MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2025-08-13 22:36:26+00:00
> Emphasis mine. It would indeed be hard to survive without that kind of support from a corporation. A user on HN estimated the yearly cost of this traffic at around 12 million USD/year (according to AWS Cloudfront rates), more than four times the full operating budget of the Python Software Foundation as of 2024.

(As the user in question: three times.)

> Leverage progress in the systems programming ecosystem to create repeatable builds. Turn prebuilt binaries from “sources” into cacheable artifacts that can be deleted and reconstructed at will. Institute a way of creating secondary caches that can start shouldering some of the workload.

This doesn't avoid the need for the wheels to exist and be publicly available. People running CI systems should figure out local caching that actually works, sure. But if you delete that cacheable artifact on the public PyPI website for something like, I don't know, numpy-2.3.2-cp312-cp312-win_arm64.whl, you're going to be re-creating it (and having it downloaded again) constantly. Windows users are just not going to be able to build that locally.

And you know, space usage isn't the problem here — we're talking about a few hard drives' worth of space. The number of downloads is the problem. Outside of CI, I guess that's mostly driven by end users defaulting to the latest version of everything, every time they make a new virtual environment, rather than using whatever's in their package installer's cache. I do know that uv makes the latter a lot easier.
by dingnuts | 2025-08-13 22:37:29+00:00
> I can't imagine some therapists, especially remote only, aren't already just acting as a human interface to chatgtp as well.

Are you joking? Any medical professional caught doing this should lose their license.

I would be incensed if I was a patient in this situation, and would litigate. What you're describing is literal malpractice.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-08-13 22:37:32+00:00
Funny how the comment making a factual correction gets downvoted.

For me, that is the crucial information in the article: Yes, multiple people have succeeded to create a cult within the rationality community, but it always involved isolating their victims from the rest of the rationality community. (Now that we see the pattern, could it possibly help us defend against this?)
by dylan604 | 2025-08-13 22:38:47+00:00
If you're designing the website, why depend on a YT thumbnail? Can't you just use your own image that you have control over, and then load the actual YT when clicked? So many image gallery style components do this. Even if you don't need a gallery, it shows it is clearly possible. It's not like you're trying to work when JS is blocked
by sfpotter | 2025-08-13 22:39:22+00:00
This is totally false mathematically. Please look up the extended real number system for an example. Many branches of mathematics affix infinity to some existing number system, extending its operations consistently, and do all kinds of useful things with this setup. Being able to work with infinity in exactly the same way in IEEE754 is crucial for being able to cleanly map algorithms from these domains onto a computer. If dividing by zero were an error in floating point arithmetic, I would be unable to do my job developing numerical methods.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-13 22:40:17+00:00
The important difference [0] is:

1. "Gross federal debt" includes the money which Congress borrowed from (future) Social Security recipients in order to pay for (current) tax-cuts and middle-east invasions and whatnot.

2. "Held by the public" excludes that portion, focusing on money borrowed from individuals/companies/other-countries that voluntarily lent their money to the US government.

So we should make our decisions based on the first one, unless someone is plotting to screw millions of American taxpayers out of the money they already paid as insurance-premiums. :p

[0] https://www.crfb.org/papers/qa-gross-debt-versus-debt-held-p...
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-13 22:41:05+00:00
I find it interesting that I'm being downvoted because I'm encouraging discussion and reasoned argument rather than just being all Rah rah! with one liners whose sentiment I endorse.

The point, at least in my mind, of HN isn't just to express one's support/solidarity with a particular point of view, whether that be with knee-jerk downvotes (did you even read what I wrote?) because I'd like to see more than shallow, one-line dismissals of anything, whether it supports or rejects[0][1] whatever thesis folks perceive is being presented.

I'd much rather see actual arguments on all sides, whether I find them reprehensible or not. We're mostly adults here, so we should be able to read and understand a variety of viewpoints, when we support them or even (especially) when we adamantly oppose them.

This makes for better discussions, better discourse and a better understanding of those with whom we agree as well as those with whom we disagree -- no matter how repugnant we may find the latter's viewpoints.

So feel free to vote me down because I didn't just take a vapid one liner as a good response. Check my posting history and you'll find that I think a Christian Ethno state is a bad idea -- for a whole host of reasons -- but I submitted TFA to spark real discussion and substantive arguments, not to pat myself on the back for being so smart and enlightened.

If substantive discussion isn't what you're here for, why are you here?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892682

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891739
by _rkcg | 2025-08-13 22:42:37+00:00
I've written Apache Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, Free Software Foundation, and OpenSource Initiative, and asked for help. We will see. If OSS has no value to our law makers and the trademark needs to be deleted, that's fine and I accept the loss. But I'm an open-source contributor since over decade and not only love the spirit, but my whole career is based on it. The last thing I can do is to fight for justice, even if it means I need help from bigger firms/initiatives.
by snackbroken | 2025-08-13 22:42:38+00:00
Like I said upthread,

> Not having an option to reject that is as convenient as the one to accept is not compliant with GDPR.

