MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-06-22 23:38:22+00:00
I think the first half of the article is the strongest, most plausible part. The argument:

Economic opportunities for professional writers have declined dramatically. The two crucial pathways were mentioned for novel writers to support themselves economically: (1) magazine writing and (2) academia. In the first case, magazine circulation has suffered because advertisers left for the internet, and in the second case, academic job oportunities have declined because of governmental cutbacks to universities, especially in the humanities.

The second half of the article argues that authors have made a tradeoff, deciding to maximize critical praise instead of book sales, thereby turning off general audiences who don't share the obscure and trendy tastes of the critics.

This argument felt weak. As far as I can tell, there's no real explanation of how it supposedly came about. Even the article author seems to admit there are holes in the argument: "There are still some important open questions: the exact role of the critics in moving authors away from popular taste." Indeed.

I'm personally a fan of contemporary literary fiction. My own suspicion is that the problem in literature is the same as the problem in music and movies: corporate consolidation and the ascendancy of data-mongering penny-pinchers with no taste except for profit maximization. Their preference in all the arts is derivative dreck that's easily marketed, ideally with a built-in audience and reproducible, with the goal of spawning an endless series based in the same "universe." The leaders of the industry don't want to take chances on new artists, unless they can guarantee a massive hit.
by nextos | 2025-06-22 23:38:43+00:00
LaTeX needs several passes to compile because it was designed with minicomputers of the 80s in mind, i.e. tiny memory constraints.

Latexmk is one way to address this problem. A good IDE like AUCTeX can also figure out how many times the compiler should be invoked.

Good IDEs will also provide other invaluable assistance, like SyncTeX (jumping from source to exact point at PDF, and back).
by kanbara | 2025-06-22 23:39:43+00:00
unfortunately, there are millions of people for whom the cruelty is the point. the attacks on LGBTQ people, on hispanic people, on women, on anyone non-white just prove that people really do want these hateful cruel regulations, against anyone who is not what they deem as "american"

as far as meeting "actual people"-- yes, there are definitely people who are anti-gay anti-trans anti-women pro-war pro-hate pro-"america" and they are pretty gross, authoritarian, and fascist-leaning, and to me that's not what america is about.

saying that everyone's fear is made up is just coming from a place where white well-off christian people just don't see problems and that's pretty sad
by throwawaymaths | 2025-06-22 23:40:25+00:00
did you miss the part where the biggest contractor on the project was shady as fuck?

> Oshkosh encountered delays and engineering problems during early manufacturing runs, and disagreements — and accusations of corporate dishonesty — among executives plagued the production process, The Washington Post reported in December.

> Oshkosh was supposed to have delivered about 3,000 vehicles by the end of 2024. Instead it had provided roughly 100 and raised its prices as the Postal Service ordered additional EVs

the corporate "looting" as you put it, has already happened. and this part of the omnibus bill stems the bleeding. without any particular judgement on the rest of the omnibus bill, and yes, i believe there is probably looting in the rest of the bill.

you should support this part of the bill, if you believe the things that you claim to, such as not having the nation on open fire sale.
by ponector | 2025-06-22 23:40:39+00:00
>recent events show that instead, every country should have nukes if they want to be safe.

More recent events show that it doesn't matter. India-Pakistan endless fight.

And Ukraine. Imagine they had nukes in 2022 and russian army advances. Should they nuke russian cities? It would not stop troops and give them more motivation to fight, to revenge. Should they nuke russian troops? To many nukes need for such large frontline.
by corimaith | 2025-06-22 23:41:51+00:00
The consumption of media is exponential, if you read something good and you expect more from a genre, the number of consumable works quickly dwindles down to the point that you often end up waiting for new works. In the same way, as people get a better understanding of their own preferences, entire subgenres will become less relevant.

