MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nathan_compton | 2025-05-09 17:15:58+00:00
"Fake it till you make it" was practically the motto of young scientists when I was matriculating. In fairness, I don't think they really meant "fake your research" but our entire incentive/competition based society encourages positive misrepresentation - you can't do science, good or bad, if you get competed out of the system entirely.

Guy Debord wrote a book about what he called "The Society of the Spectacle," wherein he argues that capitalism, mostly by virtue of transforming objects into cash at the point of exchange, (that is, a person can take the money and run) tends to cause all things to become evacuated, reduced as much as possible to their image, rather than their substance.

I believe even GK Chesterton understood this when he said that the purpose of a shovel is to dig, not to be sold, but that capitalism tends to see everything as something to be sold primarily and then as something to be used perhaps secondarily.

There is some truth in all this, I think, though obviously the actual physical requirements of living and doing things place some restrictions on how far we can transform things into their images.
by streptomycin | 2025-05-09 17:16:06+00:00
I could never get beyond "honorable mention" for the NSF GRFP. I found the diversity part of it most difficult to write. Like honestly my research had nothing to do with diversity and I'm not an underrepresented minority myself. But that was a major part of how the application was scored, so you had to come up with some bullshit and hope for the best.

And that was like 15 years ago, I hear things have only gotten more extreme since then. Well, at least until very recently...
by skissane | 2025-05-09 17:16:45+00:00
So, a foreign prince (not the King, his brother) enrols as a student at Harvard - would he be considered a “foreign diplomat”? He wasn’t formally acting as a diplomat, and unless he happened to be officially accredited to the State Department as one, I doubt he would have technically counted as one either. Was he present in the US on a diplomatic/consular visa, or a student visa?

Also, in most countries (the US included), one’s status as a citizen/national is legally independent of whether one tries to “claim” it.
by seethishat | 2025-05-09 17:17:30+00:00
Nice write-up. Thanks for sharing.

Some may not remember BitKeeper being used to maintain the Linux kernel source code and how a discrepancy was found (22 years ago) between that repo and the CVS repo. This kind of led to git and signed commits that we have today, etc.

Here's a short write up: https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoo...
by autoexec | 2025-05-09 17:18:18+00:00
> I believe that we shouldn't attempt to fix the sins of those who are long since dead

I mean, we should try where it's possible and reasonable and the impact is ongoing. When a bunch of long dead people passed a law saying that women can't own property we were right to later correct that sin. We shouldn't allow ourselves to be trapped by the horrible choices of the dead. We just have to be careful about when and how we try to correct the wrongs of the past.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-09 17:18:35+00:00
Forgive my arrogance, but nothing presented in that article should be such a big blocker. Spare parts for the traction gear sure, but none of the computing "problems" make any sense.

It's not like hard real time systems aren't available. More concretely, they talk about running a DOS virtual machine on a laptop to download logs from the cars, but there's no way that protocol is so complicated it couldn't be re-implemented reasonably.

This sounds more like "It's cheaper to just buy old stuff off ebay than it is to actually care about this system"
by coatue | 2025-05-09 17:18:57+00:00
[Joe, Hydra cofounder] Hey, that's really great - I love hearing that. Hydra is a columnar database with an integrated Postgres rowstore. Analytics aren't purely best on columnar: we've heard from users that their analytics workload would benefit from fast lookup on row tables too, not just scanning large tables. Our goal for Hydra is to enable realtime analytics on Postgres without requiring an external analytics database. This makes it possible to join the rowstore and columnstore data in Postgres with direct SQL. Other analytics databases typically rely on ETL pipelines to move data out of Postgres, which depending on your scale, can become expensive and introduce delay.
by pinko | 2025-05-09 17:19:43+00:00
Even the word "siphoned" is loaded with bias. Is research aimed at understanding why kids choose to participate in high-school science classes or not, and whether certain teaching approaches lead to better outcomes for boys vs girls, not legitimate NSF research? We can't make improvements to science education without that kind of data.

That's not siphoning anything away from science -- it is science.

Completely aside from the incompetent misidentification of which proposals have anything to do with race, gender, or sexuality (hint: it's a lot less than 25%), the staggeringly stupid premise that all of them are inherently politically-motivated is part of the problem here.
by heavyset_go | 2025-05-09 17:19:47+00:00
There will be plenty of money to be made serving the needs and interests of the wealthy, while the rest of us are serviced by an informal economy that doesn't see institutional investment.

Look at street markets in countries with high wealth disparity. The well-off wouldn't shop or eat there, and they certainly wouldn't invest in a street vendor, the vendors are meant to serve the needs of people in poverty.

