MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akst | 2025-08-05 01:23:58+00:00
I've gone back to university as an adult to study econometrics, already with a software background.

It has been quite an adjustment, the hardest part isn't really the content, there have just been assessment tasks that are more demanding in time than cognition. I think a big part has been these are introductory subjects.

You have much less agency over your schedule outside university itself than you would have when you're working as well, which has been a massive PITA having previously worked as a software engineer for quite a while. As an institution it just doesn't respect peoples time, which is fine when you're much younger and you're just coming out of school (another institution that doesn't care for your time outside of it).

I think my problems have been compounded by the fact this is a undergraduate degree not a masters. There was only a masters for applied Econ in my area (which is much less data and math focused than econometrics), I've had this conversation 100 times, not looking to repeat that, trust me the moment I see an option to change to a masters in my area of interest in the city I live in, I would jump at it. But my choice to go back to uni to some extent is an as much an act of consumption as it is getting a piece of paper to saying "you can trust this man with econ".

Anyways in these first year subjects, you'll have assessment tasks like "make a recording of you demonstrating your understanding of <basic function in excel>, explain the value of <basic function in excel>". They are easy subjects but they are also really time consuming so to some extent it feels degrading. I would take steps to skip the subject based on my prior experience but the focus of these subjects isn't even Excel, its just thrown in there because they anticipate you have little experience with these things and it'll be useful in later subjects when it becomes assumed knowledge.

Edit: phrasing
by Telaneo | 2025-08-05 01:24:58+00:00
Everything (the program for Windows) gives Windows very good search, and it's not really doing any magic. It's just taking the NTFS journal and putting a decent GUI around it. File content search is optional and much slower, and indexing of other file systems is done the manual way (by actually searching through the entire file system). The fact that Windows hasn't done what Everything has already done goes to show it's not that Microsoft can't, but rather that they don't want to, unless every single Win32 developer over there has either kicked the bucket or moved on to better pastures.
by silentkiller17 | 2025-08-05 01:25:04+00:00
Define a new series in p: p.mySeries = new BrownianGenerator(start, mu, sigma) p.mySeries = new BrownianGenerator() // With default params

Combine and transform series: p.ma = p.mySeries.sma(20) // Simple Moving Average p.ema = p.mySeries.ema(10) // Exponential Moving Average p.emaCustom = p.mySeries.ema(10, 0.3) // EMA (specify alpha) p.diff = p.mySeries.subtract(p.ma) // Difference p.sum = p.mySeries.add(p.ma) // Sum p.prod = p.mySeries.mul(p.ma) // Multiply p.prod = p.mySeries.mul(8) // All arithmetic operations work with numbers p.absdiff = p.diff.abs() // Absolute

Chain series:

p.diff10 = p.mySeries.subtract(p.ma).mul(10)

Render series in the chart: show(p.mySeries, p.ma) // Show selected series showAll() // Show all series in p
by k310 | 2025-08-05 01:25:17+00:00
How many more people must go through the agony of software enshittification before free and open source software is more widely adopted and better supported?

I started making a list of FOSS Trello alternatives. If none suit your needs, contribute dollars or code to one.

All other good reasons aside, FOSS is the only way to get what you want outside of building your own, but public repos give you economy of scale plus the ability to make your bespoke mods.
by burkaman | 2025-08-05 01:25:50+00:00
Yes of course it is on you, that's why the driver in this case was found mostly responsible. The question is whether Tesla bears any additional responsibility, not whether they are solely at fault, which they obviously aren't.

> Tesla infamously doesn't have a marketing team

Come on, obviously they do marketing. "We don't have a marketing team" is itself marketing. Here's their most popular YouTube ad, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlThdr3O5Qo

That video, which is called "Full Self-Driving" even though it came out when Autopilot was the only capability the cars had, was coincidentally released 3 days before the crash we're discussing. Do you think an ad like that, which simply shows the car driving itself and links to a page about Autopilot in the description, might lead someone to believe that Autopilot will do what the video shows? Again, remember that there was no separate FSD product at the time.
by arjvik | 2025-08-05 01:27:00+00:00
The HSA thing intrigued me and so I did some digging. It appears that post-65, you still have to pay income tax on non-medical withdrawals from an HSA? That is, besides the tax-free-for-medical-expenses part it reverts to a traditional IRA?

One additional trick though is that it looks like you can pay for any HSA-eligible medical expenses (incurred after you created the HSA) out-of-pocket now, and reimburse your bills at any point in the future? Thus you can still earn interest on the cash before withdrawing it at any point in the future (treating it as tax-free liquidity).

