MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonathanstrange | 2025-09-25 10:45:47+00:00
I appreciate the detailed reply and wholeheartedly disagree with most of your points. Most foundational research also has no quantifiable ROI, and rightly so. Putting these details aside, let me put it in more practical terms, since both you and the other person who replied seem to be unaware of the unavoidable practicalities of funding evaluation.

As someone who has been in various evaluation panels and also based on my own successful applications (the guidelines are always public), I want to stress that "popular" in the context of science evaluation really just means that the majority of evaluators think a proposal has more scientific merits, is original, can be expected to make substantial contributions, can be pulled off, is supported by the candidates CV, and so on. Providing more funding for "misfits" and "outcasts" could mean two different things.

First, it could mean that less popular proposals are getting higher chances of obtaining funding without jeopardizing the proposals of which the panel thinks they have most merits. Then this is merely a complicated way of saying that there should be more funding for everyone. I've never met a researcher who disagreed with that.

Second, it could mean that unpopular proposals of "misfit" candidates should be given precedence over more popular proposals in certain calls, for example by explicit guidelines or special grants. Although there are grant schemes for that (e.g. special grants for "high risk" projects in the EU Horizon 2020 scheme), this would be almost contradictory as a general guideline in all calls. It just doesn't make sense. Scientific peers must at one point or another evaluate proposals to decide over grants. This cannot be done by politicians or mere administrators. It would be idiotic to ask them to favor proposals they think have no merits.

So, Yes: Funding schemes for high risk proposals should exist, and they do exist. But these are the exception, not the rule, just like successful outsiders in science are outliers instead of the rule. Most of science is an extremely collaborative effort. (The same holds for philosophy, which is not a science.)

Regarding replication efforts: If someone's area is deeply unpopular and most people think the area or approach has no merits, then nobody will replicate it either. That's exactly my point. There needs to be a high enough threshold of scientists working on the same approach and the corresponding networking and embedding into the scientific community to ensure there are enough replication efforts and there is enough critical evaluation. Otherwise, the "misfit" is bound to publish in fringe journals with no quality control and nobody will ever check whether the work makes sense. That's not good.
by mrighele | 2025-09-25 10:46:58+00:00
A stable country is a country that is primarily a country of X. What constitutes X may change over time, but it works fine if it is slow and gradual.

> But one of the legacies of colonialism is the Middle East and Africa being carved up in lines that didn’t match the underlying cultural groups.

If it is not gradual and you have Y and Z beside X, is when trouble start. Middle East and lot of African countries is the example of this. Those people where unable to live together (too many cultural differences) in their home country, why should be different in Europe, where cultural differences will be even higher ?
by cornholio | 2025-09-25 10:47:00+00:00
The customer can ask their bank anything, but the SEPA terms allow reversal for very strict scenarios, only if the payment was erroneous, it was duplicated by a human or technical errors, the wrong amount was sent etc. So the bank will refuse demands based on consumer protection reasons, they correctly fulfilled the customer request to send the money and further disputes are handled privately.

You might be referring to SEPA direct debit, which can be reversed unilaterally by the client at any point during the 8 weeks. These are payments initiated by the merchant, using an already established direct debit channel.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-09-25 10:47:04+00:00
It might sound weird, but yes. The economic perspective is the same.

You're making a huge upfront unprofitable investment into something, so that a lot of insanely profitable investments can be made 10 years in the future, that uses the result of todays investment as infrastructure.

Whether it's as important as roads, all of that is not relevant from an economic standpoint -- I'm just explaining the rationale behind the investments today.

> These companies

It's useful to mentally think of it as an implicit "team effort" among all relevant, rich companies. Openai (just an example) themselves are being "allowed" by everyone else in the "team" to not make money, because everyone knows that at the end there will be a gajillion new product companies they can all make their money back on. Openai/stargate is in that sense just a "front" for this massive infrastructure investment. Sama/Microsoft themselves will make money that way, either by building those products (just think of the ai integrations in MS enterprise in 10 years...) or by investing in others building those products. Defense folks have investments into this for the same reason.

That's why I said it's similar to roads, no one expects to make money from roads. But on those nice roads amazon will create a 1-day delivery product, charge you 10$ a month for it, and investors will make money from that [1].

[1] yes yes this specific example is bunk and historically wrong, but wanted to drive home the parallel with a small example
by blahlabs | 2025-09-25 10:48:09+00:00
My partners owns numerous brother knitting machines of that era. They are fascinating machines, I love them. Complicated mechanisms to move the needles in and out depending on the pattern set. My partner is the expert in them, not me, so my understanding of how they actually work is limited.

We converted a Brother KH750 (or 950 maybe?) to be able to knit from a digital image with an arduino and a project called All Yarns Are Beautiful [0].

I was going to say unfortunately the project looks dead, but looking at their news page, there is an update from this year after being dormant since 2019, which is exciting.

[0] https://www.ayab-knitting.com/
by griffzhowl | 2025-09-25 10:49:09+00:00
The idea is that it's a set of basic rules that can be used to model any computation (lambda calculus is Turing-complete). So think of it as a programming language with a very minimal set of primitive/builtin operations, which is really what it is.

