MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _rpxpx | 2025-05-16 08:04:50+00:00
Uehreka, I'm sorry, but this is such utter tosh. This is the sort of rabid utopianism I remember hearing about the web in 1996. But then of course it was predictive - at least a bit excusable. Take a hard a look at the actual history of the web in the last 30 years. "Democracy"...what? It is a story of corporate seizure of commons leading to the frankly nightmarish scenario we are in now, heading full steam into a total surveillance techno-fascist neofeudalism. Here's an innovation in the last millennium that did actually democratize access to information: Libraries. Simple public libraries. Look at the message that is engraved over the door of one of my favorite libraries, the central library in Edinburgh, Scotland. These places were palaces for public learning. Contrast them to the grotty, advert-saturated, casino of the web. Also, the calm, reflective, intelligent state of mind they cultivated. How many people can even read a book anymore, cover to cover? Or even a single page without electronic interruption?
by alexnovikov | 2025-05-16 08:05:00+00:00
Fair point! A single complex multiplication `(a+bi)(c+di)` indeed requires at least 3 real multiplications to be implemented.

However, when researchers (and systems like AlphaEvolve in this context) analyze fast matrix multiplication algorithms like Strassen's, the primary goal is usually to improve the asymptotic complexity (and understand the space of these algorithms better). This complexity is determined by the number of multiplications in the field over which the matrices are defined. * For real matrices, we count real scalar multiplications. * For complex-valued matrices (as in the 4x4 example where AlphaEvolve found a solution with 48 scalar multiplications), "scalar multiplication" refers to a complex scalar multiplication.

The key is that these are the operations you recurse on. Additions, or the constant factor cost of implementing one field's multiplication, don't change the exponent in the `N^(log_base(multiplications))` complexity. They are constant factors.

Of course, for practical performance on a specific 4x4 matrix, one would absolutely dive into the real operations, additions, memory layout, etc., but making 4x4 matrix multiplication practically faster on some particular hardware was not the focus in this section. (We do improve practical implementation of large matrix multiplications on the target hardware in the “Enhancing AI training and inference” section of the blog post.)

(Disclaimer: one of the authors.)
by elric | 2025-05-16 08:05:28+00:00
3DSecure is ... weird. It doesn't always trigger. It depends on some measure of "risk" (however the hell that's determined). E.g. my payments to pizza place never invoke 3D Secure because I order from them so damned often.

I would be happier if this were configurable by the user, because I too would be happier if all my online payments required my second factor.
by once_inc | 2025-05-16 08:05:36+00:00
Expected time to first block confirmation is always 10 minutes. If the last block was found 10 minutes ago, then the expected time to the next block is still 10 minutes. It is always 10 minutes until it is actually found, at which point it is still 10 minutes.

The only thing that can change value is if the global hash rate significantly changes. This is why we have the difficulty readjustment every 2016 blocks (give or take 2 weeks).
by marsten | 2025-05-16 08:06:34+00:00
Unfortunately C++ ended up with a set of defaults (i.e., the most ergonomic ways of doing things) that are almost always the least safe. During most of C++'s development, performance was king and so safety became opt-in.

Many of these can't be blamed on C holdover. For example Vector.at(i) versus Vector[i] – most people default to the latter and don't think twice about the safety implications. The irony is that most of the time when people use std::vector, performance is irrelevant and they'd be much better off with a safe default.

Alas, we made our bed and now we have to lie in it.
by notpushkin | 2025-05-16 08:06:49+00:00
Which is why I have a couple bank accounts. If these banks decide they don’t want to work with me anymore (happened a couple times already), or if they decide they don’t want to send money to, say, a particular country (hint hint), I’ll have crypto as a last resort.

(You conveniently left out “cash” from your reply. Cash. I’ll buy groceries with cash, if I can’t use my card.)
by zigzag312 | 2025-05-16 08:06:55+00:00
I agree there's an overlap.

> But it's a software problem that you can solve ... with enormous economies of scale.

Can be a problem for software that doesn't have such economies of scale.

