MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Alecocluc | 2025-08-21 20:38:00+00:00
Ever since I started down this path, I’ve asked myself this question. I saw gurus like Marc Lou (@marc_louvion on X) launching 20 startups and it seemed kind of crazy to me. On the other hand, entrepreneurs like David Park (founder of Jenni AI) have focused on one idea that worked and scaled it to infinity, reaching $9M ARR.

But is it really beneficial to build so many startups, or is it better to pursue one good idea? Are people truly willing to pay a subscription for just anything? If that were the case, managing so many subscriptions would be insane—the real winners would be startups like Subbuddy or ClickUp.

After a few years of being obsessed with this world, I’m still undecided on this topic.
by nailer | 2025-08-21 20:38:04+00:00
> Each update seemed to chip away at something I liked about the platform.

I have a MBP, 48GB RAM running today's stable version of macOS Sequoia 15.6.1

If I do cmd+space and type something it has 0 results for anything in my Documents folder. It's been that way for momnths despite all the OS updates.

macOS used to be good.
by blobbers | 2025-08-21 20:38:10+00:00
First of all, shocked people still use d3. Hasn't there been something better? It's pretty ancient by javascript standards. Do people still use jquery too? Haha... been about a decade since I touched this stuff!

Second of all, isn't it ungodly slow? I get that it can draw a few boxes nicely, and maybe shuffle them around, but I had to write my own engine using html canvas because d3 couldn't get svg to flow properly if I had thousands of pixels in my image.

Honestly, if you're going to go through the trouble of understanding d3, I would just write your own javascript canvas to animate things.
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-21 20:39:01+00:00
Sure, f you trust the administration to rely on objective standards rather than making arbitrary and capricious decisions at scale. Looking at social media, I see a lot of people (including GOP county chairs, example below) saying things like 'deport them all, let them reapply for re-entry,' which kinda proves the argument that it was never about illegal immigration in the first place.

https://x.com/BoFrenchTX/status/1958611053119775213
by rawgabbit | 2025-08-21 20:39:10+00:00
It said 41% of the water used in the US is for thermo electric cooling. Albeit, it didn't break this down into saltwater vs freshwater. It also said the vast majority of this water usage is due to older plants that did not recirculate the water. The newer plants that recirculate the water only used a tiny fraction of water in comparison.

So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up almost 40% of water used today?
by Bostonian | 2025-08-21 20:39:14+00:00
https://archive.is/676aO

...

The best writers don’t only keep you engaged with a gripping tale. They will, under the guise of that compelling narrative, teach you more about human motivation that lies at the base of everything in politics, business and life itself.

Fiction engages the emotions as well as the intellect in a way very little nonfiction can. The ease with which stories become embedded in the memory also gives a novelist the edge. We are much more likely to remember a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end than a list of valuable instructions. While I can barely remember a page from my undergraduate textbooks, I can still recount stories I learned as a child.

The good novel exploits the virtues of storytelling to capture a truth. I doubt there is as good a nonfiction book that conveys the reality of the life, economics and politics of New York in the 1980s as well as Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” You can read as many guides to living your best life as you wish, but I defy you to find a better account of the travails of love, happiness, faith and morals as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” Histories of the Cold War are fine, but nothing portrays the moral ambiguities and complexities of geopolitics as effectively as John le Carré’s novels of the age. (Though not his later ones, where the espionage-era paranoia that had entered his soul descended into generic anti-Western, anticapitalist tropes as tiresome as any critical theory textbook.) Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” is as good a portrait of 20th-century American capitalism as any economics treatise. If you think you’ve only just discovered technology’s corrosive effect on the human spirit, read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” from 1932.

...
by cauch | 2025-08-21 20:39:33+00:00
Even if we are generous and accept that GU was more criticized than other bullshit papers, the claim still needs to prove that the difference of treatment is due to some real bias and not a simple fluctuation.

"I saw 2 persons being judged by a judge, and turned out they were both guilty of the same crime, but the first one got less than the second one. The first one had the same letter in second position in their family name as the judge, so it's the proof that judges are biased favorably towards people who have the same second letter"

But then, the problem is that "their own bullshit papers" is doing a very heavy lifting here. The point of Hossenfelder is that String Theory is as bad as GU. But is it really the case? Hossenfelder keep saying it's true, but a lot of people are not convinced by her arguments and provide convincing reasons for not being convinced. The same kinds of reasons don't apply to GU, so it already shows that GU and String Theory are not on the same level. Even if String Theory has some flow or is misguided on some aspect, does it mean that the level of rejection in an unbiased world will obviously be the same as any other bullshit theory.

