated with the project, but I think that PocketFlow is really nice, and I love the example projects Zachary uses.

Edit: There was also some interesting critical feedback on the produced documentation: https://technicalwriting.dev/ml/pocketflow/index.html
by bruce511 | 2025-05-19 05:56:27+00:00
I'm with you. I've used natural keys in the past, and they've always been a problem eventually.

On the other hand I've used surrogate keys for 20 years, and never encountered an issue that wasn't simple to resolve.

I get there are different camps here, and yes your context matters, but "I'm not really interested in why natural keys worked for you." They don't work for me. So arguments for natural keys are kinda meh.

I guess they work for some folk (shrug).
by kamaal | 2025-05-19 05:56:57+00:00
>>The one thing you'd think it gives them is freedom, but they all pretty much end up working til they die so I don't know.

I was having this conversation about this colleague a few weeks back about another colleague we knew who made it big working at a start up. You would expect he has lots of free time and mental space at hand to do whatever he wants, instead it turns out he has to now worry about managing that money.

And its not exactly a easy job. Managing big money can be hard as any loss even a small percentage is a lot of money. And that begins to weigh heavily on you in form of stress as there is a lots at stake.

>>Like the Bill Murray quote about people who want to be rich & famous should try just being rich first.

Absolutely there is big difference between 'comfortably rich' and 'having to worry day and night for your money'. You would expect more of a thing make things awesome as you go, but as it turns out there is a counterintuitive aspect to this.

Plus announcing your success to friends and family can bring unexpected complications. People begin to think you owe them things, and they are entitled to it. And saying no can be quite tricky, and make you look evil.
by riggsdk | 2025-05-19 05:57:22+00:00
BGFX (https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx) uses a different approach. You basically write your shader in a GLSL-like language but it's all just (either very clever or very horrible) macro expansions that handles all the platform differences. With that you get a very performant backend for OpenGL, WebGL, Vulkan, Metal, Direct3D 11 and 12 and Playstation. It's shader compiler program basically does minimal source level transformations before handing it over to the platforms' own shader compiler if available.
by moralestapia | 2025-05-19 05:58:00+00:00
I don't believe that, our senses are extremely (extreeeemeeeelyyy to the absolute extreme) sensitive. Our nose can detect single molecules and their chirality, our eyes can detect single photons under some conditions. We might be able to detect quantum phenomena as well ...

Are you suggesting this light is of lower intensity than what a single photon puts out? Explain your reasoning.
by theshrike79 | 2025-05-19 05:58:25+00:00
You can always run Headscale: https://tailscale.com/opensource#encouraging-headscale

> Headscale is a re-implemented version of the Tailscale coordination server, developed independently and completely separate from Tailscale. Headscale is a project that complements Tailscale — with its own independent community of users and developers. Tailscale does not set Headscale’s product direction or manage the community, and neither prohibits nor requires employees from contributing to Headscale.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-19 05:58:55+00:00
Ok, but you'd agree that we shouldn't allow, say, an offensive word for a specific race to be used right? Because that would be actively harmful to many people.

So we make a rule saying "you can't use word X". So someone submits a plate that is X but... with a number replacing a letter. It's not against the rules, but it's still actively harmful because a human subjectively reads it as the banned word. So you expand the rule, but then language changes, etc etc. Surely you need to have a subjective judgement process because the interpretation/harm is subjective?

I'll grant you that finding the right balance here, or where the line is, is a hard problem. This list to me however shows that it can be achieved in a reasonable way.