That's why I find that the true enthusiasts of a hobby tend to prefer works that are less well known or even not even high in "quality", primairly because "quality" is no longer a suitable metric for them. The kind of "hobbyists" who just stick to the classics strikes me more as lifestyle hobbyists that aren't neccessairly interested for intrinsic reasons.
by handfuloflight | 2025-06-22 23:44:48+00:00
No offense, if this is your response, then I don't think you have any experience to qualify you to have this discussion, you clearly do not have basic experience in using LLMs.

To make my point, let me know when Stack Overflow has a post specifically about the nuances of your private codebase.

Or when Google can help you reason through why your specific API design choices might conflict with a new feature you're considering. Or when a mailing list can walk through the implications of refactoring your particular data model given your team's constraints and timeline.

LLMs aren't just faster search: they're interactive reasoning partners that can engage with your specific context, constraints, and mental models. They can help you think through problems that have never been asked before because they're unique to your situation. That's the 'deep exploratory thinking' I'm talking about.

The fact that you're comparing this to Stack Overflow tells me you're thinking about LLMs as glorified search engines rather than reasoning tools. Which explains why you think teammates can provide the same value: because you're not actually using the technology for what it's uniquely good at.
by lisper | 2025-06-22 23:45:01+00:00
> Double slit experiment with one detector has a seemingly impossible phenomenon when the interference pattern disappears without measurement in our branch

Then you don't understand quantum mechanics at all. You should read this:

https://flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

The TL;DR is that measurement and entanglement are the same phenomenon. A particle can become entangled with a detector even if the detector doesn't register anything.

But that is neither here nor there. Why do you get interference with no detectors? Your theory is that a detector at one slit is somehow paired with a "virtual detector" in a parallel branch at the other slit. But why would that "virtual detector" go away when the real detector is removed? Why is it never the case that there is a "virtual detector" at either slit unless there is a real detector at one of them?
by vessenes | 2025-06-22 23:45:57+00:00
I was on the typst train, particularly because its layout engine has some additional vertical control for long documents that latex lacks. However, just about when I was looking at moving over, LLM coding became good or at least good enough, and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst. Really bad. Maybe in another year or six months!
by productmanager | 2025-06-22 23:47:00+00:00
I find it helpful to keep in mind that the traditional statistical significance test is a statement about a conditional probability. i.e. it's the probability of the data given the hypothesis (the null hypothesis). But what many actually want is the probability of the hypothesis given the data. Sometimes these are referred to as the frequentist vs. bayesian approach. There's a helpful recent podcast here by with author of Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments https://music.youtube.com/podcast/hEzpiDuYFoE
by protocolture | 2025-06-22 23:47:01+00:00
>Literary fiction, serious fiction,[1] high literature,[2] or artistic literature,[2] and sometimes just literature,[2] encompasses fiction books and writings that are more character-driven rather than plot-driven, that examine the human condition, or that are simply considered serious art by critics.

Same reason new christmas carols dont land. And people dont listen to new classic music styles. It has to meet arbitrary rules regarding art, seriousness and get past critics to even be added to the category. I say category because anyone can write fiction, its just magical fairy dust better than you wankery when you add literary to the front.

Much easier to instead simply write good fiction and let idiots clutch pearls over its literariness.

Boils down to "This arbitrary category with a bunch of great nostalgia based entries doesn't have modern competition"

Meanwhile genre fiction printer goes brrrrrr which contains a lot of shit, but due to sheer quantity contains so many gems you never even need to worry about critics or "literary" fiction.

Actually I feel like this is yet another example of how stupid it is to gatekeep art as higher than process. Art comes from process. It isnt a single part of the process that can be separated from it. People complained video games could never be art. People complain that genre fiction cant be art. These days its AI image generation. Its all art, or can be art.
by pdpi | 2025-06-22 23:47:48+00:00
> If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

Haven't tried it in a while, but, last I checked, Word Equation Editor output didn't look serious because it looked janky and look like it wasn't really done in a "professional" tool. Part of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of course, LaTeX output looks right in part because it's what people have been reading for decades, but TeX's formulas just look plain good.
by TuxSH | 2025-06-22 23:48:07+00:00
About everything in std::initializer_list is noexcept, and builtin wrappers (type traits, bit_cast etc etc.) are 0-cost.

