MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BenkaiDebussy | 2025-08-31 01:36:08+00:00
I think one issue you can run into with clever abstractions is that it can be harder to fix/change them if something is wrong with their fundamental assumptions (or those assumptions change later). Something like this happened at my work a while back, where if I had written the code it would have probably just involved a few really long/ugly functions (but only required changing a few lines in and after the SQL query to fix), but instead the logic was so deeply intertwined with the code structure that there wasn't any simple way to fix it without straight-up rewriting the code (it was written in a functional way with a bunch of functions taking other functions as arguments and giving functions as output, which also made debugging really tough).

It also depends how big the consequences to failure/bugs are. Sometimes bugs just aren't a huge deal, so it's a worthwhile trade-off to make development easier in change for potentially increasing the chance of them appearing.
by pyuser583 | 2025-08-31 01:36:40+00:00
This article makes me like the company a lot less. Never had that reaction to a puff piece before.

I mean satanic parties? Not because some of their employees are satanists, but because they like the look?

They know they’re going to miff some people, and one of them is me.

I don’t care what religion their employees are. But when they’re endorsing one religious group to piss off another?

I don’t have to like it, and I don’t. Plenty of movies coming out. Plenty I haven’t seen that came out years and decades ago.

If they weren’t in such a competitive market, i probably wouldn’t care. But they’re so easy to avoid, why not?
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-31 01:36:45+00:00
I keep meaning to reread Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather, about a future where the climate is trashed & weather escalates. Amid this, a group of tornado chasers are trying to find the first "F6" class tornado. https://thierstein.net/index.php?view=article&id=355:bruce-s...

Different extreme weather but fun book.
by nickthegreek | 2025-08-31 01:37:02+00:00
Then i’d like to inform you that I know the same number that you know plus one that think otherwise. You use these professionals in your comment to highlight how mainstreams your views are but will not provide any information. I stated I was open to researching this train of thought more, but you are not interested in helping people understand your point of view. Surely there is a site on the internet that shares your worldview. Please share a name of a community that you feel consists of users that are aligned with your believe structure.
by mahirsaid | 2025-08-31 01:37:06+00:00
I never thought America was this fragile, or should i say the governmental mindset was, to just change things are essentially the backbone of what made America "America" in the first place. Changing policies that otherwise should not be changed is dangerous. When in doubt and there needs to be change then make the changes around the preexisting guidelines/settings, not change those first. Whether we like it or not enemies and competitive economies are reliant on our policies and , therefor vice versa. Changing big things first will make you the outcast, especially to our rich economy--relatively moderate population. Vs other economies of much larger population. There is fragile silver lining there to pay attention too IMO.
by hedora | 2025-08-31 01:37:33+00:00
I built two intel atom nas machines before switching to synology.

One has no linux or windows video drivers (Intel’s fault — no transcoding), and caught fire (not intel’s fault).

The other was one of the ones where the clock signal is basically a doomsday countdown timer. I had to swap it out for a warranty board for some other reason.

So, there’s no way I’d consider an N100. Other options?
by kragen | 2025-08-31 01:37:38+00:00
It's only been 8 years since the attention breakthrough. Since then we've had "sparsely-gated MoE", RLHF, BERT, "Scaling Laws", Dall-E, LoRA, CoT, AlphaFold 2, "Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning", and DeepSeek's training cost breakthrough. AI researchers rather than physicists or chemists won the Nobel Prizes in physics and (for AlphaFold) chemistry last year. Agentic software development, MCP, and video generation are more or less new this year.

Humans also keep struggling with context, so while large contexts may limit AI performance, they won't necessarily prevent them from being strongly superhuman.
by reaperducer | 2025-08-31 01:37:40+00:00
You can change your address with USPS with no fee. You just fill out a form and mail it to Postmaster, $your_town. I did it just last year.

The $2 is only if you choose to do it online.

Bonus: Doing it with paper means you don't give your information to the address change web site operator, which sells it on to a million companies.
by 80hd | 2025-08-31 01:37:53+00:00
Not OP but my two cents - probably laziness and propensity towards daydreaming.

I have extreme intolerance to boredom. I can't do the same job twice. Some people don't care.

This pain has caused me to become incredibly effective with LLMs because I'm always looking for an easier way to do anything.

If you keep hammering away at a problem - i.e. how to code with LLMs - you tend to become dramatically better at other people who don't do that.
by com2kid | 2025-08-31 01:38:07+00:00
JS is very much a minimal language that has a handful of choices. E.g. arrays being objects with field names that are sequentially numbered integers.

The initial equality operator was a mistake, but that was rectified over a decade ago with `===`. Not having a proper int type sucks and holds the language back in a number of ways, but otherwise the language is wonderfully regular.

