MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gametorch | 2025-06-07 17:17:14+00:00
Am I supposed to lie?

I think generative AI is commoditized. The commenter denied that but gave an explanation about something else.

Whether generative AI constitutes art is a separate question merely of semantics, about which I did not deny the commenter their own opinion.

You're the one acting bad faith, it feels. I spoke truth about commoditization. I did not deny them their opinion about the semantics of what constitutes art.
by vaxman | 2025-06-07 17:17:43+00:00
This is a no-op. There is no $1T in savings, only infinite political liability (cutting USDVA by 80K people -laughable). DOGE is cooked, Trump will unwind it and DOJ will start chasing down the data they are reported to have copied.

As for how we’re going to reign in the budget, they’ll likely turn to Regan-era austerity initiatives at some point. Come get your 10lb block of cheese…
by BurningFrog | 2025-06-07 17:18:09+00:00
I don't doubt your numbers, but we are (or at least I am) talking about plastic bags.

I would guess they are less than 1 of those 150kg/year.

> Burning that is creating between 264 and 750kg of CO2 per person and year, definitely not insignificant.

Grok says total US CO2 emissions are "approximately 13.83 metric tons per person". I agree that 750kg (0.75 ton) is significant, but I don't thing plastic bags even affect the last decimal of that number.
by paxys | 2025-06-07 17:18:11+00:00
Spends on what? It's not like you can disband the military, not build roads and bridges and eliminate medicaid just because you send out a $1000/mo UBI payment.

If you want to consider just social assistance then the US government spends about $950B annually, and that works out to $2800 per year per citizen. To make it a livable amount you'd have to at minimum 5x that expenditure (and a lot more than that in urban areas).
by iancmceachern | 2025-06-07 17:18:25+00:00
It's not like this.

It's like this: Company wants to do R&D, they have a budget, they do math that says they can afford to pay X number of R&D workers with Y budget.

Government changes tax laws in unexpected way, that changes the math so that Y budget only can support X-A R&D workers because the "A" goes to taxes now.

Also important to note, the tech R&D space is a very small part of the overall economy. We exist in a little thought bubble here on HN.
by 9x39 | 2025-06-07 17:18:48+00:00
I agree with you about the VA, although everything I know is secondhand.

I make two generalizations from veterans I know: one type accumulates injuries throughout service (neck, knees, hips, shoulders, back, toxic exposure) but being the walk-it-off types, never documented much because they were often deployed and didn't bother with paperwork. Bitterly complains about the VA and their limited or temporary disability ratings despite grinding pain and difficulty in later life.

Second type is similar to the first type, but played the 'game' optimally, documented, documented, and documented. While you can absolutely get some of the same injuries, I was surprised to find things like mild sleep apnea and male pattern baldness helped get someone a permanent 100% disability rating. No doubt life isn't easy, but to think this individual is 100% disabled is a bit of a stretch when they also work full-time for .gov doing project work.

My point is that like a video game, people are very good at finding the optimal or 'meta' path to maximizing outcomes in a set of rules, and outcomes from a system can be different than what casual observers might think is the intended purpose of the system.
by bob1029 | 2025-06-07 17:19:36+00:00
Minimizing dependencies is probably close to the #1 thing you can do to improve the survivability of your product and business.

In a prior role, I was responsible for figuring out the best way to deliver a docusign-style experience that integrated with our product. After having conversations with two of the biggest vendors (DocuSign/Adobe), we decided the constraints of their APIs were causing too much friction with how our product/customer wanted things to work. We went with a fully in-house solution.

In most situations, trying to reinvent something like DocuSign is a terrible idea. In this case especially so since often you are using it simply because it is trusted (not because it is technically superior). In our case, the product was already installed and deeply trusted by the customers. They would have gone along with DocuSign, but they also had no problem with us doing it first-party.

Ultimately, it was a lot of up front work to get this implemented, but the customer absolutely loves it. We had to make some minor tweaks to how it functioned and that really highlighted why this was a good path. If we had gone with DocuSign, Adobe, et. al., that minor tweak would have turned into a major refactor and hack around shitshow.
by hinkley | 2025-06-07 17:19:42+00:00
> That’s a pretty bold assumption.

