MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by npongratz | 2025-06-12 17:29:53+00:00
From TFA, they're using LIDAR results to determine features suggesting indigenous farming practices. Researchers are doing the same in tropical rainforests around the world, where there's far more vegetation, finding similar evidence of intensive agriculture.

I highly doubt weeds, extensive though they might be, would wipe clean the evidence they've found in the landscape.

> I find it very hard to believe that we can find evidence of intensive cultivation after 3,600 years in such a wet area.

Perhaps I'm missing something. I'm no expert, and have merely skimmed through, but the earliest date I could find in the PDF linked from the fine article was 400 BCE [0], so around 2400 years. That's still a lot, but definitely not 3600 years.

[0] "While there is evidence of maize in the Upper Peninsula as early as 400 BCE (7), intensive cultivation, like we clearly see at Sixty Islands is typically not undertaken until roughly 1000 CE."

https://www.science.org/doi/suppl/10.1126/science.ads1643/su...
by hodgesrm | 2025-06-12 17:30:07+00:00
Montaigne's Essays are primarily philosophical reflections. He did write a very interesting travel diary recounting his voyage from France to visit the Pope in Rome. [0] That diary has a wealth of observations covering everything from the riches of German towns to the number of kidney stones he passed after drinking the waters at various spas along the way.

If you ever wondered what travel was like in earlier centuries, it's a delightful account but nothing like Pepys. Pepys recorded a vast range of topics from affairs of state to the consistency of his stools (and everything in between).

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/70838/70838-h/70838-h.htm
by piva00 | 2025-06-12 17:30:16+00:00
> You're not supposed to take the Democratic talking points about Trump being a "wannabe dictator" seriously. It's just political mudslinging.

I think you should go up this comment thread and read this[0], it's not the words of Trump but the actions his administration take, they are authoritarian, it's clear to most people outside of the USA with a decent education.

Cynicism about "political mudslinging" as if these actions are all normal and could be taken by any administration, and would be condemned anyway by their opposing side is exactly the shift in Overton Window which legitimises authoritarian overtakes.

Please do read about any authoritarian rise to power in democratic countries in the last 100 years, even better if you read about "competitive authoritarianism" to understand why it might just so be this time is a little different...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259953
by jtrueb | 2025-06-12 17:30:17+00:00
A true champion

> when I started contributing to Rust back in 2021, my primary interest was compiler performance. So I started doing some optimization work. Then I noticed that the compiler benchmark suite could use some maintenance, so I started working on that. Then I noticed that we don’t compile the compiler itself with as many optimizations as we could, so I started working on adding support for LTO/PGO/BOLT, which further led to improving our CI infrastructure. Then I noticed that we wait quite a long time for our CI workflows, and started optimizing them. Then I started running the Rust Annual Survey, then our GSoC program, then improving our bots, then…
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-06-12 17:30:59+00:00
And what do you buy with your "triple" income?

A boring mansion, with a boring lawn, in a boring, gated community? -- and all that while the other neighbourhoods are on fire. But at least you can buy $700 sneakers and leave the big garage in style, to work your ass off with a job pretending to "better the world" -- maybe have one or two weeks to fill your social media account with pictures already taken by the millions (you might as well use generative AI).

Congrats to your final destination: hell.
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-12 17:31:16+00:00
To balance the budget we need to raise taxes (or stop lowering them), reduce the DOD budget (as it is hitting $1 trillion), and cut spending in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (all three are political third rails).

The rest of the budget almost doesn't matter.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

As a hypothetical, if we'd cut everything that isn't in the Social Security, Medicare, Defense, Interest, and Health categories we'd still have $169 billion in deficits. Odds are VA benefits will not be cut any time soon, so if that's preserved we still have $429 billion in deficits.

And we'll never actually cut all of these spending categories. This leaves us having to touch the untouchable and/or raising taxes to balance the budget and get the debt under control.
by bitpush | 2025-06-12 17:31:19+00:00
> Apple proved that a closed and locked down model wouldn't affect sales (in fact you can use marketing spin to actually convince some people who are plenty tech savvy that they are better off having their own access to their device removed, a feat of mental gymnastics I still can't understand), the whole industry has moved heavily that direction.

