MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by basscomm | 2025-08-22 23:32:50+00:00
Okay, let's say I have a list of widgets that's in an HTML table. How do I sort the list if I don't want to use Javascript or install some programming language on the web server I'm using (let's say I'm using shared hosting and don't have admin access)? I could sort it by hand, but then I'd need to re-do the whole list if I decided to sort it by another column for some reason. And then if I wanted to add entries, I'd have to insert them by hand into their appropriate place and hope that I don't make a mistake
by indigodaddy | 2025-08-22 23:32:51+00:00
Take it easy. It's not their official support channel. They have tickets like everyone else, with the added bonus that you can nudge them in their chat. You can take advantage of it or not, no forcing involved. The discord is more about community than a support channel. In fact they will usually ask you to open a ticket if you haven't already for direct support issues that don't look to be a general/shared issue.
by keyle | 2025-08-22 23:32:58+00:00
This is kind of a hard read. I'm no mac fanboy but at some point I decided to replace the frankenstein world of computing by something roughly coherent.

Clearly this person just wants hackability and tweakability, which Arch will give you in spades. All power to them!

I'd say this is a "fine" alternative, but not an upgrade.

+1 for using an ARM processor though. Once you leave x86 and the fan parade, there is no going back. Silence is bliss.
by Rohansi | 2025-08-22 23:33:23+00:00
> The actual way to get a good game in most things is to only play with people you trust and, if you think someone is cheating, stop trusting them and stop playing with them.

One of the games mentioned in this article is Rust. Playing with only people you trust defeats the point because it's a game full of betrayal. At best you'll be able to get a group together once and then destroy your relationships more than Monopoly would.
by k310 | 2025-08-22 23:34:10+00:00
The web is full of garbage but one can find sources of specific and detailed information, and also to contact friends directly. So, I choose to go to sites for information (product, “how-to”, or Wikipedia-like), to use aggregators like Hacker News to get a broad brush picture of what’s going on (because no “news” site can be so diverse) and to contact friends directly, and not via a “social” site with billions (?) of users.

Likewise, AI is biased, tries to be all things to all people, and is outright wrong in many cases. It is too easy to nudge in strange directions, and is NOT a nice companion. The lure of advertising is too big not to enshittify it.

However, in strict verticals, it can be helpful.

Since it is by structure non-social, it can’t be used to connect people.

It’s really a matter of choice, and people choose poorly.

“My Internet World” consists mainly of two aggregators, heavily moderated, sites that serve my interests directly, and communications with friends. The latter could be improved by “group forums” outside of the surveillance capitalism monster sites, but nobody seems to care, and should be part of operating systems, but Apple, Google and Microsoft, for example, will never agree on anything, so it’s left to third parties to crack a billion-device market. Fat chance.

As an example, I used to host Moodle on laptops and servers for docs, where people could comment, and it had built-in controls. Perhaps, some outside hosting? Small is beautiful.

People and information. They’ve been poisoned and probably always will as long as people use “big” sites.

Oh, and as for advertising. If I want information, I’ll just go get it. Anyone who pushes information on me is poisoning my cache. Out, damned slop.
by wahern | 2025-08-22 23:35:02+00:00
> Can somebody explain to me how the government made an investement, bought shares, but paid nothing?

Extortion.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have permitted the government to unilaterally cancel disbursements, even in flagrant violation of the plain text of law, impervious to preliminary injunctions, and then put up procedural hurdles to significantly increase the cost of reaching a final judgment in favor of the plaintiff. See, e.g., the most recent decisions issued this week in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Assn.: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/relatingtoorders/24

So presumably the administration's deal was, give us what we ask for and you'll get the money Congress awarded, or don't and wait 1-2 years for any case to wind its way through the courts.
by chrsw | 2025-08-22 23:35:08+00:00
If (or when) China invades Taiwan we will be better off than Taiwan but I wouldn't call us "OK" at that point. That will be a major disruption.

