MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shayway | 2025-06-01 14:43:01+00:00
While the overall message of the post rings true, I do think it deserves some criticism for the framing device of American vs. European. Let me explain.

First, it has to be said, online cultural osmosis and working for an international American company are two very narrow experiences of American culture. The anecdote they use to demonstrate German 'European mindset' - their flatmate using used furniture - is not something that one would be exposed to online or through business connections. That they saw it as notable to have used furniture in the first place I find more telling, which brings me to my next point.

This post is more a condemnation of middle-upper class consumerism and greed than American culture in particular. While it's fair to say the US spawned and championed the mindset, as noted in the post, it's spread far and wide in the decades since.

Now, why does the distinction matter? Well, there are gazoodles of people in the US with the 'European mindset'. You don't see them through international business connections, you don't see them out and about in San Francisco, you don't see them making blog posts about it - not ones that would be shared on Hacker News, anyway.

To those in the middle-upper-class tech sphere they don't exist. I'm happy for those who gain something from posts like these, who are inspired to adopt a more deliberate way of living. But furthering the perception that the 'European mindset' is tied to specific material things (in this case, living in Europe) only helps to perpetuate the 'American mindset', and further erase the existence of alternatives to it!
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-01 14:43:02+00:00
Yes, back in the days, I/O was often really low latency because memory and therefore buffers were expensive and gate count was limited, it meant more direct connections, which meant low latency.

The Atari 2600 for instance was known for "racing the beam", updating the image while it was being drawn on the CRT monitor. A latency measured in pixels rather than frames! It was necessary because the console didn't have enough memory for a framebuffer.

The Atari ST is special for the inclusion built-in of MIDI ports, and it was made cheaply, which at the time meant direct connections and it resulted it low latency.
by Spooky23 | 2025-06-01 14:43:10+00:00
I think for older fans we don’t get it. My son is 15 and grew up with the animated series, for him that’s peak Star Wars and I think he’s right. His buddies really loved Rogue One. The magic is its simplicity.

I think like the Asimov books, Star Wars is best as fantasy history. The forward looking ones (that horrific “final” trilogy) are just awkward stories.
by ghaff | 2025-06-01 14:43:13+00:00
Most routine corporate stuff is basically a document in presentation form which a lot of people seem to prefer these days. Yes, you may give a 30 minute "presentation" using the "slides" but it's not really a presentation which I think is fine. I don't really disagree with your basic point. The sort of thing presented at larger team meetings I attended latterly tended to FYI sort of stuff, some of which was vaguely useful to know and some of which wasn't.
by ajb | 2025-06-01 14:43:20+00:00
No, because it's much easier to independently value a house

What are you suggesting as an alternative?

- Both taxation and offer on the improved value - this is consistent, but it's no longer Georgism so it doesn't solve the problem of how to estimate and tax the unimproved value

- Both taxation and offer on the unimproved value - this is now unfair to the owner as you're not paying for the value of their house, and also they have the incentive to include the value of the house in the land value
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-01 14:43:33+00:00
I have two and, judging from colleagues’ reactions, I am unsure which is more unpopular.

The font size in my text editor/terminal is 22 pt (I think; it might be 24). I want to avoid eye problems when I am older and I believe avoiding strain on them when I am younger will make that more likely.

My lines of code are no longer than 80 characters because reading vertically is faster and less error-prone than reading horizontally. (100 characters is also acceptable.) This has nothing to do with old software except as far as it introduced the 80-character limit at all. However, it is somewhat related to the font size, given a larger font means fewer characters per line, but they are otherwise independent choices.
by more-nitor | 2025-06-01 14:43:42+00:00
hmm this might be solved in some simple ways:

1. create `with_err` function: some_mayerr_func().with_err_log()?