This is part that is unfortunate. You'd expect hacker types (folks who hang out here on HN) would be 100% behind an open-source operating system, and would freely allow a corporation burning money to make improvements to it.

Instead what you see is an odd (and counterintuitive) behavior of saying alternate app stores are bad, side loading is bad - mostly because of Apple's unique PR/Marketing spin.
by nitwit005 | 2025-06-12 17:31:21+00:00
There generally hasn't been a way to buy just the local news, so who knows. I emphasize "news", rather than "newspaper", here.

I gave up on the local papers because they contained more Reuters and New York Times wire stories than any actual local content. That was two decades back. I don't think they were willing to give up on the business model of being an aggregator.

This seems a common enough complaint that there is a Texas news company that simply called itself Local News Only, and there are a few other similar names: https://localnewsonly.com/
by bubblyworld | 2025-06-12 17:31:40+00:00
Okay interesting, I've never heard of snapshot testing. I'll have to play with it some time.

I agree that mathematical problems are much easier to test, but I think only once you know the mathematics. Like I think it's possible that TDD fell flat for the sudoku solver because the dude just didn't know what properties he wanted. In that situation writing tests is like casting bones.

But I'm not convinced one way or the other... for me tests have always been most useful for regression and basic quality checks. Which is very useful! Means you never (hopefully anyway) take a step backwards as you evolve a program.
by hadlock | 2025-06-12 17:31:52+00:00
I can't think of a single feature my phone has gained since at least 2015 that I use. Actually it looks like the nav bar and material design 1.0 came out in 2011? The smart phone was largely "done" being developed by 2014. That's the year we got formal support for "use the flash LED as a flashlight" feature. Nexus 5 had wireless charging in 2013. Other than that the only reasons to upgrade is forced obsolescence or battery failure, or better quality phone camera(s).
by quuxplusone | 2025-06-12 17:32:11+00:00
FWIW:

(1) The art style is 100% "WikiHow meme", when I think you were probably (or should have been) shooting for "ligne claire". It's... distracting, at least. The facial expressions in particular are WikiHow-style.

(2) I can't quite read that "handwritten note" on page 14, nor is it explained to the reader how the protagonist figures out what date it is ("A.D.") for the Roman he thinks he's time-travel-talking to. Nor why he immediately jumps to time travel paradoxes; wouldn't it be obvious at first that this is, at weirdest, some sort of MMAcevedo situation, not a magic time travel communicator? Or is that my HN bias showing?
by crazygringo | 2025-06-12 17:32:19+00:00
Because the actual value corporations provide is only in their profit. Whereas the economic value individuals provide is measured by their compensation. It's completely incoherent to tax a corporation based on revenue. If profit margins are an average of 5%, what exactly would you want the tax rate on revenue to be that wouldn't immediately put out of business nearly every corporation on earth?

And if individuals got to deduct everything they spend money on, then everyone would be incentivized to spend their entire paycheck every year and never save money for retirement or anything.

So the reasons we tax corporations on profit and individuals on income doesn't just make sense logically from a point of measuring economic value, but is also literally the only practical mechanism.

And just to check, you really want most of journalism to go out of business?
by os2warpman | 2025-06-12 17:32:27+00:00
>what’s the plan for the election?

Boogeyman. It's always a boogeyman.

Recently, we've had transgendered people, antifa, DEI, migrants, and sleepy joe. As the acute impact wears off they switch to something else based on A-B testing of which generates the most fear.

It'll be something, but what?

Honestly my bet is on black people. They're going to go full-on racist. We'll probably see shit about phrenology, genetics, and degeneracy with the historically successful (to their target audience) descriptors of vermin and leeches.

All of this bullshit to lower taxes for billionaires and enable their successionist libertarian microstate fantasies.
by energywut | 2025-06-12 17:32:46+00:00
We're so fucked, as a species.

