MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-07 17:02:52+00:00
It's not carbon neutral, it still adds to the problem. We need to replace our carbon emitting power generation with renewable energy, not burn our trash to keep emitting the same. And trash can just be buried, it doesn't need to be burned.

There's a lot of talk generally of running carbon sequestration technologies and how important that will be. Burying plastic waste is exactly doing that, without spending the extra power to actually extract the carbon from the air.
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-06-07 17:03:01+00:00
> I am the parent of a college sophomore. My son is learning data science in the US.

This is nice and all, as a parent. But I am sort of scratching my head wondering why the son is not posting themselves.

In my experience of seeing hundreds of posts over the decades like this, the key resourcefulness to do good work is also the same compulsion to post for this kind of advice themselves. Without knowing your background, surely a student (your son) studying data science, is far better suited to finding a project that a) matches their skillset and b) matches their interests.

If my son was trying to find a project I’d be telling them to find one themselves, not asking others online on their behalf.
by itishappy | 2025-06-07 17:03:04+00:00
I just applied to a job and part of it was a disability disclaimer. Here's the list:

* Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)

* Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS

* Blind or low vision

* Cancer (past or present)

* Cardiovascular or heart disease

* Celiac disease

* Cerebral palsy

* Deaf or serious difficulty hearing

* Diabetes

* Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders

* Epilepsy or other seizure disorder

* Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome

* Intellectual or developmental disability

* Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD

* Missing limbs or partially missing limbs

* Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports

* Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)

* Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities

* Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)

* Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema

* Short stature (dwarfism)

* Traumatic brain injury

The form asks if you currently have or have ever had one of these in the past. Well, I don't know if anyone I've met hasn't. I said "no." I have no idea what the right approach here is.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-07 17:03:12+00:00
It's not a rhetorical trick, and I would appreciate the benefit of the doubt. I just didn't feel like writing a larger comment.

The US is 100% not a functioning democracy, and whether something is a thing if it does not function as a thing is actually a deep philosophical argument that goes back thousands of years. Is a chair a chair if it functions as a chair, or simply if I call it a chair? Can a chair which one cannot use as a chair still be a chair? As you can see, I have an opinion on this, at least in this context, but I am not trying to convince anyone else to share this view. However, it is my view and I used it to advance my argument.
by MPSimmons | 2025-06-07 17:04:03+00:00
At least one person at every company impacted knows why they're firing people, right? Likely several people who are in a decision making capacity. At every company.

Those companies have R&D for a reason. A company _wants_ to make things, right? If this is impacting their ability to make things, wouldn't it be in a company's best interest to advocate openly against the tax code, rather than be silent about the reason, fire their staff, and just not make things?

It doesn't make sense to me how so many people are aware of this to the point that many many companies are all doing the same thing for the same reason, but seemingly nobody was talking about it before this post. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-07 17:04:11+00:00
I'm not sure why TFA makes it sound like almost no one has heard of it, but it was extensively discussed on HN in early 2023 as being a primary cause of layoffs, before it was cool to blame AI.

Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten survival (924 points, 981 comments) April 18, 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614313

Ask HN: How are you handling Section 174 changes for bootstrapped companies? (298 points, 187 comments) Feb 2, 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34627712

Why the big tech firms that suddenly laid off a bunch of people the instant they started looking at their 2022 tax bill didn't tell everyone explicitly that that's what was happening I can't say, but it's not like this has been happening in secret.

Obviously interest rates also play a role, and probably a larger one. But this is objectively a very very bad contributing factor, far worse than the impact of coding LLMs.
by nunez | 2025-06-07 17:04:29+00:00
Okay; so this entire article hinges on the argument that education is "right wing" because it is ruthlessly hierarchial.

While that is definitely true, and I, too, would like to see some slack implemented in that system, I think the author will reconsider their position after realizing what being "right-wing" in 2025 really means.

(It should not be a de facto requirement to have a PhD to become a full-time faculty professor in university, but removing that requirement will rug-pull all of the PhD candidates for whom tenured professorship is their most viable career choice.)

In my opinion, modern right-wing ideologies are _deeply_ seeped in anti-intellectualism. From book bans to school waivers, the right-wing groupthink believes that education by way of personal responsibility, conservative values and individuaulism.

In their eyes, public education is a failed experiment which can only be remedied by private schools, homeschooling and increased parental involvement in curriculum planning. This works within communities that are well-founded and have involved and well-educated parents but introduces massive risks in literally any other environment (like the underfunded and under-resourced rural and ex-urban communities that push these values so hard).