2. add 'newbie beginner mode(default)' / 'expert mode (optimized)' for rust:

- current Rust default is a bit too focused on code-optimization, too much so that it defaults to removing backtrace

- default should be 'show every backtrace even for handled errors (in my code, not the lib code -- bonus points for "is handled" checkbox)'
by scosman | 2025-06-01 14:43:47+00:00
We don't sell fine-tuning tools - we're an open tool for finding the best way of running your AI workload. We support evaluating/comparing a variety of methods: prompting, prompt generators (few shot, repairs), various models, and fine-tuning from 5 different providers.

The focus of the tool is that it lets you try them all, side by side, and easily evaluate the results. Fine-tuning is one tool in a tool chest, which often wins, but not always. You should use evals to pick the best option for you. This also sets you up to iterate (when you find bugs, want to change the product, or new models comes out).

Re:demo -- would you want a demo or detailed evals and open datasets (honest question)? Single-shot examples are hard to compare, but the benefits usually come out in evals at scale. I'm definitely open to making this. Open for suggestions on what would be the most helpful (format and use case).

It's all on Github and free: https://github.com/kiln-ai/kiln
by Stoids | 2025-06-01 14:43:49+00:00
As someone who created those horrifying RxJS monstrosities, I agree with most of this, which is why I caveated my concerns. Tanstack Query simplified a lot of these issues—separating server state and caching from client side state was a huge boost. I’m mostly coming from the perspective of someone who just inherited a Jotai code base with 200+ atoms and trying to wrap my head around it. Any library poorly used can lead to a mess though, so not going to claim it’s a problem inherent to all atom based approaches.
by morsecodist | 2025-06-01 14:44:09+00:00
> Not considering each neighborhood is how we get here

I am not saying we shouldn't consider each area as important I just don't think we should structure policy so tiny areas are incentivized to fight each other and the loser is where everything "bad" gets built. Also I pointed to a clear mechanism by which this sort of thing leads to inequitable outcomes, what part of that do you disagree with?

> But what is your solution? The section 8 housing or other universally unpopular projects have go somewhere. Do you think the SFH owners in the poor part of town want it in their backyard?

I feel like I have a solution here and you haven't proposed one. My point is that we should be more permissive with where we build affordable housing, including and especially in more exclusive areas. What is your solution?

I think towns or metro areas should come together, decide what they want for the region together, turn that into a set of rules that will bring about those outcomes, and then stick to those rules. If there are problems with the rules they can be revisited but not by making special exceptions for each individual project. I want to get close to John Rawls' veil of ignorance where people are setting rules based on what they think is fair and not based on their own interests. Obviously, it is impossible to achieve this ideal but I think a higher level conversation is more conducive to this kind of decision making.

> Does it matter?

It totally matters because if it is the result of policy then it is something we can change. There are numerous costs. Yes the individual needs to pay for utility hookup but in general water systems and roads are more expensive per housing unit if each segment of shared infrastructure serves fewer people. Zoning policy in general increases the supply of single family homes relative to multi family homes, decreasing their cost. 30 year mortgages are guaranteed by the government and home appreciation gives home owners a huge tax exemption when they sell their home. These apply to condos as well but loans are difficult to get for some forms of multi-family housing and they still put their thumb on the scales in favor of home owners at the expense of renters who are much more likely to live in multi-family housing.
by danabramov | 2025-06-01 14:44:36+00:00
From what I understand of the RSC protocol which the post is based on (might be wrong since I haven't looked closely at this part), this is supported: https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/28847.

>The format is a leading row that indicates which type of stream it is. Then a new row with the same ID is emitted for every chunk. Followed by either an error or close row.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-06-01 14:45:08+00:00
>Students can argue they didn’t read the syllabus, missed the first day of class, etc. but have a harder time arguing they signed a pledge without reading it.