Alternatively if you think that people should be allowed to use widely recognised, highly derogatory words for other people as number plates, that rules like being 6 characters is strictly sufficient, then I think we disagree too much to resolve.
by max51 | 2025-05-19 05:59:00+00:00
We used TI-Nspire CX CAS at my university but it was banned in the first half of the calculus 1 course. It would really make no sense to allow you to bring one to an exam where many questions are one liners, or close to it (eg. "find the derivative of f(x)=7x^5+10"). IIRC, they also banned it in a calc 2 exam. Almost all other courses allowed them and they exams where designed for it (eg. 8 big problems instead of 2).
by edanm | 2025-05-19 06:01:26+00:00
Not true for a variety of reasons:

1. You're relying on the external service to continue providing the export functionality, or else doing regular backups.

2. The format of the exports might be proprietary, so it might be orders of magnitude more difficult to parse.

3. The export might not contain all the data.

4. Even if the export isn't to a proprietary format, it might be to a format that's much harder to parse than Markdown. Markdown is not only a standard, it's fairly readable even without any parsing, as opposed to, say, exporting in HTML. Losing some functionality (often minor, depending on what you use Obsidian for) is better than losing more or all functionality.
by MoonGhost | 2025-05-19 06:02:25+00:00
Not sure Dynamixel or other servo is a good choice for dynamic locomotion. In high end they use large brushless motors with minimum gear. Just look at latest dog and humanoid from Boston Dynamics or Chinese Unitree(?) and nonames. The reason is for dynamics it has to be fast and strong. For sensors they use gyro/accelerometer in the body as main. Advanced models use pressure sensors in feet. Looks like they are needed for precision acrobatics. And rotary encoders in all joints, of course.
by roenxi | 2025-05-19 06:02:31+00:00
> When did this become a factor?!

Spivak's comment justified pump installations because of positive externalities. Which is a good justification; but as far as I know nothing similar exists for $150 million of spend on solar panels. Is there a benefit here I can't see? Do these panels protect against storms or something?

> In Pennsylvania? This is how you get solar banned.

Possibly. It is still a better plan than what the article suggests. Buying these panels looks like a mistake from all the angles I can think of. If Pennsylvania's legislature has the numbers and view that it worth making uneconomic decisions for these households there isn't a good reason to leave the non-renewable sources of power operating. In the converse, if they don't have the number or the view then they just shouldn't be making uneconomic spending decisions when they could give the people involved the money as welfare, but more of it.

This appears superficially like it is an unprincipled position that creates no particular benefits but in a wasteful way. Maybe it isn't, but if it isn't it'd be helpful if someone outlined why not.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-05-19 06:04:31+00:00
Electricity in the US currently hovers around 20 cents per kWh; 1 kWh gets you somewhere on the order of 1000 ChatGPT queries. So that's about 0.02 cents per query.

At the current US federal minimum wage of $7.25, that means you would need to work for about 0.1 seconds to afford the electricity bill for one query. Maybe 1 full second for one of the really hard ones.

So my serious answer to your question is, I'm pretty sure these disenfranchised groups can find room in their budget for a query or two if they think it's worth doing. In fact, they might even find ways to save more than 1 second by using that query, in which case they can produce more economic value... And so society gets richer.
by pflenker | 2025-05-19 06:04:35+00:00
To add to your last point - 10 years is a very long time frame. Any recurring cost grows to eye-watering levels if the time interval is huge enough. In 10 years, a lot can happen in the space and you are not locked in with obsidian - if the next better thing comes along in 3 years, you can easily migrate.
by trinsic2 | 2025-05-19 06:04:52+00:00
Yeah I just wanted to chime in here on what i see as a world view problem that might need to be updated with the times. I see your point about everything being subscription based.

There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based. But there are some developers that I think should be supported on a regular basis. Especially obsidian because they develop one product and continually work on it to make it better. IMHO they deserve the money.

On side note I wish there was a way for it to be open source, and the team's reasons for not supporting open source seems a little iffy. They could still make money of of Obsidain Sync or other features that does not need to be part of a Open Source Release. Commercialism of a project this important worries me because people that depend on it can be easy side-lined if the team decides to sell out. Look what happened to the Atom editor. Microsoft brought it then killed it. I know with Obsidian you can walk away from it and thats good, but I always worry about commercial domination of a market causing limited choice.

I know your point was about subscriptions, and I guess I am saying im more supportive of that model, based on the times we are in, for developers that have genuine passion for a project that they want to continue developing.