We're already seeing the effects of this in Houston ISD. The state of Texas took over this school system two years ago because of "low performance" due to "wokism", amongst other things (in my opinion). They've implemented severely regressive policies, like book bans and timers, but one particularly egregious thing they're apparently vibing with is AI-generated worksheets. If you want your kid learning about the Harlem Renaissance from diffusion-generated art badly resembling art from the period, look no further than HISD. [^0]

What makes this especially egregious to me is that the state of Texas and our federal government spent so much energy banning things that looked too DEI...like books on the Harlem Renaissance, history articles about Black people doing cool things, or, shit, straight up banning the word Black in journal articles. Banning real knowledge and replacing it with wildly-wrong AI generated garbage is unspeakable, but educators speaking up on this apparently makes them "left-wing".

Education is supposed to be non-partisan, but educators, by and large, being extremely opposed to these developments forces their hand.

[^0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/his...
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-06-07 17:05:13+00:00
Also, in bigger cities(Oslo in my case), even if you throw empties in public trash cans, they get fished out by various types of poor people who walk around all day collecting them. Though I tend to leave them next to the trashcan as long as it's not too windy, just as a nice gesture to the less fortunate. Or, often you'll see one of them as you finish your drink and you just hand them the bottle. Of course, I'd prefer a society where people didn't need to do this to get their next fix or meal or whatever it is, but it is sort of neat that utrash sorting can just naturally emerge in a society once the trash is imbued with monetary value.

One wonders why we don't do this with larger categories of garbage that needs to be sorted. I suppose bottles and cans are fairly easy to semi-automate given their fairly standardised shapes. But that just feels like an implementation detail.
by roflmao123 | 2025-06-07 17:05:21+00:00
> Post Section 174, the profit is now $160,000 each year. Now they pay taxes on $160,000, even though they literally have no money left over because revenues equaled expenditures.

They have the $200k they pulled from their startup, far more than what most people earn. If you make enough to pay yourself $100k then you make enough to pay taxes.
by dataflow | 2025-06-07 17:06:21+00:00
> The rule as written means contractors who write Windows drivers could deduct their expenses (as they would have no residual rights to a closed-source work product), but contractors who write Linux drivers may not (as they would have some rights to open-source Linux drivers).

Is it just me or are you conflating two orthogonal things?

An open-source Windows driver would have the same issue, no? And a closed-source proprietary Linux driver privately written for some company wouldn't have this issue either, right?
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-07 17:06:29+00:00
How about

https://www.etsy.com/listing/500290818/we-believe-yard-sign-...

? Complex issues get distilled into 3 or 4 word slogans with the total effect of suggesting that the person with this lawn sign is superior in every way to people who disagree with her, that there's one exact right way to think about every issue, people who disagree are evil, deluded, subhuman, affected by perverse psychology, etc. You can find people on Mastodon and Bluesky say the most terrible things about the 70% of people who have concerns about transgender athletes in women's sports.

I don't have the numbers to prove it but my belief is that kind of thinking is basically right wing and that putting one of those yard signs in your yard shifts the vote +0.05 R or something just as 15 minutes listening to Rush does. Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people everything the want all the time is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.
by wslh | 2025-06-07 17:06:41+00:00
Human language is more powerful than its surface syntax or semantics: it carries meaning beyond formal correctness. We often communicate effectively even with grammatically broken sentences, using jokes, metaphors, or emotionally charged expressions. This richness makes language a uniquely human cognitive layer, shaped by context, culture, and shared experience. While it's not foundational in the same way as sensorimotor interaction, it is far more than just a high-level communication tool.
by BDPW | 2025-06-07 17:09:03+00:00
I've had a similar experience from the opposite side. I've had quite a few years of experience in Python and had to work in R for an internship during my masters.

My impression was that it's pretty easy to do straightforward things like the examples described in the article. But when you have to do complicated or unusual things with your data I found it very frustrating to work with. Access to the underlying data was often opague and it was difficult to me at times to figure out what was happening under the hood.

Does anyone here know any research areas still using R?
by themgt | 2025-06-07 17:10:25+00:00
Some related topics I find interesting to ponder in relation to the Rwandan genocide and more broadly:

Accusation in a mirror:

Accusation in a mirror is a false claim that accuses the target of something that the perpetrator is doing or intends to do. The name was used by an anonymous Rwandan propagandist in Note Relative à la Propagande d'Expansion et de Recrutement ... he instructed colleagues to "impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do". By invoking collective self-defense, propaganda is used to justify genocide, just as self-defense is a defense for individual homicide. Susan Benesch remarked that while dehumanization "makes genocide seem acceptable", accusation in a mirror makes it seem necessary.

