MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-07-16 16:09:21+00:00
That's because those books (very popular in airports) are blog posts extended out into books with almost no value add as a result aside from some "choice" anecdotes intended to prove whatever points they're making. Usually it's the same point people have been making for 4+ decades. The act of reading books like those, deciding to read a self-help book for example, is almost more important than whichever book you pick. Most of them are interchangeable. They're meant to make you think you're improving yourself by reading them. (Dalio is more trying to position himself as master of the universe.)

Actual academic monographs and good novels are usually book length because their arguments and stories (and characters) require that book length to reach their full potential.
by scarface_74 | 2025-07-16 16:09:29+00:00
I just mentioned in another comment, we travel a lot

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44583545

We don’t comparison shop. Domestically flights on Delta, hotels are either Hyatt or Hilton brand hotels. Internationally? Most Delta partners (AirFrance, Virgin Airways) or Delta itself.

For Hilton, we get points directly and can transfer from Amex (rarely worth it). For Hyatt, points are more valuable and it’s easy to get points from Chase credit cards (r/churning) that can be transferred to Hyatt (saves us thousands a dollars a year sometimes).

On Delta, we have lounge access, 2 free checked bags, free regional (domestic, north and Central America) flight upgrades, priority check in, etc.
by Demiurge | 2025-07-16 16:09:36+00:00
Thats more clear, I get your point now. Again, though, that's not how most people would read the original comment. I've never even contemplated that I might generate some hostnames existence of which might be considered sensitive. It seems like a terrible idea to begin with, as I'm sure there are other avenues for those "secret" domains to be leaked. Perhaps name your secret VMs vm1, vm2, ..., instead of <your root password>. But yeah, this is not my area of expertise, nor a concern for the vast majority of internet users who want more privacy than their ISP will provide.

I am curious though, do you have any suggestions for alternative DNS that is better?
by seanhunter | 2025-07-16 16:09:41+00:00
Fun fact about ELO. It's natural to think that it is some kind of initialism, but in fact ELO doesn't stand for anything. It's the name of the guy who invented the system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpad_Elo

So don't say it "E.L.O." (unless you're talking about the band, I guess), say "ee-low"
by dangoodmanUT | 2025-07-16 16:09:45+00:00
There are three kinds of queries supported for keywords:

- field

- term

- term in field

Each file, and each row group within the file, has 3 bloom filters to handle these queries.

So something like:

{"user": {"name": "John", "tags": [{"type": "user"}, {"role": "admin"}]}}

Gets turned into queryable pairs of:

[{Path: "user.name", Values: ["John"]}, {Path: "user.tags.type", Values: ["user"]}, {Path: "user.tags.role", Values: ["admin"]}]

Then you can search for:

- any record that has "john" in it

- any record that has the "user.tags.type" key

- any record that has "user.tags.type"="user" and "user.tags.role"="admin"

Which bloom filters are used depends on how you build the query, but they test for whether a row matching the condition(s) is in the file/row group
by Webstir | 2025-07-16 16:09:48+00:00
Also, see the link here:https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7506085/

"when pathological adipose tissue loss occurs, patients may lose their facial symmetry to a serious degree within a short time. Common sites of adipose tissue loss are the cheeks, temples, and pre-auricular region."

I think we have a winner here.
by KPGv2 | 2025-07-16 16:10:38+00:00
> students were asked to read a passage in what could be reasonably called a dialect of English

They were asked to read the opening chapter of Bleak House. It's pretty much standard English.

> LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln�s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes � gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

The only word I see there that isn't used the same way in bog standard American English is "wonderful." I will grant you that "Michaelmas" is obscure to an American, but "Michaelmas Term [] over" is clear enough: it's a specific span of time that has elapsed. You don't need to know exactly what "Lincoln's Inn Hall" is any more than if you read

> I went to Carnegie Deli

and didn't know what Carnigie Deli is. It's obviously a deli.
by uamgeoalsk | 2025-07-16 16:10:41+00:00
A movie theater where 99% of the movies are crap but universal is less interesting to me than a well curated cinematheque.

What I'm wondering is why do you feel the need to dismiss people's niche interests like this? You've even been rude about it in other answers, calling it "masturbatory".

Not everything has to be for everyone. Not everything has to be for you.
by richbelt | 2025-07-16 16:10:43+00:00
I think we're misunderstanding each other. I'm not diminishing how transformative cloud computing is/was. I'm just stating how they are approaching AI today and trying to shove it down everyone's throats.

My point is that marketing is actually one of the domains where AI naturally fits, it's conversational and creative by nature. The issue is most tools are adding AI chat to existing interfaces rather than building AI-native experiences from the ground up.
by prmph | 2025-07-16 16:10:55+00:00
Indeed. Setting up infrastructure properly and documenting it properly is even more complex than coding, to me.

