MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kubb | 2025-06-01 09:42:25+00:00
> The absolute ideal method of retirement is home ownership.

I'm sorry, but I have to intervene, because this is a stunningly strong claim.

> Its cheap ... for the home owner

Homes are unaffordable for most people today, to the point where renting can be more cost effective than buying. Housing consumes a lot of income which acts like a hidden tax - a drain on the economy.

> it requires the least services provided by the state until things seriously deteriorate

1) Things deteriorate when people can't afford housing. Labor and services become more expensive. 2) Not requiring the state to be involved is an ideological advantage, not a practical one.

> But she also owed quite a decade of rates to the council and wasn't sure what she would have left over

This is an anecdote and as such has limited value, but it's made even less useful by you not knowing the exact sums and percentages. It doesn't justify your sweeping claim in the slightest.

You also seem to be talking about property tax, not LVT.

> Land value as a mechanism to forcibly move on the elderly and hand their inner city character homes over to richer people who don't increase housing density is completely ass backwards.

There's not much wrong with moving for retirement. We don't like to do it, and residential property owners should to some extent (for a number of years) be exempt from land value tax, but the alternative (hoarding valuable land) is much worse.

> You get stuck in a cycle of paying taxes -> improving services -> improved services increase land value -> increased land value increases taxes.

Services don't improve just with tax, but with the influx of capital and development to the area, available jobs, etc. You're using an incomplete model to reason about it.

Some of the other benefits of LVT worth mentioning are that it 1) incentivises owners to use the land productively (density!), 2) discourages land speculation, 3) reduces urban sprawl.
by cedws | 2025-06-01 09:44:49+00:00
I hope social media is flooded with this kind of content that sows doubt about authenticity. It’s the only shot we have at training people that seeing is no longer believing. If we don’t educate the masses about this now, particularly the older generations, democracy is completely over. Soon anybody with a GPU will be able to create anything they want. The danger isn’t the imagery we’ll be able to create, it’s the doubt they can sow. Imagery will no longer be admissible evidence. Videos of Trump on Epstein island released? Trump supporters will say they’re fake. Trump critics will say they’re real. And neither group will be able to reason with each other.

The past decade has been foreign adversaries using manual labor to sow discord through social media. That’s about to be supercharged and I’m not so sure we will survive.
by jsheard | 2025-06-01 09:47:17+00:00
Also of note is that the RenderFormer tests and Blender tests were done on the same Nvidia A100, which sounds sensible at first glance, but doesn't really make sense because Nvidia's big-iron compute cards (like the A100) lack the raytracing acceleration units present on the rest of their range. The A100 is just the wrong tool for the job here, you'd get vastly better Blender-performance-per-dollar from an Nvidia RTX card.

Blenders benchmark database doesn't have any results for the A100, but even the newer H100 gets smoked by (relatively) cheap consumer hardware.

Nvidia H100 NVL - 5,597.13 GeForce RTX 3090 Ti - 5,604.69 Apple M3 Ultra (80C) - 7,319.21 GeForce RTX 4090 - 11,082.51 GeForce RTX 5090 - 15,022.02 RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell - 16,336.54
by srean | 2025-06-01 09:48:36+00:00
With NSO (not NSO.edu but the cyberweapons/malware company) there is a hidden tenuous pun.

Adaptive optics started in a secret space weaponry research funded by SDI.

When a few profs independently proposed the idea in their NSF research grant proposal they were told - we already know this stuff.

https://www.npr.org/2013/06/24/190986008/for-sharpest-views-...
by cloud-ranger | 2025-06-01 09:50:43+00:00
Well this is unexpected. Japanese toilets aside and the comments regarding which countries people have seen them in, and the hand bidet sprayers and their usage, as I understand:

- In Islam, Muslims must pray 5 times a day, but you must have 'Wudhu' which means you need to have performed the ritual wash before praying. You have to do it again if you've gone to the toilet. * When you go to the toilet, you must, as a requirement use water * So, most Muslim household bathrooms or public bathrooms in Muslim countries have a hand sprayer or at a minimum, a water container to fill.

