MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wwarner | 2025-07-31 21:45:52+00:00
Regarding LIGO, if anyone finds the sensitivity of LIGO as shocking as I do, here's a 2002 lecture from Kip Thorne explaining how it's achieved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGdbI24FvXQ&t=495s

This video is one of about 60 recorded in a year long series of lectures that were delivered at Caltech early on in the project. They are archived by Pau Amaro Seoane at this address https://astro-gr.org/online-course-gravitational-waves/
by billylo | 2025-07-31 21:45:55+00:00
I'm retired and write apps as community givebacks and as a creative outlet.

No, I am not sad because I am in control. If there is something I want to take on as an intellectual challenge, I do it.

If it's just mechanical tasks or UI layout tweaking, AI is perfect. I can become the user who keeps asking for fine-tuning of corner radius. :-)
by rapnie | 2025-07-31 21:46:05+00:00
> Usually the words "blacklist" and "whitelist" are not hyphenated from what I could see, though

Yes, I use blocklist / allowlist myself, without the dashes.

> Sometimes the list is used to block and allow something, but sometimes other words such as exclude and include will be better.

Good example. I agree. Using the most descriptive variant is a good practice then, and no need to fall back to a vaguer container concept.
by FredPret | 2025-07-31 21:46:24+00:00
That's why you have to allow large-scale building everywhere. Then the market will find its own level.

The inverse of this situation is that everyone lives somewhere they consider unpleasant because the rent is affordable there.

The megacities you mention are enormously economically productive per capita. All sorts of efficiencies pop up when a huge number of people live near one another.
by zzo38computer | 2025-07-31 21:46:48+00:00
I prefer DER, which is also a binary format so it has the advantages of binary formats, too. (There is also BER, but in my opinion, DER is better.) I use DER in some programs, if the structured data format is useful. (Also, since text format is sometimes useful too, I had made up TER which is intended to be converted to DER. The DER file can be made in other ways as well and it is not required to use TER.)

(Also, standard ASN.1 does not have a key/value list type (which JSON and CBOR do have), but I had made up some nonstandard extensions to ASN.1 (called ASN.1X), including a few additional types, one of which is the key/value list type. Due to this, ASN.1X can now make a superset of the data that can be made by JSON (the only new type that is needed for this is the key/value list type; the other types of JSON are already standard ASN.1 types).)
by FireBeyond | 2025-07-31 21:47:15+00:00
You can be an NP in as few as 4-5 years out of high school with some courses. That’s to me the definition of not knowing what you don’t know. I’m a critical care paramedic who has corrected many NPs on fairly fundamental learning.

I’ve found that nurses with significant field experience do very well, but there are plenty of courses who will “zero to hero” you fresh out of high school.

Meanwhile, PAs go through a program near as rigorous as medical school and have to have physician supervision while NPs are not subject to oversight.
by ddellacosta | 2025-07-31 21:47:21+00:00
> If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl.

I don't think I ever thought about it but I think I have implicitly taken this to heart since I last was using Perl seriously. Almost every engineering org I've worked for in the last decade has had Ruby as a part of its stack for e.g. scripting or lambdas and it's what I reach for when I need to script something. And I've done Rails work in a few orgs too, which has few parallels in its niche even without considering Perl.

Although I suspect for most people Python is where they land if we're just talking about scripting or hacking something together...or anything (I hate it but it is what it is lol).
by koolba | 2025-07-31 21:47:49+00:00
> It isn't as simple as supply and demand.

It really is that simple.

Giving people insurance without actually increasing the supply of doctors or clinics increases the number of people willing and able to seek treatment. It does nothing for lowering costs of said treatment. Per basic economics, that’s shifting the demand curve (i.e., increasing demand).

With no changes to supply that leads to higher prices. So every time the government makes a new program or expands anny existing one that provides insurance coverage, costs for everyone will go up.

In contrast, my proposal for explicitly bringing in doctors and creating clinics increases supply. People who would have gone to see a doctor elsewhere may now choose to go to this new free clinic.

