MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-05 00:15:23+00:00
Maybe I should add more context. I have specifically tried applying PID style feedback systems to computational problems, not controllers that interface with hardware, circuits, etc. My undergrad was in math and electrical engineering, I "pivoted" to software as a grad student (though I was always very involved in the software side of my department; I was a coder from when I was a kid.) The place I found it to work the best is with designing a homegrown autoscaler years before k8s ever became a viable thing for a company to play with [1]. Most of the problem domains I applied it to do not have linear models that can effectively model the theory. Yes I know that a PID is only proven to be stable when working with linear systems, but this is the reality of the problems I've worked with.

Eventually when if statements stop working I found that decision trees work great and XGBoost continues to be a great iteration of a decision tree.

[1]: I was an early hire at a tech unicorn and we built an autoscaler pretty early into the company's tenure. While it was a great success for a long time once k8s became established in the industry we had a really hard time training new talent to it and I left as we began a massive company-wide effort to move our workloads onto k8s.
by yshklarov | 2025-09-05 00:15:50+00:00
As everyone in this thread is sharing links, I'm gonna pitch in, too.

This lecture by Dennis Freeman from MIT 6.003 "Signals and Systems" gives an intuitive explanation of the connections between the four popular Fourier transforms (the Fourier transform, the discrete Fourier transform, the Fourier series, and the discrete-time Fourier transform):

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-003-signals-and-systems-fall-2...
by nis0s | 2025-09-05 00:17:16+00:00
To me there’s so little in the way of things which unite us on the concept of humanity. Our conceptualization of evil and what it means is somewhat aligned, but more than that what I think unites us is our way of thinking about things which give us hope. The takeaway from a lot of Tolkien’s work, and that of others like him, has always been about the nature of fairy stories and what they entail.

It’s the same with games about uniting as humanity to kill aliens, you exist in some liminal space between reality and fantasy to come to terms with what it means to be who you are, etc. That said, someone is free to make their game how they like, just as I am free to dislike its direction and make a comment on it. And so on, and so forth.
by SirMaster | 2025-09-05 00:17:27+00:00
I don't understand.

At the start of the article the author says this is why Spotify is good.

"For years, I relied on Spotify like millions of others. The convenience was undeniable stream anything, anywhere, discover new music through algorithms, and share playlists with friends."

How does one discover new music through algorithms or share playlists with friends on this proposes self-hosted stack?

He claims it tiges him everything Spotify offered plus more.

"Here's how I built my own self-hosted music streaming setup that gives me everything Spotify offered and more."

But I don't see how it does those things, and those are the main reasons I use Spotify. 80% of the time I listen to automatic playlists based on my music tastes and hear new and old (but new to me) music constantly. If I don't like it I skip the track to the next as much as I want. How on earth am I supposed to do that if I have to buy and curate every new album into my collection?
by wahern | 2025-09-05 00:17:53+00:00
> We should be looking to draw people from these HCOL areas to help bring back these cities.

This is one of the arguments for high-speed rail. The primary reason to move to a HCOL city is employment opportunities. The rapid growth of rail, both street cars and commuter trains, early last century allowed metropolitan regions to expand by allowing people to work downtown but live further away, dramatically easing housing pressure. The advent of the interstate highway system originally had a similar effect, though later also a fracturing effect, especially outside the few cities capable of holding their core.

High-speed rail promises to achieve the same thing, just as it has elsewhere around the world. Certainly it's a promise CAHSR is selling, and a major reason we should strongly support it. And it's one of the primary justifications it runs through the Central Valley rather than taking the shortest route between SF and LA. It puts Central Valley cities squarely into the SF and LA metro regions, not only creating opportunities for existing Central Valley residents, but allowing people to move further out, reducing housing pressure. You simply can't achieve the same thing with bigger airports and more flights, not until flying cars become ubiquitous.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-05 00:18:35+00:00
I have done something useful (to me) with "C the language"

Generally, I do not use any third party libraries besides the "standard" ones that come with UNIX-llike OS