And anyone who complains about the ecosystem has obviously never tried python, which after a decade of attempts, is now almost on par with JS of a decade ago!
by infamouscow | 2025-08-31 01:38:22+00:00
The United States, uniquely, guards speech under its 1A, excepting only direct calls to violence. A hypothetical like "we ought to hang <person>, but the police would stop us, so have to draw a new plan first" is protected, a case study in law schools for where liberty draws its line.

If you suppress the avenues for peaceful political change, your courting violent revolution. History bears this out. Each, in its moment, seemed an unthinkable leap—overthrowing monarchs or empires—yet each remade its world.

The saying that history rhymes, not repeats, points to immutable human behavior.

Today, revolutionary pressures simmer. The U.S. saw a peaceful political shift in 2024, enabled by free speech's safety valve. Elsewhere, without such freedoms, violence fills the void. I pray other nations find paths to renewal without bloodshed, but history's lessons are not optimistic.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-31 01:39:43+00:00
Huawei doing what the West won't, smashing the product segmentation niches. 96GB is what counts here. Being able to fit a good model is more important than speed, for many folks.

Also worth trying to better compare on efficiency. I don't know how this shakes up, but TOps/W is another figure of merit that also matters a lot, maybe more than absolute TOps count. I don't know how good 1.86TOps/W measures up here, but knowing that this is 150W is quite time where-as a 4090 or whatever is way way more reasonable than how most cards get built.
by lopsotronic | 2025-08-31 01:40:12+00:00
If you've ever waded hip deep into publication technology, you can see how the 2nd CE heading has moved down, down, down, down all the way to the individual word level, in something like a DITA `conref` where the individual word is a reference.

Even though DITA pays my checks, I've always been apprehensive about functionality like `conref`[1] in a general-purpose document. You can only fuss with natural language for so long before you're not a document anymore, and if you're not a document . . well, what are you doing? Why are we here? You've built a conceptual box that's better done in an actual programming language.

But no one's going to argue about the utility of headings (hmm except for the DITA architects, who have disposed of it in favor of a nested transclusion of `topicrefs`). This sort of article is always fascinating, although it is just as concerned with fiction prose.

Off topic, the following would prove darkly prophetic:

Early modern intellectuals like Robert Boyle and John Locke would even rail against Biblical chaptering: Boyle complained of its ‘inconvenient Distinction’, which ‘hath sometimes Sever’d Matters that should have been left United’; Locke for his part despaired that the system of chapter-and-verse left scripture ‘so chop’d and minc’d […] so broken and divided’ that not only do the ‘Common People take the Verses usually for distinct aphorisms’, but even the educated have their powers of memory enfeebled.

[1] I'm calling out DITA but it's also mechanisms in S1000D and DocBook, and you can do the same in Asciidoc (include directive to region) or ReStructuredText (same). The XML specs are clunkier, but the basic concept is the same.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-08-31 01:41:23+00:00
80% of soy is destined for animal feed. While there is undoubtedly some reason why chicken and pigs have historically been fed soy meal ($/kg, nutritional profile, speed of animal growth, etc) -animal feed seems very fungible. If there is a soybean deficit, seems plausible to swap to some other abundant crop.
by bofadeez | 2025-08-31 01:41:44+00:00
So you're arguing it ws low IQ vs low IQ? Okay... Do you have a point? I understand that you're upset for some reasno.

Do you have a counter-point? You think the army is stupid and you know better? What is your point?

Would you prefer your child have an IQ of 120 or 80? If you have a preference, then you're morally inconsistent and don't even realize it? That must be a frustrating condition to go through life with? At least try to have a nice day in spite of your limitations. It's not your fault, we're all equal in God's eyes.
by reaperducer | 2025-08-31 01:42:13+00:00
I didn't know about Yotta, and looked it up …

Adam Moelis told CNBC in June 2024 that 85,000 Yotta customers, with a combined $112 million in deposits, could not access their funds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta_Technologies

Eep!
by nout | 2025-08-31 01:42:58+00:00
Nostr is a bit different - you own a private key that signs any message (and action, but it's all JSON blobs) locally in your app and then you just broadcast these signed messages to servers ("relays") that cache and relay these to other relays or users. Other users can use your public key to cryptographically verify that the message is from you. The benefit is that you fully own your data, you can later decide to rebroadcast it to any other set of relays. It's common to have e.g. 20 relays connected from your app.

There is a group of people that care and use it and it works well.