Another aspect that is unfair is that a lot of "bullshit theory within the sector" dies without any publicity. They stop rapidly because from within the sector, it is more difficult to surface them without being criticized early. For example, you can have 100 bullshit theories "within the sector" and 3 survive and surface without being as criticized as GU while 97 have been criticized "as much" as GU during their beginning which stopped them growing. Then, you can just point at one of the 3 and say "look, there is one bullshit theory there, it's the proof that scientists never confront bullshit theories when it comes from within". Without being able to quantify properly how the GU-like theories are treated when they are "within", it is just impossible to conclude "when it is from within, it is less criticized".
by simianwords | 2025-08-21 20:40:07+00:00
LISEP's report is a _non peer-reviewed_ white paper whose credibility I can't ascertain. Can you tell me how I can verify its credibility? Do I have to verify the report myself? Have you verified their methodology?

If the LISEP report had a mistake in it, how would you know about it? Did they have anyone from the outside review it?

The size of an institution is important because it gives us a proxy for its credibility to an extent. Yes I do believe that Amazon, US Department of Defense etc are more trust worthy in general than a random institute with 10 employees.

But in this case, I must admit I was wrong in using head count as a proxy because I realise smaller do institutions produce good white papers. But my main point is still valid: we are using a non peer reviewed methodology that has close to zero endorsements from anyone serious. We should stick to stats like ones from CBO/BLS which have more rigorous scientific standards.

CBO's report is much more rigorous

"CBO’s analytic reports are also reviewed by outside experts who specialize in the issue at hand, when that is practical. In some cases, those experts are members of CBO's Panel of Economic Advisers or Panel of Health Advisers. Although such experts provide considerable assistance, CBO is solely responsible for its work."

>If they don't, you're just adding epicycles to a very flawed way at arriving at truth. Do you see this as a stable epistemic methodology you'd stand by elsewhere, or is it a situational tactic for this debate?

At a more personal level - please stop using cringe language. No one is going to be impressed with it. If you do want to convince someone and engage in conversation, speak their language.

To your main point of "Veracity is a function to closeness to truth". Lets say hypothetically a redditor (since you have disdain for them apparently) comes up with a critique of this paper. Without doing your own analysis how do you verify whom to believe? You had already implicitly dismissed them - a dismissal which I think is fair, but why did you do it? Because it is just a random person somewhere with no credibility. Much in the same way LEPIS lies in the spectrum between credible and not so credible.
by AIorNot | 2025-08-21 20:40:31+00:00
Sure choice of needing space, walking sure these are subjective, but for many many people the choice to where to live in not determinable. America is such a selfish society in regards to this when it comes to local democracy. (ie NIMBY, car focused, no care given to future population densities)

I spent 20 years of my life in Houston and saw first hand how horrible it is for non drivers and poor people to get around, lose their livelihood when losing car access etc -ie the working poor

Any major city must support the needs of its poorest majority as much as possible, and a city the size of Houston must have a better transportation and social spaces -it is absolutely horrible.

now if you want space and move to places that only work with cars sure, but our cities are suffering the lack of support for walkability and public transport. Anyone who has spent time in European cities where these spaces and public transportation options exist by necessity can see the value
by vfclists | 2025-08-21 20:41:03+00:00
What kind of legal culture gives the Govt the power or the right to sue parents for "involuntary manslaughter" because their child got killed trying to cross the road?

What I see here is basically or low income probably poorly educated couple who didn't have the intellectual knowledge/capabability to seek proper legal support and advice to fight the case.

This is nothing more than the abuse of the justice system, otherwise known as lawfare.
by epolanski | 2025-08-21 20:41:13+00:00
> However, already by having been through the degree there is a whole set of skills that one would not have gotten otherwise.

Of course you would/could.

1) a degree doesn't imply you've built any specific skills or retained any information, just that you passed a set of exams. I've met a huge bunch of people from important universities that clearly studied just to pass exams with good degrees, but where absolutely crap problem solvers and even worse coders.

2) plenty of brilliant engineers did not graduate, from Leonardo Da Vinci to, just to stay in software John Carmack, Zuckerberg, Paul Allen, Romero, Wozniak (technically he did, 12 years after founding Apple), Karp, and many others.

What I'm trying to say: engineering skills are acquired by sheer will of studying and solving problems. And in 2025 you can follow pretty much any course/lecture from most top rated courses just watching your computer. A person doing so with interest will leapfrog anybody sitting there and going through the exam just because he has to.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-21 20:41:28+00:00
>Are these numbers reliable?

For murders and serious violent crimes like stabbings and robber/assaults resulting in major injuries, or for serious thefts, in a country like Canada or the U.S. i'd believe the numbers are. Very few people in these countries, where perception of police as useful more or less exists, would fail to report such crimes.

On the other hand, just to showcase a counterpoint, in countries like the one I live in (Mexico) even violent crimes and major thefts often don't go reported simply because in many parts, police are considered so useless (or even sometimes collusive with criminals and thus counterporductive) that even for serious things, they're not contacted unless absolutely necessary.

