MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benoau | 2025-05-10 15:36:22+00:00
Agreed. Because really what happens when we search is we run through a gauntlet of contrived websites stuffed with ads and trackers and referral links, selling someone else's stuff, splitting someone else's content across multiple page views, requiring your personal information if you want to view the content in its entirety, trying their best to be the #1 result for specific phrases that will get traffic even though shovelware sites should never be the authoritative source for someone else's product or company or content, while others pay to have their contrived websites be listed before them. None of this is necessary with AI.
by spankalee | 2025-05-10 15:37:08+00:00
Great. It's just a terrible name for a project that presumably hopes a broad range of people will use.

Even if you buy that the creators didn't know it was an ugly term for disabled people (but why did they think the Gimp character was called that in Pulp Fiction?), naming your potentially mainstream software after a imprisoned, tortured, and eventually murdered sex slave maybe isn't the best idea either?

If you want your project to remain niche and repel some users, then I guess it's a fine choice, however.
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-10 15:37:21+00:00
That's not comparable. Netflix did not have a monopoly on "shipping DVDs". Plenty of retailers, online or brick-and-mortar, did that at the same time Netflix did, and video rental places were still going. Some of which would deliver movies (the local Marcos near me had a deal with a local Family Video where if you bought a large pizza they would bring you both the pizza and a movie of your choice from Family Video, assuming it was in stock).

Nor has Netflix had a monopoly on streaming.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-05-10 15:37:38+00:00
I agree, all the modern technical additions over the years to operating systems have entirely been 2 steps forward, 3 steps back.

It's always, "Oh, well, you can no longer run two or three monitors any more, but your primary display is higher resolution now!" Except DPI adjustments make it irrelevant and now my (i)GPU has a higher minimum load.

Or, "Oh, well, we only give you 2 ports now, but they're all <port>!" Great, but those larger bandwidth ports don't offset the fact that I can't plug in as much any more, and USB hubs are not a solution, they're a hack, wildly variable in operation, and some devices are not compatible with them.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-05-10 15:38:05+00:00
"You know this thing you like? Have you tried not liking it? Yeah, it's because I don't like it, and I just really think everyone should give disliking it a fair shot, even if they've tried it and think they like it, that just might be because they haven't really made an effort to dislike it"

ETA: Or, to make it simpler, most people are more interested in finding things they might like than in finding ways to no longer enjoy things they already like.
by nathan_compton | 2025-05-10 15:38:33+00:00
This is a personal thing and probably not good, but I just hate narratives. Like stories are so contingent and our interpretation of our lives so irrational that I have almost no interest in the peculiar sequence of events that constitute people's lives. I especially dislike them when someone has curated them into a book, because that process is also often disingenuous, self-laudatory, irrational, or pulled around by other incentives.

I love people, I just don't care that much about how they think they got where they are.

There is a spicy quote which I resonate with. Something to the effect of tiny minds think about people, bigger minds think about events and galaxy brains think about ideas. When I read, I just really want to get to the ideas. I could not give two shits about people and I barely care about the events.
by azemetre | 2025-05-10 15:38:42+00:00
Really odd that the trillionaire dollar corporation that prints billions of dollars in pure profit every quarter due to monopolistic and anti-democratic policies is the David, the weak feeble underdog in this story, compared to OpenAI that is wildly unprofitable and has no real strategy outside of burning money.

There has been no time in human history where destroying monopolies were a bad thing.
by matja | 2025-05-10 15:39:34+00:00
For every image I try, I get the same response:

> This image shows a diverse group of people in various poses, including a man wearing a hat, a woman in a wheelchair, a child with a large head, a man in a suit, and a woman in a hat.

No, none of these things are in the images.

I don't even know how to begin debugging that.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-05-10 15:39:44+00:00
I have a lot of respect for past me and what he got us through. Some of my past experiences gave me a profound distrust of others. Even today, while I can intellectually admit that most folks are good and decent people, and I am perfectly safe with them, there are all sorts of unconscious temperaments and behaviors that would work wonders to keep me safe in a dangerous world, but limit my ability to connect to others.

Likewise, my frugal asceticism might have helped me survive when I was living below the poverty line, but it's very much not helpful when I purposely make a 'fun money' budget today, and it either goes unspent or I feel guilty about spending it because my 'inner frugal bastard' sees money as safety.

I'm seeing someone to work through these issues, but it's slow going. I can intellectually see these behaviors aren't helpful, but stopping them from being my default script is hard.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-10 15:40:07+00:00
Telecommunications is still led by small groups of companies. Giant backbone providers stitch the internet together. Telecoms providers within a country, the ones that actually have hardware in the field, can often be counted on one hand, and often in one hand after a fireworks accident. 5G/6G/7G research is led by a small handful of companies that actually build the switches, transmitters, and modems. Cell tower frequencies are sold to a tiny group of carriers that sublet their network equipment to smaller companies they eventually buy up (if succesful) or disappear from the market (if not succesful).

