MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rafd | 2025-05-21 15:13:17+00:00
Terry Bouricius (Vermont politician) has a draft book on this topic (link below). He used to be a strong advocate for electoral reform, but after seeing Citizen Assemblies in action, now advocates for Sortition.

He has some interesting ideas about how to structure a modern government with sortition - it wouldn't just be replacing the House and Senate with randomly selected representatives, but, instead: having more smaller bodies with more limited scope (ex. a body for defining the rules of bodies), and spinning out a new group for every major law proposal.

My favorite discovery on this topic (mentioned in the book), were letters between the Founding Fathers of the US where they explicitly discussed not having "democracy" in the United States, because it would give too much power to the people, and so they purposefully chose an election based system because it allowed for elites to retain control by using money to run campaigns (note also: "democracy" at the time referred exclusively to Athenian style democracy).

https://democracycreative.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-el...
by zaphar | 2025-05-21 15:13:17+00:00
Taxes don't remove money from the supply unless the government is refusing to spend it. In which case that is just "reduce your budget and spend less" with extra steps. If you could do one you could do the other just as easily.

And letting bubbles pop isn't an MMT thing. It's bog-standard economic theory. The fact that politicians often don't do it has nothing to do with which theory they subscribe to. It's just cowardice on their part.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-21 15:13:20+00:00
It is a general UUID specification problem. The dashes represent a struct breakdown. That struct has internal endian issues. That struct is also weirdly laid out in a "made sense at the v1 time way" that doesn't make sense for versions after 1. Why is the version number in the middle? Why is the relatively static "Machine ID" at the end? If you were trying to cluster your sort by machine, you have to sort things "backwards". That's what SQL Server did, and why you might blame it on being a Microsoft problem, trying to avoid clustered index churn by assuming GUIDs were inserted by static Machine IDs. That assumption broke hard in later Versions of UUID when "Machine ID" just became "random entropy". But the idea to sort like that in the first place wasn't wrong for v1, it had a good sense to it. Just like it makes sense to sort v7 UUIDs by timestamp to get mostly "log ordered" clustered indexes. At least there the sort data is all up front, but it crosses "struct field" boundaries if you are still relying on the v1 chunking.

(Ultimately UUID v1 was full of mistakes that we all will keep paying for.)

For the record it is Java with the worst possible UUID sort algorithm, sorting parts of it as signed numbers: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190913-00/?p=10...

(Friends don't let friends use Java. /s)
by KaisoEnt | 2025-05-21 15:13:43+00:00
I'm in the film & television industry.

I just turned 30, and I'm now freelance producing. I'm attached to a lot of great projects in development. The next stage of my business needs capital to grow efficiently. The term on my contracts have a limited window, so I'll need to move as quickly as possible. More capital will also allow me to continue to develop the IP rights I've acquired at the highest level, with the highest caliber of partners.

I don't want my website to be obnoxious.

I need it to validate me and legitimize me, especially when I do cold-outreach via e-mail, and folks then have to Google me to see if I'm someone who's legitimate. So my website has my bio and resume.

But I'm wondering if there's some psychological things I'm missing from what a great web page can do for a freelance producer like myself.

I also am not the most web savvy person, or if I can be, I just don't have too much time to curate something.

I have a preference for minimalism.

I built all of this in Canva. I understand that might limit my SEO growth.

But most folks only find my website from my Instagram account (@deboulay.mxf), my Linkedin (@mrdeboulay), my X page (@mrdeboulay), or from the domain that's in my e-mail (msg@danieldeboulay.com).

