MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by acjohnson55 | 2025-07-02 22:11:44+00:00
I used to struggle with understanding the "receipe" metaphor for monads when it comes to lists. But a list (or, really any collection) as a monad can be thought of as the "discrete nondeterminism monad".

Meaning that every collection is a set of possible inputs to the computation that is provided as the argument to a `flatMap` operation. Each `flatMap`, by definition, returns a new collection of possible outputs for each of the inputs, and each of those collections gets concatenated. Every item in the final output collection represents the result of following some path through the computations, selecting a single item at each step. Importantly, the type of the output of each `flatMap` operation can differ from the input.

You can imagine extending this by assigning probabilities, or making the domain continuous (I think...). These extensions would still be monads, just without being simple collections.

It's kind of like how multiplication over whole numbers is repeated addition, but that metaphor becomes less useful for other domains of numbers.
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-07-02 22:11:49+00:00
Excellent summary of critiques.

Not mentioned is the peculiar response by the Apple ecosystem pundits. They were oddly supportive of these maladaptive design system changes on the basis of excitement (they can’t afford to be left out of the media momentum…). I believe their collusive tendencies mask what would otherwise be perceived as a major flop or severe error.

Also not mentioned in the piece, I remain curious as to the internal Apple team/culture changes that resulted in this design system failure. What on earth happened?
by jjk166 | 2025-07-02 22:11:57+00:00
> People could be laid off from company A, because A is unable to compete with company B that has a smaller head count, but pays their execs more.

This is exactly the scenario I was describing - this is not a sign of a cooling economy with rising unemployment or underemployment, this is a sign of firm B outcompeting firm A. It might be interesting in its own right, but it's very much not what unemployment is meant to be tracking.

> Sure, but the point is that metrics used to discuss economic health don't typically include metrics that represent wealth inequality, or the standard of living of the general population.

Tons of such metrics are frequently discussed. Things like ratio of CEO to employee pay and income percentages are given all the time. No one feels the need to compare the unemployment rates when it's mentioned CEO to employee pay has increased from 20:1 to 290:1 since 1960. Everyone understands that the economy is a complex, multifaceted thing and the fact it may be doing well or poorly by one metric has no bearing on a discussion of a different aspect.

People care about employment rate because work is critical to our culture - we spend most of our lives working, we identify ourselves by our professions, we rely on income for both survival and social status, most of us would find it extremely unpleasant to be without a job for an extended period of time, and most of us would be delighted if our skills were in high demand at the moment such that we could confidently secure better pay. Regardless of wealth inequality, the overwhelming majority of us want unemployment to be low, and primarily frictional. An unexpected spike in unemployment is well correlated with various bad things which we would love to avoid or at least prepare for. It is a useful metric for economic health, like resting heartrate is a useful metric for bodily health. A good resting heart rate doesn't mean you have nothing else to be concerned about, but a bad resting heart rate is a concern regardless of whatever else is going on.
by danans | 2025-07-02 22:12:33+00:00
> Is the implication that the software engineer lost his job because of the tariffs?

Indirectly, it's quite possible for a software engineer to lose their job due to tariffs if they lead to reduced profits to their company due to higher supply chain costs. Most software engineers don't work at Google, Meta, and their ilk. Many work in sectors affected by tariffs.

> Because all other things being equal (which they are obviously not) tariffs would increase the demand for labor in an non-export driven economy

Last I heard, software engineering done overseas is not subject to tariffs.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-02 22:14:48+00:00
Using the 100 ppb arsenic level as a baseline, and using selenium as a model for daily requirements and toxicity since we don't have one for arsenic, that seems to suggest that up to half a kilo per day of rice should be well-tolerated? Assuming I math-ed it correctly.

There is insufficient data to build an authoritative model of dietary arsenic requirements AFAIK. It is a necessary micronutrient in animal biology and evidence suggests it is similar to selenium in requirement magnitude and toxicity profile, so it is sometimes treated as comparable in the literature. Obviously, it is a rough cut since this was extrapolated from animal models -- we don't have good human models -- but in principle the RDA should be well-tolerated by definition and these levels are endemic in some parts of the world.
by jampekka | 2025-07-02 22:14:50+00:00
E.g. OECD normalizes household income by household size:

> Household income is adjusted for differences in the needs of households of different sizes with an equivalence scale that divides household income by the square root of household size. The adjusted income is then attributed to every person in the household.