One argument could be made here that decentralization also means that there will be variety of different protocols and solutions and that's ok.
by wtallis | 2025-08-31 01:43:35+00:00
If you live on the coast, following the details of the forecasts and warnings is extremely important. But my experience living a little over 100 miles inland taught me that the hurricane category is a useful predictor to some extent: anything below category 3 would weaken enough on its way inland that it wasn't a higher risk than routine severe thunderstorms, and didn't require any special advance preparations. The winds would merely be coming from a different direction than usual for our area, and only the areas usually prone to flash flooding had to worry about the volume of rain. It's location-specific, but it is possible to usefully distill the local risk profile down to something where the hurricane category tells you whether it's time to start worrying about that storm.
by danabramov | 2025-08-31 01:44:44+00:00
And yet I could have a realtime public threaded conversation on Twitter, and am having one on Bluesky (regardless of which PDSs or AppViews other people are using), but cannot in principle have on Mastodon (unless everyone I talk to shares my instance). Does this say anything about relative ability of ATProto vs ActivityPub to meaningfully compete with centralized services?

I hear your point that slower conversation can be better. That’s a product decision though. Would you intentionally slow down HN so that our comments don’t appear immediately? You could certainly justify it as a product decision but there’s a fine line between saying you should be able to make such decisions in your product, and your technology forcing you to make such decisions due to its inability to provide a distributed-but-global-and-realtime view of the network.
by serf | 2025-08-31 01:45:07+00:00
Shame that their raison d'etre pre-dominant-model (we won't train on you) changed the moment the model and software became dominant and sought after.

their customer service (or total lack thereof) burned me into a cancellation before hand, the policy changes would have probably had a similar effect. Shame because I love the product (claude-code) -- oh well, the behavior is going to kick up a lot of alternatives soon I bet.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-31 01:45:25+00:00
Up here, Sandy was a cat 2 or 3, but caused 70 billion dollars’ worth of damage, and killed a couple hundred people. Water did most of that damage.

But about 30 years ago, Andrew swept across Florida like a giant roomba, and did a huge amount of damage. It was a cat 5. Wind did most of the damage.

Not sure how they would reconcile these two types of mega-storms.
by card_zero | 2025-08-31 01:46:54+00:00
Rationale. Is it, though? It would be ironic if anyone found it necessary to construct an argument for why argument is unnecessary. (Though that sounds familiar - classical cynicism maybe?)

Well, acting without reason is unreasonable, for sure. But since I don't think knowledge is (mostly) hierarchical, I don't think chains of reasoning are the main part of how we arrive at preferences. To the extent that knowledge does have foundations, the foundations are beliefs, and they're built in no particular order, and survive by merit of seeming to chime with other beliefs, fitting together in a paradigm. That effect where they seem to chime is an impression, a hunch, which is a feeling.

What reasoning can do is tell you "these two beliefs definitely can't go together, because they're logically incompatible", and then you have to jettison one of them (or attack the argument), even if it feels like they both belong. Somewhat disconcerting.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-31 01:48:24+00:00
I think we can formalize constructible structures as any mathematical structure which can be uniquely defined by at least one finite sequence of symbols.

As far as not wanting to pedantically refer to "constructible reals", I agree that doesn't sound fun.

The better solution would be having a clear common pithy term for "unconstructible reals", for:

1. Teaching math related to numbers, until unconstructible reals or other structures had any relevance. I.e. most people never, ever.

2. For talking about algorithms, physics and other constructible structures, where the term reals is pervasivably used to mean constructible reals.

3. Most students get introduced to the fact that the cardinality of reals is greater than the cardinality of integers. But would be surprised, and get more use, out of knowing that the cardinality of instantiatable numbers (the ones they could define, calculate, measure or apply in virtually every situation but highly abstract math games), is EXACTLY the same as the integers.

Un-constructible structures are an interesting but exotic concept that shouldn't be riding around sereptitiously in common vocabulary.

A fair number of responses here involved confusion about what "reals" covers. And this is HN.
by arcfour | 2025-08-31 01:50:09+00:00
Personally I leave the anonymous daily usage ping enabled in the (perhaps naive) hope that my use of Firefox being counted might help keep it afloat/popular. I guess that's not really in the spirit of a privacy-focused hardening guide but it is something that some may wish to consider.

Some may argue that the data that is included is a bit much for a "daily usage ping," an assertion that I won't dispute—but I will say that I appreciate the fact that Firefox even provides this level of transparency in the first place:

https://dictionary.telemetry.mozilla.org/apps/firefox_deskto...
by jalapenos | 2025-08-31 01:51:24+00:00
I think there's something deeply fascinating about socialism, specifically in its persistence of support despite its horrendous, immoral, and corrupt outcomes.

I ponder if it's because, at a fundamental level, humans actually prefer shitness. Like it's anxiety-removing. That having a moment of "triumph of the people", and enjoying the ease of delusionally believing in some leader who says he's going to help us, followed by decades of stagnation (that was completely option but only occasionally meaningfully reversed, e.g. Argentina recently), is actually preferred by people, because above all else, they can handle having less resources, but they cannot stomach the pain of responsibility.

Hence why society actually tends to proceed due to powerful and often disliked unelected leaders, e.g. business tycoons, who can push things ahead despite this tendency.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-08-31 01:52:07+00:00
In the Python world, I see this as the microframework (Flask-esque) vs macroframework (Django). I will take Django every single time.