The law, guidance provided by regulators, and court rulings are all quite clear on this: Consent must be freely given, the consent form must not be coercive in any way.

This includes (but is not limited to) making rejecting more difficult than accepting, degrading the quality of service for those who reject, gating the service behind accepting, or requiring payment from those who reject. Collecting personal information without prior consent would obviously also be a (worse) violation of the law.
by pmahoney | 2025-08-13 22:43:19+00:00
I tried to like OCaml for a few years. The things that hold me back the most are niggling things that are largely solved in more "modern" langs, the biggest being the inability to "print" arbitrary objects.

There are ppx things that can automatically derive "to string" functions, but it's a bit of effort to set up, it's not as nice to use as what's available in Rust, and it can't handle things like Set and Map types without extra work, e.g. [1] (from 2021 so situation may have changed).

Compare to golang, where you can just use "%v" and related format strings to print nearly anything with zero effort.

[1] https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/ppx-deriving-implementation-for-...
by epolanski | 2025-08-13 22:44:03+00:00
I have made a very specific example, you extrapolated some other data from it.

If you want a clearer comparison take Japan and tell me their average driver, nurse, teacher, policeman, factory worker, carpenter, painter, car mechanic, shop assistant, barista, bank clerk, etc does "less" or "less efficiently" than his american counter part.

Because there is a huge difference in measured productivity between them.

There might be, at times, some added productivity in US due to having more capital at disposal to adopt some technology, there might be some other benefits from being more risk prone in US? Sure. But that amounts for smallish differences and sure not for the immense gap measured by economic measures, which, at the end of the day, as explained with the initial sleeping nurse example is still $/hour.
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-08-13 22:44:37+00:00
Agree. If you get past the baloney, the typical Gartner analyst is speaking with 50-100 CTOs per month. This is incredibly useful, as it provides a great general understanding of what companies are implementing, what is working, what is failing, what is no longer important, what is important. This allows them to become true mavens on their specific vertical or sub-vertical, sharing best practice. So this is definitely valuable, depending on how cutting-edge you happen to be.
by rawgabbit | 2025-08-13 22:45:43+00:00
In response to the 1919 case. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1070284

Quote

There is much more to Dodge v. Ford Motor Company than meets the eye. Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate. The business judgment rule protects many decisions that deviate from this standard.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744

Courts accordingly treat Dodge v. Ford as a dead letter. (In the past three decades the Delaware courts have cited the case only once, and then on controlling shareholders' duties to minority shareholders). Nevertheless, legal scholars continue to teach and cite it. This Essay suggests that Dodge v. Ford has achieved a privileged position in the legal canon not because it accurately captures the law - it does not - or because it provides good normative guidance - it does not - but because it serves professors' need for a simple answer to the question, What do corporations do? Simplicity is not a virtue when it leads to misunderstanding, however. Law professors should mend their collective ways, and stop teaching Dodge v. Ford as anything more than an example of how courts can go astray.
by regnull | 2025-08-13 22:45:58+00:00
I always thought that this story is probably more nuanced, and indeed it is:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kodak-digital-camera-inven...

In particular:

"While this may have been a motivating factor to some at Kodak, such concerns did not stop Kodak — or even Sasson — from further developing digital cameras and making several technical developments that led to Kodak's first publicly available digital camera in 1991, the Digital Camera System."
by pixl97 | 2025-08-13 22:46:18+00:00
Eh, no, you're not entitled to make money from your work.

Moreso the amount of money people make for work isn't well grounded to the amount of effort. I sit behind a desk babysitting computers and get paid what I consider a lot. The guy out there building a side walk is doing far more work yet getting paid far less.

Even worse is almost everything you know and do is from public domain information. It is completely and totally in societies favor to turn your intellectual information into public information after some amount of time so the world doesn't become stagnant under a few large IP owners.
by strken | 2025-08-13 22:46:20+00:00
In Australian English, calm rhymes with farm and uses a long vowel, while com uses a short vowel and would rhyme with prom. (I know this doesn't help much because some American accents also rhyme prom with farm).

Consider the way "Commonwealth Bank" is pronounced in this news story: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MhkuHGRAAbg. An Australian English speaker would consider (most) Americans to be saying something like "Carmenwealth" rather "Commonwealth". See also the pronunciation of dog vs father in https://www.goalsenglish.com/lessons/2020/5/4/australian-eng....

It really ruins some poetry.
by b112 | 2025-08-13 22:46:56+00:00
Context. Note that we're having a discussion about people putting up websites, and being upset about AI snarfing that content.