You shouldn't try to avoid all of the stdlib, but rather vet what you use from it. Furthermore, stuff like LTO or -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections (+ --gc-section when linking) gets rid of unused symbols, as long as your toolchain provider compiles the C stdlib and C++ stdlib with these

> coroutines

Almost everything is customizable by user (including class-scoped operator new), is it not?

> Where should embedded c++ projects go now that they are not welcome anymore?

C++ is still very much suitable for embedded, and while I disagree with most of your post I agree that: 1) there should be a linker flag to wrap all std:: exceptions instead of using -Wl,-wrap for each individual exception when needed and 2) that embedded feels like a second-class citizen sometimes ("deprecating volatile" (reverted), #embed missing C++23 etc)
by mattmaroon | 2025-06-22 23:49:22+00:00
Yep. The western liberal is well-intended and can’t get behind the idea that anyone should ever kill anyone. But Hamas’s order of preference is:

1. They kill you (because God will give them the eternal hookup)

2. You kill them (same as #1)

3. Nobody kills anyone

Suicide bombing seems crazy and far from rational to those of us who aren’t in the death cult. But if you look at the actions of radical Islamists from that perspective, it is entirely rational and in line with both their stated beliefs and their actions.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-22 23:50:25+00:00
> Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X

If you can get multiple companies to time their interviews and offer stages perfectly and then get one of them to match the other, that’s quite lucky.

However, it’s not like it’s an easy solution. It’s transforming one problem into a much harder one: Now you have to get a second offer that’s even higher and get it at exactly the right time to use it as leverage. How do you negotiate that second offer to 1.25 * $X so you can leverage it to get the first to the same level? That’s left as an exercise for the reader.

“Just get a second offer for 25% more” is more of the wishful thinking negotiating strategy. In most cases it’s more realistic to set a target number and stick to it, being willing to walk away and continue the job search until it’s met.
by GMoromisato | 2025-06-22 23:50:39+00:00
> First of all, I disagree with your characterization of what the conventional wisdom is.

Okay, you could be right about that. I don't know.

> But if this were the conventional wisdom, I'd say that it's clearly right

That's really the crux of the disagreement: I don't see it as being clearly right. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe it's biased reasoning on my part (wouldn't be the first time). But I don't think it is obvious how the Iranian regime is going to react. I don't think any one person inside Iran knows how the regime is going to react yet (maybe not even the Khamenei).

It sounds like you think it's obvious how things will play out. That's cool, but that's where we disagree.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-22 23:50:56+00:00
> I would submit that there is the danger that people might want to keep a bad law if they continue to make money by snitching. In fact, money is the exact wrong incentive for this sort of thing.

Think bigger. If the activity were really a money-maker, then it will inevitably be scaled and industrialized. A cottage industry of snitching would spring up. If that industry got sufficiently wealthy and politically powerful, we'd see all kinds of "easy-bounty" laws getting enacted to allow these companies to further sponge up fines from the public.

If speeding fines were shared with whoever reported them, I guarantee 100% that companies would buy real estate every 10 miles along every freeway and put up speeding cameras to automate it.

(EDIT: Looks like you also already predicted the speed trap cottage industry in another comment. Oh, well, I'll leave this one up too)
by kevinmchugh | 2025-06-22 23:51:04+00:00
Magazines were so flush with cash that Vonnegut was paid $750 for his first story. That's unadjusted for inflation. I'm no expert, but I think a first time author getting $750 from a magazine would be doing pretty well these days. He saw that market fall apart within his lifetime, and blamed it on th audience moving to TV, for what it's worth.
by Spivak | 2025-06-22 23:51:43+00:00
Calling Stephen King enjoyable but forgettable I don't think works as an argument because I think it's pretty rare for an author to have 5+ novels that are so influential as to be cultural touchstones for multiple generations. The amount of fiction that he directly inspired or can trace their ideas back to one of Stephen King's novels is overwhelming.