Even with these tendencies however, you'd be surprised how often people do go through the formality of filing a report just in case it turns up a result, particularly for murders and kidnappings, where desperation obligates them.
by stetrain | 2025-08-21 20:41:55+00:00
Yes in the sense of suburbs that commute by car into the city, requiring that city to maintain adequate infrastructure, but prefer the lower taxes of the suburbs.

If you choose a lifestyle that requires more to be spent per capita on roads, utilities, and public services then you should pay for that cost.

Suburbs themselves should also have variety. People love small towns, but instead of a mix of small towns with vibrant dense centers surrounded by less dense housing options, we just build sameness stretching in all directions.
by mrkstu | 2025-08-21 20:42:15+00:00
Sales engineers should be the spirit animals of PMs/SDEs.

They often are having to integrate the company's software with the whole stack of the customer.

They experience the pain of real world setup/optimization/bugs more than anyone else in the company.

They generally are savvy to the challenges of actual software engineering and what is realistic to get done in a given time frame.

They are usually technically articulate enough to frame the challenges in an understandable way for SDEs.

They are driven to improve the customer experience because it also makes their lives better, vs the sales guy looking for ways to just close a sale for commission.

They are very aware of what the competition is coming into bake offs with as far as features and support.

They can let you know what bugs and missing features are costing the company the most money and customer sat.
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-21 20:42:23+00:00
So what exactly is the "much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out" of Rust? If I'm understanding the post right, that language still has references, lifetimes, traits, enums, etc., because all of those features cohere; you can't remove just one and expect the rest of the language to still work. Once you grant all those features, your language isn't much smaller or cleaner than Rust; your language pretty much is Rust.

The last section gives two different hints as to what this "smaller and cleaner" language might be, but neither of them fully makes sense to me.

First, withoutboats's "Notes on a smaller Rust". That post and especially its sequel are great and I like them a lot, but the title is fairly misleading as to what they're getting at. The language that boats sketches out in those posts has significantly different design goals from Rust; in particular, it abandons the requirement of low-level programmer control over runtime behavior, and so is unsuitable for many use cases that Rust is used for. The idea, rather, is to explore what lessons Rust can offer for the design of a language with more "mainstream" requirements (i.e., one that can afford things like a tracing garbage collector, and wants to avoid Rust's downsides compared to other popular languages, like slow compile times and heavy syntactic salt). That language is not "struggling to get out" of Rust; Rust doesn't want to be it.

Second, "In a manner of speaking, that smaller Rust is the language I fell in love with when I first learned it in 2018. Rust is a lot bigger today, in many ways, and the smaller Rust is just a nostalgic rose-tinted memory." I've explained above why I don't think boats's proposed "smaller Rust" is anything like the real Rust was at any point in its history (at least after the very early days, once the designers figured out that they were targeting C++'s niche). In most fundamental respects, Rust hasn't changed that much since 2018, and a lot of the changes (like the new editions) are about making it more syntactically flexible and increasing the fraction of sensical programs that compile. That said, there are two big exceptions: async and const, which were much more minimal in 2018 and have since expanded to big complex meta-features with many interlocking parts that weren't part of the language's original core. If the claim is specifically that Rust was smaller and cleaner before async and const, then by all means, say that! But the post doesn't, leaving us to try to figure out what was meant.
by Terretta | 2025-08-21 20:42:35+00:00
Contentless clickbait headline:

In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses

One can rewrite clickbait or info-less headlines, while avoiding editorial. A good one is usually either in the sub-head or first couple sentences:

"Gemini apps ... median prompt ... consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second."

Possible contentful headline that fits in 80 chars:

Median Gemini text prompt consumes 0.24Wh energy, same as microwave for a second

Learned something even without a click, can decide if you want to!

---

Even better, skip the reblog and link the research, with a headline from the abstract:

• Median Gemini Apps prompt uses less energy than watching nine seconds of TV — https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...
by bkettle | 2025-08-21 20:43:11+00:00
To what extent is having a car convenient because we've built our cities under the assumption that people own cars? Where I lived for a year in SF (near Church station) I found that for day-to-day life I never once wished I had a car. Groceries, restaurants, bars, and parks were all within (short) walking distance, and my job downtown was easily accessible by transit.

As much as I love college campuses, I think they often miss out on having interesting amenities within the walkability of the campus itself. Still, going to school in Cambridge I never wanted a car and the few times I rented one for a longer trip or a move I wished that I didn't have to.

I think cars are and probably should be convenient for certain things (mainly moving, buying furniture or other big stuff, and to a lesser extent getting into nature). But for day-to-day life, it is a sign of failure (and wasted potential!) when cars are convenient.
by anmiller3 | 2025-08-21 20:43:13+00:00
I appreciate the tact taken by the writer in general, despite deeply disagreeing. However the gross generalizations and myopia of the argument are clear enough from the closing lines:

> I wonder if the massive shift in urban vs. rural living over the past 200 years has happened at the expense of our natural inner urge for open space. Am I bad because I want to live on land that otherwise would have been used for hay farming?

