MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hollerith | 2025-06-30 16:30:46+00:00
Cows have been kept for food for 10,500 years. Sheeps and goats for longer than that. Although the keeping of cows, sheeps and goats started in the Near East (specifically Asia Minor and the Levant), the people who started it migrated into Europe and after some time (probably less than 1000 years) constituted the majority of the European population. Virtually every farm in Europe kept animals for milk and meat at a time when most households were farming households. (The other households were hunter-gatherers, which kept on decreasing in number, who also ate a lot of meat, fish and shellfish.)

It is just not true that European commoners did not eat meat. Yes, for many centuries, the hunting of game was restricted to the aristocracy, but the amount of this game was always dwarfed by the amount of meat on farms (just as it is today for example in the US or Canada).

The Europeans of today are descended not only from these farmers that originated in the Near East and the original hunter-gatherer Europeans, but also from invaders from the East (particularly, where Russian and Ukraine are now). The most famous of these invaders are the Yamnaya, who invented wheeled vehicles and might have invented riding on horseback. These invaders were nomads and semi-nomads who relied heavily on meat and milk products.

Going back in time, from 115,000 to 11,700 years ago, glaciers covered most of Europe and about half of Asia. Below the glaciers was the largest ecosystem known to man, extending from Europe, over the Bering land bridge all the way to about where Kentucky is now. It is called the Mammoth Steppes. Only grasses grew there because those were the only plants that could survive trampling by the mammoths and other large herbivores (including the ancestors of cows). Humans could not eat the grass, and farming hadn't been invented yet, so they ate mostly meat. These humans were the ancestors of the humans mentioned earlier. We know from studies of carbon and nitrogen isotopes that humans living in the Mammoth Steppes derived most of their calories from animals that ate grass (because grass has a different effect on carbon isotopes ratios than other plants have). They might have eaten a lot of plant food, but if so that plant food contributed at most 20% of their calories (which is not surprising given how meager in human-usable calories most non-domesticated plants are).

Going back further in time, humans have been eating meat for about 2 million years. We know that because wherever we unearth human settlements from the last 2 million years, we usually find animal bones and the bones usually show marks consistent with stone tools' having been used to separate the meat from the bones. Since plant foods do not survive the way that bones do, we do not know whether humans have been eating plants for those 2 million years, but I concede that they probably have been, but again before the invention of agriculture about 11,000 years ago, it was really hard for people in most locations to get enough calories from plants to survive.
by benchly | 2025-06-30 16:31:22+00:00
A few things!

1. After hearing Cell by Pannotia, I became obsessed with trying my hand at making a bit of electronic music. I have an Arturia Keystep 32, a Korg NTS-1 and a Korg SQD-1 to mess around with, but I'd really love to learn how to capture the sound on the Pannotia's album since it speaks to me on a visceral level (album link for the curious: https://pannotia.bandcamp.com/album/cell)

2. Turning some old telephones into fun "audio guestbooks", have some additional features lined up that I am going to add (just waiting on parts to arrive), trying to improve a bit on the ones shown in this excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI6ielrP1SE

3. Managed to get a blog post up recently. My work is not exactly what I would call "HN worthy" but if you need a laugh or some decent toilet reading, it probably qualifies (my blog: https://futz.tech/)

I love these threads. So many people working on so many different and interesting things. Renews my hope for the future, a bit.
by kevindamm | 2025-06-30 16:31:30+00:00
I also have a few of those from the 80s but only as notes written on sheets of paper (including many pages of hand-written BASIC and sometimes in various shorthands) because my Atari 800 did not have a cassette drive peripheral with which to save them.

They were fun when they ran for 15-20 minutes, even after keying them in for hours.
by RestlessMind | 2025-06-30 16:31:38+00:00
> These jobs are being offshored to India.

That was inevitable the moment remote work caught on. Software engineers in rich countries were stupidly short-sighted to cheer on the remote work. If your work can be done from anywhere in the US, it can be done from anywhere in the world.

