MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-19 13:51:14+00:00
You don't need to reinvent the justification, just quote straight from the "Resolution on eliminating excesses in design and construction" from the USSR, 1955 [0]:

The Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR resolutely condemn the mistakes made in architecture, design and construction, as contradicting the line of the Party and the Government in this matter, causing significant damage to the national economy and hindering the improvement of the housing and cultural and living conditions of workers. When designing and constructing buildings and structures, architects and engineers must pay primary attention to issues of economics, construction, creating the greatest conveniences for the population, landscaping, apartments, schools, hospitals and other buildings and structures, as well as landscaping of residential areas and neighborhoods. In order to avoid excesses and amateurishness, our architects and engineers must become conductors of everything new and progressive in design and construction. Construction must be carried out according to the most economical standard projects, developed taking into account the best achievements of domestic and foreign construction, based on industrial production methods. Soviet architecture should be characterized by simplicity, strictness of forms and economy of solutions. The attractive appearance of a building and structure should be created not by using far-fetched, expensive decorative ornaments, but by organic connection of architectural forms with the purpose of buildings and structures, their good proportions, as well as the correct use of materials, structures and details and high quality of work. The Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR believe that decisively overcoming shortcomings in design and construction, and the rapid and complete elimination of excesses in architecture will make it possible to save significant funds and direct them to the further expansion of housing, cultural and domestic, industrial and agricultural construction, as well as to the expansion of work on the improvement and landscaping of cities and towns.

That, incidentally, was the point of time when the Soviets borrowed the brutalism from the UK; it'd be only fair for the UK to re-embrace it. All in the name of the people's prosperity and happiness, and it worked so well in the past too! Oh, and also retroactively fine the most prominent architects for good measure as well, to set proper example.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-19 13:51:23+00:00
For the sake of discussion I want to play devil's advocate concerning your point

> It was an interesting result to me because it shows that experts in a field are not only more likely to recognize when a model is giving incorrect answers but they're also more likely to get correct answers because they are able to tap into a set of weights that are populated by text that knew what it was talking about. Lay people trying to use an LLM to understand an unfamiliar field are vulnerable to accidentally tapping into the "amateur" weights and ending up with an answer learned from random Reddit threads or SEO marketing blog posts, whereas experts can use jargon correctly in order to tap into answers learned from other experts.

Couldn't it be the case that people who (in this case recognizable to the AI by their choice of wording) are knowledgeable in the topic need different advise than people who know less about the topic?

To give one specific examples from finance: if you know a lot about finance, getting some deep analysis and advice about what is the best way to trade some exotic options is likely sound advice. On the other hand, for people who are not deeply into finance the best advice is likely rather "don't do it!".
by edot | 2025-05-19 13:51:31+00:00
Upvoted for discussion, but this is a pretty junky article with opinions more than facts. Most of the facts (wow look at that per capita wealth increase!) make me question if the author understands basic math. Wow, the average went up! I wonder why he chose not to show the median and standard deviation?

One main point seems to be that the middle class is actually rich if you add up our home values and social security benefits. Those things aren’t liquid like AMZN or META stock, nor can I use them as collateral for loans to buy a yacht or manipulate elections (I guess I could get deeper in debt and risk losing my house with a HELOC).

Quote from the article: “capital taxation should target income rather than wealth or inheritances”.

Does the author not understand that billionaires have dozens of loopholes performed by dozens of accountants and lawyers to make them have minimal income on paper?
by geodel | 2025-05-19 13:51:32+00:00
I don't know if its weird. This seems to me using money to reduce hassle. At my even lower level of existence I do similar thing in sense I keep one pair toothbrush and paste in upstairs bathroom and another pair at main level just to avoid whatever inconvenience I've thought of in my mind. Same with multiple pair of glasses at different location I work from.

I have not done these things when I had less money and now I think removing minor hassles with extra money is worth it. At another order of magnitude of money I'd definitely acquire multiple copy of things I need.
by imtringued | 2025-05-19 13:51:40+00:00
The reason why you want quasi direct drive with low gear reduction has to do with the kinetic energy stored in the gears. It's difficult to get an intuition as a human, because we don't have rapidly spinning disks inside our arms.