I don't know if more inbound calls is what I need. So SEO isn't extremely my concern, but I'm open to some advice on all of this because I'm only thirty years old and eager to learn.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-21 15:14:09+00:00
> It's easy to live without IPv6 until someone creates the IPv6-only killer app

This was a few years ago, but the majority of Danish ISP wasn't offering IPv6, because "there's is no demand from customers". Well, the customers also aren't demanding IPv4, they are demanding internet access. How you deliver it is not interesting to anyone but a small niche segment of the market. If you could somehow make it work over IPX, then 95% of customers would be fine with that, it's not something they care about.
by toss1 | 2025-05-21 15:14:22+00:00
I've long thought sortition could be adapted for our government and make it more democratic. Properly randomized selection among the qualified and willing would ensure no one has a sufficient chance of great power to make it worth attempting to plot to exploit the system for their benefit (although some opportunist would try while in office). I'd have it work something like the following:

Once a person has achieved a certain level of demonstrated competence and responsibility, they are entered into the pool. The criteria might include a college degree, certain military rank, level of business responsibility, running a charity of a certain size and success level, etc.

The willing must also pass a series of tests, e.g., the standard security clearance, citizenship test, knowledge of humanitites, science, technology, history, finance, and law, and be vetted with a background check filtering out criminal behavior, tax evasion, etc. Once in the pool, it is like Jury Duty; your number comes up, you get a quick screen for the office, exemptions for hardship (so the alternate is picked) and that will be your job for the term.

To mitigate the problem of everyone in govt being newbies, once in office, any official can stand for a confidence/no-confidence vote for re-election for one or two terms (depending on the office).

The pay would be the greater of the 75th percentile earnings or 100% of the officials documented income for the previous three years.

Obviously, this is a mere headline sketch and needs many more details and suggestions to work, but it seems it would improve on the current situation.

Thoughts?
by jmull | 2025-05-21 15:14:28+00:00
For purely mathematical properties, a purely mathematical technique is probably best.

But "is commutative" is just an example here (one of the topics of this post is how simplistic examples can mislead people as to the usefulness of a given verification technique).

The general point of software verification is to ensure the software "does what I want". But in a very large proportion of cases, people aren't clear on precisely what they want. They could not use a formal method because they could not write a formal specification. A nice thing about unit tests is that you can work through your expectations iteratively and incrementally, broadening and deepening your understanding of exactly what the software should do, capturing each insight along the way in a reusable way.
by jandrese | 2025-05-21 15:14:43+00:00
Costs are also high for solar installers in the US. It is a relatively dangerous job (on par with roofers) which makes health insurance premiums unaffordable. The permitting process is also quite onerous in a great many localities, involving multiple parties (your installer, the HOA, the city, the county, the power company) and multiple inspections. US installers also tend to provide generous warranty plans, 15 years parts and labor is typical, and have to make sure they have the capital to honor them. This is especially a problem as some solar hardware manufacturers have had some serious quality control issues, especially on the inverters, and have resulted in quite a lot more warranty work than was initially expected.

The other issue was just plain pent-up demand. Installers could charge what they wanted because there weren't enough of them to go around, even as everybody and their dog started their own installer business. Many of those businesses were poorly run and have since gone under, leaving the homeowners high and dry when the inverter craps out and they're told by every other installer that they will not work on someone else's install and also told by the inverter manufacturer that if they attempt to replace the hardware themselves it will result in their warranty being voided.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-05-21 15:15:02+00:00
Even if you're just sort of leaning onto one of those things, it looks like there's absolutely no room for anyone's knees.

And what happens if you're shorter or taller than the norm? One hopes you can at least adjust these up and down - otherwise, a tall person will effectively be fully seated with their knees jammed into the seat in front of them, while a short person will be able to dangle their legs.
by mediaman | 2025-05-21 15:15:04+00:00
The idea that the hard goods are sold for "imaginary numbers" is popular but a bit of a misnomer.

These "imaginary numbers" are actually claims on future income generated by the United States economy. It is true that they are "imaginary", in the sense that any property ownership is imaginary in a way that a toaster is not. The most common form is Treasuries, which the government then pays interest on and which must eventually be either repaid or rolled over.