See Citigroup's plutonomy paper[1] that explores what that would look like and what investment strategies investors should take. The tl;dr is that the formal economy will abandon lower classes in favor of making a ton of money serving plutocrats and their friends and families instead.

[1] https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
by mlinhares | 2025-05-09 17:20:00+00:00
It also complete bullshit, pharmaceuticals are heavily dependent on the basic research that is done by colleges and anyone that thinks these private entities can do more research than the best universities in the planet is just insane.

For decades now the main difference between the US and the other economies is the amount of highly qualified labor across the board, this move to destroy academia and elevate the stupid and unqualified will be the end of America and the whole world will be poorer for it.
by overfeed | 2025-05-09 17:21:54+00:00
>$10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.

The current admin thinks those $10k grants are better spent by giving them to some billionaire via tax cuts. Impoverishing the many to enrich a few is a 3rd-world, banana-republic mindset, and unfortunately is not self-correcting.

The politically-connected will see the pile of money controlled by the treasury as easy money, unless there is some organization with enough independence and (arresting) power keeping a check on them.
by amiga386 | 2025-05-09 17:22:55+00:00
The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen are home sweet home to me.

The Northern Lights of Aberdeen are what I long to see.

I've been a traveller all my life, and many's a sight I've seen.

God speed the day, 'til I'm on my way, to my home in Aberdeen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufO8qNy2w6k
by _bin_ | 2025-05-09 17:23:02+00:00
They have healthier people going in, obviously. When the average person is approaching being wider than he is tall, all the healthcare spending in the world can do only so much. I have a bunch of family in Europe and have heard way too many of their experiences with waiting lists and overcrowding.

Not sure what the heck you want in terms of validation if not "analysis that supports my point". Are you now criticizing that I've read on this and have data and analysis that agrees? I'm sure if I didn't, you'd come after me for not having that. Double bind sounding ass.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-09 17:23:28+00:00
Standards (whether official or de facto) often aren't the best in isolation, but they're the best in reality because they're widely used.

Imagine you want to replace CSV for this purpose. From a purely technical view, this makes total sense. So you investigate, come up with a better standard, make sure it has all the capabilities everyone needs from the existing stuff, write a reference implementation, and go off to get it adopted.

First place you talk to asks you two questions: "Which of my partner institutions accept this?" "What are the practical benefits of switching to this?"

Your answer to the first is going to be "none of them" and the answer to the second is going to be vague hand-wavey stuff around maintainability and making programmers happier, with maybe a little bit of "this properly handles it when your clients' names have accent marks."

Next place asks the same questions, and since the first place wasn't interested, you have the same answers....

Replacing existing standards that are Good Enough is really, really hard.
by emn13 | 2025-05-09 17:23:56+00:00
While I'm most familiar with C#, and haven't used Ruby professionally for almost a decade now, I think we'd be better off looking at typescript, for at least 3 reasons, probably more.

1. Flowsensitivity: It's a sure thing that in a dynamic language people use coding conventions that fit naturally to the runtime-checked nature of those types. That makes flow-sensitive typing really important.

2. Duck typing: dynamic languages and certainly ruby codebases I knew often use ducktyping. That works really well in something like typescript, including really simple features such as type-intersections and unions, but those features aren't present in C#.

3. Proof by survival: typescript is empirically a huge success. They're doing something right when it comes to retrospectively bolting on static types in a dynamic language. Almost certainly there are more things than I can think of off the top of my head.

Even though I prefer C# to typescript or ruby _personally_ for most tasks, I don't think it's perfect, nor is it likely a good crib-sheet for historically dynamic languages looking to add a bit of static typing - at least, IMHO.

Bit of a tangent, but there was a talk by anders hejlsberg as to why they're porting the TS compiler to Go (and implicitly not C#) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10qowKUW82U - I think it's worth recognizing the kind of stuff that goes into these choices that's inevitably not obvious at first glance. It's not about the "best" lanugage in a vacuum, it's a about the best tool for _your_ job and _your_ team.
by tombert | 2025-05-09 17:24:38+00:00
Well, no, when I say "people should just" arguments, I'm referring to arguments that talk about society at large. I think those are bad arguments. I didn't say "people should stop", I just think it's a bad argument, they're obviously free to make bad arguments. I wouldn't take that right away from them even if I could.

"People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to. You're free to think it's a dumb argument but there's a slight pedantic difference.
by autoexec | 2025-05-09 17:24:42+00:00
> preventing the sort of cheap low quality development that makes sense in areas where it's a given that nature will flatten everything every 50yr or whatever.

