MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fy20 | 2025-08-03 20:38:04+00:00
English often has a lot of redundancy, you could rewrite your comment to this and still have it convey the original meaning:

Regarding cost per token: is a token ideally a composable, atomic unit of information? Since English is often used as an encoding format, efficiency is limited by English's encoding capacity.

Could other languages offer higher information density per token? Could a more efficient language be invented for this purpose, one teachable to humans, especially aspiring prompt engineers?

67 tokens vs 106 for the original.

Many languages don't have articles, you could probably strip them from this and still understand what it's saying.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-03 20:38:06+00:00
> One of the big reasons is that bars are dead.

I only ever knew one guy who was a regular bar patron. He lost his license for DWI and was hit by a drunk driver while bicycling home.

Our peers all had parties and crashed where we were.

Bars always felt like a TV-Only thing. Like self-cleaning houses. Like making 40k/yr in LA and affording bars and nice housing.
by Sammi | 2025-08-03 20:38:28+00:00
Absolutely not. He's making exactly the opposite case. America behaved too weakly towards Russia and that's how they got away with starting a bloody war.

All nations are only beholden to their own citizens and only cooperate with other nations out of self interest.

The only periods of relative peace that the world has ever seen have been during the reign of a supreme hegemonic power.
by kesor | 2025-08-03 20:38:48+00:00
Fiat currencies are like Unicorns and Santa Claus, they stop existing when people grow up and stop believing in them. And there is no need for a "replacement" (i.e. the nothing is better argument) or a need for "enforcement" (i.e. the military argument) or a need for a "system" (i.e. the rule-based-order & courts argument). Fiat currencies simply die off due to lack of trust and belief, and it often happens by way of Gresham's Law.
Show HN: Apple AirTag Page Recreated in React and Tailwind [video]
by andreupifarre | 2025-08-03 20:39:07+00:00
I've been experimenting with speed‑running UI builds. To test myself, I cloned Apple's AirTag landing page using React (Vite) and Tailwind CSS. The goal was pixel‑accuracy, based on a custom Figma layout inspired by Apple's design. I recorded the process as an eight‑minute speed‑run.

– GitHub: https://github.com/andreupifarre/apple-airtag – Video: https://youtu.be/cXrOBLCQqkY

I reproduced the layout using Tailwind's utility classes and a few custom components. I'm eager to hear feedback from fellow builders, what would you improve, or how would you approach this challenge?
by jleyank | 2025-08-03 20:39:46+00:00
Don't forget, the US is the lowest-taxed Western country, so they have lots of room (and lots of inherent wealth) to tax. Whether they have the political will to do this, or the political will to reduce Defence Spending is an open question. But it's not inevitable. Hell, they can always do what other countries have done and abrogate debt or pay it down pennies or quarters to the dollar. Would work once.

Or, the country can break up with each portion rearranging its financing and resources accordingly. There's a number of options, if people choose to think beyond the next social message post.
by roughly | 2025-08-03 20:39:59+00:00
I think this may also be why every discussion of the limitation of these models is met with a “well humans also hallucinate/whatever” - because we Do, but that’s often when some other part of the controlling mechanism has broken down. Psylocibin induces hallucinations by impairing the brain’s ability to ignore network outputs, and Kahneman and Tversky’s work on cognitive biases centers the unchecked outputs of autonomous networks in the brain - in both cases, it’s the failure or bypass of the central regulatory network that induces failure cases that look like what we see in LLMs.
by justinsaccount | 2025-08-03 20:40:59+00:00
I have an older breach data set that I loaded into clickhouse:

SELECT * FROM passwords WHERE (password LIKE '%password%') AND (password LIKE '%123456%') ORDER BY user ASC INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/res.txt' Query id: 9cafdd86-2258-47b2-9ba3-2c59069d7b85 12209 rows in set. Elapsed: 2.401 sec. Processed 1.40 billion rows, 25.24 GB (583.02 million rows/s., 10.51 GB/s.)

Peak memory usage: 62.99 MiB.