The demand curve itself would not change, though with the lower cost due to the supply curve shift you would have a larger overall market.

This is clearly oversimplified. There’s some second order effects where if primary care market increases, you’ll need more X-rays and CAT scans. So there could be an increase in those prices. But that’s could be solved in the same way too.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-31 21:47:50+00:00
you speak as if the bad part of the holocaust was the excuse, rather than the ethnic cleansing and genocide

by this logic, if only the nazis had provided an excuse acceptable to germans, like israel has provided one acceptable to israelis, the ethnic cleansing and genocide would have been ok

oh wait, they did, and it was the same excuses: 'the preservation of our ethnicity is more important than them'; 'they’re subhuman'; 'we must wipe them out for the good of our society'; etc; etc

so much for 'never again'
by fullstick | 2025-07-31 21:47:52+00:00
We're building AI workflows at my company. Yes chatbots, but also more interesting/complex workflows that I won't get into. Let's just say we have the data, expertise, and industry structure to leverage AI in valuable and useful ways.

As an engineer, development still comes down to requirements gathering, solid engineering principles, and the tools we already have at our disposal - network calls, rendering the UI, orchestrating containers and job, etc.

All that is to say that I thought AI was going to be sexy, like Westworld, and not so boring...
by franze | 2025-07-31 21:48:08+00:00
i created this last summer

https://gpt.franzai.com

(test just email gpt@franzai.com)

sadly it never took off so it just became another abandoned side project

but still sometimes I use it ie do distill long emails or translate them without leaving the inbox - also the reminder and todo list feature is nice - whereby i mostly use the "remind me of this email next monday"

so my learnings for email agents: give them a sense of time and memory. its not only about that you write an email and send it but also when to write whom
by jll29 | 2025-07-31 21:48:14+00:00
Yes but that's "in a few decades" ON TOP of millions of years.

If I had to give an estimate, I would consider less the time taken to date, but the current state of our knowledge of how the brain works, and how it has grown in the last decades. There is almost nothing that we know so little about as the human brain, how thoughts are represented, modern imaging techniques notwithstanding.
by tptacek | 2025-07-31 21:48:54+00:00
Induced demand can only function if there's a scarcity to begin with, and it's premised on increased supply increasing affordability (that's the mechanism by which it works), but these axiomatic derivations don't matter because we have case studies (in MN, in TX, and now CO, a story we're literally commenting on). Empirical observations win.
by paulcole | 2025-07-31 21:49:13+00:00
Thanks! I tried to distill down what was in Difficult Conversations:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004CR6ALA?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_a_con...

I think even a bad difficult conversation is better than no difficult conversation so just giving the managers I work with some tool to compel action is valuable.
by bayesic | 2025-07-31 21:49:16+00:00
> Sam Altman knew exactly which buttons to push. Congressional testimony about the need for regulation (from the company furthest ahead). Warnings about AI risk. OpenAI's playbook: Build in public, warn about dangers, present yourself as the responsible actor who needs resources to "do it safely."

And this is why Matt Levine calls Sam Altman the greatest business negger of all time
by decimalenough | 2025-07-31 21:51:18+00:00
> Office hours were great, though. It’s is like debugging a program, you start at the symptoms and then try to trace your way up to the root cause. Except you have a conversation instead of a stack trace. Just like debugging, it can be really frustrating in the moment, but the end result is really satisfying.

You sound like one of those rare souls who might both enjoy and be good at people management.

(Line management, at least. The higher up you go, the less fun it gets, unless you're a psychopath whose primary motivation is Number Go Up.)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-31 21:51:24+00:00
> only if you believe that more capacity does not induce more demand

No, it doesn't. What you're describing is elasticity. It's a well-studed concept, and means that a 5% increase in supply will probably reduce prices by less than 4.8%.