What kind of low quality development makes sense when you know it's only going to be washed away into the ocean at some random point within the next 50 years? Who is going to live in a place like that? What happens to them when they lose everything?
by sokoloff | 2025-05-09 17:24:54+00:00
Do we make government the sole provider of investment advice? Of legal advice? Should we also mandate life insurance? Exercise and diet? Budget and provide spending money allowances to adults? Ration alcohol? Limit screen time?

All of those things could help people be more successful, make them less likely to lose their job or have a better relationship, etc.

At some point, there’s a line where government should protect third parties and a different line where government protects first parties from themselves. Different people will prefer those lines be located in different places; I tend towards giving individuals power over governments.
by Const-me | 2025-05-09 17:25:08+00:00
The .NET runtime is cross-platform, the lower level asp-net infrastructure is included in the runtime. The higher level CoreWCF RPC library OP uses is written fully in C#. I would expect it to run in all environments supported by the .NET runtime.

Personally, I have reproduced the bug on Windows 10 running on AMD64 processor. BTW, the code in the question only communicates to localhost address i.e. doesn’t need any networking on the computer.
by basch | 2025-05-09 17:25:08+00:00
I fall pray to this often. Internal complexity and growth over time lead to great giant feature charts and comparison matrixes. But sometimes you just need a tool that gets a job done.

It's one thing for something simple to not be a drop in replacement. But simplicity and minimalism can also be a virtue. Can this complete the task in an environment designed around using it?
by amiga386 | 2025-05-09 17:26:21+00:00
Named after Lord Aberdeen (born in Edinburgh)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hamilton-Gordon,_4th_Ea...

> His diplomatic successes include organizing the coalition against Napoleon in 1812–1814, normalizing relations with post-Napoleonic France, settling the old border dispute between Canada and the United States, and ending the First Opium War with China in 1842, whereby Hong Kong was obtained.
by MPSFounder | 2025-05-09 17:26:26+00:00
It speaks volumes tho that one of his clauses was to be treated as a co-founder. He clearly has a chip on his shoulder, and his technical abilities are to be questioned. Ultimately, people choose to believe Elon is smart or a good guy (saving the environment etc.). I think he is a remarkable conman. He was able to convince remarkable engineers to work on these products under the pretext of saving the environment, while paying relatively low wages (a few years ago Tesla pay was not comparable to other car manufacturers despite its California location). Also, I find it really funny that he was illegal in the US for a few months, and currently opposes immigration the way he does. Regarldess of your views on these matters, any man that takes a piece of the pie (subsidies, immigration etc.) and denies it to the next person is either a conman or a hypocrite, or both. I think he is a conman, who knows the next person will resort to tactics similar to his, and wants to avoid it. He never cared about the environment, given he is doing everything in his power to kill other EVs and maximize his own profits. There are many skeletons in the Musk and Thiel closets, enough to fill a graveyard. Hypocrisy is truly seen as a virtue in DC
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by zachkepe | 2025-05-09 17:27:03+00:00
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by BuckRogers | 2025-05-09 17:27:09+00:00
I grew up in the tattoo era (teenager in the 90s) and never got one. I just told myself to represent something, buy a tshirt. I've noticed people with tattoos love to show them off, either in person or on Youtube. Tattoos are like motorcycles, the people with them seem to think everyone cares. I do have a motorcycle so I can sense that mentality from the community.

The only thing I would possibly tattoo is something about me that will never change, for me that's my religious views. That said, my religion has mixed reviews on if tattoos are even acceptable at all, our body being a temple.

Overall, I still feel tattoos should be relegated to prisons and skid row as I'm old fashioned. I wouldn't recommend or encourage anyone to get one. People are leaning more conservative as a sign of the times. That's the root of the trend against tattoos. Even famous tattoo artists like Kat Von D has wanted to remove hers and felt she was better off blacking them out instead.
by sorenjan | 2025-05-09 17:27:39+00:00
I don't manage any Blender renders, so this isn't for me, but if you want to use Python for the TUI part as well you can use Textual [0].