If you think timezones or knowledge of English will save you, Canada has much lower wages for SWEs and central/south America has enough SWEs with good English skills. They are also paid one third or one fourth of what SFBA jobs used to pay. No wonder all the new headcount I have seen since 2022 is abroad.

Remote work, high interest rates and (excuse of) AI coding agents has been the perfect storm which has screwed junior SWEs in the US.
by warthog | 2025-06-30 16:32:03+00:00
Working on Cursor for Excel: https://www.tryalphaexcel.com/

As there is no open source version of Excel except Libreoffice, working to build the core Excel functionality with other open source packages. Then bringing in agentic editing functionality for real world data.

What is also has been interesting is to introduce banker/consultant formatting guidelines to the agent and making it beautify its work whether in tables or models.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-06-30 16:32:37+00:00
> he just doesnt include maps,

Totally fine.

> nor does he hold himself accountable to them.

Iffy: consistency matters in worldbuilding.

> Fans trying to stitch his world together run into issues and he just straight up doesnt give a shit.

Bad: This implies that 1. the constructed world is inconsistent and 2. the author doesn't care. A story set in a fluid world where things just move around breaks immersion and undermines stakes because the reader doesn't know what the rules are and stops caring when it becomes clear that things are just made up on the fly whenever it's convenient.
by habinero | 2025-06-30 16:32:49+00:00
Huh? This is not at all accurate. There are simple and reliable methods, they're used all the time.

I promise you, women understand their cycles quite well and absolutely nobody jumps right to IVF (which costs tens of thousands of dollars) without exhausting cheaper options first.

Also the old canard of "just relax and it will happen" is just that: an old wives tale.
by rwyinuse | 2025-06-30 16:32:51+00:00
Yeah, it's not worth the risk. When I tried the stuff, I first felt absolutely nothing. Then I took some more, and a couple of minutes later I had a full-blown panic attack, probably some hallucinations too. My brain felt a bit weird/slow a day or two after that.

Only later I found out that a deceased close relative of mine had schizophrenia. That killed any remaining interest I might have had towards the substance.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-06-30 16:32:56+00:00
Is it just me, or does Mr. Wang give grifter/charleton vibes. Like I get you don't hand 14bb and positions like this to 28 year olds for nothing. He seems like a really good salesperson mostly, which sometimes give me pause. However, I'm sure Meta needs excellent sales people... for 14bb though? Like did Meta really need labeling/training infra? Idk, the whole deal is weird to me.
by cryptonector | 2025-06-30 16:33:24+00:00
It is control for control's sake. Honeybees are doing fine except for the ones that are driven around to provide fertilization services -- those bees are exposed to very high pesticide doses and -surprise!- have high loss rates. (The same is true for non-mobile beehives in areas that have high pesticide loads.)

Most problems with beehives are down to old brood comb not getting managed out. Feral bees don't have that problem because they swarm and build a new hive when their old one gets small, and they'll leave altogether (not just split) when the brood comb gets old.

It's all bad management, but God forbid you have a beekeeping hobby, no, you must get inspected and the state apiarist gets to come on your property w/o a warrant and they can burn your hives.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-30 16:33:44+00:00
It makes plenty of sense. Python handles strings well, has a great package ecosystem, and is easy to write/learn for non-programmers. It can be easily embedded into a notebook (which is huge for academics) and is technically a "write once run anywhere" platform in theory. It's great.

If you think Python is a bad language for AI integrations, try writing one in a compiled language.
by WA | 2025-06-30 16:33:48+00:00
I just started on an old-school forum software. Go + Sqlite. Good old server-side HTML templating.

Why? I don’t like Discourse and Flarum that much. I want an even simpler solution with fewer bells and whistles.

But I guess the market is dead anyways for forums. I might replace my phpBB instance that has been running for 15 years.
by ericmcer | 2025-06-30 16:33:49+00:00
I have been on the other end of this. I have a few Spanish tutors I pay ~$10 to chat with for 30m sessions. It is nice creating a dynamic where you can shamelessly talk about yourself without worry, because you are paying.