It will take decades for the US to get where Taiwan is now in semiconductor manufacturing, if ever. It's not just about building the most advanced chip factory. It's about re-aligning the entire nation's value system and culture to allow such development to happen in the first place.

We complain about the money we spend already. And now we're supposed to subsidize an entire industry to the point where we can build the most complex machines known to civilization at scale in a time-frame that matters to a global conflict that's potentially approaching soon? I don't see it.
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-08-22 23:36:41+00:00
"good" is a relative term. In health care insurance world, it's the expensive plans, with broad coverage, and the best facilities in network (who participate in research and are at the forefront of treatment - MD Anderson, Mayo, Cleveland, Sloan Kettering etc). You get fast access to the best facilities with the best doctors and best treatments.

Maybe look at the rankings of best treatment facilities globally. Here is the list for oncology. Choose any dropdown you like. You are going to see a lot of "US" at the top.

https://rankings.newsweek.com/worlds-best-specialized-hospit...
by onetimeusename | 2025-08-22 23:36:57+00:00
This is my thought on it too. I don't think this is meant to be a political win so much as US intelligence views chip manufacturing extremely strategically. I also don't know about what will happen to TSMC. But the US has been pushing for US made GPUs as well. This goes back to Biden's admin as well.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/us-govt-pushes-nv...
by dgunay | 2025-08-22 23:37:29+00:00
I don't personally care whether bikes (or scooters) ride on the road or the sidewalk, but my one ask is that:

If they ride on the sidewalk, they should behave like pedestrians. That is, do not blast into the crosswalk at 20mph (impossible for drivers to safely check for in most environments), do not randomly enter the road from the sidewalk, pass pedestrians at a respectful speed and distance, etc.

If they ride on the road, they should behave similarly to motorists. That is, actually obey stop signs (rolling stop, or even treating it like a yield is okay), and actually obey traffic lights.

I'll even tolerate transitioning from one to the other at appropriate traffic stops. Just please don't get upset if I almost run you over for abruptly taking right of way you never legally had.
by heavyset_go | 2025-08-22 23:37:37+00:00
> If someone has suggestions please share.

Stay away from ARM laptops and SoCs, they aren't there yet when it comes to Linux. If you like to tinker, go for it, but expect hardware to just not work, or worse, you'll get stuck on a kernel fork that never gets updated.

If you want a good Linux machine, buy one from a vendor that explicitly sells and supports machines with Linux on them.

IMO you can tinker as much as you want without forcing hardware compatibility issues upon yourself in order to have something to tinker with.
by pxc | 2025-08-22 23:38:10+00:00
I think most of the people like this in the ML world are extreme specialists (e.g.: bioinformaticians, statisticians, linguists, data scientists) who are "technical" in some ways but aren't really "computer people". They're power users in a sense but they're also prone to strange bouts of computing insanity and/or helplessness.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-08-22 23:39:04+00:00
> What exactly do you need to replicate??!

The AI coming up with it? When Google claimed their Wizard of Oz show at the Las Vegas Sphere was AI-generated, a ton of VFX artists spoke up to say they'd spent months of human labor working on it. Forgive me for not giving the benefit of the doubt to a company that has a vested interest in making their AI seem more powerful, and a track record of lying to do so.
by nelblu | 2025-08-22 23:39:53+00:00
Another happy mailbox.org user here who dumped gmail since a little over 4 years now. I'd highly recommend them to anyone who prefers more control on the client app they can use to access emails, calendars etc. Their web interface may not be the best/fastest, but their video conferencing web app is really good. I rarely use their office suite, but good to know it exists.
by _heitoo | 2025-08-22 23:40:02+00:00
TDD does not require an upfront understanding of the solution. It’s primarily about verifying what your application (or module) does, not how it does it. In other words, tests should be written from the outside in.

The common struggle with TDD arises when people reduce it to writing glorified spell checkers. This usually goes hand in hand with the belief that unit tests must always check classes in isolation using excessive mocks—an approach that misses the real purpose of TDD.

