MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by staunton | 2025-06-23 21:04:49+00:00
This is a lot of text, details and hair splitting just to say "modeling things like this is bullshit". It's engaging "seriously" and "on the merits" with something that from the very start was just marketing fluff packaged as some kind of prediction.

I'm not sure if the author did anyone a favor with this write-up. More than anything, it buries the main point ("this kind of forecasting is fundamentally bullshit") under a bunch of complicated-sounding details that lend credibility to the original predictions, which the original authors now get to agrue about and thank people for pointing out "minor issues which we have now addressed in the updated version".
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-23 21:04:54+00:00
The concentrations in the household cleaner section are way too low to be usable for anything but small scale household cleanups.

There's a reason why you can't get industrial strength cleaners in a Walmart - too many people would either seriously injure themselves because they don't know they actually need PPE or otherwise this stuff will break down their skin, because they mix it and make enough mustard gas to actually kill them, or because they break down their homes because guess what, a highly acidic cleaning agent and most kinds of stone don't mix.

Of course, yes, one can try to concentrate H2O2 but there's easier and less messy ways to off oneself than this.
by jerf | 2025-06-23 21:05:15+00:00
It became a bit of a meme, especially in the web development space, that all programs are always waiting on external resources like networks, databases, disks, etc., and so scripting languages being slower than other languages doesn't matter and they'll always be as fast as non-scripting languages.

Even on a single core, this turns out to be simply false. It isn't that hard to either A: be doing enough actual computation that faster languages are in fact perceptibly faster, even, yes, in a web page handler or other such supposedly-blocked computation or B: without realizing it, have stacked up so many expensive abstractions on top of each other in your scripting language that you're multiplying the off-the-top 40x-ish slower with another set of multiplicative penalties that can take you into effectively arbitrarily-slower computations.

If you're never profiled a mature scripting language program, it's worth your time. Especially if nobody on your team has ever profiled it before. It can be an eye-opener.

Then it turns out that for historical path reasons, dynamic scripting languages are also really bad at multithreading and using multiple cores, and if you can write a program that can leverage that you can just blow away the dynamic scripting languages. It's not even hard... it pretty much just happens.

(I say historical path reasons because I don't think an inability to multithread is intrinsic to the dynamic scripting languages. It's just they all came out in an era when they could assume single core, it got ingrained into them for a couple of decades, and the reality is, it's never going to come fully out. I think someone could build a new dynamic language that threaded properly from the beginning, though.)

You really can see big gains just taking a dynamic scripting language program and turning it into a compiled language with no major changes to the algorithms. The 40x-ish penalty off the top is often in practice an underestimate, because that number is generally from highly optimized benchmarks in which the dynamic language implementation is highly tuned to avoid expensive operations; real code that takes advantage of all the conveniences and indirection and such can have even larger gaps.

This is not to say that dynamic scripting languages are bad. Performance is not the only thing that matters. They are quite obviously fast enough for a wide variety of tasks, by the strongest possible proof of that statement. That said, I think it is the case that there are a lot of programmers who have no idea how much performance they are losing in dynamic scripting languages, which can result in suboptimal engineering decisions. It is completely possible to replace a dynamic scripting language program with a compiled one and possibly see 100x+ performance improvements on very realistic code, before adding in multithreading. It is hard for that not to manifest in some sort of user experience improvement. My pitch here is not to give up dynamic scripting languages, but to have a more realistic view of the programming language landscape as a whole.
by ozim | 2025-06-23 21:05:28+00:00
I think you underestimate inefficiency of requiring all business analysts and employees to learn GIT. If not all employees than more employees. I can pick put up job ad for BA saying knows JIRA and I have dozens of applicants.

We had a technical guy once where I worked that wanted to force sales guys to use LaTex to write documentation and requirements in and store it in GIT. I feel bad for the guy as he was laughed out by sales guys and he did not understood why because those are such a great tools…
by benreesman | 2025-06-23 21:05:44+00:00
I find this line of argument really weird. Obviously mastering his tools is only one of many things required of a master craftsman, but the relentless pursuit of excellence in all dimensions of ones craft is the minimum possible criteria for ever attaining it, almost tautologically.

It's like when people complain that leetcode is nothing like the job: yeah, it's a pretty bad test, but you're making a bad argument about that because CS knowledge is extremely relevant to the job, unless the job is assembly-line library composition.