I can go back to code I wrote months or years ago, and assuming I architectured and documented it idiomatically, I takes me only a bit of time to start being able to reason about it effectively.

With infrastructure is it a whole different story. Within weeks of not touching it (which happens if it just works) I start to have trouble retaining a good mental model of it. if I have to dig into it, I'll have to spend a lot of time getting re-acquainted with how it all fits together again.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-16 16:11:34+00:00
> OpenGL offering at least lines...

WebGPU does have line (and point) primitives since they are a direct GPU feature.

It just doesn't bother to 'emulate' lines or points that are wider than 1 pixel, since this is not commonly supported in modern native 3D APIs. Drawing thick lines and points are better done by a high level vector drawing API.
by dagmx | 2025-07-16 16:11:36+00:00
Your last paragraph is fairly revisionist to me.

How is Apple solely to blame when there are multiple parties involved ? They went to Khronos to turn AMD’s mantle into a true unified next gen APi. Khronos and NVIDIA shot them down to further AZDO OpenGL. Therefore Metal came to be and then DX12 followed and then Vulkan when Khronos realized they had to move that way.

But even if you exclude Metal, what about Microsoft and D3D? Also similarly non-portable. Yet it’s the primary API in use for non-console graphics. You rarely see people complaining about the portability of DX for some reason…

And then in an extremely distant last place is Vulkan. Very few graphics apps actually use Vulkan directly.

Have you tried writing any of the graphics APIs?
by rglullis | 2025-07-16 16:11:40+00:00
> How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them?

How do you that with Gemini?

> If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web

There is no way you can have an air gapped network with public access. The moment this "parallel ecosystem" showed any content that hinted at something lucrative, you will have people creating bridges between the two networks. Case in point: Google and USENET.
by ahamilton454 | 2025-07-16 16:12:45+00:00
This was a pretty thoughtful piece and a pleasure to read. My gut reaction at first was that it was going to be some critque on children not reading due to generative ai (a cynial piece), but it was quite an interesting reflection on simply how reading is changing from the prepective of this author whose spent a his life deeply reading books

The ending had a nice flair of grandness to it as well.
by Filmatic | 2025-07-16 16:12:51+00:00
Yes. They do in fact find this easy-to-read and straightforward passage challenging, or even impenetrable.

A key problem seems to be that more than half of folks either have functionally no working memory, or for some reason fail to exercise it whatsoever when reading. They can't retain one or two subjects or actions or details about setting in their head while they read on a few more words to see how the passage comes together. As soon as you ask them to hold any amount of context past the end of a sentence, they'll judge your writing "difficult", or in even harsher terms.

The brighter of this set will latch on to Hemingway's preferences as gospel and declare that anything harder to swallow than cotton candy is simply bad. Never mind that most of these folks probably struggle to understand Hemingway, too.

I don't know whether this has always been the case, or it's something that has changed over time. I suspect the latter, and that the rise of radio and especially TV had exactly the effects that critics worried they would, but have no data to back it up. Just a hunch.
by cwmoore | 2025-07-16 16:12:53+00:00
I would argue that "that gives any LLM a sense of the passage of time" is but a suspension of disbelief and metaphorical hope.

For those looking for "a calendar", here is one[0] I made from a stylized orrery. No AI. Should be printable to US Letter paper. Enjoy.

EDIT: former title asserted that the LLM built a calendar

[0] https://ouruboroi.com/calendar/2026-01-01
by riedel | 2025-07-16 16:12:55+00:00
Why should immovable property differ from moveable property. How many things are sold for 1 EUR, just because everything else would be too difficult. Often those things have value that is only specific to the buyer and have negative value for the seller. The process for declaring something actually worthless and paying for waste removal is so much, but also gifting something to someone is often so much more difficult than selling for the lowest possible price that all stupid booking systems accept and that dictate what we may do.
by agentcoops | 2025-07-16 16:12:56+00:00
Yeah, I've had similar results. Even with GPT-o1, I find almost all errors at this point come from the web search functionality and the model taking X random source as an authority. It's interesting that I find my human intelligence in the process is most useful for hand-collecting the sources and data to analyze -- and, of course, for directing the process across multiple LLM queries.
by jpadkins | 2025-07-16 16:13:08+00:00
it's a straw man argument to say that the average civil servant is the beneficiary of the trillion dollar deficits. No one is making that argument. Very wealthy people, politicians, and corporations are the beneficiary of the government largess.

> After 50 years of cost cutting and wage freezes

It's hard to say the federal government has been cost cutting for 50 years when the budgets have been growing at exponential rates.
by roryirvine | 2025-07-16 16:13:11+00:00
You do need to be careful that you don't end up with a "build it and they will come" mindset when creating that Golden Path, though - it needs to have early and continuous input from actual users.