And this is on a Xeon W-2265 from 2020.

If you don't want to use clickhouse you could try duckdb or datafusion (which is also rust).

In general, the way I'd make your program faster is to not read the data line by line... You probably want to do something like read much bigger chunks, ensure they are still on a line boundary, then search those larger chunks for your strings. Or look into using mmap and search for your strings without even reading the files.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-03 20:41:01+00:00
One thing I desperately wish the markets would finally recognize is that the call is coming from inside the house: by letting private enterprise capture government, they are destroying the very currency that gives them power through unnecessary subsidies, preferential tax policies, socialization of losses and privatization of profits. Through corporate mass media manipulating voters and outright corruption in donations or associations with politicians, they did this to themselves.

Until markets begin penalizing companies receiving government funding (or whose workers disproportionately rely on welfare due to low wages) with shitty share prices and recognize which sectors should be private while which others should be public, this nonsense will continue unabated.

This is why I loathe believers in the mythos of “the invisible hand of the free market”: if said hand existed, it’s been firing shots into its mouth for decades and everyone in finance has seemed okay with that continuing.
by morpheos137 | 2025-08-03 20:41:16+00:00
I didn't read the whole article yet (lol) but I am not sure what the author's issue is. She seems to take issue with memorizing words. That's how I think I read. I recognize the shape of the whole word, instantly, unconsciously. I don't sound out the word or pay attention to the letters. I don't see why memorizing words is a bad strategy. Many English words are not spelled regularly or phonetically so phonics reading strategies are not necessarily a good route? What else is there besides associating each word with an meaining in memory. It seems less direct to associate a word with a sound and then associate that sound with a meaning. When I am reading I never consider the sounds of parts of words or of letters to get the meaning of the whole word. Rather I associate each word with an idea visually and then my brain makes it available to my consciousness as that idea spoken in my internal reading voice, or less often as a visual experience. For example if I read "red" I hear "red" and see red in my mind's eye and mind's ear.
by DaveZale | 2025-08-03 20:41:22+00:00
Very nice essay, and very relevant in this time of DOGE-like deep cuts across all government sectors in many places.

I worked in a public health laboratory in a high immigration region for 5 years in the 1990s.

At that time, the focus was almost exclusively on microbiology, like testing and monitoring immigrants and at-risk populations for communicable diseases.

But since then, the scope has widened, as your essay suggests. For example, the staggering numbers of fentanyl and other opiates, which have claimed around 500,000 (according to some) US lives! Deaths of despair (disproportionately affecting men) have also become a glaring issue, which often overlap with drug and alcohol abuse.

Communication clearly is important as you suggest. But is it a matter for federal, for example, the US CDC or equivalent, or state or local agencies. You raise some good questions.

Who should prioritize which issues get tackled first? Funding is required. In the US that means the president and Congress have to show concern and willingness to act and fund; likewise in any country.

I hope you are successful in your outreach.
by const_cast | 2025-08-03 20:41:26+00:00
I view it as: yes, in general, "we" should stop kids watching porn. But should I stop kids watching porn? No, they're not my kids.

We don't necessarily need governmental or even technical solutions to everything. Sometimes the solution is "parties involved, figure it out". Ultimately, these aren't my kids, and I don't care much.

If it is really a big problem, then the people who care, i.e. each individual parent, should be taking up the problem. But, they're not. Which signals, to me, it's not actually that big of a problem.
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-08-03 20:41:35+00:00
Most of us, by far, won't either.

But consulting will always be part of the economy. It's impossible for businesses to always have the expertise they need so they hire a consultant. Especially, if they say that they can predict what companies needs to survive or move ahead of others. I bet most large corporations have a number of consultants as part of there executive team right now and always will.
by Rochus | 2025-08-03 20:41:39+00:00
The author seems to have some interesting OS projects, and also his own PL, which seems to be used by the author for his Serenum OS, but many questions remain open (e.g. what's the architecture of the kernel, how does it releate to known kernel architectures and what's the specific advantage, same questions for the PL). Interestingly, no references to other work at all; the author even seems to use his own terminology.
by roughly | 2025-08-03 20:42:45+00:00
Yeah, and this may be part of what the brain is doing - a referent check on our personal sense of identity to validate whether or not a response or action seems like the sort of thing we would do - “given that I’m this kind of person, is this the sort of thing I’d say?”