I do not _have_ to use other third party libraries, it's a choice; I choose not to use them for personal reasons that may or may not apply to anyone else
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-05 00:18:58+00:00
I apologize if you feel attacked/judged. Conversations shouldn't go like that. I believe people have the right to their opinions, and in a democracy we WILL go down different avenues than I would like and that is part of democracy. And I appreciate you raising views not your own but not represented in the conversation. But I am going to point out the outcomes. I'm going to point out that the 'body autonomy' people harassed my mother for wearing a mask while dying of cancer and didn't care about her autonomy to wear a mask out of chemo need.

The original anti-vax exemptions were given on religious grounds. All justifications after that have built on that initial allowance. It is very much not a straw man when it comes to vaccine allowances. It is the OG justification that opened the conversation.

After watching my santa cruz woo woo ex-wife's friends all literally talk themselves into believing in the damage of vaccines (while being fine taking MEGA/unhealthy doses of western science discovered vitamins), I consider vaccine hesitancy a form of Munchausen syndrome. One that should only be tolerated to a certain point, and this is well past that point.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-05 00:19:17+00:00
One example was she asked the kids to pick a variety of alternate ways to tell the story. My son chose to break down a book into a comic with like 10 pages. One kid did a song.

He hit a wall because his aspirations hit the limits of his pencil skills. Enter AI. He used an early Google AI (I think it was called Duet) to generate comic style imagery to put in the comic cells.

Proud dad moment - the teacher loved it. The AI image generator takes the skill barrier out and let him focus on the assignment — telling a 300 page story in a couple of dozen comic cells.
by Timwi | 2025-09-05 00:19:20+00:00
I agree. A better choice of word would have been diligere, meaning to value (verb). Value the user, the data, and the truth. Diligere usorem, data, (et) veritatem.

Further, I'm not sure if the infinitive was the best choice of verb form. It feels to me more applicable as an imperative (thou shalt...), so I think it should be dilige (present imperative) or diligito (future imperative). I don't know Latin well enough to judge which of those two it should be.
by jekrb | 2025-09-05 00:20:59+00:00
the excuse is actually the other way around i think

banks are an excuse to have closed source ledgers that don't operate efficiently for internet capital markets

if they wanted to, they could open source their ledgers and let anyone make them faster, more interoperable, more programmable, etc.

stablecoins operate on infra that is more like linux for finance, anyone can contribute to blockchain rails and even run their own nodes
by jared_hulbert | 2025-09-05 00:21:24+00:00
I tried with the log scale before. They failed to express the exponential hockey stick growth unless you really spend the time with the charts and know what log scale is. I'll work on incorporating log scale due to popular demand. They do show the progress has been nice and exponential over time.

When I put the lines on the same chart it made the y axis impossible to understand. The units are so different. Maybe I'll revisit that.

Yeah around 2000-2010 the doubling is noticeable. Interestingly it's also when alot of factors started to stagnate.
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-05 00:21:43+00:00
> The US has ample land and money

The money part doesn't ring true given the current US political climate. That's not the president you elect when your future looks bright.

> society to thrive

Does society thrive on AI though ? And is the technology better ?

Those are real questions. My answers would be no, we have better use for our resources. If we need to sacrifice for something, at least be it worth it.
by mullingitover | 2025-09-05 00:21:55+00:00
Yes, we all read the article and nobody's disputing that Google hasn't removed the pledge, just made it less visible. I'm just giving my interpretation.

We also all saw Sundar being paraded around like a prisoner of war at the inauguration (to be generous, another interpretation being that he is an enthusiastic collaborator in a despotic regime). He's clearly involved politically in this regime, and they have made their stance on clean energy clear. To be willfully blind to that reality is simply a choice I'm not making.
by hx8 | 2025-09-05 00:22:01+00:00
Yes, both the reduction in the amount of reading and the reduction in the complexity of the average read text is leading towards a decline in cognition. Less than half of American adults have read a book in the last year, and younger people are reading less books[0].