(An interesting side effect of a government committing to a zero real-price increase housing strategy is it eliminates whole categories of speculative demand. I wouldn't count on this for policy effects. But it's another feather in the cap for pro-housing policy.)
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-31 21:52:42+00:00
I took great pride in making readable, maintainable perl.

I worked at a VFX place that was held together by loads of perl, written over a good 15 years. Some of it was clever, but most of it was plain readable scripts.

The key to keeping it readable was decent code reviews and someone ripping the piss out of you for making unreadable soup.

Its all python nowadays, I do miss CPAN, but I don't miss perls halfarsed function args.

However for the longest time, the documentation for perl was >> than python. At the time python doc were written almost exclusively for people who knew how to python. Perl docs assumed you were in a hurry and needed an answer now, and if you were still reading by the end assumed you either cared or were lost and needed more info.

With the rise of datascience, python has lost its "oh you should be able to just guess, look how _logical_ the syntax is" to "do it like this."
by zzo38computer | 2025-07-31 21:52:47+00:00
That is a text format, although DER is a binary format and encodes the data which there is represented by text. I think they should not have made a bit string (or octet string) to encapsulate another ASN.1 data and would be better to put it directly, but nevertheless it can work. The actual data to be parsed will be binary, not the text format like that.

DER is a more restricted variant of BER and I think DER is better than BER. PEM is also DER format but is encoded as base64 and has a header to indicate what type of data is being stored, rather than directly.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-07-31 21:53:18+00:00
I'd buy some Put options if I was a Figma employee. Buy them out-of-the-money enough that the premiums are relatively inexpensive.

As of right now, it's trading at $138/share, though options aren't available yet, at least on RH. But I'd probably buy a $100 Put option expiring in January. I'd expect that's enough out of the money to balance the premiums versus risk.
by nosignono | 2025-07-31 21:53:24+00:00
Sorry, I should have included -- in the context of the story. They are of course, not agents. They are fictional characters in a videogame.

But humans built them, and humans framed them in the camera. Those humans did have the choice to provide them with a setting in which the characters do or do not have that agency. Those humans chose whether or not to depict that agency.

Art reflects something about the creator, and often (but definitely not always) it's the values of the creator. If the authors choose to depict a world in which the character has no agency (within their setting), then perhaps the authors did not feel it was important or valuable to do so. Likewise, if the authors do depict a world in which the characters have agency, perhaps the authors feel it is valuable.

But even detached from authorial intent, art is subject to critique -- we can look at a piece of art, knowing nothing of the creator, and ask, "What themes do we draw here? What values does this work put forward?" Kotor 2 raises many interesting questions about pedigogy and teaching, for instance. One critical read is that it is a piece of art that believes you should absolutely question the motivations of the people who want to teach you. Another thing Kotor 2 seems to value is women can (or even should) be objectified (in the case of the handmaiden) or instrumentalized (in the case of Kreia).

None of the above requires you to recognize that the characters are agents within our world or have agency here.
by davidw | 2025-07-31 21:53:52+00:00
This argument always comes up when discussing a specific place.

"Everyone would move to ________ because it is the best place in the spiral arm of the Milky Way", where ________ is Boulder, Bend, Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Hawai'i, Santa Fe, etc.... etc....

It cannot be true for all of them. So they all need to build and people will figure out where they actually want to live.

Bozeman, Montana, a small city of 50K people, is seeing falling rents because they built a lot of housing:

https://montanafreepress.org/2025/06/23/has-bozemans-rental-...