Double-genocide or at least mass war crimes against Hutu by the RPF:

Estimates of Hutu deaths from mass violence in the 1990s are much less precise than Tutsi death figures from the Rwandan genocide due to the greater timescale and geographic spread of the killings. Researcher Alison Des Forges estimated that the RPF killed 60,000 people in war crimes in 1994 and 1995. Historian Gérard Prunier estimated that 100,000 Hutu were killed by the RPF in 1994–1995. Historian Roland Tissot argued that there were around 400,000 Hutus killed by the RPF between 1994 and 1998 (excluding disease and excess mortality), while Omar Shahabudin McDoom estimated several hundred thousand Hutu victims during the 1990s. Demographer Marijke Verpoorten guesstimates 542,000 deaths of Rwandan Hutus (about 7.5 percent of the population), with "a very large uncertainty interval", from war-related causes in the 1990s, including battle deaths and excess mortality from poor conditions in refugee camps.

Kagame, the leader of the RPF, has also had an ... interesting tenure as president, in power 25 years and most recently winning 99% of the vote:

The highest-profile opposition figure for the 2017 election was local businesswoman Diane Rwigara. Although she acknowledged that "much has improved under Kagame", Rwigara was also critical of Kagame's government, saying that "people disappear, others get killed in unexplained circumstances and nobody speaks about this because of fear". Like Ingabire in 2010, Rwigara was barred from running in the election.

Throughout Kagame's tenure as vice president and president, he has been linked with murders and disappearances of political opponents, both in Rwanda and abroad. In a 2014 report titled "Repression Across Borders", Human Rights Watch documents at least 10 cases involving attacks or threats against critics outside Rwanda since the late 1990s, citing their criticism of the Rwandan government, the RPF or Kagame

My general impression is that Rwanda has been compressed down to a simplistic morality play when the reality seems a lot more complex and in many ways more unsettling.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory_(Rwanda...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Blood#Death_toll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kagame#Assassinations
by oskarkk | 2025-06-07 17:10:37+00:00
YouGov made a survey on June 5, asking "If you had to choose, who would you side with more between the following?" with Musk and Trump to choose. For Republicans, it's 71% Trump, 6% Musk, 12% neither, 11% not sure.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/economy/survey-results/daily...
by hinkley | 2025-06-07 17:10:49+00:00
This feels like some of the problems I’ve ended up tackling. The people too close to the problem don’t see it so someone has to reach across the aisle and make something happen in code they normally wouldn’t touch.

Even with the quadratic complexity I suspect this problem has been brewing for a while. This commit has been biding its time for 16 years waiting to ruin someone’s day (let’s not confuse the utility of Make it Work early in a project with justifying retaining that code in perpetuity. Make it Right, Make it Fast.) Backups have probably been going over six hours for years and steadily climbing.

“We” feels a lot like one or two people jumping on a grenade.
by lukan | 2025-06-07 17:11:59+00:00
Indeed, but it seems widespread.

Even the trial against a musician who incited violence argues in that direction.

"In addition to other evidence, the prosecution cited a song celebrating the abolition of monarchy and the regaining of independence from 1959 to 1961: a Rwandan expert in the trial later expounded that the latter song could not have been addressed to the Rwandan nation as a whole, because the Tutsis were associated with the Rwandan monarchy and colonial regime, and that it was impossible to hate the monarchy without hating the Tutsis"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bikindi#Details
by unkulunkulu | 2025-06-07 17:12:44+00:00
Wow! You probably just opened my eyes to the “spring productivity boost” pattern clearly observed in my life :)

> But yeah, if 'work' is the highest principle one has, these are just excuses for procrastination.

exactly! And even rhyming some other thread here, this might happen if “work” is procrastination for the life itself. I honestly feel myself here now: work figured out as process, but life… oh my I better go write some code.

It’s like you’re cornered: you’re like deer in the headlights concerned with “work”, if you’re not “productive”, you devalue yourself completely. It could happen if you chose work as your primary value long before you realized that the same patterns will lead you into the corner inside work itself.

It’s like running away from one world to another to another until there is no further escape. Then hopefully, you start to find the way back, because you have the Ariadne’s thread in your hands.

Good luck to us all :)
by grogenaut | 2025-06-07 17:13:00+00:00
"""General rule of thumb is that the opening in a Faraday cage should be smaller than 1/10th of the wavelength that should be blocked. For example, in order to block EM fields with frequencies of 10 GHz and lower, the hole size of the Faraday cage should be smaller than 3 mm."""

wavelength of red in inches: 2.46063e-5 wavelength of 2.4ghz in inches: 4.25 wavelength of xrays in inches: 7.87402e-7 (upper end)

You could easily see through a 4.25 mesh, that's almost chain link

you could not see through a 2.4e-5 mesh, that's call fabric, unless you can see through clothes in which case I'm not going near you. xrays can see through that :)
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-06-07 17:13:16+00:00
There's a big cultural gap here. To people who are concerned about porn, it's like asking why we have to stop children from buying handles of vodka.

Can't you just educate them to avoid drinking to excess? No, you can't, they don't have that level of self-control yet.