That’s not a bold assumption it’s the predicate for this entire sidebar. The commenter at the top said some things can’t be done in quadratic time and have to be done anyway, and I took exception.

>> unless a more optimal solution does not exist

Dropping into the middle of a conversation and ignoring the context so you can treat the participants like they are confused or stupid is very bad manners. I’m not grumpy at you I’m grumpy that this is the eleventeenth time this has happened.

> Almost every startup

Almost every startup fails. Do you model your behavior on people who fail >90% of the time? Maybe you, and perhaps by extension we, need to reflect on that.

> Then we fixed it as we scaled

Yes, because you picked a problem that can be architected to run in reasonable time. You elected to do it later. You trusted that you could delay it and turned out to be right.

>> unless a more optimal solution does not exist

When the devs discover the entire premise is unsustainable or nobody knows how to make it sustainable after banging their heads against it, they quickly find someplace else to be and everyone wonders what went wrong. There was a table of ex employees who knew exactly what went wrong but it was impolitic to say. Don’t want the VCs to wake up.
by Taeper | 2025-06-07 17:20:06+00:00
This works for a lot of back issues but not all of em! For example syringomyelia, depending on where it forms, can be exacerbated by working out. So ideally make sure you have a good idea of why your back hurts before you start, but it can be hard to diagnose.

https://asap.org/disorders/articles/exercise-concepts/
by drewbeck | 2025-06-07 17:20:08+00:00
It sounds like you think that any statement of values expresses superiority. Is that correct?

Also, this is something you made up, not something anybody on the left has expressed, and especially not represented by that sign: “Advocating that 99.4% percent of people should just shut up and give 0.6% of people what they want is what I expect out of Peter Thiel, not the left.”
by pistoriusp | 2025-06-07 17:21:06+00:00
redwoodjs.com has a very clear letter of intent on the homepage. Our community forum has a description. Our document has a header that describes this.

I'm not sure that you really appreciate that RedwoodJS is open source, and if you cared as much as you're pointing out to care, then you would have opened a bunch of PR requests to help us out. I'm still open to that, so please why don't you help us?
by RajT88 | 2025-06-07 17:23:23+00:00
> I tuned in deliberately on Jan 7, 2021, just a few days before Rush passed away, and found he was shocked and aghast at what had happened to the day before... but did not draw the connection to how the culture he created contributed to it.

That's kind of his thing. He's complained about drug addicts and perverts, but yet he was a prescription junkie, and also got caught flying to the Dominican Republic with a bunch of Viagra and condoms in his suitcase.

Even if he was acutely aware of the connection between his rhetoric and Jan. 6 events, it would probably bother him not at all and he'd refuse to acknowledge it unless forced to face it (like with his drug woes).
by genewitch | 2025-06-07 17:23:40+00:00
126-128MHz if i am reading what you said correctly is aviation (aircraft use 108-136MHz, AM) - but i am unsure of what that notation means and the AI explanation made my eyes glaze.

I'm unsure why the FCC wouldn't be the ones to complain; but i've never managed to annoy a government with my radio-work yet, so i am not sure who calls who to send someone to knock on the door.

either way https://www.ntia.gov/sites/default/files/publications/januar...

also i only glanced the the US band plans, if this setup isn't in the US, then you'd have to find the relevant band plan for your area (although the US band plan for HF will be fairly accurate, HF is hemispherical on a bad day and global on a good day)
by hinkley | 2025-06-07 17:23:48+00:00
I just exited a B2B that discovered they invested in luxury features and the market tightened their belts by going with cheaper and simpler competitors. Their n wasn’t really that high but they sure tried their damnedest to make it cubic complexity. “Power” and “flexibility” outnumbered, “straightforward” and even “robust” but at least three to one in conversations. A lot of my favorite people saw there was no winning that conversation and noped out long before I did.