People are already way too easy to get to believe conspiracy theories. Shit like Pizzagate or whatever is only going to get more common when bad people start making, "and look, here's the video proof!"

And we've already got Tiktok and Youtube Shorts just pumping the dopamine centers in the brain for short form content. Generating shit you like dynamically is going to be an addictive nightmare. The moment it gets monetized we're going to see the equivalent of slot machines pumped at us from every channel -- flashing lights and emotional tugs to get us to part with our valuable money or attention.

And that's to say nothing of the impact these tools have on artists and creative people or the costs to train and deploy these tools.

We're already seeing it today. The amount of 'footage' about LA right now that's showing some sort of war zone that is clearly AI generated, but being consumed as if it was real is staggering.
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-12 17:33:20+00:00
He embeds the footnotes in the web version (it's a proper footnote in the email newsletter version). Find the "..." in this paragraph:

> Ryan solved this by writing Queens as a SAT problem, expressing properties like "there is exactly one queen in row 3" as a large number of boolean clauses. Go read his post, it's pretty cool. What leapt out to me was that he used CVC5, an SMT solver. (...) SMT solvers are "higher-level" than SAT, capable of handling more data types than just boolean variables. It's a lot easier to solve the problem at the SMT level than at the SAT level. To show this, I whipped up a short demo of solving the same problem in Z3 (via the Python API).
by jadbox | 2025-06-12 17:33:30+00:00
Not related to the article, but after years of using Rust, it still is a pain in the ass. While it may be a good choice for OS development, high frequency trading, medical devices, vehicle firmware, finance software, or working on device drivers, it feels way overkill for most other general domains. On the other hand, I learned Zig and Go both over a weekend and find they run almost as fast and don't suffer from memory issues (as much as say Java or C++).
by PaulShin | 2025-06-12 17:34:39+00:00
Great question, and very timely. We've been tackling this exact problem at my startup, Markhub. The cost of hot storage for observability data, especially logs, can quickly become a significant line item.

We adopted a tiered approach that's working well for us so far:

1. Hot Tier (Last 7 Days): Elasticsearch. For our real-time debugging and immediate operational needs, nothing beats the query speed of Elasticsearch. We keep a rolling 7-day window of all logs here. It's expensive, but essential.

2. Warm Tier (7-90 Days): AWS S3 Standard. After 7 days, our log shipper (Fluentd) automatically archives the logs to S3. If we need to investigate an older issue, we can still query these logs directly using AWS Athena. It's much slower than Elasticsearch, but for occasional, deep-dive investigations, the cost savings are massive.

3. Cold Tier (After 90 Days): S3 Glacier Deep Archive. After 90 days, the logs are transitioned to Glacier Deep Archive via S3's lifecycle policies. This is purely for long-term compliance and "break glass in case of emergency" scenarios. It's incredibly cheap to store, but we know that retrieving it would be a slow and deliberate process.

The key lesson for us was to be realistic about our actual query patterns. We found that over 95% of our queries were for logs less than 3 days old. This data-driven approach allowed us to be aggressive with our tiering strategy without sacrificing critical visibility.
by linsomniac | 2025-06-12 17:34:49+00:00
I get your point, but I'm envisioning a different endpoint.

Let's take your factory example: Factories are just a fact of life right now, almost nobody is producing bespoke cars or phones or clothing. So given that my son is basically 100% likely to be working with an automation line, how do I get him on the track to being a machine operator or a millwright rather than doing conveyor belt work?
by quesera | 2025-06-12 17:35:01+00:00
Aha, (literal) llol. That's interesting.

I am realizing now, that with no research or even conscious thought, I had settled on the idea that the song was some goofy Korean dude making a statement about the absurdity of late-stage capitalist sexualized excess, perhaps metaphorically asking who really is the horse and who really is the rider. And how we're all simultaneously instigator, enabler, beneficiary, and victim of same.

I can go a few directions from here...