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
by foxglacier | 2025-07-02 22:14:56+00:00
This article really needs to be a graph. From what I can make out:

2023 average quarter 15.7 GWh / 4 = 3.9 GWh [1]

2024 average quarter 31.4 GWh / 4 = 7.85 GWh

2024 Q4 11 GWh

2025 Q1 10.4 GWh

2025 Q2 9.6 GWh

So I guess it's up from the same time last year but down from the peak Q4 2024? Maybe it's seasonal and it's actually growing not shrinking?? The numbers also don't distinguish between residential and utility installs. Maybe they had one huge utility customer in Q4 2024 that distorted everything?

[1] https://www.energytrend.com/news/20250115-49006.html
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-02 22:15:51+00:00
I did not say their performance is 1:1 with a business line, but great job tearing down that strawman.

I said they are accountable to their business line -- they own a portfolio and are accountable for that portfolio's performance. If the portfolio does badly, it means nearly by definition that the executive is doing badly. Like an athlete, that doesn't mean they're immediately put to the streets, but it also is not ambiguous whether they are performing well or not.

Which also points to why performance management methods are not valid, i.e. a high-sensitivity, high-specificity measure of an individual executive's actual personal performance: there are obviously countless external variables that bear on the outcome of a portfolio. But nonetheless, for the business's purpose, it doesn't matter. Because the real purpose of performance management methods is to have a quasi-objective rationalization for personnel decisions that are actually made elsewhere.

Perhaps you can mention which performance management methods you believe are valid (high-specificity and high-sensitivity measures of an individual's personal performance) in AI R&D?

"Pretty much every top-tier executive at top-tier companies is making seven or eight figures as table stakes". In this group, what percentage are ICs? Sure there are aberrational celebrity hires, of course, but what you are pointing to is the norm, which is not celebrity hires doing IC work.

> If execs really were so replaceable... companies wouldn't be paying so much money for them

High-level executives within the same tier are largely substitutable - any qualified member of this cohort can perform the role adequately. However, this is still a very small group of people ultimately responsible for huge amounts of capital and thus collectively can maintain market power on compensation. The high salaries don't reflect individual differential value. Obviously there are some remarkable executives and they tend to concentrate in remarkable companies, by definition, and also by definition, the vast majority of companies and their executives are totally unremarkable but earn high salaries nonetheless.
by oceanplexian | 2025-07-02 22:15:55+00:00
Your field of vision is equivalent to something like 500 Megapixels. And assume it’s uncompressed because it’s not like your eyeballs are doing H.264.

Given vision and the other senses, I’d argue that your average toddler has probably trained on more sensory information than the largest LLMs ever built long before they learn to talk.
by NomDePlum | 2025-07-02 22:16:37+00:00
I'm not really aware of the circumstances of that so hard to say. I'm more aware of Iran because of recent events. I'd doubt it would have been legal and if that was the case I would not see it as justified.

I'm not aware of any illegal wars this century that I do see as justified.

I personally don't believe any country should have nuclear weapons.
by sudhirb | 2025-07-02 22:17:46+00:00
I really like the design of this!

This is perhaps a bit more of a philosophical point but I think that I find the separation of quantity and ingredient perhaps a little arbitrary - in many cases they're coupled tightly e.g. I've only ever found 'cloves' as a quantity to refer to garlic.

I've personally always wanted recipes to be prefixed with a mise en place section of steps - e.g. instruct the reader explicitly to dice onions, etc. in the main body of the recipe rather than imply the step in the ingredient description - what do you reckon?
by frereubu | 2025-07-02 22:17:57+00:00
Maybe this is something you heard too, but there was a This American Life episode where some people who'd had early access to what became one of the big AI chatbots (I think it was ChatGPT), but before they'd made it "nice", where they were asking it metaphysical questions about itself, and it was coming back with some pretty spooky answers and I was kind of intrigued about it. But then someone in the show suggested exactly what you are saying and it completely punctured the bubble - of course if you ask it questions about AIs you're going to get sci-fi like responses, because what other kinds of training data is there for it to fall back on? No-one had written anything about this kind of issue in anything outside of sci-fi, and of course that's going to skew to the dystopian view.
by 1659447091 | 2025-07-02 22:18:15+00:00
> I'm just not a fan of foreign spending using taxpayer funding at all.

If only things were that simple.

The US spent billions of dollars for food from US Farmers. Ask them about their lost billions for sorghum, corn, beans, soybeans, rice, vegetable oil and other crops that they could sell to the US government in bulk. Not just the farmers, but also the small town USA communities that benefit from the farms.