In the rest of life I usually am the captive audience (kids, wife, etc.) and put my own stuff on the back burner. The author is questioning why people would pay, but it is nice to curate a conversation that is intentionally one-sided, otherwise if you contact him the onus is on you to make it worth his time.
by middayc | 2025-06-30 16:33:55+00:00
The waiters (many, low-trust) were transferring orders to cashiers (few, high trust) by showing them QR code that transferred data to the cashiers' apps.

Then the waiter paid the cashier (in advance), got the bill to give to customer and order tickers (printed on a bluetooth POS printer with a cutter, so they were already separated) to recieve the goods (grouped by stations that gave out the goods, food, drinks ...). The stations took the order tickets and gave them goods. The waiters delivered them to customers and used the bill to get cash from the customer.

The waiters could use their own starting money and just stop selling at any point, or got it from the main cashier and had to return the same amount at the end.
by thesuperbigfrog | 2025-06-30 16:34:35+00:00
Maybe this is more of a Debian question since a lot of Ubuntu packages come from Debian, but what process is used to deprecate unmaintained packages?

If a package is abandoned (i.e. there is no current maintainer), how is it determined if a package should be updated and maintained by Debcrafters or someone else?

Is there any kind of download metrics to know if a package is used?

How would package maintenance be prioritized?
by charcircuit | 2025-06-30 16:34:35+00:00
Academia is not the only place to learn.

>The tech giants whose founders and engineers were trained in these institutions, whose core technologies were incubated in these research environments

There is a reason many of those founders dropped out than continue. It turns out that what you learn is useless and inefficient compared to picking up the knowledge externally. Practical experience is a much better teacher than the people at universities. Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day.

Also notice how those core technologies are not listed because it would weaken there point.

It's natural for universities to argue for why they are still relevant in the 21st century. They don't want to be disrupted.
by chbkall | 2025-06-30 16:34:46+00:00
https://childrensbookforall.org

My wife (who is a psychotherapist) started this and I am helping her with this. We are using specially curated children's books as a medium to talk about social, emotional and psychological aspects of mental health among adults, adolescents and teachers. We are also building communities and support groupsaround children's books.

This is in India where talking about mental health can often be a taboo subject. People who need/want to talk about this also find it hard to express and there are limited spaces which give you opportunities to do so. We found the abstractness of children's books as a great evocative medium. They also promote play, wonder and joy - aspects which positively impact mental health of individuals.

The project started with a personal journey of grief my wife experienced (death of a parent, diagnosis of other parent with Stage 4 cancer).
by tlogan | 2025-06-30 16:35:01+00:00
Here is 2005 list:

- Chevrolet Aveo – Starting at $9,455

- Kia Rio – Starting at $10,570

- Hyundai Accent – Starting at $10,999

- Toyota Echo – Starting at $11,110

- Ford Focus ZX3 – Starting at $13,365

- Chevrolet Cavalier – Starting at $13,405

- Chrysler PT Cruiser – Starting at $13,995

- Dodge Neon SXT – Starting at $14,195

- Pontiac Sunfire – Starting at $14,200 see: https://www.kbb.com/pontiac/sunfire/2005

-Saturn Ion – Starting at $14,430 - see https://www.kbb.com/saturn/ion/2005

It is based on this links: https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/top-10/top-10-cars-under... This is article from 2005 (at least metadata says that). The prices are verified via kbb.com which has original MSRP for all used cars.
by cmdrk | 2025-06-30 16:35:05+00:00
Broadly: Still forging ahead building a game server framework in Erlang. I've shifted my attention away from Godot integration (which AFAIK is still working) and toward LÖVE and Lua. Godot is great, but having to write GDScript on the client and Erlang on the backend has caused me many headaches in my game logic. My current goal is to have a beautiful, concurrent, Erlang-based control plane with Lua-based game logic running on both the server and the client.