Fiber rollout in countries where a government funded phone line rollout has already succeeded is laughably slow, taking decades and many billions with little to show for it. Even in countries where no phone lines were rolled out back in the day, fiber is more and more being skipped as 5G allows for cheaper (though less reliable and less capable) deployment.

I'm not saying monopolies are good or anything, and I think our problems would be even worse had we stuck to the monopolist systems that brought us telecoms as we know it, but I wouldn't consider the industry one where there's enough competition to drive innovation, especially since at least half of the entire sector is competing against Chinese government-controlled companies with seemingly endless coffers.
by derektank | 2025-05-10 15:40:37+00:00
Yet empirically, the biggest funders of basic research have historically been monopolies. The US government was, at least up until the last few months, the largest funder of basic research globally and it obviously maintains multiple different monopolies, a monopoly on legal use of force, a functional monopoly on financial transactions as the global reserve currency, and I'm sure others. Excluding national governments, Bell Labs and IBM were both probably the biggest funders of basic research in the last century during their respective heydays. Bell was obviously a monopoly and while IBM might never have faced anti-trust penalties, they did at one point control 70% of the mainframe market and the DoJ did bring a case against them (that was eventually dismissed by the Reagan administration.)

I think there are many good reasons to pursue anti-trust action against companies that are in a dominant market position, but we should be honest about the tradeoffs. Businesses that have to aggressively compete to maintain market share don't have the slack to fund basic research.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-10 15:40:50+00:00
I didn't flag your other reply, by the way, but I did vouch for it. Your retort about LLMs is spot-on, as was your point about how "they're all robot jobs." We just currently disagree on whether eliminating such jobs -- all of them -- is a good goal or a bad one.

You defended your perspective by arguing, correctly, that people take undesirable jobs because they don't have a choice. We agree there as well, and my point is that this is a form of coercion in itself. The status quo treats humans as if they were robots.

(And I really don't care if someone thinks I live in a cave. Life in my cave is actually pretty comfy. It beats the hell out of a warehouse or a cube maze at a click farm. It's a privilege, one I'd like to see more equitably distributed.)
by mdaniel | 2025-05-10 15:40:50+00:00
It sounds like you're currently struggling against provisioning new database instances (or clusters) when the delineation is actually at the database within that instance

Compare:

psql --host=team1.example -d team1 # versus psql --host=the-db.example -d team1

Sometimes one can get away with schema level split, which can allow cross schema references in a read only setup, but carries coupling concerns

psql --host=the-db.example -d my_db -U team1 "select * from team1.orders o inner join team2.products p ..."

I don't mean to troubleshoot over HN comments, as the problem space is filled with nuance and trade-offs, but intended it as "for your consideration"
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-10 15:40:52+00:00
> I think they have a good point with AI. After lagging behind initially, Google really went at it hard. Gemini is great now, and they are building a good set of tooling.

> It's easy for Google to suffocate the startups in that area. They already have a massive advantage with all the data they are sitting on.

What is the solution, though? Should they not be allowed to compete in the LLM + search space? Should they handicap their models till perplexity &co. catch up? Will they be allowed to do something then? I honestly don't see what's asked of google here.

Yes, they are massive. But they're massive because they've invested billions ($, manhours, etc) into their infra and have gathered a huge baggage of data, know-how, tech and expertise in this field. But what exactly are they to do from now on?
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-05-10 15:41:07+00:00
I'll give a viewpoint that the article reads like a listing of spec sheets and process improvements for CPUs of that era and not much else. Not really worth reading imho.

I'd love some discussion on why Intel left XScale and went to Atom and i think Itanium is worthy of discussion in this era too. I don't really want a raw listing of [In year X Intel launched Y with SPEC_SHEET_LISTING features].
by azemetre | 2025-05-10 15:41:19+00:00
It usually means that they will somehow rat fuck the public commons for monetary gain.

Democratic software means three things:

1. Can you understand it

2. Can you influence it both now and after your death

3. Can you destroy it

I don’t see how any of these things apply to AI, I’m sure it will make some people incredibly wealthy at the expense of others.
by lurk2 | 2025-05-10 15:41:21+00:00
> caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry.

Religion predates the emergence of both agriculture and animal husbandry. These belief systems didn’t emerge as a result of surplus.

> There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.