It has less to do with thought patterns and more with simply misunderstanding the approach entirely because of clinging to the wrong dogmas they've heard somewhere.
by FireBeyond | 2025-08-22 23:40:07+00:00
> Their no-bullshit returns policy.

> Seriously. Click button, get your returns label. The refund is sent to you as soon as the courier or post office has scanned the barcode.

Hah, exceptions and all, but let me tell you of the absurdity that was me getting a broken bottle of shampoo and Amazon trying to insist that I return the "unused portion" (which was poured out into the bubble wrap mailer) to get a refund. Shockingly (only to Amazon), the UPS store didn't want a Ziploc bag of shampoo.

So they agreed to send a replacement.

Which also was broken.

"I want a refund."

"You already got a replacement, you can't have a refund." "The free replacement was also broken." "We can't refund a free replacement." "I've still paid for a bottle of shampoo that I haven't got". "Oh... uhhh..." before "my supervisor has made an exception and we are issuing a refund"...
by anon291 | 2025-08-22 23:40:23+00:00
The government is not 'bailing' Intel out. Intel's CPU business is profitable. Their manufacturing is not. America gave intel grants to build better manufacturing to secure America's national security interests. Congress did not authorize any acquisition of Intel shares.

All the talk about this from a business / investment side leaves out the simple fact that this is not actually authorized by anyone with the power to actually do such a thing.

Essentially, the government, elected by the public, voted to offer grants to intel, and then intel shareholders woke up today to find their equity had been diluted.
by perching_aix | 2025-08-22 23:40:32+00:00
As the other comment says, Python considers strings to be a sequence of codepoints, hence the length of a string will be the number of codepoints in that string.

I just relied on this fact yesterday, so it's kind of a funny timing. I wrote a little script that looks out for shenanigans in source files. One thing I wanted to explore was what Unicode blocks a given file references characters from. This is meaningless on the byte level, and meaningless on the grapheme cluster level. It is only meaningful on the codepoint level. So all I needed to do was to iterate through all the codepoints in the file, tally it all up by Unicode block, and print the results. Something this design was perfectly suited for.

Now of course:

- it coming in handy once for my specific random workload doesn't mean it's good design

- my specific workload may not be rational (am a dingus sometimes)

- at some point I did consider iterating by grapheme clusters, which the language didn't seem to love a whole lot, so more flexibility would likely indeed be welcome

- I am well and fully aware that iterating through data a few bytes at a time is abject terrible and possibly a sin. Too bad I don't really do coding in any proper native language, and I have basically no experience in SIMD, so tough shit.

But yeah, I really don't see why people find this so crazy. The whole article is in good part about how relying on grapheme cluster semantics makes you Unicode version dependent and that being a bit hairy, so it's probably not a good idea to default to it. At which point, codepoints it is. Counting scalars only is what would be weird in my view, you're "randomly" doing skips over the data potentially.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-08-22 23:40:57+00:00
QUIC implementations are definitely not tuned well in practice for 600Mbps flows on low latency, low loss networks, as the paper attests. But I don’t think almost any uses of video streaming fit that bill. Even streaming 4K video via Netflix or similar is tens of Mbps. In general if you don’t have loss or the need to rapidly establish connections, QUIC performance is not even theoretically better, let alone in practice.

P.S. if there’s a public link to your masters thesis - please post it! I’d love to read how that shook out, even if AF_XDP didn’t fit in the end.
by pornel | 2025-08-22 23:41:05+00:00
XSLT is merely a glorified compression/decompression mechanism.

XSLT used as a "stylesheet" in browsers isn't dynamic, so it's like browsing static HTML pages, but expanding of on-the-wire data representation into repetitive HTML is done with XSLT's rules instead of just gzip/brotli (and it doesn't make much difference, because regular compression is really good at compressing the same things that XSLT is good at generating).