Heck I know am realizing I need to support open source projects with regular donations because I want them to thrive long term
by bernb | 2025-05-19 06:06:15+00:00
I don't think your provoking theory holds because before the massacre on 7th October, the situation between Gaza and Israel was improving. That's also why intelligence didn't think Hamas would start such a massacre.

Israel tends to eventually destroy infrastructure that's (dual-)used to increase Hamas terror infrastructure. Unfortunately, that's virtually all of existing infrastructure right now.

Why hasn't Gaza normalized it's relationship with Egypt? They have closed their borders to Gaza as well because Hamas is friends with Muslim brotherhood and apparently Egypt thinks a proper border with Gaza would do harm to Egypt.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-19 06:06:59+00:00
Or Pope Leo XIV could be the next "Tower of Babel".

A degree in math doesn't necessarily anoint him with deep or special insight into the nature of AI. But that doesn't stop him from babbling about it destroying humanity.

Leo XIV's views on AI may very well be similar to Leo XIII's views on industrialization --- which is to say overwrought.
by bemmu | 2025-05-19 06:07:21+00:00
But that's the thing, if you'd no longer need to think in money-constrained terms, then instead you'd just want to make something happen in the world. It doesn't need to have a financial return, because your finances would be solved already.

Suppose you have more than enough money for you and your family to live out their lives without needing to worry about that. Now that's solved, you can move on to what you actually want to happen in your life, such as helping your kids become pro athletes.
by theshrike79 | 2025-05-19 06:08:10+00:00
For me it was the It Just Works-iness of it combined with a handy way to support the project cheaply.

As long as I'm paying for it, I'm the client and not the product.

I tried some of the third party stuff, iCloud, Dropbox, etc and with all of them I either lost data because of notes not being in sync or had to manually fix stuff. $4/month and zero issues was well worth it for a tool I literally use every day.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-19 06:08:11+00:00
> Allowing a client to generate IDs can be a big help here (ie UUIDs)

Trusting the client to generate a high-quality ID has a long history of being a bad idea in practice. It requires the client to not be misconfigured, to not be hacked, to not be malicious, to not have hardware bugs, etc. A single server can generate hundreds of millions of IDs per second and provides a single point of monitoring and control.
by kmmlng | 2025-05-19 06:08:22+00:00
That's fair enough, there are problems with this way of thinking. I suppose you could say the take-away should be "Don't donate to charities where close to your whole donation will be absorbed as administrative costs". There definitely are black sheep that act this way and they probably served as the original motivation for EA. It's a logical next step to come up with a way to systematically identify these black sheep. That is probably the point where this approach should have stopped.
by viraptor | 2025-05-19 06:08:23+00:00
Oh no... Ok, Miele rant - I got a whole set in the new house. Their firmware SUCKS. Turning on the oven/dishwasher takes 5-10s. The dishwasher takes 3 power button presses with no feedback. The oven has no indication when it starts turning on and it's a touchpanel, so you stand there like an idiot deciding is the next press will work or be perfectly timed to turn it off again. Then once you start the drying after steaming, you can't cancel (~20min). The washer needs a strong long press on "start" because it's somehow read twice in software and you can get into an in-between state where the controls go away but the washing doesn't start. ("Known issue, press harder") Their kitchen extractor fan has "loud" and "jet engine" settings. (At least that one's hardware)

Would not recommend this to anyone who can't easily test them in a showroom and even then not really... They do the actual job well, but their UX makes me angry every day.

The biggest difference more money would make is that I could have someone else deal with those issues.
by mvdtnz | 2025-05-19 06:08:27+00:00
This is a very interesting article, it was fun to learn what shaders are and why I have to wait for them to compile every time I play Call of Duty.