(Noting that humans are, of course, not universally good at that kind of “identity” check either, or at least not universally good at letting it be guided by our “better natures”)
by happytoexplain | 2025-08-03 20:43:14+00:00
Yeah, sorry. That was probably my last comment on this trend, since I think I've said all I have to say. However, I do think "too common" implicitly narrows the definition of "tangential annoyances" - I believe this is a new phenomenon (though I understand the spirit of the rule is to not have comment threads about things other than the content of the submission).
by gs17 | 2025-08-03 20:43:20+00:00
That's true. I stopped riding the bus because the road to the stop had big speed bumps put in, and it turns out distracted drivers fly off the road when they hit them, and one near miss was enough to make me drive instead (sure it's a cognitive bias, but it's enough to make me pick the more convenient option). One fewer pedestrian means one fewer potential pedestrian death!
by _rutinerad | 2025-08-03 20:44:17+00:00
That is not what ”innovate” means, you’re mixing it up with ”invent”. You could argue that they never invented anything, but not that they haven’t had, and continue to have, plenty of innovations the past decades.

Think every product that was one way, then Apple did it differently and suddenly every product on the market looked like theirs. That’s a long list of both hardware and software.

On the other hand, when was the last time any mass market tech product was _invented_ by that definition (something no one else has done before)? Most products are incremental improvements, even innovations are rare when it comes to mass market products.
by herval | 2025-08-03 20:45:14+00:00
Why does it have to be a single currency? The single-currency reserve is an artifact from the era where settlements required actual wads of cash shipped around. It’s also from an era where most other countries’ currencies were in flux and the dollar was the only non-risky option. This hasn’t been an issue for a few decades now, with euro, yen, pound, franc, etc proving they’re quite stable

With systems like Brazil’s Pix in place (which is supposedly gonna operate across latam countries soon), you can easily settle cross-bank instantly. Countries will then be able to build spot reserves on whatever currencies they need for trade directly, instead of an intermediate “stable” currency
by abeppu | 2025-08-03 20:45:36+00:00
Nit: Is anyone else annoyed by the trend of people using block quote formatting to emphasize their own topic sentences rather than to quote from another source? In addition to being visually annoying, to me it highlights that the author habitually doesn't interact with whatever literature exists (i.e. if they sometimes needed to quote a paragraph from another author, they wouldn't use block quote formatting in this way), which signals that they're more likely to be missing something that's well known to people in the field.
by wahern | 2025-08-03 20:46:06+00:00
Yeah, I would suspect this is intended. The idea being the kids (or parents, really, in communication with teachers) who opt-in to Algebra are more likely to have good study habits, etc. Kids tend to prioritize what the other kids around them prioritize, particularly if there aren't enticing alternatives, so other than raw aptitude the biggest key to success in academia and elsewhere is being surrounded by others invested in the same pursuit.

It's the same rationale more liberal localities use to hold back academically strong students and keep them in classrooms with everyone else. Except you need a critical mass of engaged students and an environment where the less-engaged students are less likely to self-segregate and stick to themselves. I think this is why the liberal policy has roundly failed to achieve the outcomes studies promised. But for the same reason, I would think the risk to the studious kids of adding a minority of bright kids with poor study habits would be minimal. OTOH, the academically successful cohort succeeds precisely because their parents segregate them into higher performing environments; they're not thinking quantitatively or care about averaged group outcomes. What they're doing works for them, so they're gonna fight back tooth-and-nail.