The empirical evidence for cognitive benefits of reading books is so numerous and obvious that citing sources feels silly. Reading increases vocabulary, which are the building blocks that ideas are formed. This alone would be worth the time cost but reading also increases concentration, improves memory, and reduces cognitive decline.

Reading books is roughly the same level of benefit as exercise.

[0] https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-...
by globnomulous | 2025-09-05 00:23:05+00:00
Yep! See entry II of Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary for the word:[0]

> II. Repeated, que . . . que.

> A. Both ... and (not in Cæs., once in Cic.; v. Zumpt, Gram. § 338), co-ordinating,

To my ear it sounds more emphatic, formal, and annunciatory than singular -que, so it feel appropriate in the context of a guiding dictum/apophthegm.

[0] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
by queenkjuul | 2025-09-05 00:23:08+00:00
I actually had a lot of fun building a native .NET web frontend in VB 2005 recently lol. I thought it kind of amazing that i could just bind UI controls directly to state objects and the UI would automatically React to any changes i made. Felt very natural as a modern web dev lol. Found a lightweight .NET JSON library that was compatible all the way back to VB 2005 as well.

In case you also need to control Spotify from Windows 95 :D

https://github.com/queenkjuul/spotify97
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-05 00:24:11+00:00
Don't think I agree. Think of it in economic terms of supply and demand. If something becomes cheaper to produce, you get more of it.

Or think of it in terms of Gresham's Law: Bad discourse drives out good.

But maybe... if the ratio stayed the same, but what got amplified/liked/upvoted got dumber, then the algorithms would guarantee that what we see got a higher ratio of junk. (But if that's true, then eventually the first two paragraphs will come into play, and the proportion will in fact change.)
by liuliu | 2025-09-05 00:24:48+00:00
One thing I would call out, if you use SQLite as an application format:

BLOB type is limited to 2GiB in size (int32). Depending on your use cases, that might seem high, or not.

People would argue that if you store that much of binary data in a SQLite database, it is not really appropriate. But, application format usually has this requirement to bundle large binary data in one nice file, rather than many files that you need to copy together to make it work.
by bo1024 | 2025-09-05 00:25:34+00:00
There's a lot more to adapting than that. "Project-oriented creative work" builds on foundational skills. Basic knowledge, logic, numeracy, etc. That stuff all needs to be developed in the brain before you can use it to do interesting and valuable creative work. A lot of that stuff gets developed by hard work training on exercises that, yep, AI already knows how to do.

Pocket calculators have been available for 50+ years. Would you hire an engineer who couldn't instantly multiply 8 times 7? What about one who couldn't tell you the difference between linear growth and exponential growth? These are examples of skills that need to be learned, even if they're available externally, so that technical and creative work can build on them.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-05 00:25:44+00:00
Right: If parents needed to contact students during class--or vice-versa--there was never[0] any technical barrier to that!

You don't need hundreds of distraction/cheating pocket computers in a giant invisible wireless network for that, a school could easily route the information if the organization chose to do so.

The technology was used as an end-run around an organizational barrier.
by noone_youknow | 2025-09-05 00:27:03+00:00
> It's a bit disappointing that every time somebody decides to write their own kernel, the first thing they do is implement some subset of the POSIX spec.

Well, not quite _every_ time. For example, I’m deliberately not doing POSIX with my latest one[0], so I can be a bit more experimental.

[0] https://github.com/roscopeco/anos
by jared_hulbert | 2025-09-05 00:27:10+00:00
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/data-direct-i-o-t...

AMD has something similar.

The PCIe bus and memory bus both originate from the processor or IO die of the "CPU" when you use an NVMe drive you are really just sending it a bunch of structured DMA requests. Normally you are telling the drive to DMA to an address that maps to the memory, so you can direct it cache and bypass sending it out on the DRAM bus.