To that end, I've most recently been hacking on Robert Virding's Luerl (https://github.com/rvirding/luerl), working to adapt the Lua test suite to chase down some small compatibility issues between PUC Lua and Luerl. While Lua is a lovely language, it would also be swell to get Fennel working under Luerl. I wrote a game for the LÖVE jam a few months ago in Fennel and it was a pleasant way to dip my toes into lisp-likes.

I've also been adding things to control plane software, Overworld, here and there: https://github.com/saltysystems/overworld Happily all of the Protobuf and ENet stuff that I've already built nicely carries over into the LÖVE world.
by escapedmoose | 2025-06-30 16:35:07+00:00
Pen on paper is so inefficient that it both forces you to be selective about your records, and to paraphrase and condense thoughts in a way that I suspect prompts deeper thought. This is exactly what the author complained about—-that their PKM system led them to defer processing thoughts. I imagine it also collected much more noise vs signal simply because it was highly automated and easy to do so.

I.e., I think your notebooks were likely more valuable/useful toward the “ introspective archeological” purpose that you mentioned, because your notebook contained true, original thought in a more curated manner. It sounds like the author’s archive didn’t contain much of that.

Sorry you regret your decision :/
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-30 16:35:08+00:00
It can be taken to be about sides/ideology when the cause of cancellation of certain high profile university's funding is over ideological / political disputes.

TFA seems to say "This is important and we shouldn't cut general funding", but also goes on to call on industry, in particular large tech company CEOs to push back against ideologically driven funding cuts. That toes the line of calling for political responses.
by mbar84 | 2025-06-30 16:35:16+00:00
If you receive btc in a transaction, the question is, when you consider it to be settled. In other words, how much energy is enough for you to consider it infeasible for an attacker to rewrite recent blocks so that you no longer are the recipient of some btc.

One way to think about it is to relate the total fees to the value of your transaction. If fees in blocks with a block height above the block with your transaction total $10000 (the security budget) then an attacker might be willing to spend that amount on energy to rewrite the chain. Another way to think about it is to relate the security budget to all recent transactions, assuming the attacker is the counter party to all of them (worst case).

In either case, there is no obviously correct answer to how high the security budget has to be on a per-block basis. The question is how long you're willing to wait for the security budget to accumulate and cover your transaction. If the block subsidy decreases and fees don't rise to replace them, then settlement time increases. Don't hand out goods to a counter party if the value of your transaction hasn't at least been met by the security budget. No need to wait longer than the point at which the value of all transactions of the block which includes your transaction has been exceeded by the security budget. An attacker would be losing money at that point if they tried to scam you.
by segev_s | 2025-06-30 16:35:33+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRhXYyqpIk8

Meet Dory - A quick way to cycle through apps without moving your hand from the mouse - and without needing to remember any shortcuts.

Click your middle mouse button - or the right Command key if both hands are on the keyboard - and type the first letter of the app’s name.

Find apps using the first letter, middle letters, acronyms, or similar names.

If multiple apps share that letter, just keep tapping it to cycle through them.

You can also press the middle mouse button and start typing the app’s name directly.

You can also enable an optional App list popup when switching between apps

Dory works right out of the box - and over time, it learns which apps you use most and prioritizes them.

No extra shortcuts.

No setup. Nothing to remember.

It's currently $3.99 - (One-time purchase. No subscription.)
by bumby | 2025-06-30 16:35:43+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to detail it. I think that’s a reasonable take.

A couple caveats:

1) most modern hybrids use the ICE at higher speeds for efficiency, right? What does that mean in terms of added complexity and reliability?

2) somewhat of a tangent, but in the original post was regarding cost of ownership, and reliability was brought into the discussion because cost is a function of reliability. But the alternator vs electric motor aspect misses the original point about cost, considering the motor may cost 8x-10x to replace.