Flask prescribes so little that every project is a snow flake. Which of the N available options will you pick to handle auth/templating/cookies/email/whatever. Real decision fatigue when trying to enable core functionality. Extra special is that many of these libraries are single author creations, so maintenance and security are a mixed bag.

Django - every project roughly looks the same. You get so much out of the box that you must have special requirements if you must supplement with libraries. Since so many bits are first party, you have greater confidence that code is being maintained/checked for security problems.
by MrDarcy | 2025-08-31 01:53:23+00:00
I’ll bite. We’re expanding into Europe. I literally copied and pasted our entire infrastructure into a new folder named “Europe”

Now there’s a new requirement that only applies to Europe and nowhere else and it’s super easy and straight forward to change the infrastructure.

I don’t see how it was a poor choice to literally copy and paste configs that result in hundreds of thousands of lines of yaml and I have 25 yoe.
by integralid | 2025-08-31 01:54:25+00:00
>try and import goods below the threshold from outside the EU and you will be hit by a variety of fees [2], making it uneconomical for a consumer to buy anything from outside.

This is completely false. I buy tons of cheap things from outside of EU, including China, and they're insanely cheap (often for the price of quality of course). Maybe it's a Denmark problem?
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-31 01:54:36+00:00
"Alas, no distinction is made between (a) a computer owner that wants to write software to run on their computer versus (b) an "app developer" who wants to write "mobile apps" and distribute then to others for financial gain."

I could be wrong:

https://developer.android.com/developer-verification

"For student and hobbyist developers

We're committed to keeping Android an open platform for you to learn, experiment, and build for fun. We recognize that your needs are different from commercial developers, so we're working on a separate type of Android Developer Console account for you. We'll share more information in the coming months."

Will "verification" also be required for "hobbyists", otherwise known as computer owners, or "ad targets" in Google's framing of the www. Who knows

Putting restrictions on distributing bad software ("malware") to others is one thing. It makes sense, But putting restrictions on computer owners ("hobbyists") who write, compile and run software on their own computers is another thing entirely
by neltnerb | 2025-08-31 01:55:08+00:00
Moderation (the intent and success) varies to such a huge extent that it's practically silly to talk about moderation on Mastodon unless you mean moderation on a specific mastodon server (like mastodon.social). But moderation (the process) is intense and servers are usually community run on the change found in a spare couch (i.e. they're volunteers).

I think they do quite well considering the disparate resource levels, but some servers are effectively unmoderated while others are very comfortable; plenty are racist or other types of bigot friendly, but the infrastructure for server-level blocks is ad-hoc. Yet it still seems to work better than you'd guess.

Decentralization means whomever runs the server could be great, could just not be good at running a server, could be a religious fundamentalist, a literal cop, a literal communist, a literal nazi, etc etc. And all have different ideas of what needs moderating. There is no mechanism to enforce that "fediverse wide" other than ad-hoc efforts on top of the system.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-31 01:55:10+00:00
I'm not sure where you reached the conclusion that you can't have a realtime public threaded conversation on Mastodon; I do it frequently. The way it generally works is that clients will auto-at-tag people in the conversation, which makes sure the message is routed to all in the conversation within more-or-less milliseconds.

Auto-at-tagging doesn't scale to dozens and dozens of actively-engaged speakers, but neither does human attention, so that's not a problem that needs to be solved.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-31 01:56:13+00:00
I tend to agree. Having tried the Fediverse twice & each time had my server shut down, had a pretty jank sad partial migration forward path (my old replies kind of being cast into limbo), it just doesn't feel like the fediverse actually has "credible exit" at this point. Decentralized but still semi trapped.

Where-as with Bluesky/ at protocol, most folks are on Bluesky servers, yes. But there's a very strong credible exit case where you can leave the Bluesky servers & just do your own thing. And follow whomever you want to follow.

Bluesky / at proto creates a trust mechanism beyond DNS, creates an identity that can be moved around between hosts or replicated outwards in a verifiable way. I dig ActivityPub, and have been a long time http enjoyer, but it's not ideal imo for social media to need to be so coupled to such strongly DNS based client-server systems.
by hippo22 | 2025-08-31 01:59:42+00:00
From your first link, investment in manufacturing is lower than in 2024 (by like 3%), but both 2024 and 2025 (Trump’s presidency) are the highest datapoints in that dataset.

Also, your second link generally paints a mixed picture, not an outright negative one:

> On balance, the firms indicated an increase in employment, and the price indexes rose further above their long-run averages. The survey’s broad indicators for future activity suggest that firms continue to expect growth over the next six months.

I think it’s misguided to interpret current data as evidence either for or against the current policies. This is something that’s going to take a decade plus to play out. Trying to use data to call winners 6 months in isn’t really possible.