MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gus_massa | 2025-07-18 20:43:34+00:00
There is an old post by Joel Spolsky that worked as PM in Excel a looong time ago, and he agree with you: "Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros... (HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12471604 (393 points | Sept 2016 | 229 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118909 (60 points | Feb 2008 | 20 comments))
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-07-18 20:43:48+00:00
Yes but they seem to have switched because they didn’t like ORM-generated migration code. I think that’s a bad reason to switch because it wasn’t an important part of ORMs in the first place. Basically, I want to know why they were even using ORMs before.

I don’t want to go without an ORM because I’ll end up making one ad-hoc anyway. I’m not going to do work on raw tuples in my application code.
by esseph | 2025-07-18 20:44:06+00:00
Ah, then I'll fix my statement!

> If so the term "last hope" is not in my opinion accurate.

What an absolutely asshole statement, which also shows an absolutely profound misunderstanding of suicide prevention and care.

Edit: Core belief of suicide ideation is that hope is gone. This is often (but not always) a perception. There may always be more things to try - but that's irrelevant to the person that is dead because they could not see another way.
by Fraterkes | 2025-07-18 20:44:31+00:00
I don’t think you’re wrong, but if it takes someone a month (at most) to get up to speed with these tools, I don’t think thats much of an argument for closely keeping up with them (until you need to know them to keep your job or smt) especially because everything is changing every few months. There is arguably no technology that needs you to “keep up” with it less
by alphazard | 2025-07-18 20:44:42+00:00
When explaining LLMs to people, often the high level architecture is what they find the most interesting. Not the transformer, but the token by token prediction strategy (autoregression), and not always choosing the most likely token, but a token proportional to its likelihood.

The minutiae of how next token prediction works is rarely appreciated by lay people. They don't care about dot products, or embeddings, or any of it. There's basically no advantage to explaining how that part works since most people won't understand, retain, or appreciate it.
by 827a | 2025-07-18 20:45:00+00:00
If you have a GPU which you've used for AI training, but that's no longer valuable, you could sell that GPU; but then you'd incur taxable revenue.

If you destroy the GPU, you can write it off as a loss, which reduces your taxable income.

Its possible you could come out ahead by selling everything off, but then you'd have to pay expensive people to manage the sell off, logistics, etc. What a mess. Easier to just destroy everything and take the write-off.
by EA-3167 | 2025-07-18 20:45:23+00:00
I suppose it's possible at that point, possibly to try and stem the process. The question is just how rapidly this condition emerges, and I suspect (although this is just a suspicion) that the time between onset and a severe reaction is fairly brief. Mostly though the problem is that this is a really complex, whole immune system reaction that's triggered by the AAV in the liver, but simply removing the intial cause probably wouldn't stop the cascade.

I took a look at some of the aftermath reports (i.e. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10638066/ and some others) which get into specific details about the course of treatment in several patients who died from this complication. The through-line is an aggressive use of several immune suppressing and modulating therapies to calm the cascade.

I have to admit I can't find any specific discussion about dialysis in that context, so I can only assume that removal of the viral particles would be a case of closing the barn door after the horse escaped.
by Shellban | 2025-07-18 20:45:46+00:00
Well, Arch has (historically) been rather difficult to install from scratch, and requires a lot of Linux knowledge to get up-and-running as a daily driver. If one is installing it for the first time and misses something (which audio backend?), it can be rather frustrating down the line.

There is a reason Ubuntu is usually the first distro new Linux users go to. For almost a decade now, installing a feature-complete Ubuntu setup is not much more difficult than reimaging Windows.
by ModernMech | 2025-07-18 20:47:41+00:00
When I read these LLM in coding discussions, I'm reminded a lot of online dating discussions. Someone will post "I'm really having a tough time dating. I tried X (e.g. a dating app) but I had a tough experience." Someone will respond "I tried X and had great success. Highly recommended." Seems confounding, but when you click into their profiles to see pictures of each person, it becomes abundantly clear why these people report different experiences.

Not to dog the author too hard, but a look at their Github profile says a lot about the projects they've worked on and what kind of dev they are. Not much there in terms of projects or code output, but they do have 15k followers on Twitter, where they post frequently about LLMs to their audience.

They aren't talking about the tasks and the domains they're using because that's incidental; what they really want to do is just talk about LLMs to their online audience, not ship code.
by esseph | 2025-07-18 20:47:43+00:00
That would be $75 billion combined for 2025. A drop in the bucket.