So it would be more correct to say that China is trading hard work building goods in exchange for claims on future US income.
by pteraspidomorph | 2025-05-21 15:15:06+00:00
Speaking as someone who has been running discord servers since 2015 - plus I maintain my own discord bot and am deeply familiar with the API - it's absolute garbage as an issue tracker. People really need to stop using it for that.

I think part of the problem is that they confuse the semantics of nomenclature. "Servers" are not really servers, "forums" are not really forums, and so on and so forth.
Show HN: I made a Chrome extension that lets you add any feature to any website
by kishcha | 2025-05-21 15:15:40+00:00
I’m Kishan, founder of Magix. Magix is a Chrome extension that lets you modify and add features to any website using plain english text.

I built it because I was tired of wishing websites had useful features or layout tweaks. So instead of inspecting elements, copying code, or writing scripts, you can now just type what you want, and magix makes it happen in real time.

Example: I added a voice transcription button to Lovable (which didn’t have one) just by describing it in plain text. No code, no wait.

The modifications persist on every visit.

I'd love for the community to try it out and share any feedback, edge cases, or wild use cases you think would be cool. Thanks :)
by righthand | 2025-05-21 15:15:59+00:00
I don’t understand the “chips designed for AI workloads” sentiment I hear all the time. Llms were designed using Gpus. The hardware already exists, so what will make it use less energy in a world where Gpus over the last decade have only become bigger, hotter, more power hungry hardware? If we could develop Llm on anything less we probably would have shifted back to Cpus already.
by Henchman21 | 2025-05-21 15:16:46+00:00
It seems like you’ve missed my point utterly. My explanation was targeted at my elderly mom, not at Hacker News readers. Her responses were genuinely hers, and I think they are reasonable given her understanding and my explanation. I apologize this didn’t come across and I’ll have to rethink how I phrase something like this in the future.

That said, your response was emotional as well: as if your words were cast down from on high, a gift from the gods! Your arrogance and rudeness should inspire some self-examination, but I am not hopeful on that front.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-21 15:16:50+00:00
5-point harnesses, roll cages, seatbelt-ignition interlocks, fuel cells, fire extinguishers, and Hans devices for drivers and passengers would eliminate nearly all vehicle fatalities.

They exist today and can be added to passenger vehicles for much less than $100k.

Broadly, the only fatalities they wouldn't prevent are offset frontal crashes at speeds so great as to be unreasonable and vehicles that have driven off cliffs or into bodies of water (though many would be able to self-extricate).

These are all dumb devices, I'm sure you were thinking of an AI or self driving doohickey.

We've already gotten results from your thought experiment. The results are: "an arbitrary point where cost/convenience lines cross over, based on general consensus but mainly liability costs".

If $10k (what I spent to get my Miata track-ready) isn't the line, $100k ain't it either-- especially since my solution saves tens of thousands annually and yours, like, less than one (45k deaths * 0.001% = 0.45 lives saved annually).
by gjm11 | 2025-05-21 15:17:34+00:00
Surely this isn't quite right.

Max of variables = product of cumulative distribution functions.

Sum of variables = convolution of probability density functions.

So both of the equations you write down are correct, but only if you interpret "Distr" as meaning different things in the two cases.

[EDITED to add:] Provided the random variables in question are independent, as mentioned elsewhere in the discussion; if they aren't then none of this works.
by jayd16 | 2025-05-21 15:17:49+00:00
The usage of Excel is so hilariously cursed I can't stop thinking about it. Its just raw memory address look ups with extra steps. How did you merge the Excel file? Did you actually have source control on this?

Ok maybe a sheet is fine for a state machine if you don't care about visualizing transitions... Why reference cells when you could have named functions in a source file that could actually parse the syntax? That file would be trivially merged. You want to be loose on types so I guess its fine but you could actually have type safety and linting all the other language features and tooling if you just used a file full of named globals.