For XHTML the effect is almost identical to preprocessing the data server-side, except minor quibbles about whose CPU time is spent on it, how many bytes can be saved.

The only remaining use-case for XSLT is stopping browsers from displaying RSS like garbage, but that's using one browser feature to fix another browser regression. It'd be easier and more helpful to bring back integrated RSS readers, instead giving you very sophisticated technology for apologising how useless the RSS URL is.
by thinkcontext | 2025-08-22 23:41:48+00:00
The land argument is terrible. 40% of US corn acreage is already used for a form of solar energy, ethanol. Its over 20x less efficient than PV, so it's a huge waste of land.

Wind power on farmland only results in a tiny drop in acreage. And a hot area of study is mixing solar PV with various ag uses. In some cases yield is improved.

Finally, farmland that is used for solar is almost always not the best yielding land. Maybe the farmer is facing a water shortage or is just not that competitive. Solar could be a lifeline in situations like that.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-08-22 23:41:56+00:00
>its desirable for a model to be based on causal rather than merely correlated variables

Ironically, your "likes_hiphop" example would appear to be an unusually clean case of a variable that is likely to exert causal influence.

What do you think the causal effect of listening to lyrics like "Prolly leave my fuckin' show in a cop car" might be, on an impressionable teenage boy say?

From one of the most-streamed hip-hop songs of all time:

https://genius.com/Post-malone-rockstar-lyrics

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2024-05-20/best-hip-hop-songs-1...

>A model based on "socioeconomic status" has a totally different social meaning than one based on race, even if we cannot fully disentangle the two statistically.

I see no evidence Gwern disagrees with this claim. He just seems to be arguing the "cannot fully disentangle the two statistically" part.
by bigrobinson | 2025-08-22 23:41:59+00:00
LLM's are very good at answering technical questions and suggesting new approaches to coding something (whether it's right or not, there is much out there to learn). If you're a noob, it doesn't judge you and stonewall your attempts to pose questions like stackoverflow does. Copilot can accelerate coding with its autocomplete on steroids, doing things like writing out formatted docstrings and completing lines of code according to the logic of the surrounding code. You can easily inspect these small contributions. Trying to get an LLM to code something with any complexity results in mass confusion. I tried it, and it was a learning experience, and a debugging festival. If you're a junior and you rely on LLM's right out of the chute, you're going to be a mushbrain coder I bet.
by stillthat | 2025-08-22 23:42:19+00:00
reductio ad absurdum.

there were a few months when a neighbor couldn't get the oil he needed to heat his home ...

another one fried a circuit and his solar cells were ... well ... powerless ... I mean they weren't, except they were, but you know what I mean.

I had a bicycle stolen once and a car got smashed on the rail tracks to my university ... it was horribly bloody and messy.

A friend broke his good arm once. His other arm was useless.

And we shouldn't touch the Gen part of your AI.
by analog31 | 2025-08-22 23:43:04+00:00
In my experience, there are people out there who don't program, or who don't feel that it's a productive way of doing things. I'm firmly in the Python camp, but recognize that my workplace has several JMP licenses, and the majority of engineers are satisfied with Excel. And I never let anybody see how long it takes me to do things. ;-)

However, those people also belong to the most-of-the-world who are still leery of "open source" or anything that doesn't come from a known brand.

This thing could be an option for someone who wants to mess around with data but isn't comfortable mentioning it to the boss until they see for themselves if it's worthwhile.
by hluska | 2025-08-22 23:43:11+00:00
I could have understood it in a month - onboard, try something out and decide if it helps. But a week and then a meeting on a Saturday to explain why or get fired?

Management is hard so I’m generally a little more patient with managerial missteps. But this is a different level of unreasonable. Heck a lot of developers in the finance world adopt slowly because they’ve worked with compliance departments and it becomes a habit.
by adastra22 | 2025-08-22 23:44:12+00:00
OsStr/OsString is what you would use in those circumstances. Path/PathBuf specifically for filenames or paths, which I think uses OsStr/OsString internally. I've never looked at OsStr's internals but I wouldn't be surprised if it is a wrapper around &[u8].

