MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-04 15:08:36+00:00
When I was interested in information extraction I saw the problem of resolving language to a semantic model [1] as containing an SMT problem. That is, words are ambiguous, sentences can parse different ways, you have to resolve pronouns and explicit subjects, objects and stuff like that.

Seen that way the text is a set of constraints with a set of variables for all the various choices you make determining it. And of course there is a theory of the world such that "causes must precede their effects" and all the world knowledge about instances such as "Chicago is in Illinois".

The problem is really worse than that because you'll have to parse sentences that weren't generated by sound reasoners or that live in a different microtheory, deal with situations that are ambiguous anyway, etc. Which is why that program never succeeded.

[1] in short: database rows
by alnwlsn | 2025-09-04 15:09:08+00:00
I'm sure part of it is that EE claims probably the widest range out there. You can have kilovolts or microvolts, but mostly the same rules apply. Or you can learn how to power a small sensor for years off one small battery, or how to power a country. I don't know many other disciplines that can lay claim to 10-15 orders of magnitude.

At most levels, software will be in there somewhere, even those fake flickering candle LEDs have RAM, ROM, and a processor these days.
by maxsilver | 2025-09-04 15:09:13+00:00
> That would be so out of place in midwest USA, where cynicism is rampant

Well yeah, the Midwest USA is full of drastically under-employed individuals holding advanced degrees who still can't find any decent work, and yet still have to pay $2,000/month rental costs, while also paying back $100k to $200k+ student loans for all that "more learning" they did.

I think much of HN still thinks of "college grads" as entering a market similar to how they had it back in 2002 - 2010. But it's 2025, the market is far far less forgiving on the low end than it used to be.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-04 15:09:19+00:00
That’s a bizarrely low cap on a service with nearly zero marginal cost, and clearly meant to make you upgrade.

I load my Kobo with things like CACM issues and books I buy on sale and then flick through them at leisure when I’m on a plane or such. So now I can’t fetch the July journal issue because it’s aged out?

Nah, I’ll pass. It’s not controversial to say ReMarkable pushes you toward a paid plan. They’d even agree with that, I’m sure. It’s no great sin. Lots of things are subscription these days. It does mean I wouldn’t use it, though, because the non-rental alternatives are also pretty great.
by SoftTalker | 2025-09-04 15:09:36+00:00
I know only two people who've had LASIK and they both had not-so-great results.

One had severe "dry eye" feeling (described as "sand in my eyes") for a long time and needed to use drops.

The other had distorted vision and needed multiple follow-up "corrections."

I'm staying with contacts and glasses, personally.
by tomku | 2025-09-04 15:10:03+00:00
I actually like Helix a lot too, but it is different than (neo)vim in a lot of significant ways. It feels like alternate-universe vim more than just better defaults. It also doesn't just not require scripting, it doesn't support scripting (yet). Very interesting in its own right but it might not be what you want if you're familiar with (neo)vim already.
by the_af | 2025-09-04 15:10:30+00:00
(I cannot edit my other comment any longer, but I want to add that it's far from my intention to sound as if I'm lecturing anyone, I'm well aware a lot of these are open questions -- possibly unresolvable -- and I don't consider myself an expert or well-read on this topic. I find it fascinating to discuss. All of my remarks/questions/disagreements with you are made in good faith.)
by mint5 | 2025-09-04 15:11:25+00:00
>“ Electric vehicles have a dubious environmental impact, require special and costly new infrastructure, are inferior economically and do not align with US policy goals around energy.”

Citations needed.

Oil extraction is massively damaging, co2 is causing global weather turmoil, exhaust while better than the 70’s for passenger cars/trucks is still an air quality issue, noise pollution is worse for ice.

And electric cars are objectively more pleasant and nicer to ride unless one likes loud, slow to accelerate vehicles over smooth and quiet. I guess there will be some who prefer noise and lag for nostalgia.