I worked in Dubai and Saudi before, and apartments come with hand bidet sprayers.

Regarding Singapore, I wouldn't be surprised if this was influenced by Malaysia (a Muslim country, but they were part of the same country before) although when visited Malaysia I can't remember (ok they probably did) have a similar arrangement. I remember my Chinese friend telling me that her dad went to a Muslim school (a Malay school), so he pretty much uses water like Muslims do (when they go to the bathroom).

Regarding the deadly hand sprayers (pressure wise), usually in modern Mid East apartments: - They are connected to a tap so you can control the pressure - those bathrooms usually have toilet paper too, so you wet the paper to clean first, then you can direct the water on to your hand whilst you clean yourself with your left hand, finally dry with toilet paper. Final step of course, wash your hands! Hence why Muslims only eat or shake someone's right hand, knowing the left hand is on toilet duty.

I've been in corporate bathrooms in the UK, in a cubical, and you hear someone enter, pee (or even more) and exit without washing their hands!!! Not only once either.

The bottom line is, use water. No one can argue it's better to use paper. Some folks dislike of things from the Middle East lead them to argue toilet paper is enough. It isn't. (-_-)

Side note: If you're ever in Dubai and visit one of their big malls, like Dubai Mall, you'll question where the 1st and 3rd worlds are. Clean and maintained luxury rest rooms, you'll be happy to relive yourself in such restrooms, rather than dread using the toilet if you're outside. And they have good baby changing facilities too.
by mhog_hn | 2025-06-01 09:51:09+00:00
Find coworking spaces targeted at digital nomads. Pick spacious airbnb apartments - important to have this as a backup for calls when the coworking space does not work out. Stay somewhere for at least one month, ideally 3 months. Japan is very nice. Portugal is alright. More rural places can be nice. Avoid most coffee shops.. Time zone differences can be very painful.
by hualaka | 2025-06-01 09:52:01+00:00
vlang is a Golang-like programming language. I will use vlang as an example,

v has the same syntax as golang and is derived from it. But otherwise, v is moving closer to rust, with immutability, bounds checking, and so on.

Here's a discussion of vlang's implementation of coroutine https://github.com/vlang/v/discussions/11582 Until recently, vlang has not supported coroutines very well

The syntax of nature is different from golang. But everything else is the same as golang, including goroutine, GC, channel, cross-compilation and deployment, and even free programming ideas, less is more, and so on.

I think these features are the best thing about golang, even in front of all programming languages. That's why I'm trying to see if I can create a better golang.

In the early stages of availability, I would not advise others to switch to nature, as this would be irresponsible. When nature is sufficiently advanced, the situation will be different.
by susam | 2025-06-01 09:52:07+00:00
I've got a page about this too: https://susam.net/1.html

In fact, this is the oldest blog post archived on my website! I wrote it about 24 years ago, back when pondering on questions like this felt endlessly fascinating. What especially intrigued me at the time was how the concept of limits (the epsilon–delta definition) allows us to avoid the conceptual pitfalls often associated with infinity. Using limits, we can define and understand problems like this in a precise and rigorous manner, something that felt both elegant and incredibly satisfying.
by petee | 2025-06-01 09:52:41+00:00
I have an older garmin gps18x I use for ntp and it gets fantastic reception from a window shaded by trees. I wanted to test a monitor script so I stuffed it in a metal can, capped with a thick plate, and used excessive tinfoil to seal...If i recall it only dropped 2 satellites near the horizon, leaving 4+ with good signal. I suspect the signal was leaking in through the cable.