(I don't fully understand this so these are questions not statements, but hopefully I'm correct!)
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-05 01:27:05+00:00
Why is this special? The Japanese killed ~7 million Chinese, 0.5 to 1 million Filipinos, 500k in Korea, you can keep adding them up. Then Japan loses 0.2% of all their atrocities and it's the worst thing ever? No, it's not the worst thing ever, not even close. Sure, we'd all like it to never happen again. But if I had to pick one thing not happening again I'd pick saving all others that died in WW2 over this one incident.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU

There's also the argument that it saved more lives than the deaths it caused. The same can not be said for Japan's atrocities.
by nunez | 2025-08-05 01:27:14+00:00
Sora is actually quite incredible. Someone on Reddit used it to produce a fake medical ad (yay, America!) that attracts puppies to you: https://reddit.idevicehacked.com/r/singularity/comments/1ksm...

It was quite convincing, and I could see lower-budget studios trying to make it work. (There is a truckload of garbage tier animation on all platforms.)

The person who submitted it is an experienced producer who used something like 600 prompts to generate the end result, so it's not exactly few-shot prompting from novices with no film experience. But it happened

Then again, the astroturfing done (presumably) by big LLM is off the charts, so who knows if this was actually what happened.
by sipofwater | 2025-08-05 01:28:05+00:00
"Motorola moto g play 2024 smartphone, Termux application, and QEMU running under Termux: Booting "Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)" with debian-12-nocloud-amd64.qcow2": https://old.reddit.com/r/androidterminal/comments/1mc3pnz/go... (old.reddit.com/r/androidterminal/comments/1mc3pnz/googles_linux_terminal_plays_a_big_part_in/n5tjgu8/)
by x-complexity | 2025-08-05 01:28:08+00:00
The section is not without its own flaws, mainly in 5(c):

> (c) Civil penalty.—Any payment card network that violates subsection (b) shall be assessed a civil penalty by the Comptroller of the Currency of not more than 10 percent of the value of the services or products described in that subsection, not to exceed $10,000 per violation.

I see 2 problems as it is currently written: (1) The penalty's too low, & (2) restricting dispense of the law to only the Comptroller renders it ineffective.

(1) is easily solvable with regards to editing the text alone: raise the limit to 50% & $100k respectively.

(2) is also solvable, by striking out "by the Comptroller of the Currency", or adding in ", or by a federal court, whichever penalty is higher, " at the end of that part.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-05 01:28:25+00:00
EDIT for anyone struggling with DPI problems: Windows seems to over-ride the Nvidia control panel's default GPU, at least on my system. Swapping from the integrated graphics to the 'high-performance' Nvidia GPU option in System->Display->Graphics for wsl.exe and wslg.exe seems to have fixed it for me. I can't 100% confirm that was the solution as I was tweaking a lot of other things, but it's my best guess.
by throw0101d | 2025-08-05 01:29:21+00:00
If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir...

* https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-...

It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender.

What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
by Der_Einzige | 2025-08-05 01:29:34+00:00
A whole lot of FOSS folks don't like that the vast majority of folks do not care about license distinctions that ultimately won't ever be tested in court anyway.

Ultimately, most people use the term "open source" to mean "freely downloadable" or similar. Sorry I guess that the gnulag[1] never happened.

[1] https://i.redd.it/th4prtdk6xr61.jpg
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-08-05 01:30:02+00:00
Like it or not, but json data types are inherently linked to the primatives available in JavaScript. You can, of course write JSON that can’t be handled with the native types available in JavaScript, but the native parser will always deserialize to a native type. Until very recently all numbers were iee754 doubles in JavaScript, although arbitrary precision bignums do exist now. So the defacto precision limit of a number in JSON that needs to be compatible is an IEE754. If you control your clients you can do whatever you want though.
by skydhash | 2025-08-05 01:31:10+00:00
> "slightly better stackoverflow"

I'm still not sold on that. Stack overflow UI has lot of signals for a good response. The amount of answers, the upvotes on those answers, the comments,... With a quick scan, you can quickly see if you need to go back to the web search page (I've never used SO search) or do a slower read.
by throw0101d | 2025-08-05 01:31:23+00:00
> I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.

They were concerned about Japanese lives. They were more concerned about American lives, but they concluded the shorter the war was the more lives of everyone involved could be saved.

The Japanese food situation was also very dire: there was a very real risk of famine during Winter 1945-46, and so if the war could be ended before that many millions of Japanese civilians could be saved.
by jdlshore | 2025-08-05 01:31:34+00:00
I’ve started with tasks that I understand at an expert level myself. The LLM has invariably gotten surface-level work correct and subtle details wrong. Given those errors, I’m not willing to use them for things I don’t understand.