Cloud is cheap for very basic usage, but costs can increase noticeably when workload increases.

Regarding UX. Some things work better in the cloud while some tasks are not so well suited for the cloud (e.g. latency sensitive tasks, task that require non trivial amount of data transfer between the user and the could).

I have no idea how many casual users would be affected by one or more of these things, if any. Phone centered user could still use cloud for some things. Maybe there would be enough interest, if polished solution becomes available. It could be you are right, I don't really know.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-16 08:07:07+00:00
> Of course, every language has its quirks. French, for example, puts extra letters on the ends of words that you are not supposed to pronounce. Well, unless the right two words are next to each other, in which case, you pronounce the letters after all.

A lot of this is to due with latin, which pronounciation evolved over time to give modern French but which origin is still kept in spelling. So it's not that the language "puts extra letters" it's that it kept old spelling when the pronunciation change.

An example: 'est' (to be, third person singular) is very obviously verbatim latin spelling but pronunciation has shifted so that the 't' is not pronounced (and arguably the 's' could go, too).

Sometimes there are useful "rules" about how spelling and pronunciations evolved, which can be useful for English speakers writing in French, too, to remember your accents:

hospital -> hôpital

hostel -> hôtel

castel (castle in English) -> château
by thehappyfellow | 2025-05-16 08:07:45+00:00
You’re right, there are downsides like turbine you mention! We mitigate it by running a hot backup we can switch to in seconds and a box in which we test restoring backups every 24h, that’s necessary! But it requires 3x the number of big expensive boxes.

I still think it’s the right tradeoff for us, operating a distributed system is also very expensive in terms of dev and ops time, costs are more unpredictable etc.

It’s all tradeoffs, isn’t it?
by Skeime | 2025-05-16 08:08:49+00:00
This is not necessary. Practiced German speakers generally do not struggle with splitting words into their components because syllables follow relatively predictable patterns. You will run into ambiguities from time to time, of course, but the same applies to tons of other features of natural languages as well. (Do you want to outlaw homophones in English?)

Anyway, there is also a perfectly acceptable and established way of making German words easier to parse if need be: hyphens. So Hyphen-Case instead of PascalCase.
by Animats | 2025-05-16 08:08:56+00:00
I've done a little bit of "lock-free" programming in Rust, but it's for very specialized situations.[1] This allocates and releases bits in a bitmap. The bitmap is intended to represent the slots in use in the Vulkan bindless texture index, which resides in the GPU. Can't read that those slots from the CPU side to see if an entry is in use. So in-use slots in that table have to be tracked with an external bitmap.

This has no unsafe code. It's all done with compare and swap. There is locking here, but it's down at the hardware level within the compare and swap instruction. This is cleaner and more portable than relying on cross-CPU ordering of operations.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/rust-vulkan-bindless/blob/main...
by maccard | 2025-05-16 08:09:02+00:00
paraphrasing another reply I left here, if everyone just wrote their code correctly we’d all be writing C and everything would be safe and fast. I’ve fixed this exact issue with this exact cause (someone wrapped an await in a loop and it passed code review because our benchmark test still passed. But the benchmark test simulated the entire stack on a local network and when we deployed it, all of a sudden it took 5 seconds to load)
by elric | 2025-05-16 08:10:54+00:00
The article claims that funds were held after being donated. That certainly goes way beyond "not choosing to do business". The claims were refuted by BuyMeACoffee, which changes things.

But if I, as a donator, donate money to someone using your service, and you then don't give that money to its intended recipient, you've effectively defrauded me. Had you said in advance "I can't do that, because you're trying to give me money to $foo which I don't support", then that is your right as a business.
by p_v_doom | 2025-05-16 08:11:08+00:00
Don't think this is a new paradigm. More of a revival of an old one - that of cybernetics. It was incredibly successful at the time, to the point where so many of its findings today are integral to our world, and we kind of forget where they come from and the original principles behind them. I am happy to see this revival though, I think it heralds good stuff...
by bashkiddie | 2025-05-16 08:12:32+00:00
From a foreign learners perspective, it is easier to just learn the article together with the noun.