Of all the criticisms I expected to be leveled at the man forgettable was perhaps the last one on my list.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-22 23:52:04+00:00
Me too!

But I also recognize that people are human and make mistakes. I've missed turns before and had to make a decision between a slightly risky u-turn or being stuck going the wrong way for a while. I chose the u-turn after doing my best to ensure I wasn't going to put anyone else at risk

Should I be fined for that?

How about speeding? Basically everyone speeds right? Let's just auto fine everyone for that all the time.
by gerdesj | 2025-06-22 23:53:14+00:00
I live in a UK sticks n bricks two storey roof and a half building. It looks like a bungalow with three bedrooms in the roof on floor one (second floor for the US and other one based countries).

I have two switches in my attic above those bedrooms and most of the rest of IT.

That means I can easily run cable drops along my attic and then under the roof to the outer walls of my house. I've run four Cat 5e to my garage and four to my sitting room.

Basically, I think we are both doing it right.

The biggest criticism of IoT is insecure and unreliable. If you buy any old tat and wire it up to Alexa well that's fine if it hangs together and it mostly does these days. If you squint hard enough, you can forget about Alexa being a bit of a security ... quandry.

There is no such thing as absurd when it comes to automation.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-22 23:53:59+00:00
> Taiwan, Japan, Poland, Canada, Spain, Australia, many others, these are all countries that do not have nukes, have a great political and economic relationship with the US, and are currently at 0% risk of attack or invasion by our shared enemies (ok, you can put Taiwan at slightly higher than 0%).

Including Taiwan in this list is hilarious.

Poland, Canada, Spain, Australia, and others, are certainly reevaluating the wisdom of their current strategy. That's the whole point I'm making.
by sytelus | 2025-06-22 23:54:13+00:00
Amazon remains totally complacent of these issues which are now professionally hacked by China based providers day in and out. Tons of vitamins are now fake and downright harmful. A lot of books, even small scale ones, are also fake and very low quality.

I tried to move my purchases to Walmart and surprisingly, even after 25 years, they haven’t got act together. Walmart even haven’t recognized that they should jump on this problem by prominently showing authentic brand logo or something.

I also tried to move all my books purchasing to B&N and again, surprisingly, they haven’t learned any real lesson in past 25 years. Their website is clunky, they charge $7 delivery fee, they can’t even deliver to my nearest their own shop for free!

Amazon is definitely riding on this utterly deficient competitors and that’s why they get to be so complacent.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-22 23:54:32+00:00
> If you re-read the transcript, I hope you will come to the understanding that this is a lie. The company is trying to leverage your desperation for a job.

From the hiring side: It’s not a lie at all, it’s just that we have other serious candidates we also like. If you’re not serious about taking the job then we need to move on to the next candidate quickly.

Generally you can come back and ask if they’ll re-issue the offer letter past the expiration. Most companies will happily do it if the position hasn’t already been filled, but you may have to wait for their second-choice offer letter to also expire (see why the expiration dates exist? It’s like locking a database row with a timeout added).

In my experience, the candidates who want to extend out the negotiation process for weeks or even months are rarely serious about joining the company. Statistically they’re a waste of time to continue holding up other hires.
by pfdietz | 2025-06-22 23:56:56+00:00
US WWII Bombers video on this weapon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMlGkt-FA6Y

"A total of 158 Disney Swish rocket assisted bombs were deployed by B-17 bombers during WWII. The bombers were deployed during 4 missions during the months of Feb, March and April 1945. The targets included E-boat pens in Holland, submarine assembly factory in Germany and additional hardened targets in Hamburg, Germany. The long slender bombs were rocket propelled to increase their strike speed by 26%. They could perforate around 16 feet of reinforced concrete. Unfortunately, the combat effectiveness was less than desirable. Issues included, the bombs needed to strike the target (near misses were insignificant), the rocket motors failed to ignite and the warhead payload was insufficient to induce significant damage."
by corimaith | 2025-06-22 23:58:03+00:00
We aren't getting good games past 2015 or so because the industry has become incredibly risk-averse and realized there's more profit to be made releasing sequels and remakes than producing something innovative. That being said, that's not a sustainable strategy and we are seeing the limits of that.