> I guess what we should really ask, is why on Earth should anyone produce anything, if the end result is not one sees it?

>

> And instead, they just read a summary from an AI?

The above is referring to that context. To people wanting others to see things, and that after all is what this whole website's, this person's concerns are about.

So now that this is reiterated, in the context of someone wanting to show things to the world, why would they produce -- if their goal is lost?

This doesn't mean they don't do things privately for their friends and family. This isn't a binary, 0/1 solution. Just because you have a website for "all those other people" to see, doesn't mean you don't share things between your friends and family.

So what you seem to dislike, is that anyone does it at all. Because again, people writing for eyeballs at large, doesn't mean they aren't separately for their friends or family.

It seems to me that you're also creating a schism between "family / friends" and "all those other people". Naturally you care for those close to you, but "those other people" are people too.

And some people just see people as... people. People to share things with.

Yet you seem to be making that a nasty, dirty thing.
by elliotto | 2025-08-13 22:47:09+00:00
The author is a New yorker columnist, and seems to be a practicing / ex-practicing doctor. They talk about their experience with their various doctors and being passed around different medications with various side effects, to some degree of success. Despite all their expertise and expense, they still cannot find a root cause (which may not exist at all), and struggle to find a medication protocol that works for them.

If you really want a bad trip, head over to the r/migraine and r/chronicpain subreddits. These subreddits are full of people, with none of the resources or experiences as the author, betrayed entirely by the medical system which does not serve them, and condemned to chronic pain. The complexity and range of headache and migraine causes does not lend itself well to a 15 minute GP appointment every few months, and without the technical expertise these people turn to alternative medicine, online pseudoscience, and opiates.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-08-13 22:47:30+00:00
One problem is, making $300k annually and donating $200k of it to charitable causes such as curing malaria does not make an interesting story. Maybe it saved thousands of lives, maybe not, but we can't even point at specific people who were saved... and malaria still exists, so... not an interesting story to tell.

A more exciting story would be e.g. about Scott Alexander, who was harassed by a Wikipedia admin and lost his job because he was doxed by a major newspaper, but emerged stronger than before (that's the interesting part), and he also keeps donating a fraction of his income to charitable causes (that's the charitable part, i.e. the boring part).

Most rationalists' success stories are less extreme than this. Most of them wouldn't make good clickbait.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-08-13 22:47:50+00:00
trademark as far as i know is the only form of IP that is actually rivalrous. that is: use by you deprives me of of my use. for example. suppose i started an (independent) mcdonalds restaurant and used their livery and had trashy service and poor customer service and cleanliness, this would damage (real) McDonald's reputation
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-13 22:48:24+00:00
You can't "reduce the fertility rate" out of a kid you've already popped out. It's not households with people who can only provide value by working within their specialty that are electing to do this. It's households where the parent staying at home can provide value to the home beyond just babysitting the kids who are the first ones electing to do this.
by nilamo | 2025-08-13 22:48:25+00:00
Does that seem like a real solution to you? That it's ok to represent a never-functional operation as one that might maybe work? ...because it could work of you jump through a bunch of undocumented hoops?

It's so wild to me that so many people are apparently against making a user-friendly update. The whole thing seems very against pep8 (its surprising, complicated, non-specific, etc)
by trentellingsen | 2025-08-13 22:48:28+00:00
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We're a fast growing profitable SaaS that helps stores sell Pokemon cards (and other tcgs). https://storepass.co.

Tech stack: Node.js, Express.js, React, MongoDB

Apply here: https://storepass.co/jobs
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-08-13 22:48:35+00:00
> I think people will get really, really mad.

Many of them will get really mad at whoever the person to blame points the finger at, regardless how plausible. But what good does getting really, really mad do, against a government with a functioning panopticon and an effective monopoly on force?

Until now, there has never been a time in human history when an oppressive government had the technical means to effectively surveil and control the population en masse in an automated fashion. It doesn't help that they have a monopoly on advanced weapons, lethal drones, and armed goons. As George Orwell put it: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever".
by adastra22 | 2025-08-13 22:49:39+00:00
There’s a very serious point here. Cryptographers are and always have been deeply concerned with performance. Some of the most skilled low level optimization people I know work on cryptography. It is only relatively recently that computer hardware has gotten powerful enough that cryptography isn’t a serious bottleneck for production systems. In all the recent new crypto standards, a big decision in the whittling down of the finalists was performance.

If someone is telling you that we need a new, faster standard for cryptography, and the selling point is “faster,” you’d better wonder why that wasn’t the standard already in use. If there is not some novel, brand new algorithm that is being employed, the answer is because it is insecure. Or at least that it doesn’t meet the level of security for general use, which took a cryptographer is approximately the same thing.
by diego_moita | 2025-08-13 22:49:42+00:00
> Why would anyone support this knowing how it went the last time?