LLMs are good at generating text that sounds authoritative. They’re great for creative writing to share for a laugh with friends. I’m not at the point where I’m willing to use them for important work, let alone pay for them.

(I’ve yet to try them as a coding assistant, though. Maybe that’s the missing link.)
by jjk166 | 2025-08-05 01:32:08+00:00
Well yeah, the law isn't "do whatever you want, there are no rules" either. The important thing is getting your license and insurance is purposefully an extremely low bar. Driving is a dangerous activity, someone could hurt or kill themselves or others every time they get behind the wheel, but so long as you have demonstrated the very most basic understanding of what you're doing (ie getting a license), and taken responsibility for the potential consequences of your actions (ie carrying insurance), you're free to take that risk. Note, you still don't have the right to run over pedestrians, but if you do, you will be held liable, not the manufacturer of your car or the state which granted you a license. You would likely lose your license under such a circumstance, but no one else will lose their licenses to mitigate the risk of future pedestrian impacts.

Zoning laws are a complete non sequitur. The issue with building a large dynamite factory in a residential neighborhood is the threat to the people of the neighborhood who not only didn't consent to live near it but specifically chose to live in an area zoned so that such things could not be built. Building a dynamite factory wherever you want is not something you have the innate right to do. That said, you probably can get a permit (assuming you have the proper licenses and insurance) to build a dynamite factory in an appropriately zoned area.
by krapp | 2025-08-05 01:32:20+00:00
I don't believe FTL travel is possible, but if it were, the Fermi Paradox would seem to suggest it isn't obvious or trivial. It might require burning the mass energy of an entire star just to open a wormhole or hacking the matrix and forking the physics engine or sacrificing us to their chaos god patrons or something.

I think I'd rather deal with the aliens who just have really good rockets. At least we could potentially comprehend the rulebook they play by. Who even knows what the hell the Walkers of Sigma 957 are about?
by alexjplant | 2025-08-05 01:33:03+00:00
> Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.

Some contemporaries of note didn't think it was justified either [1]. Eisenhower, a decorated war hero who later cautioned against the over-expansion of the military industrial complex in his Presidential farewell speech, said of the bombing in his memoir:

> I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. [...] I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced [...] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives

I vacationed in Japan a few months ago via a tour group and we went to Hiroshima. It was one of the most emotionally-taxing experiences of my life. The bomb was literally dropped on a hospital [2]. The heat of the explosion melted the tops of headstones in a neighboring graveyard and seared some poor soul's shadow into the nearby steps that they were sitting on. Hundreds of thousands of civilians' lives were erased or permanently altered in a matter of seconds. Grabbing a sandwich from the 7-11 next door and eating it while I stared at where it all happened 80 years prior definitely fucked with me a bit.

I've never experienced war or lost somebody I care about to an enemy combatant. All things considered I've led a rather easy life. I can't say how I'd feel otherwise, but the me that exists right now thinks that our military shouldn't have done what it did. That they haven't done it again makes me wonder whether they realize this too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shima_Hospital
by throw0101d | 2025-08-05 01:34:39+00:00
> The allies _dramatically_ underestimated the forces that the Japanese had marshalled at the two invasion sites, and it would have been not very good.

They did not underestimate the Japanese forces.

They did an assessment in early 1945 and did calculations and the needed invasion force. But the Japanese could read a map just as well as the Americans, and could guess where Olympic would happen and redeployed, which the Americans detected:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Ground_thre...
by robertritz | 2025-08-05 01:34:40+00:00
I’m the owner of a smallish furniture manufacturer. About 15 employees. I built out the order management system myself because nothing really fit our process.

After looking at the site I can’t really say I know how this software could help us. I’ll look at it later on my desktop but first I think some better demo videos or gifs on the landing page would be nice.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-05 01:34:42+00:00
Of course there are. Because nothing goes up the line forever. Eventually any real world line actually ends. Nothing in the real world actually obeys the equation of a line to infinite. This happens to every fucking line in existence. So why do trend-lines even exist? Why don’t we flex some of those common sense muscles.

If we know that locally we are on a line, and we know that the trend obeyed that of a line or upward trend -x units into the past. The most probable bet is to say that the line will obey the trend +x units into the future.

The more data and the less noise we have on the past trend makes predicted future trend more likely. This is The data driven logic, no way around this other then using your gut to say random contrary shit.

My claim is given all the information we have the best most probable bet is AI will follow the trend it followed in the past. And your bet is that it won’t and you didn’t even supply any qualitative evidence for why not. You just cited common trope quotes from investing without nuance. You realize that value investing on the index sp500 is a trendline based bet?
by keeda | 2025-08-05 01:34:58+00:00
If you look at all the hyperscalers' earnings reports, they all report their data centers being capacity constrained, especially for GPUs. Then couple this with survey-based reports [1, 2] showing that so far a minority of people used AI regularly for work, and that too for a fraction of their workdays. This indicates huge demand with even bigger potential for growth.