-- > From 2013 to 2020, cloud infrastructure capex rose methodically—from $32 billion to $119 billion. That's significant, but manageable. Post-2020? The curve steepens. By 2024, we hit $285 billion. And in 2025 alone, the top 11 cloud providers are forecasted to deploy a staggering $392 billion—MORE than the entire previous two years combined.

https://www.wisdomtree.com/investments/blog/2025/05/21/this-...
by gosub100 | 2025-07-18 20:47:52+00:00
I'm all for enforcement of laws. I am very careful to obey the law because I know it will potentially ruin my life if I don't. If you want to change immigration law, that's another topic. But what happened was blue states let them in, created the problem, and now are using the predictable and preventable suffering to try to win voters. This is the second most popular move in their playbook, next to calling everyone a racist. They let their policies cause suffering and say "vote for us and we'll fix it, vote for them and the suffering continues". It's a scam.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-18 20:49:24+00:00
The thing is that the number of actual transactions on the blockchain is low. It may be that the transactions are bigger so the value transferred has not dropped so much. Or maybe now that there are ETFs people can buy a small amount of BTC without going to the chain.

BTC might be able to hold its value without a lot of on-chain transactions but certainly there is not growing interest in payments, say, buying things with BTC.

On the other hand there is a pattern of NFTs that just have not traded much so even though the price is stable you can’t say the price is a real price.

https://opensea.io/collection/krunker-collection
by proberts | 2025-07-18 20:49:45+00:00
There are a lot of options. In the end, creating a successful business in the U.S. is the best path to a green card but more specifically, assuming that you have employees in Canada whom you are managing, opening an office in the U.S. and transferring yourself to this office and then growing the business is a great way to get initial work authorization and a green card. Another option, if you have strong credentials, is to come over on the O-1 and then pursue an extraordinary ability green card then or after you have built up the company.
by FrankPetrilli | 2025-07-18 20:49:54+00:00
"Rarity" is a distinction without merit in this particular case; the important thing to note is that (most) clouds don't guarantee _any_ availability of a single zone. A system which stashes all of its infrastructure in one zone only is expected to be impacted by issues with that cloud, while a multi-zone setup spanning a region is generally "soft-guaranteed" to be resilient to normal operations / failures.
by tomgag | 2025-07-18 20:50:02+00:00
The reasons you listed are exactly why the lack of factorization records should not be seen as a "critical black eye to this field", because they are not a relevant measure of progress. Again, think of the parallel with LLMs: it took decades to get out of the "AI winter", because that's what non-linear technological progress looks like.

With QC, the risk (and I am not saying this is going to happen, but I'm saying that it is a non-overlookable risk) is that we end up transitioning from "QC can only factorize 15" to "RSA-2048 is broken" in such a sudden way that the industry has no time to adapt.
by f33d5173 | 2025-07-18 20:50:13+00:00
It's an endemic issue on wikipedia, and even editing wouldn't fix this one instance, since someone can (and demonstrably already has) remove whatever you add later on. The issue is wikipedias preference for "deletionism", removing perfectly correct information for no particularly good reason. It's especially pernicious when it comes to short articles, which tend to get deleted with impunity, and redirected to sections of articles, which later get renamed, destroying the link, or removed altogether. Nothing can be done by any individual to fix this issue, since it comes from a wikipedia wide policy, which unfortunately is not one of the things that "anyone can edit".
by chaps | 2025-07-18 20:50:22+00:00
Think of it like gun/taser safety -- even an empty gun is treated as a loaded gun because of the significant risks. These systems have well-documented histories of leading to false arrests and ruining lives and families. When the risks are destroying someone's life, why isn't it treated with similar caution?

The spectrum stuff is about the likelihood of harm was my interpretation. Obviously we shouldn't be throwing spears, but there's probabilistic side of it that doesn't exist with nukes, and there's a spectrum between all of that with various probabilities of extents of harm. So if the harms of using these technologies intrinsically carries similar probabilistic risks (false arrests, elevated charges, etc), why not treat it as a risky object worthy of kicking someone off the range? I'm reminded of situations of waiting for the rangemaster to walk away so you can do something stupid and risky.
by phil21 | 2025-07-18 20:50:31+00:00
Capital equipment is depreciated over time. By the time you're selling it off, it's pennies on the dollar and a small recoupment of cost. Paying 30% (or whatever) taxes on that small amount of income and having 70% remaining is still better than zero dollars and zero taxes.

It is a giant pain to sell off this gear if you are using in-house folks to do so. Usually not worth it, and why things end up trashed as you state. If I have a dozen 10 year old servers to get rid of - it's usually not worth anyone's time or energy to list them for $200 on ebay and figure out shipping logistics.

However, at scale the situation and numbers change - you can call in an equipment liquidator who can wheel out 500 racks full of gear at a time and you get paid for their disposal on top of it. Usually a win/win situation since you no longer have expensive people trying to figure out who to call to get rid of it, how to do data destruction properly, etc. This usually is a help to the bottom line in almost all cases I've seen, on top of it saving internal man-hours.