But there are rules for 2/3 of cases. https://sprachekulturkommunikation.com/genus-der-substantive...

You can classify by suffix.

* -ung, -heit, -keit -> feminin, e.g. die Schönheit

* -ling -> masculin, e.g. der Flüchtling

* -chen, -lein -> neutrum, e.g das Mädchen

You can classify by category. Every alcoholic drink is masculin, except for beer.

You can classify by phonetic spelling. That is probably the closest you have to Portugese.
by written-beyond | 2025-05-16 08:12:55+00:00
That's the issue, Deno wasn't my first impression of typescript for the backend. Every decision I was took, there was a voice in the back of my head whispering, "it's probably easier on node". Not the actual code, but getting information about how to actually achieve those things.

The problem with making something as important as a package file optional it makes it very confusing for new users to get started because a variety of tutorials and getting started guides end up having a lot variation between them.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-16 08:13:28+00:00
I hate that people don't look up the details on laws.

GPDR says that all governments are the ones judging whether the GDPR is violated (meaning not the courts), for example the https://ico.org.uk/ and they even formalized an exception process. You cannot sue a company for GPDR violation, you can report it to a government department that may or may not decide to action your report, that's it. GDPR only allows for the government to intervene directly in the private sector.

Needless to say, all governments have used the exception process to carve out blanket wide-ranging exceptions for themselves, for state owned or partially state owned enterprises (police, government departments, police, justice, banks, insurance, hospitals, doctors, incumbent telco's, ... exactly the people where GDPR protection would be critically important) that seem to grow in scope over time. For example the tax offices in the EU now have exceptions that allows them to mandate companies store PII as part of their regulations (meaning without an actual law).

And, in any case, if anyone violates your rights, there's nothing you can do with the GDPR. Try to get a hospital to empty your patient record and tell me how it goes (I wanted to do that after the hospital charged the insurance for an -embarassing- assessment they didn't actually do (it allowed them to charge a lot because it involves staying a few days at the hospital, I was in there about 2 hours). So I wanted it cleared of my medical record, which is one of the core things the GDPR allows for, it's given as an example in the law! Nope. Not allowed, and the government doesn't pick up the report)
by KronisLV | 2025-05-16 08:14:11+00:00
> The money is still “there”, so probably no lawyer can say BMaC has “stolen them”—you just can’t neither receive “your” money nor, at least, give them back to those who sent them.

Lawyering aside, really now? If someone holds money that should be mine with no way for me to get it out and me never getting a way to get it out, it’s not different to me no longer having that money. If the entire purpose of them having that money was for me to be able to get it out, it really feels a lot like theft.

It’s no different than you having money on your PayPal account, it getting suspended for some dumb reason and them just taking your money.

I have used Wise in the past to send money to some gaming friends abroad with weird banks, I really hope that it or some other option that supports as many countries as possible remains available.

I hate to sound like one of those “crypto bros” but I’ve also used BTC in the past for similar use cases and it’s refreshing, you just need to have an exchange available in a given country and also not store too much money in crypto due to the high volatility, unless that’s what you’re going for.

Not to badmouth some need for regulation or whatever is actually going on behind the scenes (assuming a charitable interpretation of whatever it is), but not being able to support a content creator or send pizza money to an acquaintance or whatever for reasons like that seems... dumb. Plus, a "proper" way to handle discontinuing the support for entire regions would be something along the lines of:

1. public announcement and timeline for upcoming changes 2. "Here's how you transfer out all of your money off of the platform before the change: ..." (with regular reminders) 3. "Here's how you migrate your follower base to another platform that supports your region: ..." (maybe a collab of some sort, at least offering each patron the ability to register on the new platform if they want to keep supporting the person)
by _dain_ | 2025-05-16 08:14:40+00:00
Regarding coal futures: more likely a reference to the quixotism of "selling coal to Newcastle"[1], and by extension to that famous Irish-American Quixote, Timothy Dexter, who indeed did so, and broke a miner's strike. The similarities probably end there; Mr Rosier was clearly a literate man, and Dexter was not.