And it's very much the kind of small place where "everyone wants to live there".
by neom | 2025-07-31 21:54:16+00:00
Yes, yours feels very good! I apologize, I was hijacking your post a bit, sorry for it. I happened to be working on a docs revamp project this week so it seemed like a good place to ask my questions, I've been trying to think how robust to build the chat function of the docs/onboarding etc. as it seems things are going in this direction, but I'm still cognizent of the fact that docs are as much an evaluation of a product as they are how to use the product. Anyway, sorry again for using your HN post for my homework. :)
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-31 21:54:44+00:00
In Colorado, that's about 5 hours of labor for minimum wage employees (ignoring taxes, but at that income taxes are low). If you're working full-time, you average 174 working hours a month so that's about 2.9% of a minimum wage earner's gross income, which is nothing to scoff at for those folks who are earning at that level. And when you consider taxes (payroll which can't be easily avoided, and whatever level of income tax they have to pay) it's probably pushing closer to one day of work to take home that $71.
by wolf550e | 2025-07-31 21:54:59+00:00
The vast majority of Israelis wanted the Palestinians to have a state. That's why Barak, Sharon and Olmert were elected. Israel tried twice to negotiate for a Palestinian state, and once gave the Palestinians Gaza unilaterally. The Palestinian leadership did not agree both times, and we have seen what they did with Gaza since 2005.

The problem is that the goal of the Palestinians is not a Palestinian state, it's to ensure that the Jews don't have a state. Otherwise they would have gotten a state in 1947. Except that the Palestinians didn't exist as a polity in 1947, and the West Bank was claimed by Jordan until 1988. The PLO was established in 1964, not to free the West Bank from Jordan, but to undo the 1948 war.

There is no Palestinian opposition that says not agreeing then was a mistake and they should have taken the offer (e.g. in 2008).

The main issue is not that some Palestinians are under the rule of horrible leaders like Hamas, the problem is that Hamas is the most popular party. The Palestinians completely support the goal of undoing the establishment of Israel. And apparently are mostly ok with the principle that it doesn't matter how many lives it costs, as long as Muslim land is freed, i.e. no sovereign Jews.

Basically, Israel has peaceniks and leftists, and even right wing governments were very willing to give land for peace, believing in the two state solution. The Palestinians have never had any peaceniks. The Israeli peace camp was badly wounded by the second intifada and it seems completely killed by October 7th.
by neilk | 2025-07-31 21:56:12+00:00
I personally find these examples underwhelming. Most of them are processes that require time, like the pitch drop experiment.

I suspect that the things in our lives that truly have value and take a long time aren’t easy to identify as projects. No one person starts it with a clear idea of where it will end. Investment in future capabilities. Knowledge gathering without clear application or business model. Strengthening institutions and traditions of human rights to ensure that no one group can arrest history.
by vel0city | 2025-07-31 21:56:24+00:00
It's not a solution, its kicking the can down the road. What happens with the UPS battery dies and the power comes back on? The cameras are still down for an unacceptable amount of time because of poor software.

The cameras should reassociate almost immediately after regaining a connection. It shouldn't take hours for them to try and connect again. I won't fault the camera for going down when the power dies, I will fault it for not coming back immediately after the power comes back though!
by shermantanktop | 2025-07-31 21:56:30+00:00
Interesting - one of the most single-mindedly arrogant engineers I ever worked with was an absolute zealot about CUDA.

Could not stop talking about CUDA, and why everything else was terrible, and how nobody listened to him, and how that was because they couldn't handle the truth, and how he could solve everyone's problems if they would only let him, on and on. He didn't last that long at my company.

Maybe he was taking his CUDA pain and pushing it onto other people.
by spydum | 2025-07-31 21:56:33+00:00
There are quite a few who have. Ive worked in a google workspace enabled company on a chromeos device for like that last 6? Years. It works 95% of the things, but that last 5% can be frustrating: especially when it involves interoperability with a customers system. Now multiply that by 40000 employees.. that's a lot of help desk tickets.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-31 21:56:45+00:00
> We can work on reducing the barriers to building more housing of any kind while also advocating for more social housing development

One of the NIMBY lobby's greatest wins was putting these options on the ends of a policy spectrum.