The devs voted with their feet and the customers with their wallets.
by mplanchard | 2025-06-07 17:24:02+00:00
To be fair to the authors, this IS a problem, albeit one they phrased poorly, especially with building docker images via nix. The store winds up containing way more than you need (eg all of postgres, not just psql), and it can be quite difficult to patch individual packages. Derivations are also not well-pruned in my experience, leading to very bloated docker images relative to using a staged Dockerfile.

Image size isn’t something we’ve focused a lot on, so I haven’t spent a ton of time on it, but searching for “nix docker image size” shows it to be a pretty commonly encountered thing.
by FlyingSnake | 2025-06-07 17:24:35+00:00
I recently, for fun, tried running zig on an ancient kindle device running stripped down Linux 4.1.15.

It was an interesting experience and I was pleasantly surprised by the maturity of Zig. Many things worked out of the box and I could even debug a strange bug using ancient GDB. Like you, I’m sold on Zig too.

I wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44211041
by uecker | 2025-06-07 17:24:50+00:00
I don't know, to me it seems the blog tries to make the case that comptime is useful for low-level optimization: "Is this not amazing? We just used comptime to make a function which compares a string against "Hello!\n", and the assembly will run much faster than the naive comparison function. It's unfortunately still not perfect." But it turns out that a C compiler will give you the "perfect" code directly while the comptime Zig version is fairly complicated. You can argue that this was just a bad example and that there are other examples where comptime makes more sense. The thing is, about two decades ago I was similarly excited about expression-template libraries for very similar reasons. So I can fully understand how the idea of "seamlessly weaves comptime and runtime together" can appear cool. I just realized at some point that it isn't actually all that useful.
by hxtk | 2025-06-07 17:25:13+00:00
I notice that library self-identifies a problem of generally keeping a fixed-size number of buckets and addressing them with hashing, which leads to great memory usage but introduces a risk of collision.

Stochastic Fair Blue shares that problem, so I think you might find the solution it uses interesting: it rotates hashes on fixed intervals by re-seeding to ensure that if a responsive flow collides with a non-responsive flow that's being rate-limited, it is at least guaranteed not to do it for very long.

This leads to a problem similar to the problem with Fixed Window Counter rate limiting where it would basically forget the rate limit history every interval. To solve this, two queues are fed input data at a time: the router enforces one of them, while just feeding the other data and ignoring its output in order to warm up its buckets.

I imagine if I tried to make use of the library you linked and didn't absolutely need per-user granularity, I'd do something similar by concatenating the user's identifier with a seed value for each of the two queues and rotating at regular intervals.
by hensybex | 2025-06-07 17:25:21+00:00
In short - it's like comparing Ubuntu with MacOS/Windows

Open source power vs corp - if you are eager to do some stuff yourself, aider is probably a better pick (or even a strategic investment); otherwise you'll simply find much more tools that don't require setting them up in Cline/Claude Code

But man, if you're on ycombinator.com, how not to stick with open source?
by hinkley | 2025-06-07 17:25:50+00:00
I read that as a typo given the next sentence.

I’m on the fence about cubic time. I was mostly thinking of exponential and factorial problems. I think some very clever people can make cubic work despite my warnings. But most of us shouldn’t. General advice is to be ignored by masters when appropriate. That’s also the story arc of about half of kung fu movies.

Did chess solvers really progress much before there was a cubic approximation?
by j_bum | 2025-06-07 17:25:53+00:00
I strongly prefer `dplyr` and the R stack for table processing and visualization.

But, recently I’ve been working with much larger scale data than R can handle (thanks to R’s base int32 limitation) and have been needing to use Python instead.

Polars feels much more intuitive and similar to `dplyr` to me for table processing than Pandas does.

I often ask my LLM of choice to “translate this dplyr call to Polars” as I’ve been learning the Polars syntax.
by matthewn | 2025-06-07 17:26:33+00:00
In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not just programmers) the "bicycle for the mind" that Steve Jobs spoke of. I think this is the timeline that Atkinson envisioned, and I wish I lived in it. We've lost a true visionary. Memory eternal!
by rcarmo | 2025-06-07 17:26:43+00:00
Oh. I came here to pass the time as I built a TinyMac with a Pi and was compiling BasiliskII in SDL mode. I'm quite saddened by the news, as Bill was one of the people who had the most influence in the technical design of early Macs (and a brilliant engineer for all accounts).