How do you reconcile this belief with the idea there is no meaning, and that “there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done”?
by globnomulous | 2025-05-10 15:41:23+00:00
This is debatable, I think. What I've read is that, whereas Bell Labs did foundational, groundbreaking research that radically altered the course of human history, technological innovation since then has more often followed the lines Bell Labs, and their ilk, laid down. Giving the world a faster computer or faster network is fine and nice but pales in comparison to the consequences of giving the world modern computers, Unix, and C.
by simonw | 2025-05-10 15:42:15+00:00
POP3/IMAP work with any client that supports those protocols.

OAuth really doesn't. Every OAuth integration I've ever built always feels like it needs a tiny bit of custom development.

Also the OAuth flow is usually absolutely horrible for when you're trying to get a token for accessing your own data. I've had to spin up a temporary web app to handle a hunch of redirects just to get my own token!
by riehwvfbk | 2025-05-10 15:42:28+00:00
They are not really the same.

First, NVMe is a protocol to access block storage. It can be used to access any kind of block device, Optane, SSD, NVDIMM, virtual storage on EC2, etc. So it's true that the protocol is the same (well, not quite - more on this in a bit), but that's like saying a server is the same as an iPhone because they can both speak TCP/IP.

What was the "more in a bit" bit? Persistent memory (PMEM) devices like NVDIMMs and Optane can usually speak two protocols. They can either act as storage, or as memory expansion. But this memory also happens to be non-volatile.

This was sold as a revolution, but it turned out that it's not easy for current operating systems and applications to deal with memory with vastly different latencies. Also it turns out that software is buggy, and being able to lose state by rebooting is useful. And so Optane in memory mode never really caught on, and these devices were mostly used as a storage tier. However: look up MemVerge.

So you are right that it turned out to be a faster SSD, but the original promise was a lot more. And here comes the big problem: because Optane was envisioned as a separate kind of product between RAM and SSD, the big price differential could be justified. If it's just a faster SSD - well, the market has spoken.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-05-10 15:42:34+00:00
You might be getting downvoted for saying it's an "atypical" way of using three.js. the pmnd.rs community (for example) is quite large.

I understand why people like the declarative nature of react three fiber, but it's quite unfortunate that it requires something like code sandbox to allow modification / working with it on the web- but that's by nature due to being react.

Vanilla three.js can be written surprisingly similarly, if you are disciplined about breaking things up into functions/components. And no react necessary / can embed a code editor and allow direct modification.
by iainmerrick | 2025-05-10 15:44:46+00:00
No mention here of binary size (beyond linking out to a ClickHouse blog post on the topic).

The total number of lines of code is relevant, sure, but for most practical purposes, compile times and binary sizes are more important.

I don't know the situation in Rust, but in JS land, there's a pretty clear divide between libraries that are tree-shakable (or if you prefer, amenable to dead code elimination) and those that aren't. If you stick to tree-shakable dependencies your final bundled output will only include what you actually need and can be pretty small.
by mjevans | 2025-05-10 15:45:01+00:00
Which is why, like the 'monopoly on violence' the government should also be funding a _lot more research_.

It should be at, or partnered with, higher learning institutions and since it's public funded all of the results should be free to use*. I'm willing to entertain the idea of: Free use for people and corporations within the country/countries that funded research, everyone else pays compulsory license fees.
by deadbabe | 2025-05-10 15:45:04+00:00
No matter what you do you’re going to die with regrets. Some might even feel it wasn’t a good life. I’d say try to focus on the things you did right. You’re just passing through for a moment in a universe currently teeming with activity. You’ll probably regret you didn’t get to see more. Right about when you’re about to die something new and exciting that will revolutionize the future of humanity will be invented and you’ll only know about it for a few days or so.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-10 15:45:38+00:00
Funnily enough, most users I speak to use WhatsApp and they're mostly concerned about their contacts and pictures. I've rarely heard someone say "this is a disaster!" because part of their WhatsApp messages weren't backed up to the cloud the moment they switched phones.

Truth be told, I don't think most users even care that the company their messenger comes from can read their messages. All of the people I chat to on Telegram seem absolutely fine with it. I begrudgingly accept their chats (I don't want to be that guy that people need to install a special app for to communicate with, as much as I'd like Matrix or XMPP to succeed).

And to be honest, who cares if Apple's backups are encrypted. They can push a software update to undo that encryption any time they want to. The only people you need to protect your backups from are criminals (but that's what your password and 2FA is for) and law enforcement ("but I'm not a criminal! I have nothing to hide!"). You can't use Apple's phone/Facebook's messenger without accepting the risk that Apple/Facebook will undo all the security they claim to have added to their software.
by lwo32k | 2025-05-10 15:46:07+00:00
> Would you give tenure to someone who’s studying coffee stains?

> I might. The paper has been cited more than 7,000 times, including by engineers developing inkjet printers and nanotechnology.