There's a tension between a theoretical Golden Path that leads someplace no-one actually wants to go, and simply paving every possible "desire line". Managing that is one of the trickiest parts of platform engineering.
by Elextric | 2025-07-16 16:13:15+00:00
You can certainly rationalize anything, but I fail to see what help that is to us.

"The great subverter of Pyrrhonism [radical skepticism] is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life. [...] I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther."

Hume
by cptskippy | 2025-07-16 16:13:16+00:00
We looked into purchasing a house on the Amalfi Coast about 10 years ago. To get anything done you need permits and in order to get permits you need to bribe everyone involved. The permits are time bound and expire so you have to be ready to go when approved but the small towns don't readily have access to construction materials so in order to get materials in the time bound window you end up having to bribe a whole new set of people.
by dsign | 2025-07-16 16:13:22+00:00
Once upon a time, reading and books were for the elites. The printing press and the Enlightenment changed that and, time passed, we got other forms of entertainment that required less and less mental investment. Now anybody can choose to inflict themself with either literacy or vote-for-Trump mental acumen. Maybe touching the inner mind of high-flying human thinkers will become a thing for the elites again, with the silver lining that access to books will be slightly less about how golden is one’s cradle.
by KPGv2 | 2025-07-16 16:13:27+00:00
> New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation.

I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing the possibility that specific expression of an idea is the modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren't just losing some magic. You're losing the entire point.
by dagmx | 2025-07-16 16:13:43+00:00
The point of the graphics APIs is to be as close to the metal as possible. It’s a balancing act between portability and hardware design/performance. I really don’t think it’s as trivial as non-graphics engineers make it out to be to make something universal.

But even when it existed in the form of OpenGL , or now WebGPU, people complain about the performance overhead. So you end up back here.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-16 16:13:57+00:00
Why not? Egyptian pharaohs were buried with (among other things) food and everyday necessities, because it was believed they'd take them along to the afterlife for use there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_goods

Modern society is not much different: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/photo/ohio-mans-wish-fulfilled-...
by Gys | 2025-07-16 16:14:01+00:00
An additional benefit might be that many of these small villages have a tax advantage, created also for attracting foreigners. It is a flat fee of 7%. I cannot remember the name of this rule, but this is a link for example that I found: https://magictowns.it/the-definitive-2025-list-of-italy-7-ta...
by neutronicus | 2025-07-16 16:14:20+00:00
Almost certainly not, $1 houses in Baltimore at this point (there were some good deals decades ago) are often ones requiring significant work just to be weather-tight, structurally sound, etc.

And of course it becomes clear that no one is there and they are full of valuable hardware some problems may result, as the other commenter points out.

Lastly, our electricity rates are almost certainly not cost-effective for this purpose.
Show HN: GetPost – "Self-hostable" pastebin that runs free on CF Workers
by itdaniher | 2025-07-16 16:14:26+00:00
I built GetPost because I miss the simplicity of just SCPing files to a personal server, but I do not miss the maintenance burden. It's a pastebin/imagebin that runs on Cloudflare Workers with zero ongoing costs and zero maintenance.

Key features:

- Deploy in 5 minutes, runs free forever (100k reads, 1k uploads daily on CF free tier)

- No complex toolchain - no NPM, no wrangler - just curl, python3, and a simple build script

- Handles text, markdown (server-rendered), images, any file type up to 10MB

- ULID-based access control with separate delete keys

An interesting technical bit: instead of using Wrangler or complex build tools, it uses a simple Python script that embeds static assets directly into the worker code via template replacement. The whole project deploys as a single JavaScript file to Cloudflare's edge.

It's completely open source (no rights reserved) and designed to be forked and modified.

Try it: curl --data-binary @somefile.md https://staging.getpost.workers.dev

The goal was to make "self-hosting" so trivially easy that everyone runs their own instance under their control instead of depending on more centralized services.

GitHub: https://github.com/getpost-loves-you/getpost
by mbastos | 2025-07-16 16:14:43+00:00
I had someone tell me the other day that they don’t like it when their employees work on side projects. I actually encourage my team to work on side projects in their free time of course, even if those projects may eventually lead them elsewhere.

That’s why I ask upfront if they’ve got other technical interests during an interview. No one stays at a company forever, and I’m not hiring them because I can’t do the job without them.

What I’ve found is: folks who are building on the side tend to bring fresh ideas to the table. They’re more engaged, more creative, and way more valuable than someone just checking off tasks. Plus, supporting their side projects helps defuse resentment, especially the kind that builds when people feel stuck or held back.