What I'd like to know is why game developers can't provide a service / daemon that will perform shader compilation when shaders or drivers change so I don't need to waste 25 minutes of my precious gaming time when I load CoD and see they need compiling. My computer has been sitting there unused all week. Steam was smart enough to download game updates in that time, why isn't your game smart enough to recompile my shaders on an idle machine?
by fy20 | 2025-05-19 06:09:18+00:00
I'd disagree, once you get wealthy (and it doesn't even need to be that much), you can:

- schedule beauty appointments to fix how you look

- go on coaching sessions to increase your confidence and how you socialize

- take people out on dates without thinking "oh that's a bit expensive"

- buy dating coaches who understand the psychology behind dating and successful relationships

- buy therapists to heal your past traumas

Love is still not guaranteed, but you can do a lot to increase your odds.
by bizzleDawg | 2025-05-19 06:09:30+00:00
I'm in a similar position of never having found a use where memorising lots of facts would be useful. The main use I keep seeing is vocabulary building when learning a language. I'm sure people are using the system for learning other stuff too though?

Seeing this did make me wonder how I might be able to get better at memorising important parts of iso/iec standards at work, but I can't see how that maps to flashcards
by cess11 | 2025-05-19 06:09:39+00:00
Since you bring him up specifically I'm guessing you already know he's a capitalist but is perfectly fine with hereditary wealth extracted from other people's labour, so maybe look into his predatory practices towards the poor, e.g. in lending, or other corporations.

Perhaps you also recognise this quote:

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-19 06:09:48+00:00
I've got a few lighting automations (turning the lights on when I come home, dimming the lights at night, etc.) and I disagree on the idea that home automation makes things all that much worse.

It doesn't take that much effort to find smart devices with a manual override button. As for lights, the IKEA ones I have are programmed to turn on after cutting the power regardless of smart setting, so all of my physical light switches still work if my automations fail. Toggling them that way kind of screws up the Zigbee network, but I'm not losing any functionality if the Zigbee controller dies.

As for the blinds, you have to place those strategically. You wouldn't be the first one to come out of bed or out of the shower and surprise flashing your neighbours because the smart blinds opened without you noticing.
by sfeng | 2025-05-19 06:10:43+00:00
What so many people fail to realize is the true purpose of money is to avoid having to spend time with people you don’t like, or do things you don’t value. So if you have a $400/million per month job, but you have to have meetings all day long, you’re not really rich. Similarly, no offense to billionaires, but the ones I’ve met have been someone manic and misanthropic. If you are using your access to spend your time with them, you are not really rich in my book.

True wealth is being able to spend all your time doing things with and for people you love. It sounds trite, but the truth is many people miss the opportunity to jump off the train and enjoy their life while they can.
by fermigier | 2025-05-19 06:10:46+00:00
"Yet most of the public money goes to proprietary software, and Open Source is the exception." → I've asked, twice, for the CNLL, the French Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes) to work towards giving precise figures. This was rejected, but may reappear in a different form (given that the Court is currently running an enquiry on digital sovereignty - I hope, but I doubt, that they will be able to pull precise figures).
by theshrike79 | 2025-05-19 06:10:52+00:00
People are really bad with quantifying things.

I can easily grab a few imperial stouts for the weekend for 20€ but will balk at paying for a search engine.

Until I did the math of use per euro and Kagi turned out to be well worth it. I just drink one beer less a month and it's paid for and I'm healthier too =)
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-05-19 06:11:21+00:00
This was the most demonstrative part for me:

PERSPECTIVE. The wealthiest person I have spent time with makes about $400mm/year. i couldn't get my mind around that until I did this: OK--let's compare it with someone who makes $40,000/year. It is 10,000x more. Now let's look at prices the way he might. A new Lambo--$235,000 becaome $23.50. First class ticket internationally? $10,000 becomes $1. A full time executive level helper? $8,000/month becomes $0.80/month. A $10mm piece of art you love? $1000. Expensive, so you have to plan a bit. A suite at the best hotel in NYC $10,000/night is $1/night. A $50million home in the Hamptons? $5,000.

My issue with this level of 'earning' is, it feels entirely like stealing from them would be justified since they're most obviously stealing a whole lot from the rest of the world.

What products can I buy that don't filter up some percentage into these billionaires bank accounts?