I am confused as to why anyone would need to sign a pledge to provide proof that they are aware cheating is bad. If you don’t know that by the time you are in university, then tough luck. One would hope a defense of “I didn’t know cheating was frowned upon” would get you laughed out.
by dahart | 2025-06-01 14:45:54+00:00
Even though the example is contrived, and hopefully not too many people are doing massive reductions using a linked list of random pointers, it would still be nice to offer some suggestion on what alternatives there are. Maybe it’s faster to collect all the pointers into an array and use the first loop? If ‘list’ entries are consecutive in memory, you can ignore the list order and consume them in memory order. Collecting and sorting the pointers might improve the cache hit rates, especially if the values are dense in memory. For anything performance sensitive, avoiding linked lists, especially non-intrusive linked lists, is often a good idea, right?

What’s with the “if (idx == NULLPTR)” block? The loop won’t access an entry outside the list, so this appears to be adding unnecessary instructions and unnecessary divergence. (And maybe even unnecessary dependencies?) Does demonstrating the performance problem depend on having this code in the loop? I hope not, but I’m very curious why it’s there.

A couple of other tiny nits - the first 2 graphs should have a Y axis that starts at zero! That won’t compromise these in any way. There should be a very compelling reason not to show ratios on a graph that start from zero, and these don’t have any such reason. And I’m curious why the X axis is factors of 8 except the last two, which seem strangely arbitrary?
by larodi | 2025-06-01 14:46:16+00:00
Batching. Yes.

And one thing it can help you locally is when you rate certain content and want to make sure it didn’t hallucinate. So you toss 3 or 5 times or… batch_size times .)

Curious that batch if has been there from day one, but it takes a while for people to see/grasp/grok it.
by anovikov | 2025-06-01 14:46:18+00:00
Of course they do. Unless a person is clearly insane and unable to comprehend what they are doing. It is inhumane and cruel to prevent someone suffering like that from dying - the very thought of it almost makes me cry, and i'm not a very empathic person.

And yes, mental illnesses are a particularly terrible case. Being insane does not mean not having a debilitating, painful and incurable - whether or not outright terminal - physical illness. And perhaps, a really bad and certainly incurable mental condition itself is enough. Just take advanced Alzheimer's. What's the point of forcing people to suffer like that? Themselves and their caregivers, too. But i understand that one is unapproachable because of immediate Aktion T4 = Nazi = BAD association and will probably remain so for a very long time.

But for fuck's sake, at least get off the butt of mentally fit people who don't want to suffer!
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-01 14:47:04+00:00
I actually greatly prefer the prequels to the original trilogy. I suspect it has to do with the fact that I was a child when episode 1 came out and I was still a child when the prequels concluded.

A big part of the problem is that these movies were written, basically, for 12-year old boys. You're not going to be able to get that spark back as an adult, and it's not easy to make a movie that appeals so strongly to both demographics. And much like wu-tang, star wars (and other fun stories) is for the children. Andor is at least more adult-oriented, I think.

So, do I like the new movies? No, I literally slept through the last two they were so boring, and I found the lack of coherent plot baffling. And yes, it does make me a little sad. But seeing little girls dressed up like Rey, I'm reminded that there are better things for me to care about.
by mtillman | 2025-06-01 14:47:15+00:00
Loved Andor. Unlikely Gilroy would do more Star Wars and if he did, he probably wouldn’t be given another $650M for a side character. Season 2 was $290 and that was after their budget was capped by Iger, they tried to spend more.

Source: https://screenrant.com/andor-budget-confirmed/
by Spooky23 | 2025-06-01 14:47:36+00:00
Yeah that really killed the golden goose. Brick and mortar computer retailer and collapsing prices cant mix - you can’t cross sell high margin services and products with a $400-400 rebate purchase.

When I moved out of retail to professional internships, they were looking to enhance margins by selling candy and DVDs. Best Buy survived that era with appliances and TVs.
by zozbot234 | 2025-06-01 14:47:41+00:00
> HoTT is a highly technical, highly niche topic and it doesn't make sense to tackle two ambitious projects at the same time like this.