During past year running i don't believe its lost 3d fix once (not in the can)
by neRok | 2025-06-01 09:52:47+00:00
Multiple calls?! That sounds like n*n+1. Gross :P

I think the issue with the example json is that it's sent in OOP+ORM style (ie nested objects), whereas you could just send it as rows of objects, something like this;

{ header: "Welcome to my blog", post_content: "This is my article", post_comments: [21,29,88], # the numbers are the comment ID's footer: "Hope you like it", comments: {21: "first", 29: "second", 88: "third" } }

But then you may as well just go with protobufs or something, so your endpoints and stuff are all typed and defined, something like this;

syntax = "proto3"; service DirectiveAffectsService { rpc Get(GetPageWithPostParams) returns (PageWithPost); } message GetPageWithPostParams { string post_id = 1; } message PageWithPost { string page_header = 1; string page_footer = 2; string post_content = 3; repeated string post_comments = 4; repeated CommentInPost comments_for_post = 5; } message CommentInPost { string comment_id = 1; string comment_text = 2; }

And with this style, you don't necessarily need to embed the comments in 1 call like this, and you could cleanly do it in 2 like parent-comment suggests (1 to get page+post, second to get comments), which might be aided with `int32 post_comment_count = 4;` instead (so you can pre-render n blocks).
by masklinn | 2025-06-01 09:57:14+00:00
> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like.

The underlying difference can not be fixed by software, because software can't make you care about or value things: Jobs saw presentations as performances.

I don't mean that in a dismissive way, I mean that Jobs treated presentations as plays and musicals. Few people are willing (let alone able) to block out days in order to rehearse and fine tune a presentation. Even less so days of multiple people in order to get feedback and suggestions. In real world settings.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-01 09:58:50+00:00
I'd say this is generally true, but in practice there are a decent number of cases where some reasoning can give you a pretty good confidence one way or another. Mainly by considering what other correlations exist and what causal relationships are plausible (because not all of them are).

(I say this coming from an engineering context, where e.g. you can pretty confidently say that your sensor isn't affecting the weather but vice-versa is plausible)
by leloctai | 2025-06-01 10:00:38+00:00
Timing comparison with the reference is very disingenuous.

In raytracing, error scale with the square root of sample count. While it is typical to use very high sample count for the reference, real world sample count for offline renderer is about 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than in this paper.

I call it disingenuous because it is very usual for a graphic paper to include a very high sample count reference image for quality comparison, but nobody ever do timing comparison with it.

Since the result is approximate, a fair comparison would be with other approximate rendering algorithm. Modern realtime path tracer + denoiser can render much more complex scenes on consumer GPU in less than 16ms.

That's "much more complex scenes" part is the crucial part. Using transformer mean quadratic scaling on both number of triangles and number of output pixels. I'm not up to date with the latest ML research, so maybe it is improved now? But I don't think it will ever beat O(log n_triangles) and O(n_pixels) theoretical scaling of a typical path tracer. (Practical scaling wrt pixel count is sub linear due to high coherency of adjacent pixels)
by DonHopkins | 2025-06-01 10:01:24+00:00
I have posted several highly upvoted informative comments relevant to this discussion, while you've posted absolutely nothing useful or relevant whatsoever, your own comment was flagged and killed, and you're projecting your own failure and irrelevance on me right now.

And my guess that the foaming at the mouth climate change denier was also into blockchain was 100% correct.

You already said you weren't going to speak to me again, yet here you are back again for more.

Touch some grass, crypto shill.
by virtualritz | 2025-06-01 10:04:24+00:00
I think it's rather the other way around. What parent said, even though they prefixed it with a 'maybe' to make their statement less confronting, is that you used the term "systems programming language" too freely. As is also the case with Go.

If people keep doing that, the term will eventually loose meaning. Maybe in 20 years, it will have eroded enough that something like Python will be called a "systems programming language". I mean after all, a printf statement in C also parses the format string at runtime. Who is to say the fact that all of the code is interpreted should thusly exclude something like Python? I'm being sarcastic, if that wasn't obvious.

Nature claims 'concise'ness in it's README's opening paragraph. That is laudable. It's even more laudable if the conciseness would also be reflected in the use of natural language (no pun) that describes it.

Calling it a "systems programming language" while using GC is IMHO eroding the meaning of the term.

Something meaning X and someone including Y and then someone pointing out that X does not include Y has thusly nothing to do with stereotypes here.
by nixpulvis | 2025-06-01 10:04:55+00:00
Right, but what if some of that SLA information actually directed the code itself.