Isn't it unfair to the responsible bakers who just want a really tender pie crust? Yes, it is, but they're going to have to deal with it.

Won't a determined kid still be able to get their hands on alcohol? Yes, they will, but it matters that they get it less often and less frequently.
by pdimitar | 2025-06-07 17:14:04+00:00
I agree and completely sympathize.

[rant]

What irked me many times: people around here idolizing a certain PL they learned as kids and giving it much more credit than it ever deserved.

[/rant]

I completely understand the almost PTSD levels of reactions when people say "you actually can do ${obviously_difficult_thing} in ${obviusly_niche_language}!". I have the same reactions towards these statements myself.

I mean sure, if you're a good enough physicist you probably can make a lounge chair out of toothpicks, toilet paper tubes, rubberbands and glue. Doesn't mean that it's sustainable or viable to do so for everyone else. It's just your hobby; go wild and have fun! Don't pretend that's how lounge chairs should be mass-produced, however.

Same goes for PLs.

A lot of PLs should have remained niche curiosities and research ideas -- and nothing beyond that. Sadly we both know how people are. They easily fall in love and lose all scientific objectivity.

So yeah, I quite get your frustration.
by setheron | 2025-06-07 17:14:13+00:00
Nix has support for bit reproduction and will not rebuild on comments if you specify it.

Of course lots of software isn't ready for but reproduction which is why Nix has taken such a pragmatic approach. (I have written a lot about this).

It's all a series of tradeoffs. If your goal is reproducibility (as close as you can get), you will have a larger graph likely ..since you are accounting for more!

Sometimes we like to believe we can have our cake and eat it too rather than understand life's a series of tradeoffs.

When we think we are getting a silver bullet, we've likely just pushed that complexity somewhere else.
by pstuart | 2025-06-07 17:15:05+00:00
Edit: just waking up.

> suggesting that the person with this lawn sign is superior in every way to people who disagree with her

Da fuq? No, it's a statement of beliefs (which I share). None of it is meant to belittle those that disagree, it's simply stating a belief system.

As opposed to calling Democrats DemonRats and implying that they're all evil and are destroying America?
by grey-area | 2025-06-07 17:15:16+00:00
So we’ve established the default is a hyphen, not an em dash.

You can certainly select an em dash but most don’t know what it means and don’t use it.

It’s certainly not infallible proof but multiple uses of it in comments online (vs published material or newspapers) are very unusual, so I think it’s an interesting indicator. I completely agree it is common in some texts, usually ones from publishing houses with style guides but also people who know about writing or typography.
by Const-me | 2025-06-07 17:15:18+00:00
CPUs can’t do that, but legacy is irrelevant. They just don’t have enough parallelism to leverage all these extra transistors. Let’s compare the 486 with a modern GPU.

Intel 80486 with 1.2M transistors delivered 0.128 flops / cycle.

nVidia 4070 Ti Super with 45.9B transistors delivers 16896 flops / cycle.

As you see, each transistor became 3.45 times more efficient at delivering these FLOPs per cycle.
by energy123 | 2025-06-07 17:15:28+00:00
What many in the US don't have conceptual familiarity with is pre-genocidal speech. Historically and empirically, the actual call to violence only happens at the end of a long period of collectivizing dehumanization via media, when people are already pliable for it. In my view, those causal antecedents to genocide should be illegal due to their historically proven connection to genocide. This speech is more dangerous and leads to more dead bodies than other types of speech which are already illegal, like isolated calls to individual violence or libel.
by chacha102 | 2025-06-07 17:15:45+00:00
Too much domain knowledge for an IDE to catch. I'm self taught as well, and it comes down to spending more time thinking about the code than writing the code.

It's a fairly simple thought experiment to ask yourself what if there was 10x items in this array? 100x? That is essentially what the O(n) notation is trying to quantify. You just don't need to do it that formally.
by giardini | 2025-06-07 17:15:48+00:00
Tough to handle though!8-)) It gets all over the place: stains skin, clothes, most everything else unless you handle it as if you were in a laboratory.

Never thought about it before but handling MB in a chem lab might be a very good way to show beginning students how difficult it is to do good lab work and how easily traces of material (and organisms) may pass from one place to another (contact).
by marklubi | 2025-06-07 17:16:20+00:00
> I don't get tempted to smash the sell button during major dips, I get tempted to smash the buy button.

Same. Not quite dollar-cost averaging, but when I'm confident in the long term outlook of a company, if they dip, I like to buy more.

Just before the COVID lockdowns, I sold everything and went to cash for a month or so. Bought back all my previous positions right about the bottom of the dip. Massive gains on that one... hard to time things that well all the time though.

Edit: One additional thing is that you can't be emotionally invested in the investments. That's just a recipe for poorly thought out choices, and ultimately a disaster