If you're in "failed startup being liquidated for asset value" territory, then the receiver/those in charge typically have a fiduciary duty to find the best reasonable outcome for the investors. It's rarely throwing gear with residual value in the trash. See: used Aeron chair market.
by w10-1 | 2025-07-18 20:50:37+00:00
> The correctness statement is not helpful

But... that's everything, and why it's included.

Undefined behavior from asynchronous computing is not worth study or investment, except to avoid it.

Virtually all of the effort for the last few decades (from super-scalar processors through map/reduce algorithms and Nvidia fabrics) involves enabling non-SSE operations that are correct.

So yes, as an abstract term outside the context of computing today, asynchrony does not guarantee correctness - that's the difficulty. But the only asynchronous computing we care about offers correctness guarantees of some sort (often a new type, e.g., "eventually consistent").
by svieira | 2025-07-18 20:51:02+00:00
> Third, one of the major benefits from AI research has little to do with AI directly; the programming environments and techniques developed for AI research can also be applied to conventional programs. In particular, the ability to do rapid prototyping or what some refer to as exploratory development. This is being seen as a way to limit risk in large programming projects. Rapid prototyping is also valuable in helping customers to more fully define and articulate their needs at the beginning of projects.

> Finally we're beginning to see what I think is a most telling sign for knowledge based systems they're ceasing to be just standalone applications they're more commonly becoming integrated with the installed base of conventional computing especially with databases and realtime applications. As knowledge-based systems become components embedded within larger systems some of the glamour may disappear but their usefulness will greatly increase.

Aside from a few popular terms that didn't transfer ("knowledge-based" and "rapid prototyping") this sounds like something that could have been said today.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-18 20:51:15+00:00
> Most healthy, active people who eat decently, get enough rest, and avoid drinking and smoking, will be able to eliminate cancer as it comes up

Incorrect.

There are tons of cancers that hide and mask with symptoms common to other symptoms. Kidney cancer, for example, presents pretty similarly to both kidney stones and UTIs. Even blood in the urine isn't proof positive that anything is wrong beyond either of those conditions. And, by the time blood is in the urine, it's often too late.

Liver cancer is even worse. The first symptoms you get can be thought of as a simple pulled muscle, just a little ache in the back. By the time you have appreciable problems, like turning yellow, it's quite advanced and too late to really do much.

There are common cancers like colon, skin, breast, and prostate that more fit your description of being mostly harmless so long as you get regular screenings and eat healthy. But, for every part of the body, a cancer can form and the symptoms are very often invisible.

I'm unfortunately all too familiar with how cancer looks. My wife currently has stage 4 cancer that started as kidney cancer. She does not drink or smoke, gets enough rest, and is very active.
by exiguus | 2025-07-18 20:51:51+00:00
Error page of the error page made me smile. Somehow, this makes total sense to me. Consider a reverse proxy where the origin is down and displaying the 'real' error page is not possible because of that. Alternatively, imagine a CloudFront function or Lambda experiencing the same issue, or encountering so many redirects that it interrupts and simply shows the error page of the error page. Nonetheless, I agree that you shouldn't see this issue very often.
by vasco | 2025-07-18 20:51:54+00:00
Yeah but then you'd go through life having biopsies all the time. If all people did a full body MRI almost everyone would have weird lumps that doctors would have to biopsy to be really sure, and then what do you do? Do you biopsy yourself every time some weird tissue appears? Most of those will be nothing and you'll be going through the complications of surgeries and anesthesia all the time just to always make sure.
by jtrn | 2025-07-18 20:52:02+00:00
I can respect this view 100%. And your rephrasing, "Should we recommend psilocybin treatment to depression patients more broadly," is in perfect sync with my thinking, and the right question to ask.

I would only add that it's extremely hard to know if something actually works. There are seriously some medications that people claim don't work, but objectively they are healthier, happier, more social, more active, and "better" on almost every objective measure. An example of this is when you really have a good match with venlafaxine for co-morbid panic disorder and depression.

Then there are drugs everybody claims are good for them, but they almost never are, especially in the long run. Basically, all of the benzo sleeping aids (in the context of chronic use).

So I can't and won't say you are not right. But I hope you permit me my goal of finding "objective" markers for saying "something works." Because, to quote Murderbot, "Humans are idiots!" (me included). And self-report is a notoriously unreliable measure.
by proberts | 2025-07-18 20:52:44+00:00
The E-2 is very much a check the box type of visa but whether $100k is enough would depend on a number of factors so you should consult with an immigration attorney. One relative advantage of the E-2 is that spouses can work and that it is in large part a company benefit that makes it relatively easy to bring over talented people from the founder's/owner's home country.
by darknavi | 2025-07-18 20:52:58+00:00
> At no point did we use tools/call or any command that could trigger actions, incur API usage costs, or alter data.