As for the final baseball anecdote, I think you've misread it. It is not from the point of view of the batter, but the catcher -- the anonymous narrator was a boy watching the game from the stands, and he caught the ball at the final moment. It is unarguably a 12 year old Mr Rosier; this would have been during his "youth gang" era, and he tells us that

>Whiston is glaring daggers at me: I will suffer eternally for letting them down. The other guys look away at the stand ...

-- Whiston is one of his boyhood friends, and prior to this incident he disappointed them in some way. Catching that ball was a singular moment of glory, one that he dwelled on for the rest of his life, looming larger and larger in his mind until it could no longer be contained, but spilled out into a vast museum cataloguing everything connected to that instant. It was his "Rosebud". Everything about the war, Poland, etc is a red herring. He founded the museum precisely 30 years after the game, at the age of 42, possibly brought on by a midlife crisis.

It's a funny inversion of Ezra Buckley's project from Tlön; Buckley wanted to secretly invent an entire planet, Rosier wanted to publicly preserve an infinitesimal point in time and space (one which, per The Aleph, contains all other points in time and space, and through it they may be perfectly understood).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coals_to_Newcastle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter
by briansm | 2025-05-16 08:14:59+00:00
Maybe I didn't explain it well, gold and bitcoin are the 'memory' of used energy, they are not energy sources themselves.

I think of them as representations of the idea that energy is (currently) so abundant and cheap that we can waste it on mining things like gold and crypto, a fundamentally ridiculous concept in terms of real actual human needs.

Once that stops being the case (when fossil fuel starts running out globally), the whole thing - cash, gold, crypto, stocks, bonds, property - everything falls apart.
by Retric | 2025-05-16 08:15:11+00:00
Nope land is comparable, subtract that out and you’ll see a huge difference as you literally can’t legally build a house that shitty in most areas. These things were typically ~750 SF and had terrible insulation via single pane windows etc.

Survivorship bias means most of the lowest quality housing stock either didn’t survive or was significantly upgraded, but that’s irrelevant when talking about what was being built.
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-16 08:17:06+00:00
> One solution regularly proposed is that the left needs to break with the Democrats and build a third party

Disenfranchised Republicans have spoken this out loud too, but third parties fail in the US because of money. It takes a lot of money to organize enough people to get on all ballots in all jurisdictions. Most Americans otherwise lack sufficient interest to help achieve this.

The other side of the problem is attempts to superficially game the system through artificial candidate selection via primaries and first past the poll voting mechanisms. Once you eliminate those politics does a 180 converting from toxic to exceptionally pleasant.
by notpushkin | 2025-05-16 08:17:10+00:00
I’m not sure if that’s the case. I mean, crypto is surely used for some transactions, but governments also just pay for stuff openly. EU is still paying Russia for gas, I believe?

> They are used for profit by their local oppressors/gangs and by western cryptobros.

For a razor-thin margin, maybe. It’s still the cheapest way to move money out from Russia, meaning it’s not used there to pay taxes (i.e. fund the war!) And the alternatives are using banks or money transfer systems, which I think are more likely to be pro-government than just a bunch of local guys that want to make some cash.
by diamondage | 2025-05-16 08:18:20+00:00
I did work on a diagnostic assist tool developed by a large pharma which diagnosed between Asthma and COPD. GPs get this right 52% time, specialists just over 60 and AI came in over 80%...using 12 relatively mundane input variables. I believe there are a lot of these situations, but not clear pathway to FDA approval
by DoctorMckay101 | 2025-05-16 08:19:50+00:00
My approved to shut down question rate was about 40/60. And within the approved questions, I only got the answers I looked for like 50-60% of the time. Got to 350 points myself. I hated every second of it.

Really aggressive moderation, people trying to score points for a worthless achievement system by spamming comments like "You should narrow the scope of this question"

Having to grind achievements to be able to comment, like or dislike.