All that to say, reliability and cost of ownership is complicated. I was pushing back on the overly simplistic takes and appreciate you adding some nuance.
by tempfile | 2025-06-30 16:35:47+00:00
> It is none of my employer’s business how I spend that time as long as deadlines are being met

This contradicts what you already said ("there are always more TODOs"). Which one should I reply to?

If your employment has fixed deadlines, and your employer does not react to efficiency increases by setting earlier deadlines, then you should expect the headline effect (efficiency increases mean your weekly hours decrease).
by svat | 2025-06-30 16:35:51+00:00
To be clear, this was/is a statement about the worst case, not every problem. So it may be clearer to rephrase your sentence as:

For nearly 50 years theorists believed that there exist problems taking t steps that also need roughly t/log(t) bits of memory.

(The Quanta magazine article https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorithms-a-little-memor... gives some context: for a long time, the best result was t/log(t) as proved in "On Time Versus Space" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/322003.322015 by Hopcroft, Paul and Valiant in 1975.)
by hinkley | 2025-06-30 16:36:04+00:00
There are a couple cooperatives here that own their own processing facilities. As food businesses got bigger the distance between processing plants has grown and grown and it ends up netting the farmers less and less.

I learned recently that there was a small coop near where I live that got bought up by a larger one, Organic Valley. Which has a semi famous permaculturist as a member (Mark Shepard), and the only reason I knew it to be a coop. They don’t advertise that fact well.
by ajross | 2025-06-30 16:36:09+00:00
Little to no source code is written for single (human) language development teams. Sure, everyone would like the ability to write source code in their native language. That's natural.

Literally no one, anywhere, wants to be forced to read source written in a language they can't read (or more specifically in this case: written in glyphs they can't even produce on their keyboard). That idea, for almost everyone, seems "horrific", yeah.

So a lingua franca is a firm requirement for modern software development outside of extremely specific environments (FSB malware authors probably don't care about anyone else reading their cyrillic variable names, etc...). Must it be ASCII-encoded English? No. But that's what the market has picked and most people seem happy enough with it.
by BanterTrouble | 2025-06-30 16:36:18+00:00
That don't directly take control away from me.

I am specifically talking about things that take over control of the vehicle.

I've had lane assist fight me when trying to move lanes. I apparently wasn't turning the wheel enough and it thought I was drifting (I wasn't).

I've had another hire car refuse to move backwards without me putting it into reverse. It had anti-rollback measures. I didn't know what was going on. All my other cars would rollback (I drive manuals). Now I know technically you shouldn't coast backwards but it was maybe a foot.
by dijit | 2025-06-30 16:36:21+00:00
> Seems to be a mental mishmash. For one thing, they are taking it as given that temperature is relevant to device lifetime, but Google's FAST 2007 paper said "higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates".

Google have been wrong a couple of times, and this is one area where I think what they've said (18 years ago btw) might have had some time to meet the rubber of reality a bit more.

Google also famously chose to disavow ECC as mandatory[0] but then quietly changed course[1].

In fact, even within the field of memory: higher temperatures cause more errors[2], and voltage leaking is more common at higher temperatures within dense lithographic electronics (memory controllers, CPUs)[3].

Regardless: thermal expansion and contraction will cause degradation of basically any material that I can think of, so if you can utilise the machines 100% consistently and maintain a solid temperature then maybe the hardware doesn't age as aggressively as our desktop PCs that play games- assuming there's no voltage leaking going on to crash things.

[0]: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206811

[2]: https://dramsec.ethz.ch/papers/mathur-dramsec22.pdf

[3]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271300947_Analysis_...
by Spivak | 2025-06-30 16:36:26+00:00
I think the author leaves out one important point which is that most people sound like idiots when put on the spot and asked to talk about things outside their core competency, and for these men that core competency is business. It's entirely possible they're bad at that as well but a priori you would probably expect them to do a lot better.

It's the human person Gell-Mann effect, we listen to CEOs talk about science, tech, and engineering and they sound like morons because we know these fields. But their audience is specifically people who don't-- and to them, thanks to the effect, they sound like they know what they're talking about.