In theory... the specifics of what is supported exactly? I can't vouch for that.
by denimnerd42 | 2025-09-05 00:27:10+00:00
I'm not sure it's possible to expand the housing supply. Inflation has made the cost of constructing new housing almost impossible. In fact he even has a graph comparing cpi to case shiller. I would argue that case shiller correctly models inflation where as CPI has been neutered and is no longer an effective model of inflation.

Basically we're at a point where used housing is actually far more valuable than list price because it would be absolutely impossible to rebuild any used house for anywhere near the amount it sold for.
by arkis22 | 2025-09-05 00:27:53+00:00
Mamdani was largely propelled by disillusionment of the young who then voted for him. They listen to the headline political message and they don't understand the underlying principles, his policies will not make them better off. But he'll try and fail, and then they'll just increasingly think the system is broken. If they read more they would understand that. It's the same thing that propelled Trump into office
by sunrunner | 2025-09-05 00:28:16+00:00
> human curation

More and more I feel like recommendation algorithms for discovery of anything seem to just not actually work for finding things which are new and exciting, but perhaps that's by definition.

If information is surprise then the most interesting things are those which aren't like the things I already know. And the easiest way to find those things I find is to just tune in to something where you don't know what you'll hear, and simply wait. That's it. It might take a while, but I bet you'll find something that feels new, exciting and perhaps expands your tastes a bit. And what could be better?
by antod | 2025-09-05 00:28:26+00:00
Yeah. As I mentioned in another comment, as someone who studied Civil Engineering (ages ago) maybe most EEs never learn enough hydraulics to know the analogy probably goes further than they realize - ie much further than just kids level stuff.

Voltage drops across components or look a like head drops across pipe fittings. Losses along a pipe are similar to wires. Head and flow rate are very similar to voltage and current across multiple paths. Kirchoff can apply to both etc.

Many of the quantities have direct parallels and derive from each other in similar ways.

Obviously there are limits. But my middling DC circuit knowledge helped a lot when learning hydraulics from a mathematical engineering perspective.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-09-05 00:28:34+00:00
I mean, I did say if you're listening to new music all the time then Spotify makes sense. It sounds like you are, so it makes sense for you. But not everyone does that. For myself, I already have the music I like. I would say that once every 3-4 years I come across a new artist I like and I purchase a few of their albums. If we're really aggressive, let's say I buy two new albums per year at $12 each... so my marginal cost is $24/year versus $144/year with Spotify. It all comes down to one's listening habits.
by cellis | 2025-09-05 00:29:11+00:00
What point are you arguing here? That it’s more difficult to be a doctor than an NFL player? That is highly subjective depending on what one finds “difficult”. For instance my dentist in SF and even primary care or dermatologists don’t have very stressful jobs and although they had many years of schooling, they didn’t have to subject their bodies to the intense and unrelenting physical rigor of first HS football, THEN college football and then the NFL. I would say for low level or intense stress maybe surgeons, oncologists, anesthesiologists or cardiologists have more stress day to day but that’s just my subjective opinion as well, as to them it may be as easy as flying a kite.

So what do you consider difficult? Having a linebacker smash into you at a full sprint over and over in practice and then not choking in a real game? Or studying relentlessly, writing grants, doing essentially free work as a resident for years while being on call. They are just stressful in different ways, but again, different humans have more fitness for one or the other.
by tombert | 2025-09-05 00:29:31+00:00
I remember I played with some software called "The Illumination Software Creator" [1], and I remember the saved project files were just SQLite databases.

I actually thought it was kind of cool, because I was able to play with it easily with some SQLite explorer tool (I forget which one) and I could easily look at how the save files actually worked.

I haven't really used SQLite for anything serious [2], but always found the idea of it kind of charming. Maybe I should dust it off and try it again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumination_Software_Creator by Bryan Lunduke before I realized how much of a pseudo-intellectual dimwit that he is.