ICE ludism doesn’t matter though, we’re at a tipping point, especially in the rest of the world. Ice cars are become horses and no amount of complaining will stop that.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-09-04 15:11:32+00:00
There probably needs to be a change in financing models if the Japanese animation industry is to remain healthy long-term.

Kyoto Animation has a good thing going. They do everything in-house and their currently-airing CITY has incredible production values and was fully finished before it began to air. That model might work for some other studios too.

With modern Internet crowdfunding, a return to the OVA model of the late 80s and early 90s where productions were funded directly by viewers could make a comeback, which could be cool since it’d give more relaxed schedules and unshackle studios from broadcast regulations.
by jonhohle | 2025-09-04 15:11:42+00:00
It’s cyclical. People will stop seeing movies because they’re repetitive and dull. Who really wants to see the avengers again?

Then some unexpected hit will pop up out of nowhere and make a ton of money and studios will fund all kinds of off the wall things trying to create a new success formula. Along the way we’ll get a lot of fun movies again, but eventually they’ll figure out what is getting people into theaters and beat that concept until it’s dead. Repeat.
by cmurf | 2025-09-04 15:12:30+00:00
Trump is an untrustworthy liar. It is more reasonable to assume the boat was full of migrants on a human smuggling run than anything to do with drugs.

Everyone involved in this will eventually need pardons. But this abuse will get much worse before that. The same arguments they use today can be used for extrajudicial murder on land, foreign and domestic. It's just a matter of degree and time.

https://www.justsecurity.org/119982/legal-issues-military-at...
by fenomas | 2025-09-04 15:12:45+00:00
I don't think this complaint stands at all. The original question is stated colloquially, not formally, and vos Savant's interpretation of it is the one that's consistent with the question's language and with how game shows work. Even if other interpretations are possible, hers is the one a normal reader would make, and the one the letter-writer apparently intends.

> And that ambiguity has given rise to so much spilled ink (and, by the way, the misconception that statistic professors don't understand probability theory).

I don't think this stands either - the letters quoted don't say anything about the distinction you're making. Unless they're all fictional or selectively edited, a bunch of PhDs really did get the puzzle wrong.
by boringg | 2025-09-04 15:12:50+00:00
Utilities are dragging their feet on interconnect. Tariffs are squeezing solar supply and probably will impact availability of materials and products (reshoring will take a lot of time if it even makes sense).

Nuclear regulatory environment is overly prescriptive. You need nuclear safety but you also can't use regulatory as a mechanism to shutdown all development - which has been the defacto case for the last 40 odd years.

Agree faster timelines are necessary -- we also need to see if this AI thing is real real or if its in over its skis a little bit. At this particular moment it feels like it might be selling more than it is offering - and thereby the energy demand won't materialize in the way that they assume...

Noting -- that the financial backers for energy products aren't all cash cows like tech companies -- they need to see real return on projects before they put up the necessary large amount of money and public-private partnerships given the risk on putting projects together like that.
by lproven | 2025-09-04 15:13:00+00:00
Hmmm. Interesting question.

Obviously enough there are not a great many native GNUstep apps. It's Linux, though, so there are a million alternatives, but they won't share GNUstep's look, feel, keystrokes, etc.

It comes with a file manager, both plain text and rich text editors, image viewers, a chat client, a pretty good email app, a terminal emulator (possibly a choice of them too), and GSDE also provides a web browser, although it's a wrapper around Chromium. It works pretty well.

There are lots of programming tools available too, including Gorm, which broadly replicates NeXT's Interface Builder.

Pic from one of my own machines here:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/07/05/deb_11_gsde.jpg

I wrote about it (and Lomiri):

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_deskto...

I think it's beautiful, myself, but then I consider NeXTstep to be the high-water mark in desktop GUI design thus far.

I find GNUstep's choice of accelerator keys weird and frustrating, though.

I do not run it as my daily driver, but I am thinking about it.