Why isn't the black bar up atop the site?
by DSMan195276 | 2025-06-07 17:28:01+00:00
> If the restaurant buys e.g. a fancy oven or a delivery truck, it can't expense 100% of that cost in year 1, it has to spread that cost over the lifetime of the oven or truck.

The difference of course is that you'll have a truck or oven that can be sold. If you could count the full value in the first year then you could sell and buy one each year to reduce your taxes without actually changing anything.

Thus if we want to go that route for software the salary of the R&D employees should be counted against the value of the software they created (As in, the value were it to be sold wholesale to another company). The time spent by the employees is not an asset, once you pay the employees for their time it's gone even if they generated nothing of value. The actual value is that of the software, but that's obviously not easily assigned a value.
by diggan | 2025-06-07 17:28:10+00:00
> "and having offshore porn sites or any other third parties collect IDs from adults and becoming a repository of potential blackmail material comes with its own risks [...] A more technically sound approach would be content controls directly implemented on the devices parents chose to give their children" said the company's (Proton's) spokesperson

While I agree with their second point, the first argument sounds a bit overly dramatic, considering how the implementation seems to work. They couldn't blackmail, as the information they receive is limited.

As far as I understand how at least one of the methods for verification must be, is “double-anonymity” or "double-blind" protocol: the site never sees the user’s identity, the verifier never learns which site is being visited, and only a yes/no “18+” token is exchanged. Then other methods could be offered too.

Although if we assume the average security competence with these types of companies, handling ID documents and stuff, they'll surely get hacked sooner or later. So maybe the link between porn site and identity isn't there, but your personal data that been submitted to them will yet again float out there.
by ghusto | 2025-06-07 17:28:13+00:00
> Can't you just educate them to avoid drinking to excess? No, you can't, they don't have that level of self-control yet

This is not only untrue, it's actually the only worthwhile course.

I know that bans, rules, and technical solutions are not substitutes for parenting. This is why all the kids of the parents I know who have tried that are doing all the supposedly disallowed things secretly (and circumventing the technical restrictions with ease).
by wenc | 2025-06-07 17:28:31+00:00
The SQL question (mentioned in the thread) was:

"It was very benign and was probably the most practical question I asked him! Let's say you want to randomly sample 1,000 users out of a table with a user_id column, e.g. so you can get a list of IDs to send a customer feedback form to. How would you do that?"

To me, that's not a dumb question. I mean, there is a simple answer but there are also complicated answers (especially if your table size is large, and performance matters):

1. SELECT user_id FROM table LIMIT 1000 -- this gives unordered results, but is not truly random (it's dependent on database retrieval patterns)

2. SELECT user_id FROM table ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1000 -- this is uniform random, but it's expensive for big tables.

3. SELECT user_id USING SAMPLE reservoir(1000 ROWS) -- this is a fast and memory-efficient streaming method, i.e. Reservoir Sampling [1] in which n is treated as large and unknown (DuckDB supports this sampling method and others: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/samples.html) Reservoir sampling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling) was a hot topic among data scientists on Quora circa 2011.

Sometimes simple questions have deep implications.
by ris | 2025-06-07 17:28:50+00:00
It's the idea that every application can near-arbitrarily choose a bespoke-but-exact mix of versions of every underlying package and assume they all work together. This is same attitude that leads to seemingly every application on planet earth needing to individually duplicate the work of reacting to every single dependabot update for their thousands of underlying packages and deal with the fallout of conflicts when they arise.

Packages in nixpkgs follow the "managed distribution" model, where almost all package combinations can be expected to work together, remain reasonably stable (on the stable branch) for 6 months receiving security backports, then you do all your major upgrades when you jump to the next stable branch when it is released.
by Hnrobert42 | 2025-06-07 17:30:10+00:00
I really appreciate the level of detail in this post. Not too little. Not too much.