> Maybe now, but not back then. People did not like what I was doing, and they told me so. But, you know, I’ve had a lot of fun
by lolinder | 2025-05-10 15:46:08+00:00
That's (a) a different argument than the competition is "too risk averse", (b) subjective, and (c) arguably the result of a number of flywheel effects. That is, Bing's ability to compete is hampered by the fact that Google already has an overwhelming majority of search traffic from which to learn and improve.

For example, from the second filing I linked to:

> After search began appearing on phones, Google started logging information about user location, swipes, and other user-related movements. PFOF ¶¶ 1003–1004. This data is now vital to every aspect of search, including figuring out where and when to crawl specific websites, how to index the information retrieved from that crawl, what documents to retrieve from the index in response to a user query, and how to rank the retrieved items. Some elements of Google’s search engine are trained on 13 months of data—a volume that would take Bing over 17 years to accumulate.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-05-10 15:47:16+00:00
Godot is amazing for 2d. There's basically zero reason to use Unity anymore. For 3d it's still a bit rough around the edges, but gaining traction fast. If you want high tier 3d you're probably better off with Unreal, but IMHO it has a significantly worse DX and it will only start to shine when you work in a big studio.
by jmogly | 2025-05-10 15:48:54+00:00
I think that is one of the most interesting take aways from this line of thought. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the idea that we as a species have unimaginable surplus, but nearly all of us feel we are living precariously on the edge of ruin, or are living in destitute poverty. There is plenty to go around, but because the worst parts of human nature have triumphed the good, we are forced to live in an incredibly inequitable distribution.

Rather than build a system that works for everyone in an altruistic manner, we have a system that funnels surplus to our most sycophantic, manipulative, exploitative, brutal members. It might just be human nature, our worst instincts tend to beat our best instincts.
by fsckboy | 2025-05-10 15:49:06+00:00
>The two felines—one adult, one juvenile—appear to have been cared for by the sailors

so, these were ship's cats rather than passenger or cargo cats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship%27s_cat

"The ship's cat has been a common feature on many trading, exploration, and naval ships dating to ancient times... most importantly to control rodents"

and one presumes others were on most every other ship to have plied those waters
by beambot | 2025-05-10 15:49:13+00:00
This feels a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face...

Unlike Microsoft's antitrust case of the 90s, Google seems much less anti-competitive by nature. Sure, they have unprecedented scale in search... but even that hegemony is being threatened by others in AI.

If anything, going after Google with a DoJ kludgel will cause a servere freeze on startup M&A across all of FAANG. With IPO windows (mostly) closed, this removes the biggest exit dynamic the startup ecosystem has at its disposal. This is not a good thing from my perspective, and would seem counter to YC's interests.

Someone steelman this for me...?
by WalterBright | 2025-05-10 15:49:18+00:00
Thanks for the nice story!

Another thing I liked about the ADVENT FORTRAN code is it would detect if its static tables were initialized or not. If not, it would initialize the statics, and then write the executable out overwriting the executable. Then, the next time it ran, it was already initialized!

I used this trick in my editor in 80s. It didn't have a configuration file, one just set ones configuration in the editor, then hit a command to rewrite the executable. It worked like a champ! This greatly speeded up load times for the editor as doing a file lookup for the configuration file on a floppy disk was very slow.

Sadly, this all ended when the operating system would shut down an executable that attempted to modify itself as "malware".
by ggandv | 2025-05-10 15:49:20+00:00
Generally concur but I wish we wouldn’t squander credibility by making claims like, “travel for attend conferences (a key part of science!).”

Oh come on. Conferences are a monument to waste if ever there was. It’s all kickbacks and hotel and airline industry lobbying and protectionism. Some conferences may be better than others I’m sure, but no, science does not depend upon travel to conferences.
by aseipp | 2025-05-10 15:50:18+00:00
There is a fork of Mesa with some support for the onboard GPU (Immortals G720), but it's not upstream yet and might not be for a while. Some people on the forums have installed various discrete GPUs, which would obviously work (modulo bugs.)

There is also an open source driver for the NPU somewhere (Zhouyi NPU) and some documentation, but nothing in an upstream kernel yet. https://zhouyi-npu-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/0_radxa...
by anthk | 2025-05-10 15:50:22+00:00
"Arreglo" (fix, set) for "array" isn't any better in Spanish, sadly. We could just use "formación", or better, "serie" (as in series in English).

Ajuste looks better than "arreglo". It actually means set (the noun made from a verb, not a collection), so you are actually saying that some data belongs into sorted nxn dimensions, but it lacks the sorted meaning. You aren't fixing some broken data. And some 'arreglo' between people happens after previous troubles, so you are actually trying to set some fix.

"Serie" can mean both a sorted (ordinal) and unsorted set of elements.