This extrapolation, that humans innately desire to live apart from one another, is a bold claim and directly refuted by the immense populations of voluntary urban dwellers. For certain, pro-density arguments against car-centered development can suffer from the inverse generalizations, and it should be called out in either case.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-21 20:43:36+00:00
I disagree. I find the relatively recent 2020 bubble to be closer to the DotCom bubble.

100 billion dollar video conferencing tools, 50 billion dollar treadmills, 20 billion dollar EV startups that are vaporware, and space tourism companies valued over 10 billion that are hot air.

In the public equity space, much of the AI market cap is contained in megacap tech companies which have fortress balance sheets and strong cashflows to support the capex and AI initiatives. That begs the question "are they overvalued?", and well, yes, they could be, but that would move the needle closer to the Nifty 50 historical parallel than the DotCom bubble. The DotCom bubble at its zenith was closer to the massive 2020 "profitless tech" bubble (or duration bubble, to be more general), in that it devolved into pure fantasy. Indeed, it rewarded fantasy, and punished realism and anything that brought the narrative down to earth (like profit at any expense to future growth).

https://i.ibb.co/d4c7kD9S/bigmoo.webp (and we saw how that chart ended...)

It's very strange to me how the massive 2020 bubble is glossed over. That was the most DotCom-esque speculation I've seen since, well, the DotCom bubble, and it's something I definitely had exposure to due to doing relative value SPAC warrant trading over that timeframe on dozens/hundreds of those names. I'm trading these AI hype names too, but today isn't really close to DotCom or 2020 when it comes to tone. Yes retail participation is high, but it's mostly in names like Palantir and not a full on delusional speculative mania. DotCom was also full of outright scams. 2020 was full of outright near-criminal level scams as well, with projections fabricated by hype-men to an insane degree (see image below to sum it up), eventually requiring the SEC to step in and shut down 90% of the SPAC IPO machine with threats of criminal proceedings. Today's AI startups feel very "modern venture capital" in comparison, and at least the typical SaaS metrics like ARR aren't totally ignored in favor of fantasy narratives (well, maybe mostly, but not close to full on DotCom mania levels).

This was an actual slide from SoftBank's investor deck during the 2020 DotCom 2.0 bubble (perhaps the best slide of all time), explaining how they were going to weather the storm with their massive hoard of speculative investments: https://i.ibb.co/MknYdQdY/valley.jpg

Make no mistake, the forward returns of these rich AI names are probably quite terrible, I just honestly think today's market is more like Nifty50 than DotCom. And while 2020/DotCom style unwinding mainly hurts the speculators, the index concentration unwinds - ex: NVIDIA down 70%, PLTR down 90%, etc - can have more of an impact on real 401ks than Virgin Galactic and Nikola going to zero, because long market cap weighted indexes is the ultimate crowded trade.)
by stetrain | 2025-08-21 20:44:13+00:00
Asking most Americans to go car free isn’t realistic.

But I think asking for the kinds of development that reduce the need for and length of car trips, as a choice of place to live, is reasonable.

There’s also a vast gulf between a car-free household and the current situation where many suburban households have 3+ cars due to two working adults plus children in high school or college, each of which needs their own car every day.
by silversmith | 2025-08-21 20:44:38+00:00
Hah, I know, been around forests since childhood, seen (and done) plenty of sketchy stuff. For me it averages out to couple days of forest work a year. It's backbreaking labour, and then you deal with the weather.

But man, if tech goes straight into cyberpunk dystopia but without the cool gadgets, maybe it is the better alternative.
by Gergiana | 2025-08-21 20:44:43+00:00
I just checked out and it’s surprisingly fun and useful. The interface is really simple . you just enter the heights and it instantly shows a visual comparison. I tried it with a few random examples (celebrities, athletes, and even fictional characters) and it actually made me realize how much harder it is to picture height differences without a tool like this.

What I liked most is that the site isn’t cluttered or overloaded, it just does one thing really well. It feels like one of those small, well-built web tools that you don’t know you need until you try it. I could see it being useful for parents tracking kids’ growth, or just for fun curiosity comparisons. Definitely bookmarking it.
by janalsncm | 2025-08-21 20:44:45+00:00
> From an Engineering point of view it's perfectly logical

Most physics papers have not been debunked or have rebuttal papers written about them. If Weinstein was serious about his work, he would either respond to the criticism or revise his position to something which is useful. It shouldn’t be our job to dissect his theory to find what can be salvaged.

If I open a PR and it fails some CICD tests my next move should be to fix the PR or fix the tests. Not go on Joe Rogan and say my PR was just “entertainment”.