"How it went"? Seriously?

What about this: the Apple Watch Series 0 up to 3 no longer work with modern iPhones (or Android, anyways). Series 2 and 3 were released after Pebble went out of business.

And I still can use my old Pebbles with Android's latest phones.

TL;DR: Pebble's "sell you out" worked better than Apple's "sticking with you".
by jerlam | 2025-08-13 22:50:51+00:00
The Apple Watch feels like it's designed as a very small iPhone. It has a lot of unnecessary functionality on-device, like email, a separate iMessage client, and its own Focus settings, which can sync to the iPhone, possibly as a requirement to make the watch operate independently. All these things take up battery power.

Also, Apple sees no benefit having their watches last longer, so they're adding features instead of optimizing them, as long as it hits 18 hours or so.
by ubedan | 2025-08-13 22:50:52+00:00
"There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. ... Now, mostly dead is slightly alive. Now, all dead…well, with all dead, there’s usually only one thing that you can do."

I personally believe that illumos will survive for decades, and it very well could rise again for those users that want/need robust stability.

One particularly notable design win was Oxide Computer Company as their hypervisor. They published their reasoning for choosing illumos here:

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P5Mk_IggE0&t=2556s
by b112 | 2025-08-13 22:51:36+00:00
It may be legal in your jurisdiction, but I think this is a more generic conversation that the specific work class being copied. And further, my point is also that other parts of copyright law, at least where I live, view "for profit copying" and "some dude wanting to print out a webpage" entirely different.

I feel it makes sense.

Amusingly, I feel that an ironic twist would be a judgement that all currently trained LLMs, would be unusable for commercial use.
by woodruffw | 2025-08-13 22:52:14+00:00
I don't know what to tell you; I just gave an example of it being functional for a subset of users, who don't deserve to be broken just because it's non-functional on PyPI.

Nobody wants anything to be user-unfriendly. You're taking a very small view into Python packaging and extending it to motives, when resources (not even financial ones) are the primary challenge.
by The_President | 2025-08-13 22:52:27+00:00
Lotta miles using radar detectors -- they detect 3 different bands of radar and some "detect laser." Radar detectors are great insurance, and more useful on the open highway than they are in town, but I've not seen a vehicle give off Ka band emissions that wasn't law enforcement. I have noticed that newer Honda cars set off the K band, which is also used by a lot of the cheap lightpole "your speed" I've seen. Very rarely still I will see X band speed radar being used in the middle of nowhere where the cop cars are older.

Radar detector users just learn to ignore the X and K band alerts while simultanously learning a subconscious quarter second brake reaction time based on the Ka band noise.
by Gigachad | 2025-08-13 22:52:44+00:00
I just went a looked up my closest bowling alley. 4 people, 2 games mid day Saturday and it was $180 AUD.

It’s not surprising a large chunk of Gen Z are choosing to stay at home when it costs that much to go out. I'm starting to think we as a society need to start subsidising social spaces. Local council owned/run bouldering gyms, meetup spaces, etc. Charging a bellow market rate fee just to get people out of the house.
by kylecazar | 2025-08-13 22:55:01+00:00
"One news report found an AI-powered therapist chatbot recommended “a small hit of meth to get through this week” to a fictional former addict."

Not at all surprising. I don't understand why seemingly bright people think this is a good idea, despite knowing the mechanism behind language models.

Hopefully more states follow, because it shouldn't be formally legal in provider settings. Informally, people will continue to use these models for whatever they want -- some will die, but it'll be harder to measure an overall impact. Language models are not ready for this use-case.
by gboss | 2025-08-13 22:55:37+00:00
I guess you’re proposing eliminating the h1b program to raise wages. That would maybe work but our companies would theoretically be less competitive globally. If we’re going to allow immigration based on professional skills then these people should be fast tracked to having the same employment rights as natives otherwise it creates a subclass of workers that depress wages because those that belong to that group will be too risk adverse to ask for more money knowing that they’ll likely have to leave the country if they get let go.
by muzani | 2025-08-13 22:57:06+00:00
I know a juggler who was frustrated as he didn't have "natural" skills at juggling despite being born into a circus family.

He was good at drawing, so one day he took drawing classes. He realized that the class just repeated everything he learned on his own.

It clicked that he was a "natural" at art and not at juggling. What natural skill meant was simply coming to the right techniques early on compared to other people who might need years to discover the same thing.

He eventually became a really good juggler, by interviewing other "naturals" and reverse engineering how they got there (they just practiced better). Most naturals don't even realize what they're doing right or what others are doing wrong. When naturals do classes, they're sometimes not even that helpful.