The installation takes a while but it's a `git clone` followed by a few scripts. It's not actually difficult. It took me a few hours but that's because my VM kept crashing.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-04 15:13:11+00:00
That’s my point, though. People slag on them all the time for being cheapskates with their iCloud offerings. And even they give you a fully usable, unlimited feature iCloud account for free to sync all your devices together. I’m certain it costs way more per user to provide iCloud, with its constant syncing, than it costs ReMarkable to see if your PDFs are still up to date.
by nonethewiser | 2025-09-04 15:13:48+00:00
>There's 26 people marked at "very liberal", which is 14% of the sample.

> There's 39 people marked at "very conservative", which is 21% of the sample

I think these numbers are off. Where are you getting that from? Is there raw data somewhere?

I counted the people on the page and see 39 very conservative and 47 very liberal (not 26).

I did not check the other numbers. But with that its 78 liberals which is 43%. And the total liberals + conservatives are 180. So I dont think the total participant number is 180 - thats just the total of liberals and conservatives.

And if its a 56/43 (~1.3) split for conservatives that seems to actually udnerrepresent conservatives compared to the general population without moderates. Where we see a 36/25 (1.44) conservative/liberal split in terms of ideology, not voter registration, which I think aligns more closely with the "political views" label.

>The way Americans identify themselves ideologically was unchanged in 2021, continuing the close division that has persisted in recent years between those describing themselves as either conservative or moderate, while a smaller share identifies as liberal. On average last year, 37% of Americans described their political views as moderate, 36% as conservative and 25% as liberal.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead...
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-09-04 15:14:03+00:00
The issue with Rust is that as a strict language with no function overloading (except via traits) or keyword arguments, things get very verbose. For instance, in python you can treat a string as a list of columns as in `df.select('date')` whereas in Rust you need to write `df.select([col('date')])`. Let's say you want to map a function over three columns, it's going to look something like this:

``` df.with_column( map_multiple( |columns| { let col1 = columns[0].i32()?; let col2 = columns[1].str()?; let col3 = columns[3].f64()?; col1.into_iter() .zip(col2) .zip(col3) .map(|((x1, x2), x3)| { let (x1, x2, x3) = (x1?, x2?, x3?); Some(func(x1, x2, x3)) }) .collect::<StringChunked>() .into_column() }, [col("a"), col("b"), col("c")], GetOutput::from_type(DataType::String), ) .alias("new_col"), ); ```

Not much polars can do about that in Rust, that's just what the language requires. But in Python it would look something like

``` df.with_columns( pl.struct("a", "b", "c") .map_elements( lambda row: func(row["a"], row["b"], row["c"]), return_dtype=pl.String ) .alias("new_col") ) ```

Obviously the performance is nowhere close to comparable because you're calling a python function for each row, but this should give a sense of how much cleaner Python tends to be.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-09-04 15:14:21+00:00
> But isn’t the point of writing an essay is the quality of the essay

Most of the things you write in an educational context are about learning, not about producing something of value. Productivity in a learning context is usually the wrong lens. The same thing is true IMO for learning on the job, where it is typically expected that productivity will initially be low while experience is low, but should increase over time.
by abhiyerra | 2025-09-04 15:14:24+00:00
I’ve written a bunch of Python scripts to do my books using hledger. The nice thing is I no longer pay the $75/month for Quickbooks.

Sure it means I can’t hire a bookkeeper to do my books anymore but it literally takes me like 15 mins to do my books since I can just add rules to my scripts as needed and most of my business now has a standard AR and AP.
by sophia-martinez | 2025-09-04 15:14:38+00:00
I've been tinkering with this idea for a while and built Phantomshift! I just published a breakdown — with a full demo video — showing how it plays out in the Recon phase of a red team mission. Instead of spitting out canned “try sudo -l” advice, the AI stays in your terminal, tracks what you’ve already done, and nudges you toward the next logical move. It’s weirdly fun watching it act more like a sparring partner than a chatbot!

I wrote up the story on my Medium blog if you want to check it out, linked on here.

Curious what you think — where would you want an AI to jump in and save you time during an op?
by mock-possum | 2025-09-04 15:14:55+00:00
The quote about the trip to the beach, and his description of his reverie during the musical performance are familiar to me - those are psychedelic experiences.