The moment your high gear reduction actuator is forming a contact with anything, it will have to either decelerate instantly, push the object away or move into the object by deforming it. If your robot arm is moving at speed and hitting a wall, the deceleration needs to shed all velocity in a few milliseconds. This is fine for the arm itself, but if you have a 100:1 gear reduction ratio, one gear is moving at 100 times the speed of the robot arm and since kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2, the energy stored in the gear is significant. Stop the arm and you'll break off the teeth on your gears!
by sleepyguy | 2025-05-19 13:51:49+00:00
The issue is incredibly complicated. There is little to no infrastructure outside of major population centers. The cost of land in cities makes it unreasonable to build anything but Condo towers. Investment in transportation of any type to rural towns or even smaller cities is non-existent. A network of roads and rail to move people quickly would open up vast areas to affordable housing. Unfortunately, the government/bureaucracy at all levels doesn't have the desire/ability to meet the challenges, the entire system is dysfunctional. An example, adding a subway stop or an extra lane to a highway, can take decades in Canada.
What interesting things low spending people do, that others know nothing about?
by evolve2k | 2025-05-19 13:51:50+00:00
A question on the home page is concerned with a similar question but for wealthy people. I’m interested in things low income and low spending folk do that others engaged in ordinary commerce maybe barely do or better yet never think to do of know anything about.

Keen to hear your stories. Sometimes the best things in life are free.
by nerdsniper | 2025-05-19 13:51:56+00:00
This article has a picture of one of Steve Jobs' actual cars with no plates at all (temporary or otherwise). It explicitly talks about a "new" requirement for new cars to be issued temp plates. Before that, brand new cars from the dealer had a 6-month grace period.

> "From 2019, California joins most of the other states in the nation by requiring newly bought cars to be issued temporary license plates."

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/07/steve-jobs-loophole-clo...
by thesuitonym | 2025-05-19 13:52:02+00:00
It's not really moving the goalposts, though. The idea of a self driving car has always been "I can get in my car, tell it where I want to go, and then it goes there while I read a book."

Having navigation and music, and lane assist, and adaptive cruise control, and some cars that can operate autonomously in some environments is great, but it's not what we meant when we said self driving cars.
by jfindley | 2025-05-19 13:52:11+00:00
It's a shame the article chose to compare solely against AMD CPUs, because AMD and Intel have very different L3 architectures. AMD CPUs have their cores oranised into groups, called a CCX, each of which have their own small L3 cache. For example the Turin-based 9755 has 16 CCXs each with 32MB of L3 cache. Far less cache per core than the mainframe CPU being described. In contrast to this, Intel uses an approach that's a little closer to the Telum II CPU being described - a Granite Rapids AP chip such as 6960P has 432 MB of L3 cache shared between 72 physical cores, each with its own 2MB L2 cache. This is still considerably less cache, but it's not quite as stark a difference as the picture painted by the article.

This doesn't really detract from the overall point - stacking a huge per-core L2 cache and using cross-chip reads to emulate L3 with clever saturation metrics and management is very different to what any x86 CPU I'm aware of has ever done, and I wouldn't be surprised if it works extremely well in practice. It's just that it'd have made a stronger article IMO if it had instead compared dedicated L2 + shared L2 (IBM) against dedicated L2 + shared L3 (intel), instead of dedicated L2 + sharded L3 (amd).
by philistine | 2025-05-19 13:52:11+00:00
That’s English hegemony. Languages have their own sorting that they expect. You can’t impose rules to other languages.

Of course at some point Unicode needs to be ordered, but you don’t get to impose technical details to people around the world because it matches with how English does it.

That’s where geo-ip guessing becomes relevant. Show a list with the most likely languages at the top.
by hahn-kev | 2025-05-19 13:52:34+00:00
As much as I agree Accept language should be enough, the problem is that English is the default value, so if it's default it's likely to be wrong so I understand guessing because most people don't know you can tell the browser what language you want to use. Partly to blame is also the websites that don't have other languages can't respect the header anyway. I've had plenty of users complain about localization issues and I have to explain that they can just tell the browser what language and region to use.
by Izkata | 2025-05-19 13:53:31+00:00
They mentioned background tabs: I see it in Firefox (with uBlock) when it's a tab I've had sitting in the background for hours. Usually the only fix is to copy the URL and reopen it in a few tab, refreshing doesn't work when it gets into this state.

It feels like a weird combination of caching, some key expiring, and how YouTube doesn't finish loading the video until you view the tab.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-19 13:53:36+00:00
> You are missing that I've talked about how there's more business value than direct sales.

Could you please provide enough detail here in your example, that we can discuss and quantify what that value is, so we can compare it with the cost of running the store?

Let's say we have an "all the XR glasses" store that lets visitors try on different XR glasses and see what fits, and the visitors then later buy them from Amazon because the glasses are cheaper there.

p.s.: on multiple posts, you've taken non-personal comments extremely personally (e.g. stuff like 'how dare you say something I already know [because I am smart], thus assuming I don't know it and am dumb'), and attacking others as well, almost as if the topic is you, and not your comment. Just to head that off at the pass: I'm interested in discussing what you said, not in discussing myself or you. You're a smart person. Let's focus on substance.
by gruez | 2025-05-19 13:54:21+00:00
>The dishwasher is fully enclosed...the typical DW is open at the back with all the guts just barely contained in an open structure.