It's also a bit of a controversial topic in formalized mathematics. See the following relevant comments by Kevin Buzzard (an expert in Lean and also in the sort of abstract nonsense that might arguably benefit directly from HoTT) - Links courtesy of https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Kevin+Buzzard

* Is HoTT the way to do mathematics? (2020) https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/owls/slides/buzzard.pdf ("Nobody knows because nobody tried")

* Grothendieck's use of equality (2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10387 - Discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40414404
by al_borland | 2025-06-01 14:47:43+00:00
I can think of a few reasons.

1. What you said about matching the way you think and your personal style.

2. Longevity. If you use someone else’s peoject, it’s dependent on them maintaining it. Assuming you don’t want to take it over at some point, making your own thing means you know how it all works so you can fix/maintain it if needed, and build it in a way that requires as little or as much maintenance as you want.

3. Building the tools is more fun than what you will ultimately do with it. I find the idea of writing my own site building compelling. Based on how many blogs I’ve started and never wrote in regularly, I don’t actually find the act of blogging compelling. People who have something to say and want an easy way to get the message out just pick a tool and stick with it. Others like myself, will build platforms to say things, then never actually say anything. I just build blogs from scratch over and over again, because it’s an easy, but semi interesting project that can be solved in countless ways. This could be called procrastination, but I think it’s something else, as I’m not actually trying that hard to have a blog or a site with traffic that people care about and visit. It’s just for me.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-06-01 14:48:54+00:00
Not for me it’s not.

YouTube is useful for things like “how to build a giant 3D printer” or “compare this CNC machine with that one”. It’s ok for a general place to link a video to (though I generally just put them on my own server”. It absolutely sucks at entertainment.

And the reason it sucks so badly at entertainment is just greed - I tried the free trial of YouTube Premium this last month, because the one thing I loathe about YouTube over everything else is the number of adverts, and ‘premium’ promises an ad-free experience.

But no, this sucks too, it just sucks slightly less. You still get loads of ads in ‘premium’ except they’re called ‘sponsored content’. That’s just sophistry and frankly makes me dislike the platform even more. I hate being lied to as well as forced to watch ads (sometimes the whole thing, sometimes there’s a ‘skip’ button after 30 secs or so.)

I can put up with this shit when it’s some instructional video, when I can mentally ignore whatever crap someone is trying to sell me for 30 secs or so. I cannot and will not put up with it when I want to be entertained. Ads ruin the entire entertainment experience.

If traditional TV is having its lunch eaten by YouTube, then I guess I start watching less TV, or subscribe to Apple TV+ / movie-streaming services (without ads). There’s a lot to do in this life, TV is not a requirement…
by mrbluecoat | 2025-06-01 14:49:04+00:00
> When do I have to update all those policies to use the new syntax? ... You never have to update your existing rules to use the new grants syntax. We will support our original ACL syntax forever. ... When we say that Tailscale is a stable platform, we aren’t kidding around.

Nice business decision. Just like their reaction to Headscale, I'm reminded Tailscale 'gets it' when interacting with the dev community and why their popularity will continue to grow.
by danabramov | 2025-06-01 14:49:16+00:00
Sort of! I have two (admittedly long) articles on this topic, comparing how the code tends to evolve with separate endpoints and what the downsides are:

- https://overreacted.io/one-roundtrip-per-navigation/

- https://overreacted.io/jsx-over-the-wire/

The tldr is that endpoints are not very fluid — they kind of become a "public" API contract between two sides. As they proliferate and your code gets more modular, it's easy to hurt performance because it's easy to introduce server/client waterfalls at each endpoint. Coalescing the decisions on the server as a single pass solves that problem and also makes the boundaries much more fluid.
by pdfernhout | 2025-06-01 14:49:21+00:00
Indeed; good point! And how will all that play out? Better communications or more schlock to wade through on the internet? Or both?

As a historical analogy, a lot of telephone switchboard operators lost their jobs with the beginning of direct dialing with better telephone switching -- and direct dialing presumably is preferred by most people than having to talk with a person before their calls go through. Although something was also lost in that telephone operators also had a broader informal social role in a community (including as a gossip) and also informally coordinated some emergency services (judging from old-time movies).