1. I'm completely wrong, because obviously. Never attribute to self-reflection what can equally be explained by misogyny. 2. I'm right! For which I present as evidence: the Mercedes taillights blinking in time to the beat, and the existence of the yellow guy. I'll accept credit for this theory even if the message was unintentional. :) 3. Neither/all of the above. The artist asks the question which the public misinterprets as the answer, etc.

I don't know what to believe, but please be gentle with me and understand that I was raised in a culture where Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, and Creedence Clearwater Revival are used as patriotic anthems at political rallies. Nothing is required to make sense.
by baggachipz | 2025-06-12 17:35:26+00:00
I hear you. I send my representatives messages through their channels, only to occasionally receive a boilerplate response and automatic subscription to their propaganda newsletter. I fully expect that I'll be in a roundup of "dissidents" whenever that circus happens. The fact of the matter is that the people of this country voted for this. It's what they want. I don't know how we can combat that. I speak up and scream into the void, but it ultimately feels futile.
by piva00 | 2025-06-12 17:35:29+00:00
> EDIT: I don't support the tax cuts in the BBB, I think that's counteracting all the efforts to drop spending. But in talking about cuts in general, I think we do need to make painful cuts across the board.

NASA's budget in 2024 was ~24b USD, for the overall debt this is less than a drop in the bucket, for an agency doing cutting-edge R&D which has trickle down technological effects into the rest of society making multiples of their budget in advances to the US's technological prowess.

Are you really defending to cut their budget over so many other options? Yes, the cuts needs to come from somewhere but perhaps not from programs from an agency which has empirically proven to have a very high ROI?
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-12 17:35:32+00:00
You're conflating language design and compiler architecture. It's hard to increment on a compiler to get massive performance improvement, and rearchitecture can help, but you don't necessarily need to change anything to the language itself in that regard.

Roslyn (C#) is the best example of that.

It's a massive endeavor and would need significant fundings to happen though.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-12 17:35:36+00:00
Propagandists aren't the problem. The entire incentive structure of the journalism and consumer media industry (and others too, it's not just them) is the problem. These aren't people problems. These are institutional architecture and incentive problems. Look at the entire western world. We are in way deeper shit than just one political movement or one or a few leaders.

The hubris in the second half of your second sentence is chuckle worthy though.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-06-12 17:36:13+00:00
A suggestion that maybe the dark mode shouldn't be on the end of the page and maybe on the top of the page, I personally would've loved it and do it with some of my html blogs, maybe personal preference but yeah I think I agree golang is pretty cool but the knowledge base of python feels more and I sometimes just use uv with python and ai gemini pro right within the browser to create one off cool scripts. Pretty cool!
by yummypaint | 2025-06-12 17:36:16+00:00
Compare with gnumeric, that's the only spreadsheet I can recommend. I have files with hundreds of plots, non-trivial fits, and logic. 100% of everything works always and it's much faster.

I have a direct comparison because the exact same computations were previously implemented in excel and libre office. Both dropped plots from files, had straight-up reference bugs once things got large, and would regularly crash attempting to render dozens of tiled plots in 4k. The idea of using Google sheets for this is laughable.
by andnand | 2025-06-12 17:36:31+00:00
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! Im trying to give these tools a fair shot before I judge them. Ive had success with detailed prompts and letting the agent jump straight in when working on small/new projects. Ill give more planning prompts a shot.

Do you change models between planning and implementation? I've seen that recommended but it's been hard to judge if that's made a difference.
by skinkestek | 2025-06-12 17:36:32+00:00
> Just set your preferred UI language to English in System Settings – Language and Region and Excel will honor that

That might work - assuming IT policies don’t block it - but it could easily break a bunch of other things on my machine.

> There's probably a similar system setting for the date format

Maybe. But I’ve been a power user for 30 years (counting from my first full Windows restore), and I taught my first IT course in the late ’90s - so if there is an easy fix, I’m honestly kind of impressed with my own ability to miss it.
by retrodaredevil | 2025-06-12 17:37:09+00:00
A maintain my own digital music collection. The only two tools I use for maintaining the CD portion of my collection are k3b and MusicBrainz Picard. k3b can rip to flac and it will on embed metadata present on the CD itself. Then after I rip it, I add it to Picard.