You could drop acid and take a walk on the beach and see the ocean that way and feel those things and cry about it. You could get stoned and put on your favorite album and slip into a vivid daydream, directed by the music as a soundtrack.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-04 15:15:03+00:00
> The ruling holds that business process is not only legally binding, but trump's the terms for dismissal in the employment contract.

No, it doesn't. The business process was part of the legally binding contract.

> The hearing was told that under the terms of her contract, she could be fired for “the provocative use of insulting or abusive language”. However, this required she be given a prior warning. Only more serious breaches such as “threatening and intimidating language” would be gross misconduct and warrant summary dismissal.
by mikewarot | 2025-09-04 15:15:15+00:00
If you're really worried, when you sign up for service, create a separate email that you only use for things related to your phone. Don't surf the web on it, or do anything other that making phone calls or sending texts. Don't use it as a general purpose computer.

Computers at home, behind a router, running something like Cubes to further partition activities are far more secure than something persistently exposed to all the side channel attacks present on a phone.
by jrockway | 2025-09-04 15:15:40+00:00
From the article:

> However, this required she be given a prior warning. Only more serious breaches such as “threatening and intimidating language” would be gross misconduct and warrant summary dismissal.

It seems like the prior warning is the necessary part. The company obviously wants to write the rules such that the upper management team can make a one-off stupid comment to an employee without the employee suing to get them fired. Unfortunately, this means the upper management team can't rage-fire someone with no thought. (No doubt to show how in charge and powerful they are, which kind of proves the person using the term "dickhead" right.)
by bevr1337 | 2025-09-04 15:15:45+00:00
> Shouldn't it be possible to encapsulate something like this with SQLite and produce an accounting engine

Indeed! https://www.gnucash.org/

> that can guarantee consistent numbers

It was consistent, and now it's transparent and user-friendly.

> and generate key numbers

Yes, hledger generates useful reports including trial balance, p&l
by xdavidliu | 2025-09-04 15:15:51+00:00
> Dopamine is often portrayed as a pleasure chemical, but it isn’t really about pleasure so much as the expectation that pleasure will occur soon.

I noticed this as well. One time many many years ago, I was in grad school and doing research until later in the evening, and deliberately delayed dinner until I got home. I was anticipating a nice meal and decided to do some house cleaning and some misc chores. Knowing I had the meal "on the other side" made me do the chores with gusto and a certain "sharpness" that I usually didn't have.
by meshugaas | 2025-09-04 15:15:56+00:00
their valuation from last funding in March 2024 was $550m, sold for $610m minus cash on hand. so basically at value...agreed that it's a nice windfall for these folks but relatively bad outcome. When you're building a new browser with AI a year before the trillion dollar AI industry goes bananas for AI browsers and you end up with 600 mil, that feels like an L.
by Karawebnetwork | 2025-09-04 15:16:29+00:00
> Can anyone more informed comment on the font?

Could it be that you unconsciously prefer serif fonts to sans serif fonts? Sans serif fonts are preferred by people with dyslexia, for example.

Another thing that comes to mind is high contrast in stroke thickness, thick vertical strokes and thin horizontal or curved strokes. This is reminiscent of engravings and calligraphy, but can be difficult to read on a screen, especially when the font size is small. Anti-aliasing options can also affect this and lead to even greater differences between letters than expected.

Articles like this one may provide you with the right words to describe what you don't like about certain fonts: https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/a-beginners-guide-to-web-...
by tobyhinloopen | 2025-09-04 15:16:34+00:00
> Wasn't that what they fixed using Proxy (making ES6 finally a hard requirement for anything at all)?

Maybe, but I haven't touched Vue in a long time.

> Better than one could say about the current generation stacks.

For sure. I still have some projects that use what I like to call "jQueryScript", where there's just a bunch of unprocessed (or only minified) JS files with `$("#foo").click(function() { ... })` stuff everywhere. Looking back, it wasn't all that bad.