A lot of the Textual based programs[1] can be run without having to install them with uvx, i.e.:

uvx --python 3.12 textual-demo uvx usolitaire

[0] https://github.com/Textualize/textual

[1] https://github.com/oleksis/awesome-textualize-projects
by daedrdev | 2025-05-09 17:27:44+00:00
The money is lent to the federal government via Treasuries. As the surplus is spent, it will directly decrease the funding for the government deficit, increasing the cost for the government to service its debt. The original poster is wrong since the surplus is real, but spending down this surplus will still cost the government a lot. And even if it didn't, Social Security will burn its entire reserve in 10 years and be forced to cut benefits by 20% in 10 years or be forced to spend trillions to maintain its current level deficit.
by chermi | 2025-05-09 17:27:45+00:00
Oh sure, I'm all for that in the mean time. But the people funding this are looking for big payoff. I want to be clear that this is not my field and I'm probably a bit behind on the latest, especially on the algorithmic side.

IIRC some of them have done proof of principle solutions to hydrogen atom ground state, for example. I haven't kept up but I'm guessing they've solved more complicated systems by now. I don't know if they've gone beyond ground states.

Taking this particular problem as an example... The challenge, in my mind, is that we already have pretty good classical approaches the problem. Say the limit of current approaches is characterized by something like the number of electrons ( I don't know actual scaling factors) and that number is N_C(lassical). I think the complexity and thus required advances (difficulty) for building special purpose hypothetical quantum ground state solver that can solve the problem for N_Q >> N_C is similar enough to the difficulty required to scale a more general quantum computer to some "problem" size of moderately smaller magnitude that it's probably hard to justify the funding for the special purpose one over the generic one.

I could be way off, and it's very possible there's new algorithms to solve specific problems that I'm unaware of. Such algorithms with an accompanying special purpose quantum computer could make its construction investible in the sense that efficient solutions to problem under consideration are worth enough to offset the cost. Sorry that was very convoluted phrasing but I'm on my phone and I gtg.
by dsabanin | 2025-05-09 17:27:45+00:00
Very well said. This is such an important point.

I believe that if you truly accept what Hemingway said, that writing is rewriting, you get less attached to the idea of reaching the best design on the first try, and feel better when starting with a suboptimal solution.

Of course this sometimes conflicts with organizational pressures, where that quick and dirty solution may be deemed as enough by some and you won't get to finish with the proper design. For me the trick is to consider first version just an internal stage of work on a feature, not even communicated outwards most of the times, until the appropriate design is reached.
by foota | 2025-05-09 17:27:46+00:00
Sorry, but I think the way you're phrasing this implies a burden on them to explain well understood and widely accepted principles of quantum physics that you seem to be implying are pseudoscience.

This seems like a decent overview if you want to learn more: https://www.chalmers.se/en/centres/wacqt/discover-quantum-te....
by duxup | 2025-05-09 17:27:55+00:00
I’m I am initially put off by this “academic feminism” thing. Of all things I know about feminism and how it is approached in academia it is this, there are a LOT of different views of feminism in academia, many conflicting, some saying similar things to this article.

Maybe I misunderstand what the author means by that…

Anyway one thing I do find is how much litmus testing goes on with feminism, similar to this article. Someone’s act (saving eggs or etc) may seem like feminism to them, and others may not. That’s just different people and life, not right and wrong feminism.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-09 17:28:10+00:00
It was a terrible decision.

Not that those are rare.

[EDIT] To make this a little more substantive, on an issue where they extremely plausibly could have decided otherwise, they elected to go for the option that is plainly, guaranteed to be less-just. There is no universe in which anyone with a brain could believe the overwhelming result of this decision wouldn't be to benefit people with power and money at the expense of those without power and money.
by _mlbt | 2025-05-09 17:29:02+00:00
There are advertised features of Teslas that are vaporware, but it’s a stretch to call them vaporware. xAI is also very real. Others have mentioned SpaceX. He bought Twitter/X but that’s not vaporware either. Neuralink is also real. The Boring Company has only dug 2 short tunnels so far, so the case can be made for calling that vaporware.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-05-09 17:29:40+00:00
That's really not fair because the different sects and denominations of Christianity have different apocrypha and different translations (or lack of translations) of the source texts.

And of course they vary widely in rites, practices, and liturgy.

People think they are closer than they are. The difference between the protestant denominations, catholic denominations, mormans, jehovah's witnesses, etc are quite major and in a very real sense the separation between these different sects of Christianity are essentially only a few steps removed from the separation Islam has from Christianity.
by Rotundo | 2025-05-09 17:29:44+00:00
> So how do we talk about this?

You can talk about it on many, many sites across the web. You will soon find that talking politics is useless. You're not going to convince anyone that they are wrong, just as their arguments will not alter your view. It is a waste of electrons.

Still, many sites welcome it as it generates traffic for their ad revenue. Keep users engaged in heated 'debates', to eek out a few cents more.

Please, keep politics out of HN. Let's keep this site reasonably sane, whatever that means.