It does seem that being in school made this experiment distinctly different from just living in a tent. In a sense, tuition was rent. It paid for showers, electricity, and a living room with air conditioning (the library). It also provided a supportive community. School and even society at large is more inclined to help a poor student than an adult trying to cut rent.

I make this observation not to diminish the experiment's value. I am just putting it in context to arrange its utility in my mind.

(edit: I can't imagine why this is flagged. It is def life- hacking if not tech hacking.)
by uaas | 2025-06-07 17:31:07+00:00
Good ol’ Prometheus and Grafana stack (Loki for logs, Tempo for traces) is perfect for smaller projects. You can also explore having OpenTelemetry collectors in the middle for more sophisticated processing and if you want to keep an eye on its ecosystem.

This is still the goto OSS stack, and I wouldn’t really recommend looking into smaller projects (usually backed by a single vendor) that are claiming better performance/lower resource usage for the same capabilities, because that always comes with a cost.
by throe83949449 | 2025-06-07 17:31:53+00:00
Wild camping is tolerated in Hong Kong, but this guy is going to ruin it for everyone. Leaving 2.5 meter high tent pitched over daytime near buildings, is lazy and really really bad.

Stealth camping should be done in low profile tents (1.2 meters high). You should pitch tent at dark, and leave before sunrise.
by sgnelson | 2025-06-07 17:32:30+00:00
One thing I've noticed over the past 20 years. At least in the United States, we need less "ditch diggers." This means that those who are less intellectually capable find it harder to get employment in a suitable position. I think this is an issue that needs to be addressed. But you know, I live here and now, so that ain't happening.
by ItsMonkk | 2025-06-07 17:32:36+00:00
Mostly agreeing with you here but I've been through this journey and this shocked me when I ran the numbers one time so I'm sharing.

A better way to be thinking about this is at what point will you stop gaining weight? If you are someone who burns 2000 calorie a day but eats 2170 calories a day, you will be gaining 170 calories on that first day. But then you will add some fat, and you will burn 2001 calories, and only gain 169 calories the next day. Eventually you will reach equilibrium where you burn 2170 calories. But fat isn't like muscle, it's very efficient because that is it's main purpose - it just sits there. So it actually takes a lot to reach that new equilibrium.

The rule of thumb is 100 calories surplus will lead to a long run gain of about 15 pounds. So the 177 calorie average would end up yielding about 25 pounds of fat above what they should have.

Then the next question is if you will ever reach equilibrium, or if when you start burning 2001 calories, you start eating 2171 calories...
by ngneer | 2025-06-07 17:32:44+00:00
I do not know whether the state of the art is able to reason or not. The textbook example you gave is admittedly not very interesting. What you are hearing from people is that parroting is not reasoning, which is true.

I wonder if the state of the art can reason its way through the following:

"Adam can count to 14000. Can Adam count to 13500?"

The response needs to be affirmative for every X1 and X2 such that X2 <= X1. That is reasoning. Anything else is not reasoning.

The response when X2 > X1 is less interesting. But, as a human it might be "Maybe, if Adam has time" or "Likely, since counting up to any number uses the same algorithm" or "I don't know".

Seems ChatGPT can cope with this. Other examples are easy to come up with, too. There must be benchmarks for this.

Input to ChatGPT:

"Adam can lift 1000 pounds of steel. Can Adam lift 1000 pounds of feathers?"

Output from ChatGPT:

"1,000 pounds of feathers would be much easier for Adam to lift compared to 1,000 pounds of steel, because feathers are much lighter and less dense."

So, maybe not there yet...
by hinkley | 2025-06-07 17:33:16+00:00
I’ll allow that perhaps I should have said “cubic” instead of “quadratic” - there are much worse orders in the menagerie than n^3. But it’s a constraint we bang into over and over again. We use these systems because they’re cheaper than humans, yes? People are still trying to shave off hundredths of the exponent in matrix multiplication for instance. It makes the front page of HN every time someone makes a “breakthrough”.