That seems.. fine? Why spend a bunch of money/effort on dressing up something that'd get seen for a few hours max?

>It has pucks full of detergent, a load now a days costs about $1.80...more than I'd like, but the simple avoidance of pouring soap and having a sixpack delivered when you need it is a crazy luxury.

Is pouring out detergent powder really that much of an advantage? At best you're saving a few seconds because you don't have to portion out the soap. Using loose detergent also means you can sprinkle a bit outside of the dispenser, which improves the per-rinse cycle. That means you're getting a worse wash by using tablets, because there's only detergent for the main cycle.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-19 13:54:48+00:00
>They won't get dirt off -

Oh yeah they will. We used to wash car parts at the end of shift before cleaning and draining the machine.

>in industrial kitchens everything is rinsed first and then put in.

Because you'd be cleaning out the dishwasher strainer grates thrice daily if you didn't make a min-effort attempt to reduce its garbage intake.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-19 13:55:53+00:00
> For example, the microwave. Older microwaves have a cumbersome enter time, hit start procedure. Newer microwaves also have a "quick start" button for 30 seconds which you can just press four times to get it to go for two minutes, or enter the time if you need it to go for a while. Hardly the stuff most people will replace a microwave for, but definitely a feature expected of newer microwaves.

How old are we talking about? My microwave is exactly like that, and it is about 15 years old if not more.
by evolve2k | 2025-05-19 13:55:56+00:00
Friends of mine really like spending time outdoors in nature, hiking trails, finding nice spots to just sit and be in nature.

Interestingly for me, they often carry a hammock with them and when they find the most beautiful of spots, they tie it up across a couple trees and just hang out. Once they had it slung across two trees at the water’s edge and hung there above a lovely creek. They picked it up second hand, and there no cost to head out in nature with it week after week.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-19 13:56:03+00:00
China is building more nuclear power than the rest of the world, but it's not even remotely keeping up with their renewable buildouts [1]. Mostly this is because renewables like PV modules are built in a factory using standardized mass-production techniques, and nuclear plants (currently) are not.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...
by bee_rider | 2025-05-19 13:56:20+00:00
I think this is sort of a more interesting question than the responses you got made it out to be.

Yes, of course, stone doesn’t really grow back on the timescales that we care about. Yes, stone not “bio” in any sense really.

But the goal of the law is not to make biology or geology points. It is to reduce the embodied carbon of new construction. I guess the determination was made that stone has some carbon cost… maybe it comes from the mining?

Or maybe they are trying to kickstart, specifically, a new industry in the field of growable construction material. Maybe they figure stone mining is already well developed tech anyway.
by tlb | 2025-05-19 13:57:05+00:00
There are two levels of this. If I get some other European language, I can generally figure out which is their word for English and it's not a big deal to switch. But if it gives me a script I don't know, like Bengali or something, it's a problem.

Perhaps every "choose language" menu should include English and Chinese in non-localized form, as an escape hatch, since almost every web users can recognize enough of them to navigate a menu to find their actual language.
by energy123 | 2025-05-19 13:57:25+00:00
> The TL;DR of memetics is its about gathering experts for the purpose of reducing, eliminating, and manipulating objective reality

That's not the original definition of memetics, though. Memetics refers to an evolutionary process, not to a top-down concerted scheme. In its original definition, many elements of Nazism are a result of memetics. The same can be said of religions and any ideology really. These things aren't cooked up in a vat, they're a byproduct of the evolution of ideas in a certain context.
by dezgeg | 2025-05-19 13:58:06+00:00
Is the controller really going to be that much simpler on a HDD? On HDD you still have things like command queuing, caching, checksumming and bad block remapping just as with SSD. Sure you don't have the flash translation layer, but I'd expect processing of the analog signal going to/from the heads to be a processing headache too. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to do temperature compensation and factory and/or runtime calibration of the analog path. Of course much of that will be done in fixed-function custom hardware blocks, but almost certainly so would a SSD for eg. ECC calculations.

https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=3 has some data points on a 10+ year old HDD - 3 ARM9 feroceon cores + Cortex-M3 core. Doesn't sound too simple.
by rfrey | 2025-05-19 13:58:19+00:00
>Older microwaves have a cumbersome enter time, hit start procedure. Newer microwaves also have a "quick start" button for 30 seconds which you can just press four times to get it to go for two minutes

QS-QS-QS-QS-Start

2-0-0-Start

"Cumbersome"?
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-19 13:58:21+00:00
Yep. I love finding someone's old project on github and going through it and especially comparing it to stuff they did release and seeing how it was merely a stepping stone and a way for them to learn something. That significantly influenced how I code and helped me to be okay with writing code that never sees the light of day, as long as it helps me get past something in a project that does.
by noboostforyou | 2025-05-19 13:58:25+00:00
> Price is 3-4 times higher but it lasts 5-10 times longer and is much more pleasant to use.