[2] At least outside of the "included" database in a few web frameworks.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-09-05 00:30:22+00:00
Yep, it's quite incredible that they released this faked video, quite a lot of people died in various accidents involving Autopilot / FSD where they clearly felt for the marketing, then Tesla guy who made it admitted it was faked and even crashed at some point while filming, and now instead of being in jail, he is ... the head of Tesla Autopilot program.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-09-05 00:31:02+00:00
Recently I gave up on Apple Music. The clients had gotten so bad from a UX perspective that I found it frustrating to use. Especially on desktop. There is also no easy way to cache your _entire_ library to disk. Other services+clients are heaps of Electron that I'd rather avoid.

It took some effort and pain but I have a pretty solid self-hosted system now that requires no futzing around:

0. epoupon's Lightweight Music Server (LMS) [0] is an awesome, barebones Subsonic client written in C. It's really good and deserves to be more well-known.

1. wrtag [1] is a less-fully-featured beets written in Go that handles tagging.

2. amperfy [2] is an excellent Subsonic client that runs on iOS. It's configured to automatically cache anything and everything on LMS.

3. Syncthing [3] syncs music files. Needs no introduction. Rock solid.

4. Swinsian [4] a macOS music player that is very reminiscent of old iTunes, but much better. The information density is so incredibly refreshing after using Apple Music.

5. Everything talks to each other seamlessly over Tailscale [5].

All together, an entire open-source stack maintained by volunteers that easily outdoes Apple's own UX in the music department.

[0] https://github.com/epoupon/lms

[1] https://github.com/sentriz/wrtag

[2] https://github.com/BLeeEZ/amperfy

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://swinsian.com

[5] https://tailscale.com
by johncolanduoni | 2025-09-05 00:31:34+00:00
What does ELF being stable or people not writing apps in C have to do with Linux binary compatibility? No matter what language you use, it’s either dynamically linking to the distro’s libc or using Linux system calls directly.

Also, I recommend taking a gander at what the Linux build process/linking looks like for large apps that “just work” out of the box like Firefox or Chromium. There’s games they have to play just to get consistent glibc symbol versions, and basically anything graphics/GUI related has to do a bunch of `dlopen`s at runtime.

Flatpak and similar take a cop-out by bundling their own copies of glibc and other libraries, and then doing a bunch of hacks to get the system’s userspace graphics libraries to work inside the container.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-09-05 00:32:12+00:00
You are right we have a stupid set up, but actually there is an easy way out:

a lot of SFH get turned into dense apartments, and a lot of homeowners get rich as hell because they own the land.

We should have a LVT, so the landholders don't get too rich, but it can be a bit lower than ideal (which would mean that conversion to apartment is break even because future earnings - cap ex and taxes net out)
by giantg2 | 2025-09-05 00:32:25+00:00
I think that only establishes mens rea if it's not part of your normal procedure. If I always shred my mail that has my information on it after reading it, then shredding a piece of mail allegedly related to some crime is just normal. I would have to be an unusual intentional act, such as only shredding the illegal mail and not the regular mail.
by Terr_ | 2025-09-05 00:33:21+00:00
The two situations are not analogous.

The kind of task is not the same. With a calculator, you are delegating a very specific, bounded, and well-defined task. Being unable to approximate non-integer square roots by hand isn't the same as not knowing what square roots mean or when they are applicable. However with LLMs, people are often (trying to) delegate their executive-function and planning.

Another way to tell that the tasks are qualitatively different is to look at what levels/kinds of errors users will tolerate. A company selling calculators that gave subtly but undeniably-wrong answers 5% of the time would rightfully go bankrupt.

If you want to compare LLMs to something of yesteryear, it's closer to hiring someone to do the work for you: That's always been considered cheating, regardless of how cheaply the accomplice works or how badly they screw up.
by sfRattan | 2025-09-05 00:34:16+00:00
Absolutely. I've made several new Spotify and Pandora accounts over the years. Initially they offer good recommendations but eventually the algorithms always aggressively funnel down to the same 2-to-3 dozen similar-sounding songs (though its a different set of songs with each new account). Once trapped in that algorithmic tarpit, the only thing to do is start over, which is annoying. Now I let myself discover things via human critics or just in the course of life.