>It's not so much a P5R problem as a general problem in the industry. In my current playthrough status ailments, buffs, debuffs and such just don't matter. That's the case for most turn-based games, just as the weapons triangle ceased to matter in Fire Emblem games a long time ago.

I think that's more a function of the games you are playing, in Kiseki or Xenoblade or (some) Final Fantasy there is alot more strategy involved than in Persona, whose primairly appeal I believe is more of a social life simulator than a deep rpg experience. Even with music, it's just a different style where P4 is pop while P5 is jazz, but other games draw from instrumentals or ecelectic mixes like Ar Tonelico. To say one is better/worse isn't a good term because they aren't easily comparable.

>Fictional VR games like Sword Art Online and Shangri-La Frontier have NPCs you can just talk to, I'd love to see that in real games.

Well that's just a MMORPG or a RPG or ImSim. And the MMORPG is probably closer to needing a fresh start than being anywhere close to a solved genre. But as the riskiest and most expensive genre, nobody is going to funding something that really pushes the line due to the sheer risk involved.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-23 00:00:37+00:00
Entertainment is an effect, not the main cause.

It's not the fault of availability of McDonalds that a person chooses to destroy their health eating only burgers, fries and Coke. Healthy options still exist, just that some people choose not to use them.

So why do people choose endless entertainment instead of the "healthy options"?
by alexjplant | 2025-06-23 00:01:35+00:00
There's a long and winding thread called "Best of Ali-Xpress" [sic] on WatchUSeek that has a bunch of ideas. Outside of that I'd recommend searching either by movement name ("NH35", "PT5000") or popular watch model diameter ("40mm" for a Sub, "41mm" for an SMP) and sorting by best selling. From there you can go to the storefronts and see all of their models.
by kaashif | 2025-06-23 00:02:18+00:00
Actually, I've already tried that and found it boring from the start, not just after a few hours. I found context switching between videos to be exhausting, not worth it given the low amount of content per switch, and I prefer vegging out in front of a movie, documentary, or even 30 min YouTube video to be lower effort. This is independent of any consideration of nobility or scorn.

I think the fact that people are scrolling through this stuff and NOT getting bored or tired is interesting, people are different to me in some way I don't understand.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-23 00:02:55+00:00
I worked at a company where HR would request a copy of the competing offer. Very frequently, the candidate would come up with reasons why they couldn’t show the offer letter to HR. Often it was some story about having a verbal offer or something equally flimsy.

HR eventually just assumed the mythical competing offer was a bluff, and to be honest from everything I saw that was most likely correct for the average applicant.

As someone who always interviewed and negotiated honestly, it was kind of shocking to learn how often candidates lied about everything from where they worked in the past to having competing offers.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-06-23 00:04:00+00:00
Hmmm, might be worth figuring out why (in general) left-of-center sub pubs, and right-of-center sub streams.

Bipolar makes sense-- but if local charts are any guide, there is so much noise that pareidolia is required to make any diagnosis. Fwiw whatever bipolar afflicts me seem to have a cycle of hours it's interesting to see cycles* of days or months (or if 2 writers might sync up)

*beats? Depending also on whethers posts are pub'd consistently on "highs" or "lows"
by II2II | 2025-06-23 00:04:13+00:00
For some people, that approach may work. If it does work, it's great since it avoids the mental anguish of beating yourself up (which is damaging in it's own right). That said, I can see two scenarios where it won't work: (a) those who have been dealing with the problem for an extended period of time, and (b) those who replace one counter productive habit with another. At the end of the day, we must face the reality that these products are designed to gain and hold people's attention. They are intended to be psychologically difficult to escape from.