There are parallels here with the rationale many used to justify racial segregation, and that stills echoes today in terms of the distribution of parents who understand how the system works. But by-and-large I think what undergirds the parental hand-wringing and pushback today are more direct heuristics--the failure to choose to opt into Algebra, etc, communicates unsuitability for the higher socio-economic class.
by weitendorf | 2025-08-03 20:46:23+00:00
The bitterest lesson is we want slop (or, "slop is all you need")

Maybe you can recognize that someone else loves a certain kind of slop, but if LLMs became vastly more intelligent and capable, wouldn't it better for it to interact with you on your level too, rather than at a much higher level that you wouldn't understand?

If you used it to make you a game or entertain you with stories, isn't that just your own preferred kind of slop?

If we automate all the practical stuff away then what is left but slop?
by stego-tech | 2025-08-03 20:48:01+00:00
Pretty much this. There is no “spare part” currency to swap in for the dollar and preserve the modern economy, here. The end of dollarization means the end of post-WW2 economic policy wholesale.

So what we’ll end up with is a post-WW2 supply chain but in a world where every currency dynamically floats, even the dollar. It’ll be a decade of price shocks, trade wars, and likely conflict as everyone vies to define the next era of economic power, until a smattering of core currencies (likely the Yuan, Euro, and Dollar) emerge on top for each respective region.

That’s my armchair theorycrafting, anyway.
by farkin88 | 2025-08-03 20:48:07+00:00
Big takeaway for me: the win isn’t better prompts, it’s semantic guarantees. By proving at the bytecode level that the pixel loop is side-effect-free, you can safely split it into long-lived workers and use an order-preserving queue. It's an aggressive transform copilots won’t attempt because they can’t verify invariants. That difference in guarantees (deterministic analysis vs. probabilistic suggestion) explains the 2× gap more than anything else.
by morpheos137 | 2025-08-03 20:48:56+00:00
I really wish the top comments on this article were not about the off topic and in my opinion unrelated process of reading music.

Musical notes deal with sounds and possibly with time where as words deal with abstract meaning. There is no such thing in written music. Each note corresponds to a sound wereas for words each letter is effectively meaningless on its own and at least for me the reading process is about my mind recognizing words and associating their consensus cultural meaning with the shape word I know. For me the sound of the word is irrelevant with respect to whether I know the word or not. In fact I remember when I was younger my vocabulary would often exceed my understanding of what words sound like for rarely used words that i knew the meaning of but seldom if ever heard spoken. So I could read the word but might not pronounce it right. Anyway for how my mind works memorizing words has been effective. I don't really understand the phonics people.
by cuuupid | 2025-08-03 20:48:57+00:00
What will you buy instead? The point is that the dollar is strong not purely because the American economy has been (and continues to be) the largest on the planet, but also because it is not currently possible to topple the US since its global activities are tied strongly to its military.

The only realistic options that exist at the moment are going back to the gold standard (not viable for most countries) or shifting to the yen (which is tied to the dollar as Japan is the largest holder of treasuries).
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-03 20:49:22+00:00
There is no "overspending." There is only undertaxing. The debt is literally just the accumulated difference between spending and taxation.

If extreme wealth was taxed, the debt would be zero. The point isn't even to "pay for spending" but to enforce a functional social contract, and to limit the political and democratic distortions created by extreme inequality.

"Markets" should not have a veto on policy in a democracy.

Making it non-zero is a policy choice. Inflating away this debt is also a policy choice. There is nothing accidental about this.

What will not be inflated away is personal debt. That will remain linked to inflation even after the currency is revalued, and will be captured from personal assets wherever possible.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-08-03 20:50:32+00:00
I was taught in school that Perspective was invented in the Renaissance, and before that all art was flat. This is obviously not true to anyone who's studied greecian art beyond a pop-culture level, but that's the level most people have.

It does seem to have waxed and waned; going in and out of popularity to the point of being a lost art multiple times. Wikipedia doesn't go so far as to divide it into eras, but given the time gaps, it's possible that there were multiple "inventions" of perspective in the sense of formalized techniques and pedagogy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)
by nostromo | 2025-08-03 20:50:46+00:00
If you think the US has a debt problem, the Eurozone is much worse. At least America has economic growth along with debt growth. The EU has slightly less debt but zero economic growth and almost zero population growth (and negative organic population growth).