I've consulted for companies that had all their dev boxes on coder or something, and you get really good at vscode really fast or you don't have much luck. It's more than 5%, but even stipulating that it's 5%, whoa, 5 percent?! By installing a bunch of stuff off a list on GitHub and dropping some aliases in your bashrc or zshrc? in a few weeks you're five percent more effective? Anyone in any field from banking to bioinformatics would think you were joking or a scam artist if you offered them 5% more efficient outcomes at that price.

Regarding OG editors like ed and ex and sam and stuff? I can absolutely believe that someone with a lifetime mastery of one of those tools could smoke a VSCode user, it's not at all obvious that VSCode is an upgrade to vim/etc. along any dimension other than low barrier to entry. ditto emacs which is about 1000x more powerful than vscode and the difference in library/extension ecosystem is not measured by size: the emacs one is identical to the vscode one with bottom 90% by quality sliced off the vscode one.

And this stuff compounds, you get a bit better at the tools and you can read more code faster, read the right code faster, start moving the derivative of the derivative.

It's also extremely non-obvious that collaboration at the kinds of scales and complexities that make exceptional skills or experience in it a top 3-5 core competency for people doing most software. Study after study going back to Fred Brooks and the Mythical Man Month have demonstrated that relatively small teams of people who get along very well coordinated by a relatively small number of highly technical managers who take the offload on the high-complexity cross-org collaboration is the golden ticket. It's the same reason computers have dedicated routing tables in the NIC and that those things talk to even bigger and more specialized machines that do all routing all day: you don't want to scale O(n^M) with the communication overhead.

A hacker needs to work really well with their immediate team, and have a good dialog with a manager who is both technical (to understand the work) and who devotes a lot of energy to complex collaboration.
by fuoqi | 2025-06-23 21:05:52+00:00
Temporary negative prices have been caused by the renewable generation which exceeded the grid demand at the time, which then evolved into the nasty feedback loop caused by the reaction of renewable generation to those conditions. You simply do not get such situation with traditional generation, it's the direct consequence of the intermittent nature of renewables and its high ratio in the total generation.

Also, have you read after the market part? Please watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw if the last quote is gibberish to you. It discusses somewhat different issues, but the point still stands.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-06-23 21:05:57+00:00
So in your view, there is no expectation of privacy in anything typed into the Internet. And, if a news organization, or a blogger, or whoever, came up with some colorable argument to discover everything everyone types into the Internet, and sued the right Internet hub-- you think this is totally routine and no one should be annoyed in the least, and moreover no one should be allowed to intervene or move for protective order, because it would be more convenient for the court to just hand over all the Internet to the news or blogger or whoever.

It's precisely that perspective that I think should sink a magistrate, hundreds of times over.
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-23 21:06:07+00:00
It's not so much that it is "boolean multiplication" (because how do you define that, also because digital representation of booleans implies that integer multiplication still applies) so much as AND follows similar Laws as multiplication, in particular AND is distributive across OR in a similar way multiplication is distributive over addition. [Example: a * (b + c) <=> a * b + a * c] Because it follows similar rules, it helps with some forms of intuition of patterns when writing them with the familiar operators.

It's somewhat common in set notations to use * and + for set union and set intersection for very similar reasons. Some programming languages even use that in their type language (a union of two types is A * B and an intersection is A + B).

Interestingly, this is why Category Theory in part exists to describe the similarities between operators in mathematics such as how * and ∧ contrast/are similar. Category Theory gets a bad rap for being the origin of monads and fun phrases like "monads are a monoid in the category of endofunctors", but it also answers a few fun questions like why are * and ∧ so similar? (They are similar functions that operate in different "categories".) Admittedly that's a very rough, lay gloss on it, but it's still an interesting perspective on what people talk about when they talk about Category Theory.
by cubefox | 2025-06-23 21:06:09+00:00
Their statement doesn't sound like what you said at all:

> The Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use

(Of course that statement seems to be highly confused overall. What "stored data encryption"?)
by macspoofing | 2025-06-23 21:06:54+00:00
>Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it

You're being facetious, but OP is right. For software platforms, this has been a constant. It happened with Twitter, Facebook, Google (Search/Ads, Maps, Chat), Reddit, LinkedIn - basically ever major software platform started off with relatively open APIs that were then closed-off as it gained critical mass and focused on monetization.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-23 21:06:56+00:00
They could've done it just fine. You only get treated like shit on the roads if your behavior is both selfish/unnecessary and inconveniences others

Garbage truck leaving a slowly but as fast as he can -> no problem

Tesla M3 leaving a light slowly -> dude deserves ever honk he gets.