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness."
by Chris2048 | 2025-05-19 13:58:29+00:00
> nor the motor-car killed running

Is running an art/vocation comparable to photography and/or painting? We no longer have mailmen who run the length of the country afaik.

But running did heavily contribute to sedentary lifestyles in western countries, along with a bunch of other things.

> mathematical research isn't even a significant employment area

I agree, I think it will move from mathematicians "doing" math, to managing computerised system that do it instead. I'm sure we already have such systems.

I think far more important to humanity is improving mathemetical-literacy. From my perspective, math is made for mathematicians - it could be more accesible. As "pure" amth matures, there is still plenty opportunity in "applied" math (however you might define it).
by mft_ | 2025-05-19 13:58:34+00:00
By the by, one quirk of poor language handling that I think it probably harming YouTube is advert language.

Every one of my subscriptions is an English language channel, and my language choice on all Google properties (where possible) including YouTube is English. It's not hard to judge that English is my favoured language.

And yet... every video advert I receive when travelling is served in the local country's language. It doesn't especially bother me, since I actively avoid listening to adverts (and indeed, now pay for Premium lite to avoid them almost altogether) but it's a weird not-so-edge case that I'd have thought a company as large as Google might have addressed already. They've absolutely got the tech to deliver adverts in any language. (And it could be powerful: imagine receiving adverts for local businesses in your native language while on holiday.)
by philistine | 2025-05-19 13:59:22+00:00
The way you describe it is why it’s not readily accepted. It’s misunderstood. You called it a hoax/scam and a fake. It’s not!

Whoever made the document was sincere in making up something that doesn’t exist. They had no intention to mislead. You wouldn’t call a D&D campaign a hoax because it features nonexistent things?
by bmn__ | 2025-05-19 13:59:24+00:00
It is wrong to blame the server here. For better results in content-negotiation, a user-agent should allow you to assign numeric weights instead of just a list (implying the same level of preference). Example:

Accept-Language: en;q=0.7,pt;q=0.3

If you already send something similar to this, and the server gets it wrong, then this is an outright bug, the software or its operator is out of compliance with HTTP.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-19 14:00:51+00:00
Bloat is bad. Equally, software being too minimal is bad.

> It might sting to lose features in software you use, but in most cases it’s easier to relearn how to stay on the “happy path” laid out for you by those who’ve come before

This is far too simplistic. If software I use eliminates features that greatly benefit me, then I'm more likely to look for a better piece of software than to learn some clumsy workaround.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-05-19 14:00:59+00:00
Five or ten years ago I listened to a podcast that featured an ex-butler of a billionaire family and he talked about ‘his family’ and their friends who were also very rich. The ex-butler said that the quality of the food they ate was perfect, extremely flavorful 100% nutritious meals. I can kind-of get this: the town my wife and I used to live in had two very expensive restaurants that served simple, totally delicious healthy food and I can imagine how wonderful it would be to a skilled chef serve you three meals a day like this.
by JamesSwift | 2025-05-19 14:01:20+00:00
(Not OP) Scratch is great. Its an excellent first step. But you hit the limits fairly quickly for what is easy to do "reasonably". So you stay within the limits of what it does well and that limits the kinds of things you can do. And then you risk losing the kids interest to keep at it, if they become bored with the medium.

I think Roblox is not a bad next step (tons of out of the box marketplace options), or Ive also been doing a bit of Godot with my kids but with me driving a lot of it while we explore it together.
by b112 | 2025-05-19 14:02:04+00:00
I think yes, but no. By this I mean, never compete directly with something that you cannot defeat. The BBC will never be Youtube, TikTok and the like. Just imaging what degree of state censorship will be required. Imagine all the content that will not be acceptable for a BBC Youtube like channel.

So any open platform will almost surely be a no-win for them. (I don't see a lot of content yet from youtube, and none from tiktok which isn't submitted by endusers... even if they're streamers)

The BBC can compete with some of the rest. But if you look at the studios you list, those all make longer, non-user submitted content. The BBC surely can compete here. And it has in the past.

There's no reason it can't stream, as you say.

Note that my prior post was all about "the way it was" and why we're here now. Why traditional broadcasters from the 70s through to the early 2000s behaved as they did. What they were thinking during those times.

But outside of that, websites aren't better at some things. If they were, then we wouldn't be watching full screen video. There's something to be said for curated, created, static content in episodic format.

Maybe you meant 'streaming' instead of 'websites' too?