In the context of this blog post, what if the SLA was <100ms for an initial response, with some mandatory fields, but then any additional information which happens to be loaded within that 100ms automatically is included. With anything outside the 100ms is automatically sent in a followup message?
by miki123211 | 2025-06-01 10:06:48+00:00
I'm sure there were (pre-LLM, non-plagiarized) assignments I turned in at college where I would fail this.

"Umm... this is how I've always done it" / "I copied it from my solution for assignment 1 and I no longer remember why I did it that way" / "there was an error and somebody suggested this as a workaround in the Github issue" are all perfectly valid answers in my opinion.
by ghaff | 2025-06-01 10:07:34+00:00
And graphics designers.

Maybe I should rehearse, spend more money (normally out of my own pocket as I don't have access to a graphics staff), and otherwise prepare more for a conference presentation, which may be 50 people or fewer. But that's probably not realistic. I think I do a decent job in general. I could probably do better. But everything is a tradeoff.
by hualaka | 2025-06-01 10:09:08+00:00
This is the Natural Selection interstellar spacecraft from the Three-Body Problem novel. In fact, the disc-shaped part is the head.

I tried to draw this logo myself, but my drawing turned out rather ugly. The lines of the Millennium Falcon closely match my imagination of the Natural Selection spacecraft's appearance, so I borrowed its lines.

However, this is not permanent. In fact, the name “Nature” may be modified because it is not SEO-friendly.
by DaSHacka | 2025-06-01 10:09:24+00:00
This has been my approach to presentations. If it was originally a google slides document, I download it locally before the presentation time, and even for local .pptx/.odp files I always make sure to export an extra copy in PDF format, just in case.

Sometimes, for especially important talks, I even bring two laptops pre-provisioned with the slides just in case one has technical issues for some reason or another.

Its not that much extra work, and should the preparations pay off even once makes every bit of the toil well worth it. Nothing worse than embarrassing yourself in a room full of your colleagues, even moreso if the talk will be recorded and posted online for others to witness in perpetuity.
by perlgeek | 2025-06-01 10:11:43+00:00
Probably because typing in Python is optional and kinda bolted-on after the fact, and you really need a good type system to get the most out of multimethods.

In particular, type declarations, as they were first introduced in python, did not have a run-time effect, and they very much have a run-time effect with multi methods.

(Dataclasses are kind of an exception to this rule, but one that feels far less fundamental than multi dispatch would).
by arccy | 2025-06-01 10:12:13+00:00
Having had to work with various application written in rust... i find they have some of the most terrible of errors. "<some low level operation> failed" with absolutely no context on why the operation was invoked in the first place, or with what arguments.

This is arguably worse than crashing with a stack trace (at least i can see a call path) or go's typical chain of human annotated error chains.
by nixpulvis | 2025-06-01 10:16:47+00:00
I don't think this is really a failing of the language, just a bad practice in assuming that you can bubble up a low level error without adding some more context to why it was trigged in this case. Short of matching the error and returning a new error with more info, I'm not sure what the idiomatic solution is personally. But I also haven't spent as much time as I should with error crates.

I agree it's an issue, and I hope the community centers around better practices.
by nkrisc | 2025-06-01 10:17:41+00:00
If you’re arguing that then the answer is: too bad. These sorts of pledges are not 30 pages of legalese that you’re asked to agree to in the middle of a purchase. It’s usually a single page of plain language. If someone signs it without reading it they lose all rights to argue they weren’t aware. Choosing to remain unaware is not a defense.
by strken | 2025-06-01 10:17:44+00:00
I would suggest that in a lot of cases, e.g. "where does the local slaughterhouse go?" or "should we allow small, affordable apartments for poor people?", there are also significant positive externalities...except, if you live in the area, the benefits don't outweigh the costs. That's what gives NIMBYism its name: the proverbial NIMBY likes to buy a steak dinner on Friday night, provided the cows aren't slaughtered nor the workers housed in their backyard.