I used it for a year or so back in 2013?, went back to posting in forums like XDA developers, Codeguru and Reddit.
by imhoguy | 2025-05-16 08:20:09+00:00
It may be survivorship bias but I can't imagine current so complex and fragile engineering achieving such durability.

Once you apply vibe-engineering to everything how we can even keep anything working beyond 1 year warranty. You can't RMA space probes.

But maybe we should send 50000 cheap (fr)agile probes like Starlinks into deep space and push updates randomly. Maybe just one makes it over 50 years mark.

Ah, and we should call it Starsperm. I think I should add "/s" here.
by tuyiown | 2025-05-16 08:20:26+00:00
I was very centered on the software part of the problem. A complex problem can be solved with a complicated chain of small technical solution. At implementation level, its complicated, not complex, e.g. you mostly need knowledge of the general problem to understand the solution, and many added things make things complicated.

My take is that if your complex problem is only solvable by complex software (e.g. not a combination of simple small parts), and _cannot_ be reduced to simpler things, you are in the complex space.

Maybe it's too reductive, it's just my opinion, but it's a good way for me to determine predictability on ability to solve a problem with many unknown, at the engineering level. The dangerous blockers are in complex space, identifying them early is critical. Complicated stuff can be worked around and solved later.
by rajnathani | 2025-05-16 08:20:26+00:00
The study could have potential control issues, for example those sitting excessively would less likely travel and explore new places or be outside at social gatherings, both these small examples would potentially help stimulate the brain (loneliness is directly correlated with dementia risk [0]).

[0] https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/loneliness-linked-dementia-risk...
by Sammi | 2025-05-16 08:21:11+00:00
Also parents who are both carriers have a 25% chance of making a sick child, a 25% chance of making a non carrier and non sick child, and a 25%+25% chance of making non sick yet carrier child. So they already have a 50% chance of making children who'll survive and yet be carriers of the disease. I guess this will increase this to 75%. But you have to evaluate this in connection with the rapid increases in genetic treatment options, which decreases the issues.
by cout | 2025-05-16 08:21:28+00:00
The limitation with the runtime switch is that it cannot be generated. If all you want to do is have different behavior for each type, then it's probably fine. But if you want to write generic code (apply the same function regardless of type), you need to be able to generate the function using metaprogramming techniques.

C++ isn't great for for metaprogramming, because much of it is a hack that uses the type system to do things it was never originally designed to do (i.e. as a lisp). But as metaprogramming has become more commonplace, the language has evolved with features that make it easier and more readable. It's still all based on a hack, and there's still no good way to debug a metaprogram. But at least I don't have to read the loki book anymore to grok it.

I still prefer to use a proper code generator when I can (it compiles faster, and I can see the generated code). Generating an ordinary switch outside of C++ is certainly an option and is something I've done. But I don't reach for it every time, because those tools tend to be kludgy as well (they can generate invalid C++, which templates and comstexpr cannot).
by audunw | 2025-05-16 08:21:53+00:00
Crypto isn’t an alternative to a bank. Not any crypto I’ve seen at least.

The primary purpose of a bank is to issue debt. That’s why they were created. A bank has to be able to “print” money to issue debt. This isn’t a flaw as some crypto fans like to think, it’s a very important feature. Debt issued by banks replaced the informal promise-based debt people used before we had banks. You didn’t need money on hand, or to borrow some coins from some rich dude, to get help building a barn. You got help from people in the village in exchange for some other goods or service you’d provide them in the future. Bank issued debt with “printed” money is the replacement to that, and it only works if money can be created on demand.

Crypto can’t “print” money on demand, by design. So it can’t replace banks.
by 0xEF | 2025-05-16 08:22:02+00:00
And there it is. The massive scam culture of Meta is profitable for Meta, without them having to actively participate in the scams, and therefore it will remain. This problem exists for the same reason we have crooked cops in every major police department in the US; when you pay someone to turn a blind-eye to certain activities, they will probably take the money. Meta gets so much engagement from scams, AI content and misinformation that their empire would collapse without it, at this point.