BMW M3 weaving through traffic cuts people off but is gone as fast as he came -> nobody cares

Prius doing 55 in the right lane -> no problem

Prius doing 55 in the left lane because entitlement -> lots of middle fingers

I have complete confidence waymo would have "done the right thing". The real problem is that there still would have been a million rear endings. Eventually the insurance companies would have sued them because no amount of idiots online screeching about the "rules" actually makes it ok to habitually create the preconditions for an accident. It would have been a big expensive legal fight. The state doesn't want high speed limits to reflect how fast people actually drive. Waymo doesn't wanna be involved in that. The insurance companies don't wanna be involved in that. It's just a no brainer not to given the constraints.

Though I can't help but wonder if insurance rates would've eventually gone down for everyone if the issue got forced and it resulted in some sort of "after the 3rd rear ending they're on you by default" rule or something.
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-23 21:07:00+00:00
It probably depends on where. Try driving the speed limit (50mph) on the south bound 101 between the Bay Bridge and Portola. Especially near the 280 turn off. The "right lane" of the 101 is two lanes over from the right most lane because the 2 right most lanes turn off to the 280. Diving 50 there will get you (well, me) shouted at.

No one seems to notice the speed limit is 50 and not 65 so the majority of cars are going 65 to 75mph. I thought about carrying a sign I could hold up "Speed limit 50mph!" for when I got screamed at for trying to go the speed limit

I'm on the "enforce it or repeal it" side. I personally wish they'd put up cameras there and ticket everyone until they slowed down. Or change the signs to 65 if they're not going to enforce it.

The north bound side is also treacherous in that area. Again, the speed limit is 50mph but the 280 merges on the right and people come off it at 65mph+. That makes it harrowing to get in the right lane for the Cesar Chavez exit from the 101. If you're going the 50mph speed limit you'll merge into a line going 65-70. If you go 65-70 you have far less time to get in the right line in time to make the exit.
by cmdtab | 2025-06-23 21:07:09+00:00
I think providing examples and sample code is better than tying your API to AI sdk.

Due to how fast AI providers are iterating on their APIs, many features arrive weeks or months later to AI SDK (support for openai computer use is pending since forever for example).

I like the current API where you can wait for an event. Similar to that, it would be great to have an API for streaming and receiving messages and everything else is handled by the person so they could use AI sdk and stream the end response manually.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-06-23 21:07:13+00:00
Reads very similar to some blackouts we had in Australia. Weakly connected grids with vast geographical distances leading to oscillations that took down the grid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout

Completely solved with lithium based grid storage at key locations btw. This grid storage has also been massively profitable for it's owners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve#Revenu...

Australia currently has 4 of the 5 largest battery storage systems under construction as a result of this profit opportunity; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_system#...

You can also read numerous stories of how Australia's lithium ion grid storage systems have prevented blackouts in many cases. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-south-australia-... The fact is that the batteries responsiveness is the fastest of any system at correcting gaps like this. 50/60hz is nothing for a lithium ion battery nor are brief periods of multi-gigawatt draw/dumping as needed.

There's even articles that if Europe investing in battery storage systems like Australia they'd have avoided this. https://reneweconomy.com.au/no-batteries-no-flexibility-spai...
by pydry | 2025-06-23 21:07:41+00:00
Diplomacy is always a murky world but in this case there is one and clear stand out example where what you said is true. It was announced that Minsk 2 was purely meant as a stalling tactic to allow re-armament.

Unfortunately for your little theory it was Ukraine and Angela Merkel who admitted this and not Russia.

This was made even more painfully obvious just before that day in Feb 2022 when Russia demanded Ukraine adhere to this multilateral (i.e. also agreed by Europe) agreement theyd already agreed to and Ukraine just point blank refused, preferring to fight.

Russian diplomacy follows a Clausewitzian model (i.e. that you're better off in tbe long run if you are up front about your intentions), unlike the western model where one day you announce talks with the Iranians pledging good faith in your negotiations and the next day you launch a surprise bombing raid, hoping this means you got 'em good.
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-06-23 21:07:49+00:00
My understanding is that these areas are services by a single well or spigot that serves an entire small community. Like in rural (poor) India. So you don't stockpile water for days, you're fetching it daily. But then meanwhile there's also "traditional" (unclean/less clean) water sources available much closer to or in the homes.
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-23 21:07:55+00:00
They may eat "grass fed beef" (which in no way magically makes a steak any healthier) but they are the same people who microdosed LSD for two years because it was the fad of the time.