Or the US AID funded innovation labs that "was providing market access to U.S. farmers [...] not just in trade negotiations but also in indirect ways by creating a populace that is not starving so they have extra income to buy poultry, for example, which in turn expands the global market for soybean-based feeds.”[0]

Here is a site[1] that attempts to piece together a "reconstruction of USAID's agricultural connections across America" "following the removal of the official USAID website, which contained comprehensive data on agricultural partnerships" from archived reports and other public sources.

[0] https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/usaid-dismantling...

[1] https://www.usaidstopwork.com/agricultural-impact
by Aurornis | 2025-07-02 22:18:18+00:00
> Unsurprisingly, it seems to be the same with many of these nootropics.

Controlled trials are actually very revealing of the placebo effect, which is a rampant confounded in nootropics communities. When people spend months reading about new nootropics, then a week waiting for it in the mail, then they take their first dose with excitement and anticipation they generally report feeling something.

The nice thing about trials is that they can start separating out this placebo effect.

Several people have done self-trials with different compounds with surprising results. Gwern is perhaps the most famous. Whenever people post about magnesium being a life altering substance or producing profound effects I also point them to his measured magnesium trials where the net effect over time was beginning to trend negative.

One of the myths in nootropics communities is that everything is a matter of neurochemistry and everyone is substantially different. In reality, RCTs are actually great at capturing enough people to see subgroups responding if you have enough people.

One thing most nootropics people don’t acknowledge enough is how often placebo effect appears in RCTs. Perform an RCT for depression and the placebo group will get better. It happens in every study. Give college students Adderall before an exam and they will report performing better, despite no statistical improvement in their grades. Now consider these facts in light of all of the scattered nootropics forum reports from people claiming different substances cured their depression or made them smarter. Not surprisingly, if you check their post history more recent comments will show them off on a new tangent trying a new substance, the old one long forgotten as a short trial that didn’t work out.
by IIsi50MHz | 2025-07-02 22:18:21+00:00
> The current sign-up fee is US$5; it's a one-time fee and is the only cost associated with using the site.[1]

That's…surprisingly cheap. Which reminds me that I keep meaning to set up an SDF or tildeverse account.

[1] https://www.metafilter.com/faq.mefi#1
by onesociety2022 | 2025-07-02 22:19:01+00:00
Crypto is not going to save you there. If some country like India wants to ban content from some publishers, they can do so by just asking their ISPs to ban all traffic to said publishers. Whether the publisher accepts micropayments on crypto rails or conventional rails is immaterial. They are not going to be able to distribute their content anymore and hence not get paid either.
by NaOH | 2025-07-02 22:19:02+00:00
Actual study: Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

>Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-07-02 22:19:02+00:00
I would reject that the goodness of children or parenthood is a matter of opinion. They are objectively good and intrinsically meaningful. What may or may not be a good idea is being a parent yourself. Parenthood requires a basic maturity that some people don't have, and some people may have lives that are too prohibitive or demanding in some manner, or they may have chosen to sacrifice parenthood for some noble end (like running an orphanage), but these are outliers, among others.

Parenthood is very central to our humanity. Fatherhood is a core expression of masculinity while motherhood is a core expression of femininity. Of course, parenthood isn't always expressed by having biological children. In the Catholic Church, for example, priests assume a paternal role in their parishes, while religious sisters often assume a maternal role by becoming teachers or by mentoring young novices. In such cases, such people choose to sacrifice their biological parenthood for the sake of a worthy good, and here, a parental role that isn't biological. Pathological expressions of the subconscious parental desire can be seen when people treat their pets like children (like those women who push their dogs around in strollers and pamper them in obscene ways).

However, in a healthy society, most people will choose to have biological children. The outliers do not disprove the general. And the fact that so many people are actively choosing not to have children is a sign of cultural decadence and decline.

When you speak of "autonomy", what is this "experience" of the one life you have in mind? Being a parent is, of course, such an experience, and not just one of many you can choose from, but an experience that is deeply central to being human. That so many are choosing not to have children is not the result of some spiritual awakening where they are choosing to sacrifice having children for some worthy noble end. The argument from autonomy is really an argument from self-indulgence. The objective richness and centrality of parenthood to human life is typically traded by such people for a life of pointless and empty "experiences", or lesser goods. By hiding behind "autonomy" and some relativized notion of preference, parenthood becomes as banal as choosing a flavor of ice cream, which it isn't.