Related: https://www.bbntimes.com/society/telephone-operators-the-eli... "As late as 1950, there were about 350,000 women working as switchboard operators working for phone company, and maybe another million working as switchboard operators at offices, factories, hotels, and apartments. Roughly one of every 13 working women was a switchboard operator. Of course, now the number of switchboard operators is nearly zero. The example is often given to point out that in a dynamic economy, even when hundreds of thousands of jobs are “lost,” workers do manage to transition to new jobs. But that basic story lacks detail. James Feigenbaum and Daniel P. Gross have been digging into two aspects: 1) What happened to the women who were displaced from switchboard operator jobs; and 2) for AT&T, what determined the speed and timing of investing in automation to replace switchboard operators? ... The effect of this shock on incumbent operators was to dispossess many of their jobs and careers: telephone operators in cities with cutovers were less likely to be in the same job the next decade we observe them, less likely to be working at all, and conditional on working were more likely to be in lower-paying occupations. In contrast, however, automation did not reduce employment rates in subsequent cohorts of young women, who found work in other sectors—including jobs with similar demographics and wages (such as typists and secretaries), and some with lower wages (such as food service workers)."

So, it sounds like the next generation who pursued different careers did OK even if the displaced generation did worse?

One difference though is that switchboard operator was a relatively recently introduced job in the past century given telephones are a recent invention. People have been writing/thinking, speaking/acting, and painting/drawing/art-ing essentially since there were people (essentially the jobs in the article being replaced).
by mjburgess | 2025-06-01 14:49:43+00:00
There's a plausible argument that advertisement killed "mainstream media" as a mass media. It survived only while there were no other options, giving the illusion of genuine mass appeal. The reality is it was an entirely fake constructed world designed by advertisers, and to some lesser degree, the political class: governments in the TV age pressed hard to ensure the public never got what it wanted (consider, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood).

It seems we are roughly in a place where power has equilibrated between creators giving the people what they want: advertisers have no choice but to go to mass media platforms, because one's under their control are dead. And "free speech" is increasingly been given an ahistorical radically liberal interpretation. Thus we can have multi-hour podcasts with politicians asked real questions on the audiences mind; we can have companies held to account for the real quality of their products; films, games, and other media can be reviewed by people who share the tastes of their audiences -- rather than have their tastes "made" by the nominated ad-friendly elite.

The whole traditional media ecosystem, of course, is in a full-blown panic about this -- and continues to blame the new media and their audiences (their customers, whom they long forgot existed as anything other than domesticated animals that will turn up to the only game in town). It's hard to tell how many involved realise they are purely a construct of an advertised-determined, government-sanctioned world -- a world that almost no one ever actually lived in.

My great concern with the "YT is being TV" direction is that this history repeats. Just as facebook (etc.) centralised and ad-santisied the "local, independent" internet -- so will, YT/spotify/etc. just return the mass media back into advertiser hands.

Many will say: this has already happened, etc. But I think: not quite. I think at the moment it feels like a balance. One hopes the internet stays free enough, in protocol, that if advertisers (and governments) try again to dominate and control the mass media, there are ready-made alternatives to spring up.
by ecocentrik | 2025-06-01 14:50:16+00:00
My point was to make that distinction between an masterpiece and an epic while still showing that Andor holds up against some of the most celebrated epics ever created. Comparing it to My Cousin Vinny is ridiculous. You should be comparing it to other works in the same form, other epic hero's journeys.

Was your gripe about superfluous scenes, where you mentioned the forest planet, a reference to the first few episodes of season 2? That forest plant is Yavin IV, the plant where the rebels eventually build their first base, and those rebels are some of the first recruits to the rebel army. I believe those scenes were intended to show how the rebellion lacked leadership and how Andor and others had to step up to provide that leadership.