This is why there is this huge gold rush for infrastructure, why these players have such sky-high valuations and why investors are scambling to pour in even more money. The focus on AGI and ASI is a distraction and only relevant to the frontier model labs (more on them later). Even if AGI/ASI is never achieved and all model development was frozen today, we have decades of growth ahead of us.

The only risk is that all these productivity gains are a mirage (cue that METR paper) and at some point people will realize it and the whole scheme will come tumbling down. However, studies like [1] contradict that premise and are already finding productivity gains that match various other RCT-based studies:

>This implies that each hour spent using genAI increases the worker’s productivity for that hour by 33%. This is similar in magnitude to the average productivity gain of 27% from several randomized experiments of genAI usage (Cui et al., 2024; Dell’Acqua et al., 2023; Noy and Zhang, 2023; Peng et al., 2023)

Our estimated aggregate productivity gain from genAI (1.1%) exceeds the 0.7% estimate by Acemoglu (2024) based on a similar framework.

(Not to mention my own anecdotal experiences and the rising frequency of people posting about their successes with tools like Claude Code on HN and other social media.)

To me there is virtually no risk that this data center capacity will be unused. There probably is a bubble, but only as far as the frontier labs are concerned; given that models costing millions to train still get commoditized rapidly, it is not clear if they can capture the value produced by their models to sustain their valuations.

But those models require infra to run and that's exactly what the hyperscalers are stockpiling. The frontier labs will need to get in on that game to survive long term.

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/sep/rapid-ado... (full paper: https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2024/2024-02...)

[2] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/so-far-only-one-third-of-...
by trhway | 2025-08-05 01:35:17+00:00
it was just a matter of time before the reward/error/etc. would become a vector instead of a scalar - whether it is a vector of tokens or a vector of some other qualities the output is evaluated for. So, instead of vector gradient - d scalar error by d every var - we'll have a matrix and thus would be matrix-transforming the NN instead of just adding the gradient.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-05 01:35:31+00:00
> I will not "be in a situation where I don't have a calculator". [...] Those who invent systems which subvert or short circuit the attempts to enslave individuals into doing hard work for hard works sake are ontologically good. Those who try to defend work for works sake are ontologically evil and I hope that they reincarnate into a durian fruit in the next life.

By that logic, you must also permit students another extremely well-established labor-saving technique: Hiring someone else do the homework/exams on their behalf!

After all, for students from certain families, forcing them to use the calculator personally would likewise be "robbing time from them", denying them valuable experience honing their skills in managing and subcontracting. They'll never be in a situation where they don't have a calc^H^H^H^H lackey.

I trust we can agree that (A) permitting outsourcing is absurd, (B) that cheating is not "ontologically good" even when reduces the total human labor, and (C) prohibiting the practice should not put a teacher into a state of stinky-fruit damnation.

I submit that we do care about how students do it and which skills they use, even if we disagree on what those are. It is not as simple as saying that good education means spurring them to supply Valid Answers By Any Contemporary Efficient Means.
by barbinbrad | 2025-08-05 01:35:47+00:00
we give people access to the same supabase API as us, but it's scoped to their company with RLS. the docs are autogenerated: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1873043714454811100

you can use the API from inside the codebase, or outside of it: https://github.com/crbnos/carbon?tab=readme-ov-file#api
by mfrye0 | 2025-08-05 01:36:09+00:00
Nice! Yeah, a typeahead works to a degree. I imagine that's searching their own instance vs calling out to a standardized DB you manage?

Raw materials is definitely a different animal, so auto-generating definitely works. I know a company where that's all they do - they manually pour over supplier specs to get all the model names.

Agent approach looks super cool. I see the supplier search piece happening there.

We've mapped out ~265M+ businesses globally. We're thinking about this as a data infra angle where products can tap into our system to access all the world's businesses. We're getting requests for processing millions of ERP records to clean/standardize, plus semantic supplier search across our full dataset.

I'll shoot you an email to chat more.
by jongjong | 2025-08-05 01:36:16+00:00
JSON serialization is already quite fast IMO so this is quite good. I think last time I compared JSON serialization to Protocol Buffers, JSON was just a little bit slower for typical scenarios but not materially so. These kinds of optimizations can shift the balance in terms of performance.

JSON is a great minimalist format which is both human and machine readable. I never quite understood the popularity of ProtoBuf; the binary format is a major sacrifice to readability. I get that some people appreciate the type validation but it adds a lot of complexity and friction to the transport protocol layer.