They aren't super aware and taking advantage of us, they are actually that utterly stupid. They are the epitome of that software dev you worked with who only just learned about <thing> yesterday, read a few articles and wikipedia pages, and assume they must know enough about <thing> to have better takes than people who have been working knee deep in <thing> for 30 years. They love to say they are "reasoning from first principles" because they have no actual expert experience to how those "first principles" haven't been useful or relevant in that field for centuries.

It's the classic "I know just enough to be dangerous" problem we are all familiar with of Users of our software products, the kind that uninstall System32 to "speed up their machine" like the internet told them, but 100 million people gave them the power of the US government. They vastly overestimate how much of the space they have so far learned, and don't even know how much they don't know.
by preachermon | 2025-06-23 21:08:56+00:00
Official press release, https://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment...

he U.S. Army is establishing Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps, a new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation. On June 13, 2025, the Army will officially swear in four tech leaders.

Det. 201 is an effort to recruit senior tech executives to serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors. In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems. By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal.

The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are

Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir;

Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta;

Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and

Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.

So yes, Meta's CTO is now a high ranking army officer
by paxys | 2025-06-23 21:08:58+00:00
After Reddit's API shutdown the writing was on the wall. Services like Reddit and Discord are huge data troves, and now this data has a concrete $$ value. Offering unrestricted API access means that third parties will store and sell this data. So shutting them down (and monetizing your data yourself) is an obvious decision. Slack recently changed its ToS to disallow this as well - https://www.reuters.com/business/salesforce-blocks-ai-rivals....
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-23 21:09:05+00:00
You're citing papers which came after the public health authorities decided it would work, not before. Before the sudden about face the WHO had guidance for how to handle a respiratory virus pandemic. It said don't shut the borders, don't try and socially distance, don't restrict travel. All that was torn up and replaced overnight.

But there's nothing to speculate about here. Fauci explicitly told us the idea of social distancing "just appeared", which is easy to confirm just by looking carefully at the timelines. There was no evidence that led to the policy, it was just invented out of thin air. Not my claim: his. And then because academia is corrupt they promptly produced reams of papers claiming it worked great, although real world evidence showed it didn't. You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.

> The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions

That's correct! There was uncertainty because there was no evidence these policies worked, which is why people got pissed off when they were presented as 100% dead cert things that only crazy Anti Science People could doubt. At no point did public health officials say, well, this might help or it might not so we'll leave it up to the citizens to decide what to do. Everything was 100% critical and had to be forced via law overnight because Science™.

You're trying to excuse what they did by saying they had to make decisions, but they didn't. They could have simply admitted they didn't know, done nothing and left it to individuals and their doctors to decide what to do for themselves. They chose instead to impose policies on the whole world by force, justifying it by claiming they were doing solid science when in reality the policies "just appeared".
by samsartor | 2025-06-23 21:09:47+00:00
I'm in ML-land. I thought we were all hopelessly tied to conda. But I moved all my own projects to uv effortlesly and have never looked back. Now first thing I do when pulling down another reseacher's code is add a pyproject toml (if they don't have one), `uv add -r`, and `uv run` off into the sunset. I especially like how good uv is with non-pypi-published dependencies: GitHub, dumb folders, internal repos, etc.
by aanet | 2025-06-23 21:10:19+00:00
Shake my head

If THIS is the state of Tesla's "full self driving" abilities, I would NEVER ride in one of these. Nor would I left my family ride in one. AND I would carefully steer away from any lane that has one of these vehicles running.

(disclosure: long time AV safety advocate; have tested AV capabilities of dozens and dozens of SAE L2-L4 vehicles in the last ~7 years)
by tshaddox | 2025-06-23 21:10:45+00:00
The problem with this explanation is that it also requires multiple parties to be unaware of things which you seem to think are obvious or even self-evident:

1. The designers must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs (or perhaps they're incapable of creating new designs that people do want).

2. The executives must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs.

3. The executives must be unaware of the designers' plot to prevent themselves from being fired.
by iLemming | 2025-06-23 21:10:52+00:00
The key point you're missing from the parent comment is "half of".

Maybe you have no idea how much Elisp code is out there in the wild. There is a LOT of things written in Emacs Lisp. Elisp is probably the most widely used Lisp, with the global total codebase amount exceeding both Clojure and Common Lisp combined.

There are things built into Emacs that some specialized apps don't even have. Did you know that Emacs has built-in lunar and solar calendars, for example?

Just by comparing the sheer amount of code, of course vim+tmux may feel less complicated - they give you fewer opportunities to encounter complexity because they offer significantly less functionality out of the box.