At this point I'm convinced it's not possible to predict this with MCP servers (or LLMs generally). You just don't know what it's definitively going to do when you poke it, even with a simple question like "What do you do".
by hamandcheese | 2025-07-18 20:53:30+00:00
- flakes perform very poorly in large repos. This might be changing soon with lazy-trees, but I've been waiting for that for 2+ years.

- flake inputs are not fetched lazily.

- flakes are somewhat restrictive in that you can't override an input with an arbitrary value. This matters if you want to pass in, say, a specially configured nixpkgs object. In practice, for non trivial use cases, flakes fail to solve the problem they set out to solve. Most flakes expose lib functions for these advanced use cases but that's pretty much equivalent to what you get with non-flakes.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-18 20:53:35+00:00
I don't know much about advanced Google Docs, but I know that's the far from true for Google Sheets. Google Sheets covers a shit ton of ground that Excel covers, but a serious user can never replace Excel with Sheets.

We had a lot of marketing and sales people who wanted to use Google Sheets instead of Excel to load sales reports from a shared PG database. This is of course a built-in feature (loading a PG table as a sheet) in Excel. Google Sheets obviously doesn't support any imports. They are all paid plugins, and they all make you pay per row or cell or column.

You can write a plugin to do it, except their funky AppScript (which is a custom synchronous Javascript/V8 environment where there is no async or callbacks, and promises block.

Except, the plugin can only connect to MySQL. PG support ask has been open since 2011. They decided in 2014 that they don't plan to support PG. Then in 2018 they thought maybe they can only support GCP Postgres.[1]

Ok, fine. You make your own API to call and load data. No, you can't return more than 50 MBs. So better split your query.

Oh, you want to load a 50MB CSV? There are 3 different APIs for that:

- "Import from GDrive". This is the one you want. Import 50MB in a couple of seconds. But it also requires the most permissions to full access the user's GDrive

- "Basic Import API". This imports at ~100kbps but not always. gets slower for large data

- "Advanced Import API". This imports at ~250kbps but not always. gets slower for small data

and you need to run your own benchmarks[2][3] to understand which API to use in which context, then keep reruning them as things change.

[1]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36752790?pli=1

[2]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/d102c9600ba12a162c667287d2...

[3]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/030203c695b308606041587e6d...
by nullc | 2025-07-18 20:53:48+00:00
There is no absolute guarantee. You can have an arbitrarily large multiple and the decode can still fail when a set of entries exist that form a cycle, it just becomes quite unlikely as the overhead goes up.

One of the ways of hybridizing iblt and exact algebraic techniques like the minisketch library I link in my other post is to staple a small algebraic sketch to the iblt. If the iblt is successful you're done, if it gets stuck you use take the recovered elements out of the algebraic sketch and decode that. It's fast to decode the algebraic sketch in spite its O(n^2) behavior because it's small, and it'll always be successful if there are few enough elements (unlike the iblt).

Sadly this still doesn't give a guarantee since you might have more elements in a cycle than the size of the backup, but small cycles are more likely than big ones so there exists a range of sizes where it's more communications efficient than a larger iblt.
by hmkoyan | 2025-07-18 20:53:55+00:00
Thank you for your questions. The actual app can be used/seen only after signing in. Regarding your questions:

1. This was initially planned as a web-based application, and it still is. However, when it comes to mobile responsiveness, it's not great — something I've pointed out and am currently working on. I'll finish this work during the weekend. Creating native apps will probably make sense in future, too.

2. Yeah, as it's only the beta version at the moment, the pricing doesn't mention anything specific. I believe there will be three different pricing tiers. There will definitely be a freemium version with some limitations, e.g. a limit of one library and 100–200 books in library, and access to basic statistics only. I need to think more about the pricing in more detail, as I've only concentrated on building the product so far. However, in general, I imagine it to be as I've already described above.

3. This is a very good question, to be honest, and one that I haven't thought much about either. I would probably use a locally hosted application if it offered all the features that librari.io offers. However, I can think of some reasons why a user might want to use a web-based solution. Firstly, I assume that syncing across devices would be difficult when the application is hosted on only one device, unless it offers export/import functionality. Backup and reliability are other reasons why a user would opt for a web-based solution. I believe that the ability to share your library with other people or family members using a link, which gives them access from anywhere at any time, is a good reason to opt for a web-based solution.

4. I can outline the three most significant issues I encountered, which eventually led to the development of this app. The first is the outdated UI that most of them suggest (but of course, I'm not saying that librari.io's UI is the best). The second is the lack of library statistics and analytics (e.g. distribution tables of books, authors, etc. or content-wise and reading activity related statistics). The third is the lack of customisation. For example, the ability to add custom book, author and publisher data fields with different types, such as text, date and number, and then attach actual information to those fields when editing those entities.