The mind boggles
by dooglius | 2025-05-21 15:18:20+00:00
There is no UB in hardware registers or physical DRAM, I don't think you actually have familiarity with how the hardware works if you make this claim. (Or perhaps you aren't familiar with how crazy "UB" in the sense of the ISO C documentation is)

EDIT: one could see "apparent" violation of memory consistency if say the cache subsystem or memory controller were misconfigured, however this would require both (1) you are running in kernel mode, not user-space (2) you have a bug, so GP's claim is not supported that bug-free code could encounter such a state.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-05-21 15:18:34+00:00
I disagree with the conclusion that "it was Windows 3.0 that put Windows on the map". The 3.0 release was, depending on your taste and requirements, pretty much equal to a lot of other desktop environments on the market at the time: OS/2, GEM, VisiON, TopView, and probably a bunch of others.

Though it looked sort-of pretty at the time, mostly compared to its previous releases, it didn't really do anything that users truly wanted from a new OS (which was, mostly, 'run Lotus or dBase better').

Only when 3.1 was released, with DPMI which, despite being a pretty obscure technology in itself, was an absolute game-changer, as well as the foundations of the never-named (but critically important) VxD "overlay OS", Windows became the powerhouse it still is, at least on the desktop, today.

The "3.11 for Workgroups" release (which should really have been 4.0: the VxD layer was greatly enhanced to great effect, and for the first time Windows had useful networking facilities!) cemented that position.

But 3.0 was really pretty "meh", and history could have gone a few other directions at the time of its release...
by ddtaylor | 2025-05-21 15:19:15+00:00
Wow. I was just grabbing some models and I happened to see this one while I was messing with tool support in LLamaIndex. I have an agentic coding thing I threw together and I have been trying different models on it and was looking to throw ReAct at it to bring in some models that don't have tool support and this just pops into existence!

I'm not able to get my agentic system to use this model though as it just says "I don't have the tools to do this". I tried modifying various agent prompts to explicitly say "Use foo tool to do bar" without any luck yet. All of the ToolSpec that I use are annotated etc. Pydantic objects and every other model has figured out how to use these tools.
by andix | 2025-05-21 15:19:20+00:00
Those representations for 127.0.0.1 work too, just try to ping them:

0177.1 (octal, 2 stripped 0s, decimal one) 017700000001 (octal) 2130706433 (decimal) 127.0.0x1 0x7f.0x0.0x0.0x1 127.000.000.001
by fwip | 2025-05-21 15:19:53+00:00
The researchers clarify that it's only those servers that are listed in the discovery tab - you don't need an invite link to join those.

> In this regard, this paper introduces the most extensive Discord dataset available to date, comprising 2,052,206,308 messages from 4,735,057 unique users across 3,167 servers – approximately 10% of the servers listed in Discord’s Discovery tab, a feature designed to highlight public servers that users can join.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-21 15:20:12+00:00
No, greed is a necessary component. Because under capitalism both parties don't execute the trade, rationally at least, unless both are greedily better off.

Without greed it goes from a positive sum system to a destructive system because you no longer have the parties being better off from the transaction. From a cursory standpoint that might be ok (the economy won't implode if some small fraction does this like a minority of commercial activity being charity functions) but you basically lose most the information conveyed in prices and cost causing complete loss of productive allocation and it is an economic implosion.
by jdietrich | 2025-05-21 15:21:10+00:00
The UK has a unique problem with demand spikes for electricity during commercial breaks, due to the British penchant for using high-power electric kettles to make tea. In the worst case, demand could rise and fall by gigawatts within a matter of minutes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA
by Sanzig | 2025-05-21 15:21:19+00:00
You'll probably catch a lot of flak for that on HN, but I 100% agree with you. Just because something is public and can be saved for later doesn't mean it should be done so en-masse.

These are social spaces where a lot of young people essentially grew up. An important part of social development is making mistakes and learning from them. How can you make mistakes when those mistakes are archived for all time for everyone to see?