Africa's GDP is tiny and will not a serious contender for any sort of reserve currency status for many decades. I can't imagine a wave of automation will do anything positive for most of Africa.
by herval | 2025-08-03 20:50:49+00:00
You’re probably reading it in reverse. The jobs number is showing what economists predicted when this whole tariff wack-a-mole started: that companies would stop hiring and start raising prices, to accommodate for the instability being created.

Neither the FED nor anyone else had actual numbers 3 months ago, since they are always a pre-read. This clearly wasn’t as bad in months prior to the tariff scare, so this fabricated narrative that the FED is somehow responsible for this sudden slowdown doesn’t add up
by frankharv | 2025-08-03 20:51:55+00:00
I don't watch YouTube but here a mariners take.

I notice that there is a very large Car Carrier in Norfolk Drydock getting painted white to grey.

Looks like they are converting commercial vessels to military use.

I can't imagine how they handle in big winds. A giant sail like surface.

Flickertail State Crane Ship was recently out doing testing. It is old but capable.

Gaza Pier help was a bust. Those piers are not meant to be installed long term. We looked like clowns. Not Omaha Beach.
by WickyNilliams | 2025-08-03 20:52:12+00:00
Why is an array better than pointer arithmetic and manually managing memory? Because it's a higher level abstraction that frees you from the low level plumbing and gives you new ways to think and code.

Streams can be piped, split, joined etc. You can do all these things with arrays but you'll be doing a lot of bookkeeping yourself. Also streams have backpressure signalling
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-03 20:52:13+00:00
Growth is over globally except India and Africa due to demographics [1]. Developed countries and unions will compete for the last of the world’s young, prime age workers over the next century. Financial stability will be a function of who manages this situation to the best of their circumstances. Can you attract and retain these workers and leverage that for economic success? If so, that’s where investment will flow and capital will remain invested. My thesis is Europe is best positioned to succeed in the near term, based on the above.

Sibling comment mentions Europe needs the US for energy; Canada has known fossil gas reserves of ~200 years and LNG export capabilities, and Europe is scheduled to end Russian fossil gas consumption in 2027 [2]. The world is deploying 1GW of solar every 15 hours; like the rest of the world, everyone will arrive at energy independence/sovereignty eventually through cheap renewables (solar primarily, but also wind) and battery storage (LFP and sodium most likely, as of this comment) exported by China to the world. China is also selling inexpensive EVs to as many global consumers as they can find (while internal sales of battery electric and hybrids is already at ~50% this year). This leads me to believe the future of US oil and gas is an internal petrostate similar to Russia, not an energy exporter of relevance far into the future.

[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43506589

(not investing advice)
by alphazard | 2025-08-03 20:53:17+00:00
The timing of a migration away from dollars will depend mostly on US fiscal and monetary policy. Better financial infrastructure on-chain isn't going to do it alone.

The stablecoins will absolutely accelerate the transition, so that when it does happen, it happens more quickly. Anyone with a stablecoin can transact on-chain for something else. And anyone holding stablecoins will be using an app that has familiarized them with the idea of alternate currencies and currency exchanges.

This is probably a good thing. A realistic not terrible scenario is a few year period where you have to pay attention to exchange rates, but your net-worth is mostly unaffected and at the end of it you're paying for groceries with something that's not USD.
by p_ing | 2025-08-03 20:53:37+00:00
You see it on reddit quite a bit. I wonder where the author learned that style of writing from; certainly no institution that could teach one to properly write to an established literary style.

It's super annoying. There's no reason to bold the chosen text, or any text in this post. I mean, it's on substack ffs.

Worse is when authors use emojis in titles or text. Maybe we can blame tiktok brain rot or just gen-z in general. There's gotta be someone we can toss under the bus and I bet they don't know what cursive handwriting is!

(And technically this violates the HN rules)