When they try to build something of their own, they get a firsthand look at how hard it is to run a business or ship a product. And weirdly enough, that often makes them more loyal. They see that we’re in the trenches together.

People tend to stay when they feel like they’re still learning from you, and they leave when they’ve outgrown you. I’m okay with that.
by thangalin | 2025-07-16 16:15:38+00:00
> How do you know? Seems to me you’re making the exact same estimation mistake of the people in the study.

I have over 20 years of web development experience and 40 years of general experience writing software. I wrote the authors and they confirmed my thoughts:

"I totally believe it! Per the paper abstract, we find many factors driving results - and one of the factors is how experienced the developers are on the codebase, and how big/complex the codebases are.

"Given that this was a new and unfamiliar domain and new codebase, I would expect there to be much more speedup than the domain we studied!"

> Six hours for a prototype using four LLMs?

They have limits on the number of queries, so I used four different LLMs in tandem to circumvent query limits. I didn't write it four times using four different LLMs.

> it sounds insane and a tremendous mess

I posted the code. It's well organized, has few (if any) encapsulation violations, sticks to OOP quite well, works, and---if I knew the PDF.js API---would be fairly easy to maintain.

Yes, I stand by my claim that writing this annotation editor (PHP, HTML, CSS, and JS) would take me about 60 hours by hand and about 6 hours using the LLMs.
by holy_eggplants | 2025-07-16 16:15:44+00:00
I think one problem is that it's difficult to share with non-parents that the sacrifice is worth it. It's easier to understand the pain of losing opportunities, losing freedom, losing hobbies, losing sleep, or downsizing living space.

How do you explain that you miss your newborn so much, that when the baby is asleep all you do is look through pictures of him/her? i almost cried the first time my toddler ran up to me and gave me a hug. i cried when i picked him up after the first day of daycare and he said "i missed you" - i didn't even know he knew that phrase!

My (immigrant) parents never explained to me how awesome it is to be a parent. Also they are a 100 times more affectionate as grandparents than as parents. I hope to teach my son that being a parent is the best luckiest blessed thing ever.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-16 16:15:48+00:00
I'm not convinced that hydrogen is ever better than a battery.

Your hydrogen tank is going to be bigger, heavier, and less practical (It's basically a bomb) than a battery that gives the same amount of energy. Producing the hydrogen requires significant power, so it's not even better for the environment unless your energy comes from a clean source.

I suppose there's the benefit that you can refill it quickly just like with gasoline, but you'd have to build out an entire new distribution system. At least with batteries, you just have to connect to the existing power grid.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-16 16:16:01+00:00
I don’t think it is designed for that.

https://www.wbaltv.com/article/how-to-buy-baltimore-city-1-d...

> "All vacant sales must be redeveloped for residential or mixed-use. That includes residential or green space. So, this program is not for commercial properties. It's only for residential properties at this point in time," Department of Housing and Community Development official Kate Edwards said.

Maybe if you wanted to live with your servers? Would a server farm on the first floor, and an apartment on the second count, I wonder? Free radiant floor heating, if so…
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-07-16 16:16:05+00:00
> BUT some books shouldn't be summarized because the difficulty is part of the importance.

It's not even about the difficulty. Why is there this insistent demand to have summaries of everything? Summaries never fully capture a book. If someone told me they only ever read the Cliff's Notes of books, then I simply wouldn't say they read the books. This need to jump to the finish line right away might be more "accessible", but it's also just ignoring and butchering the whole point of the book, which isn't to extract little nuggets of summarizable information, but to be read.
by tstrimple | 2025-07-16 16:16:28+00:00
This is one of those topics where gun fans will try to take to both sides of the issue. When they are talking to "normies" they talk about how suppressors aren't really that quiet and it's just to protect their hearing at the range. When they are talking amongst themselves they brag about how they were able to get their guns "Hollywood quiet" with subsonic ammunition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSWyAQe5K7k

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EqAYUb0uYn0

What's most misleading about Hollywood silencers isn't the sound of the gun firing, but the sound of the round striking. In suppressed weapons, the bullet impact is often significantly louder than the weapon firing and should be clearly audible if it's hitting a solid surface.
by guywithahat | 2025-07-16 16:18:07+00:00
There's an irony in that there is often a regulatory issue with the local government, not just some "shortage of humans".

The same thing happened in one of the most populated regions in the US. The area between Boston/NYC and DC, containing Baltimore, was once a city of a million people. It contains an underground subway and was once referred to as the Paris of America, however through regulation and unions it became completely impossible to do business in or live in, and the city collapsed. They also sold $1 row houses, which should have been a dream come true, except in practice the issue was never the house, it was the city government.

Cities offering $1 houses just means the government has ignored the actual issues for decades and is probably incompetent.