I just wish there was a pattern that is simple, works with plain, modern JS without any big dependencies (I don't want 600 node modules installing a frontend framework, please) and is easily modular and integrates nicely with other stuff (so likely either manipulating DOM nodes directly or using WebComponents)

Out of protest, I have some smaller projects that have their GUI templates stored in `<template>` tags and manipulated with plain Javascript. Anyone that opens the code will see it and think "wtf?" and then be like "oh... uh sure". The largest one I had written was 1000s of lines of code like that, kinda like a classical MVC pattern where a view (class manipulating DOM nodes) renders a model (a JS object or class). The controller would subscribe to custom events (defined by the view), update the model and call `render()` on the view. It had a lot of small classes, which was a bit too verbose to my liking.
by kgwgk | 2025-09-04 15:16:44+00:00
> [that clarification] was given in the context of a modified problem

I don’t understand what do you mean by that. The clarification was part of the original answer in the context of the original question. The clarification was stated again and again and again. If that’s a “modified problem” so be it but that was the problem being discussed with her readers.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-04 15:17:04+00:00
"In 2014 in the 2014 study on Illinois trains and buses reach our searchers followed up with people who were asked to talk to strangers The people who predicted they wouldn't enjoy the experience. What these participants reported back was almost no rejections, pleasant conversations, and an overall positive experience."

This is basically fear the emotional pain of rejection or embarrassment, brought on by a fear of the unknown.

Between 18 and 24 months old, we begin to develop the 'ability' to feel embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, etc. This is self-consciousness, a part of self-awareness. Embarrassment, shame, etc have important functions. They signal a violation of social norms. This helps create and reinforce the interpersonal boundaries and rules that govern how we deal with people in society.

When you perceive others are observing you, you imagine what their impressions of you will be. If it's a stranger, a lot of people jump to a negative conclusion. Part of this is a mirror of how we see other people. Part of it is a human heuristic to fear the unknown, which keeps us alive in the jungle. And part of it is you making a snap judgement about what kind of person someone is based on how they look or what environment you're in.

So when you're afraid that talking to a stranger will be a negative experience, really you're just trying to avoid getting eaten in the jungle by someone you fear. But we aren't in a jungle - we're in a society, with rules, laws, and norms. There is no threat to a conversation. And, as the study shows, your fears are usually unfounded. So go ahead and strike up a conversation with a stranger - it's safe.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-04 15:17:28+00:00
HR and legal across the UK are probably updating their company procedures right now to include every imaginable reason they might want to fire someone.

That’s why I don’t see these rulings as a win for the common employee. The situation now encourages companies to be as broad as possible with their contracts and policies and include so many just-in-case provisions that it starts to get hard for anyone to know and follow all of them.
by mikeyouse | 2025-09-04 15:17:38+00:00
Vogtle is an excellent example - it literally had a negative learning rate from construction of reactor 3 to reactor 4 (Reactor 4 cost more and took longer even though we ostensibly learned from building Reactor 3). The "West" has lost the ability to build mega projects, and until we regain that ability, nuclear is indeed dead. Some minuscule part of the issue is the licensing and regulatory regime, but it's a complete cop-out to lay the entirety of the blame there.

The UK is in the exact same boat with Hinkley C -- initially licensed in 2012 with a budget of £18 billion, construction starting in 2016 and a completion date in 2025. Now we're looking at £50 billion in cost with 'best case' start dates in 2030. All of that to generate electricity at over $0.20/kwh wholesale.
by Eextra953 | 2025-09-04 15:18:00+00:00
I think the drop in tinkering is due to the high skill/cost barrier to entry particularly SMT, and lab equipment. If you want to do anything interesting beyond a breadboard and arduino/rpi you are going to need to invest in a custom pcb and lab equipment. With SMT, I got into EE/HW by taking things apart and studying them, back then (late 90's) most consumer stuff still had a good mix of thru-hole and SMT so tinkering was easy. Now almost nothing is thru-hole so if you want to fix or modify anything you are going to need more than a cheap harbor freight soldering iron.