No one is forced to have children, and no one in particular needs to have them, but as I said earlier, when a culture is healthy, most people will choose to have them. That so many are choosing not to is not a matter of choosing chocolate over vanilla, but usually, it is a matter of trivializing one's life by choosing comfort, self-indulgence, and the avoidance of responsibility and commitment. These stand in the way of a voracious, egotistical autonomy. But such autonomy does not make us grow as human beings. It stifles our development, feeds narcissism, and imagines us and our appetites as the center of the universe. In the end, it is a dehumanizing recipe for unhappiness and misery. So the basic problem is not firstly the falling statistic, but the narcissistic attitude engendered by vacuous hyperindividualism.
by balfirevic | 2025-07-02 22:19:20+00:00
> It's hard to identify any downsides but the upsides are tremendous.

I wish! If you're lucky (or not particularly unlucky) that might be true.

I don't feel any mental benefits, nor do I sleep better. Fun kinds of exercise (badminton, football, BJJ) always seem to injure me me over longer time periods (and it takes months, or even years, to heal when you're in your forties). And they are not very forgiving, schedule-wise.

Lifting weights or rowing on a machine is painfully boring, but it does make me feel better physically. It's a great upside, but the downsides are real too.
by mchauhanx | 2025-07-02 22:19:57+00:00
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by jjulius | 2025-07-02 22:20:23+00:00
>NOAA was caught using data from weather stations with faulty equipment and positioned next to new heat sources and only moved to correct the issue when confronted so I'd say this is entirely justified. The first step in any scientific process is clean data.

Assuming this uncited assertion is true, why would it be "entirely justified" to simply remove it without any particular reason as to why, nor discussion around the concern over data accuracy? Seems to me that the scientific community would be better served with an open dialogue rather than mute removal.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-02 22:20:27+00:00
> If your users have really never used a web browser before, and you are absolutely sure they are using a mouse on a desktop computer, and you can't imagine them ever using a mobile phone

...have you ever used a mobile phone? Clicking is the only action you can take on one.

> Anyway, mobile phone touch screens don't click.

Let's check the dictionary!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/click

- (verb) 2. [intransitive] To emit a click.

Phones don't do that, but that can't be relevant to the text "click here" because that text is directed at the user, not at the phone.

- (verb) 5. [transitive, graphical user interface] To select a software item using usually, but not always, the pressing of a mouse button.

Hmm....
by tombert | 2025-07-02 22:21:42+00:00
Realizing that lists are monads is what made monads "click" for me.

When I was first learning Haskell a million years ago, I was completely confused by the concept of a monad; I could, after enough fighting with the compiler, usually get something working, but it was a stochastic guess-and-check process trying to figure out what `IO` actually means. Even the `Maybe` was confusing to me, because I couldn't really figure out how the hell you relate something like "checking for null" with "writing to the disk".

I can't remember where I saw it, probably on the Haskell wiki somewhere, but when they pointed out the List is a monad, and after seeing an example of how it worked, I suddenly got it: in a hand-wavey way, a monad is basically just a value with a wrapper context [1], and from a practical perspective that's all it is. In the case of a List its wrapper context is that there might be 0 or many of those things in there, in the case of a Maybe its wrapper context is that it might exist or it might not, in the case of IO its wrapper context is that it's interfacing with the outside world, and once you abstract away the entire idea of context, you can suddenly open up an entire world of reusability.

This is a good tutorial, I will probably be linking it to people if they ever make the mistake of asking about monads.

[1] I don't need a lecture on the minutia of this, I know that there's a lot more to it in the theory world, I went to graduate school specifically to study functional language verification. I'm keeping it simple.
by ColinWright | 2025-07-02 22:21:54+00:00
Much of the computational aspect of my PhD was written in BCPL[0], it's nice to see it's still alive and running.

Greybeard story time:

I learned BCPL when competing in a CoNeutron[1][2][3] competition. My player was written in Pascal but I kept getting errors. Eventually I tracked down a compiler bug, produced a 20 line program that provoked it, and submitted it to the Computer Lab. I got back a standard "We'll look into it, but it's probably a bug in your program."

About 30 minutes later I got another email, this one said: "Wow, it is a compiler bug ... congratulations! But it won't get fixed."

So I learned BCPL, transliterated the CoNeutron player code into it, and it immediately ran about 10 times faster and became effectively unbeatable. My player even beat David Seal[4][5]'s player running on then new ARM processors ... details of which were confidential, and never fully revealed.

Fun times.

=================

[0] Other bits were written in ForTran, zed line editor, and batch-control, all running on an IBM3084Q with Phoenix as the OS.

[1] It was intended to be a Neutron competition, but the rules were incorrectly explained.

[2] http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/coneutron.html

[3] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/CoNeutron.html

[4] https://davidseal.muchloved.com/

[5] https://www.informit.com/authors/bio/1e767638-32b7-4c7b-81c8...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(computer)