Therefore, a community wanting to ban a business from residence is the kind of problem that can only be dealt with from a higher level of government, which can distribute negative and positive externalities in a more-or-less even way. It is absolutely not "valid", on the assumption that valid means permissible, for a community to defect on its share of the negative externalities while still taking in the positive externalities from the rest of the country.
by username332211 | 2025-06-01 10:18:27+00:00
Incentives have nothing to do with it. Until the community recognizes that other people have rights and that rights are rights precisely because you need no "community input" (which is an euphemism for "political interference") in order to exercise them, the results will be the same.

While developing a piece of real estate can cause a good deal of damage to the character of a community, ideas are much more dangerous in that regard.

Why is it then, that we allow for unscrupulous capitalists to disseminate ideas freely? Why isn't there "community input" into the things newspapers are allowed to publish?
by tim333 | 2025-06-01 10:18:49+00:00
https://robinmarkphillips.com/household-appliances-made-life...

I've done some 3rd world travel without washing machines for a while and my laundry was once a week dunk stuff in the sink for 5 minutes with shampoo + rinse water, wring and hang up. I don't buy the whole day being necessary thing.
by jorvi | 2025-06-01 10:19:12+00:00
Declarative management of your OS is in terms of effort basically an inversion of imperative management.

With declarative, you frontload an enormous amount of effort:

- You have to learn your declarative framework

- Then you have to slowly build your configuration base, or copy someone else's and figure out why they did what.

- Then you have to figure out workarounds for things that aren't natively managed declaratively.

- Then you start writing your own little helper functions and modularize things. At this point, it starts getting very smooth.

From there on, adding another package or another machine is very very easy, basically adding a few lines of code. And now your system is mostly reproducible, putting you far ahead of an imperative configuration.

Compared to that, doing it imperatively you can just sort of do your thing and roll with it. This let's you do whatever you aim to achieve very quickly, but as time goes on you have to juggle so many balls in terms of tracking and remembering what you configured / what state your config is in that it quickly becomes impossible.

Declarative OS management really sticks once you accept that the first few weeks are gonna suck and the first few months are still gonna have friction. But once you get over the hump, the rewards are there to reap.
by andyferris | 2025-06-01 10:21:59+00:00
My take PowerPoint slides in private industry is that they are mostly analogous to what academics use poster presentations for.

They are narrated to small audiences of 1-10 (maybe 20) people at a time, who might want some notes to read before or share around.

IMO like posters they make for terrible presentations to very large groups and I kept questioning the design and purpose, but it seems to work for certain situations.
by kotaKat | 2025-06-01 10:22:15+00:00
Sounds about right: ICE is going to use their "local connections" to gain access to networks like Flock and have their buddies in the local PDs run plates for them, even if Flock 'claims' they don't support this use case.

At what point will it instead be something like a major retailer's employees letting ICE run hits off their accounts? Lowes deployes Flock nationwide.

As an aside, anyone got recommendations for good Sawzall blades?
by mkl | 2025-06-01 10:22:17+00:00
No, that works well IME. If it's worth something towards the final grade, even 1%, most students will do it. It can be hard to persuade some of my students not to spend multiple hours attempting to get 0.1% more of the course grade by doing another quiz attempt when they've already achieved 90% - I think they're better off moving on to the next thing.
by Barrin92 | 2025-06-01 10:22:59+00:00
I studied CS in Germany and the entire issues seems completely unnecessary and foreign to me. Our exercises only mattered insofar as they qualified you for the end of semester exam, and that was done on paper and without electronic devices so you couldn't cheat and it's the only thing that mattered for your degree.

Why are adults at a university doing graded homework? They're responsible for their own learning, and if they want to cheat, well good luck on your exam. Our exercises in math and CS always were a few years old and kind of cycled through, so just copying old solutions was trivial, but what for, you're only hurting yourself. People who didn't learn just bombed out at the end. A university education is voluntary, people are there by their own choice.

Honestly this seems almost entirely like a byproduct of the privatized education system. University as children's daycare where everyone needs to pass and be tutored because there isn't an incentive to just filter people out.