Note that &[u8] would allow things like null bytes, and maybe other edge cases.
by maxdamantus | 2025-08-22 23:44:44+00:00
The problem is that there are so many functions that unnecessarily take `&str` rather than `&[u8]` because the expectation is that textual things should use `&str`.

So you naturally write another one of these functions that takes a `&str` so that it can pass to another function that only accepts `&str`.

Fundamentally no one actually requires validation (ie, walking over the string an extra time up front), we're just making it part of the contract because something else has made it part of the contract.
by anon291 | 2025-08-22 23:44:53+00:00
I am a republican. I even voted for trump. I am categorically against this. In fact, he should be impeached for it, and I have already called my representative (a democrat) telling her she has my vote if she introduces articles of impeachment against him. This is a red line for me. My parents left a third world country to not have to deal with this shit.
by kaladin-jasnah | 2025-08-22 23:44:58+00:00
From my vague understanding I thought that Hygon is able to build atop Zen 1 IP that AMD gave Hygon, although they can't get anything newer because of restrictions on doing business with China.

Hygon still seems to be making x86 CPUs: https://www.techpowerup.com/336529/hygon-prepares-128-core-5....
by drew870mitchell | 2025-08-22 23:44:58+00:00
This is also where i'm at with ChatGPT. Its bullshit meter doesn't exist, but it has "read" everything in a way that i can't, so it's bad for truthiness, but it's great for search and correlating items in domains that are out of my scope. For those things outside my scope i ask for links to publication or discussions by real humans. If the source conflicts with the ChatGPT output (which does happen frequently) then i ditch the problem for a while. But it's great to replace hours of my own undirected haystack searching with getting credible needle candidates in a few minutes.
by jongjong | 2025-08-22 23:45:14+00:00
I tried AI for coding in my own time since the very early days of GPT 3.5 but I didn't try it in my day job until much later when Cursor came out. Now I use Claude Code frequently.

IMO this was the optimal approach, trying in my own time and not risking damaging the company codebase until it was safe... But I might have been fired, by the sounds of it.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-22 23:46:03+00:00
Yeah but who are their private security, cooks, cleaners, gardeners, handymen, pilots, etc? They're ordinary people and loyalty becomes harder and harder to motivate when the world is burning down.

Also, where are they running to? In an increasingly interconnected world, the whole developed world looks like it'll go down together.

I advocate for things like universal healthcare and providing food and shelter for every person not only because it's moral but also because we can afford it and it preserves the current system. If the ultra-wealthy really took a long-term view, they'd be fighting for those things because they simply won't survive the revolution.

But I believe we're beyond the point where electoral politics can halt a violent upheaval of the current economic order. And many, many people will die in that process.
by janice1999 | 2025-08-22 23:46:43+00:00
What's telling is that, even if his story is remotely true, his target audience for this tale are people who won't blink at potentially destroying peoples lives just for corporate point scoring or, worse, terrorising surviving employees into blindly obeying questionable actions. Anyone with an ounce of empathy would think how terrible it would be to be fired and maybe lose your home or end up in debt because your insane boss bought into the latest fad.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-22 23:47:16+00:00
Have you seen Congress? It’s like Denny’s on senior appreciation day.

They had to wheel McConnell in not long ago because he physically couldn’t walk.

And like I don’t mean to shit on the elderly (directly anyway) but I dunno just spitballing here, maybe we could get some folks in there who weren’t born yet when the civil rights act was passed???
by dmurray | 2025-08-22 23:47:24+00:00
1) could reasonably be self funded. $150 per driver every 5 years is a rounding error compared to all the other costs of car ownership.

2) how much of this is because the drivers are young, and how much because they are inexperienced? If you ban teenage drivers, your 22-year-old drivers will still be inexperienced.