Similarly, we have a huge problem right now with massive partisanship in the west. Changing one's opinion should be viewed in a positive light, but unfortunately our society doesn't seem to see it that way. Someone with an odious opinion when they were young, who changes that opinion to something more moderate when they grow up, should be viewed as a positive change. But increasingly what we're seeing is people going through data sets to find those old odious opinions of somebody when they were 14 years old and using that as proof that they must still be a terrible person at 24. It's a paranoid, completely self-defeating worldview, but unfortunately it's all too common right now, and I think it's honestly a huge reason for the massive political polarization we're seeing in the moment.

So yes, shame on these researchers. I know they claim to have anonymized the data set, but let's be honest, that never works. It's always easy to find common threads and identify someone, and it's particularly easy now when we have access to all sorts of machine learning models that can really do very effective denonymization.
by gnabgib | 2025-05-21 15:22:06+00:00
Previously:

We Know Why Ancient Roman Concrete Lasts Thousands of Years (29 points, 4 days ago, 15 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018319

Why was Roman concrete so durable? (627 points, 2023, 277 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34280239

Why Ancient Roman Concrete Outlasts Our Own (2017) (54 points, 2021, 67 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366911

2050-year-old Roman tomb offers insights on ancient concrete resilience (163 points, 2021, 105 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28833525

How Ancient Rome’s Concrete Has Survived 2000 Years (2017) (190 points, 2019, 84 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20482050
by GratiaTerra | 2025-05-21 15:22:36+00:00
I installed a similar EG4 inverter and battery system and had a similar experience. The big problem I ran into was that EG4 inverters are NOT compatible with my state's power grid (Hawaii) but because I had so much power, it turned out I never needed to connect to the power grid but I am loosing out on selling power. (Check with your local power company before buying!).

Another problem I had was that a week after installing, one of the TIGO units burned up and started a fire that burned a hole in a solar panel. I only noticed the problem when I saw that one of the solar arrays wasn't putting out power. Replacing the defective unit solved the problem.

Also, I had assumed I would need a generator to power through consecutive days of dark clouds but I instead opted for Ford's Pro Charger Station which has a feature that allows you to power the house; no need for a generator. However, its been over a year and not once have I needed this.

My big takeaway is this: having energy abundance is the good life when you have all electric appliances. My EV (a Ford Lightning Truck), hot tub, AC, water heaters etc have been running over a year with no problems and zero costs after the initial investment.
by bemmu | 2025-05-21 15:22:48+00:00
First I'd look if there are any lists of plugins you could get it added to. Maybe there are directories you can submit to, or if you find such lists as blog posts, can try asking the author to add it.

Another way would be to share your learnings. If you make a good blog writeup about something you learned, you now have something shareable with a natural way to include a link to the project. I don't know anything about the IntelliJ community, but you could see where they hang out and what kinds of posts seem to do well. Maybe you can write something similar.
by kbolino | 2025-05-21 15:23:08+00:00
There's so many factors affecting power efficiency that it's hard to give a categorical answer. A lot of it is dependent on factors that vary widely, from the hardware in use, to the display setup (resolution and refresh rate), to the quality of the drivers, to the window system (composited or not), to the size (cols x rows) of the terminal window, to the feature set involved, etc.

The problem with a lot of GPU accelerated terminals, if I had to wager a guess, is that they draw as fast as possible. Turning off GPU acceleration likely forces things to happen much slower thanks to various bottlenecks like memory bandwidth and sharing CPU time with other processes. GPU acceleration of most GUI apps puts them in a similar position as video games. It doesn't have to happen as fast as possible, and can be throttled through e.g. v-sync or lower-than-max FPS targets or turning on and off specific display features that might tax the GPU more (e.g. if shaders get involved, alpha blending is used, etc.).

The sibling comment makes a good point about compatibility and simplicity, though those don't always translate into lower power usage.