I use the "lookup CD" feature in Picard, which gives me a selection of releases to choose from. Among the choices, I usually see a release matching the catalog number on my CD's case. When I don't see a matching release, I will typically add the disc ID to an existing release, or I will create a new release, or sometimes even creating a new release + new release group and add the necessary metadata to MusicBrainz.

I haven't tried any automatic tagging process like the ripping program the article talks about does, mostly because I want to use Picard to make sure the metadata is correct or contribute to MusicBrainz if it isn't.

I like MusicBrainz a lot because applications like Plex use it very well to group release groups together and will (usually) deduplicate identical recordings so that identical tracks can share a rating. It's a really great database and is kept up to date pretty well.
by IAmBroom | 2025-06-12 17:37:16+00:00
The voting public never sees these costs.

They are sometimes told about it, tenth-hand, such as the fabled $10,000-hammer and the gold toilet seat.

Congress itself sees these costs, or more precisely, teams working for congressmembers see them. Congress members approve bills that are not lowest-cost when there is personal benefit for their careers: pork-barrel. It's very hard to justify not-lowest-cost without a pork-barrel angle.
by kibwen | 2025-06-12 17:37:44+00:00
You can absolutely do the same things in Rust, it's just that the culture and tooling of Rust encourages much larger compilation units than in C or C++, so you don't get the same sort of best-case nontrivial embarrassing-parallelism, forcing the compiler to do more work to parallelize.

To address the tooling pressure, I would like to see Cargo support first-class internal-only crates, thereby deconflating the crate as what is today both the unit of compilation and the unit of distribution.
by jandrese | 2025-06-12 17:37:48+00:00
Sabine is an asshole. Doesn't mean she is wrong, and I appreciate when she reads some paper that has made a bunch of headlines to figure out if they're full of crap or not (spoiler alert: the answer is usually yes), but while she can identify the problem she's not part of the solution. Her divorce from academia means she has little power to affect change for the better given how the incentives are currently aligned. She can make a lot of noise, but the people actually pulling the levers have rigged the system in their favor enough to not care.
by alistairSH | 2025-06-12 17:38:22+00:00
Apparently somebody takes issue with my comment, so here's the CBO's own analysis for 2024[1].

Total Revenue: 4.9 trillion

Mandatory Spending: 4.1 trillion

Net Interest: 0.9 trillion

Discretionary Spending: 1.8 trillion

Yes, we could zero out discretionary spending and just barely eke out a balanced budget. We either need more revenue OR a complete reset on the social contract for a long-term balanced budget.

1 - https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-06-12 17:38:27+00:00
This thread on AI disasters and ethical black boxes really resonates with a worldbuilding project I've been following: `Chain://`. It's set in a 2090s future where consciousness is literally on a blockchain (Mental Smart Chain - MSC). The premise is chilling: your existence is formalized, verifiable, and every thought costs crypto. It's 'digital serfdom' where 'Code is Law, Proof is Reality, Compliance is Existence.'

The latest story, `Web://Reflect`, explores this. They even have a theoretical framework, IPWT (Integrated Predictive Workspace Theory), that formalizes consciousness as a verifiable computational process – eerily relevant to how AI might redefine 'humanity' through pure data.

If you're into science fiction that explores the ultimate cost of existence in a tech-monopolized future, check it out.

Main repo: https://github.com/dmf-archive/dmf-archive.github.io IPWT: https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT
by bitpush | 2025-06-12 17:38:29+00:00
Graphene's claim of "AOSP is dead" is easily verifiable.

> This also marks the availability of the source code at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). You can examine the source code for a deeper understanding of how Android works, and our focus on compatibility means that you can leverage your app development skills in Android Studio with Jetpack Compose to create applications that thrive across the entire ecosystem.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/android-16...

This was posted 2 days back.