They're not. They're complementary. If it's cheaper to build, it's cheaper to build social housing. And if you have a vibrant construction sector, you can build more public housing faster.
by corytheboyd | 2025-07-31 21:57:25+00:00
Mention of Perl will always reminds me of that time I put Perl in a PR at a Ruby shop. It was a beautiful, portable little piece of code that they made me take outside and shoot in the back of the head. Fair enough, but I will never get over it lol. I don’t even write Perl scripts for personal work anymore, I use python (only because uv makes it not awful), but it’s not about that!
by alganet | 2025-07-31 21:58:18+00:00
Some models often report their training hardware. It doesn't take 5min to figure out that you can't "catch up" with it.

If you have the resources to "catch up", you would probably not ask poorly stated questions on HN, unless you have ulterior motives (which might be harmless, or not).

It seems like a question designed to steer people who might be unaware of such limitations into believing they can somehow buy cheap hardware and make their own datacenter, which is a weird propositon. That's an absurd idea, and such things would only be valuable for cheap spammy purposes (I've been investigating those schemes for a while).

So, we have a few scenarios here:

- Beginner guy who's too lazy to research for himself.

- Scammer trying to dump off hardware that was used for scams into other people's hands (my favorite kind of investigative meal).

- Someone else that is doing the same kind of investigative work I'm doing.

My answer suits these three profiles. It would humble the beginner, scare the shit out of the scammer, and elicit some respect from the investigator.

I know this is hard to follow, but keep focus on why these kinds of profiles are important. If you can think of another one, please share it, and I would rethink my answer in favor of that.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-07-31 21:58:41+00:00
Karl Popper, "The open society and its enemies":

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

It's all about the paradox of tolerance.

That chat control attempt is a direct result of the paradox of tolerance.

The thing that makes me sick to my stomach is that some of the worst of worst intolerant discourse is going to be allowed and protected because it's "religious": because we are open, tolerant, societies we are tolerant with intolerance.

If you have a holy book that calls for killing non-believers and taking their wive and daughters as sex slaves: that's fine because, see, it's religious.

If you want to discuss that holy book online with your fellow believers: that's fine because, see, it's religious.

But any talk criticizing that is going to be criminalized, crushed, pointed out as "far right" or any non-sense like that.

It's shooting the messenger.

Guess what's one of the issue concerning many people in a great many european cities at the moment? People feeling that religious extremism and obscurantism, middle-age style, is making a comeback.

And people are organizing marches all over the EU.

The last thing the EU wants is people on social media organizing themselves and protesting because they don't want the EU to become the next Syria or Somalia: most in the EU do not want the EU to become an intolerant continent.

You could say that any chat control is bad. But that chat control is going to be used prevent the criticism of intolerance.

It's really sad: I already moved three times, lived over four different countries (all in the EU) and now I'm planning to leave the EU while I still can (not that there are that many great places where I can realistically go).

P.S: for those in the US you should cherish your first amendment
by kevinbuzzard | 2025-07-31 21:58:43+00:00
Indeed. I'm not formalising FLT because I think it might be wrong -- I'm formalising it because I know the proof is correct, and using the project as an excuse to get some modern number theory into Lean's mathematics library. My hope is this will increase the chances that systems like Lean will one day be able to help modern mathematicians.
by jbullock35 | 2025-07-31 21:59:18+00:00
Leaving aside issues of language design and the emergence of other languages, it's interesting to think about other reasons why Perl lost popularity. Some of you know this history better than I do, but I think that it's now unknown to most HN readers.

The enormous reason that I see is the insistence, from Larry Wall and others, on a bottom-up "community" transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6. The design process for Perl 6 was announced at a Perl conference in 2000 [1]; 15 years later, almost every Perl user was still using Perl 5. The inability of the Perl community to push forward collectively in a timely way should be taken by every other language community as a cautionary tale.

Tim O'Reilly made a secondary point that may also be important. For a long time, Perl books were O'Reilly's biggest sellers. But the authors of those titles didn't act on his suggestion that they write a "Perl for the Web" book (really a Perl-for-CGI book). Books like that eventually came, but the refusal of leading authors to write such a book may have made it easier for PHP to get a foothold.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_(programming_language)#Hi...