The reason things can seem more complicated than they need to be is that this set of primitive operations is so minimal; and the reason it's so minimal is that Alonzo Church came up with it in the 1930s when they were trying to get to the very bare bones of the concept of computation.

Lambda calculus is the grandfather of all functional programming languages. Lisp was a more or less direct implementation of it
by atoav | 2025-09-25 10:49:39+00:00
A good manager gets in a fight with their superior(s) if their superior happens to be wrong. A bad manager will avoid conflict with their superior, nod too unrealistic demands and then badmouth the superior with their team. A catastrophic manager will actively push unrealistic plans towards their superior.

For me the main difference between a good and a bad manager is that the good manager is interested in delivering good work in a sustainable way that improves the team, while bad managers are interested primarily in looking good while burning resources and bridges for fast victories.

If you think what it takes to for example write a legendarily good piece of software, while building a team that is top class among other comparable teams, the surest way to not reach that is to cower in front of superiors and play both sides. If anything it requires a lot of resilience, patience, diplomacy, persistence and the backbone to defend ones ideals, projects and subordinates.
by ohyoutravel | 2025-09-25 10:51:50+00:00
A classmate of mine dropped out to do this. Failed, and ended up picking up later to finish the last two years of college. It really didn’t seem to have slowed them down, and finishing college a few years later (with some startup founders experience) seems to have been overall good. Unfortunately did end up going to Boston Consulting Group from on-campus recruiting, so not a great end to the story, but historically that’s a high-ish paying and hard to get job.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-09-25 10:52:32+00:00
The arguments people make here are so strange. They could be true, but they pretend that (1) life before 2020 didn’t exist and 99% of companies from startups to large companies didn’t constantly work in a single location, (2) companies weren’t already paying premiums not just to hire in areas where their offices were but to pay people to relocate from cheaper areas to where their offices were instead of just paying them a lower salary to work out of the LCOL place, (3) that there isn’t a massive amount of economic literature on agglomeration effects and the advantages of being colocated while working.

If the agglomeration effects don’t exist, SF and Silicon Valley as the center of the tech world wouldn’t be a thing.

I guess part of the reason people don’t want to believe working colocated to your colleagues plays a role in your productivity is because it punctured the idea that the reason you’re being paid the high salary you are is completely merit based, and dismiss that your fortune in either being born in or being able to relocate to a city like SF played a huge role in your success.
by mnky9800n | 2025-09-25 10:53:43+00:00
Better to start our own club then.

All things have a life cycle. Despite what yc wants you to believe, it will come and go. Perhaps it’s becoming a prestige institution in the hopes to increase its longevity.

That being said, belonging to a group is a central component of being a human as we are highly social animals. So it’s not wrong to want to belong to a group and then being sad when you are rejected. It requires a lot of maturity and stoicism to cut your own path. This is somewhat ironic since traditionally founding your own company is considered cutting your own path but I think yc and others have made it much less so. There is a formula now to follow which is why there is now an in group and an out group. Cutting your own path by definition does not include a set formula.
by lucfranken | 2025-09-25 10:54:10+00:00
I am currently testing the app. Maybe, for more engagement, start processing cards faster just after installation. It feels weird to have to wait 30 minutes, just show me at least a card. Like the fact that I am installing DayFlow would be a positive experience.

Compliments for the Wizard - that one works perfect at least with Gemini. One little detail: You have a Github Star button in it, that really was at a non-logical place and made me think.
by Saline9515 | 2025-09-25 10:55:17+00:00
> A company applying for H1-Bs over and over and over is going to stick out and should get its H1-Bs denied--regardless of whether it is selling them to wealthy foreign nationals or is running an IT sweatshop that people flee as soon as they can.

You understand that 10 US companies hired 50k H1-Bs in 2025, out of 85k visas? The second largest hirer is Tata Consulting Services, who then "resells" the H1-Bs to clients while taking a cut. It's already happening.

And even then, you can still create subsidiaries or stand-alone companies to avoid being seen as a "repeat customer".

> In addition, if foreign nationals want to come to the US and pay taxes here, we should let them. The US was built on immigration from working-class people--wealthy foreign nationals are kind of a no-brainer.

This is a democratic issue, the USA is not earthlings' free for all, but the land of the citizens of the USA.

Just as a country is not a sum of taxpayers, immigration is not always mutually beneficial. If young CS graduates can't find a job because entry-level offers are reserved for foreigners, they'll end up working in underqualified jobs and paying less taxes, on top of the human cost caused by this situation. Supply and demand laws exist, and the job market is not magically immune because Amazon decided that the skills of the 14k H1-Bs they hired this year couldn't be found on the local market.
by ryukoposting | 2025-09-25 10:55:19+00:00
I don't find it hard to believe at all. Here's an incredibly unscientific way of looking at it:

I'm 27. Among me and a hastily-assembled list of 14 of my male friends, 7 of us definitely have at least one sports betting account, 4 definitely don't, and I'm not sure about the other 4. I'd bet (heh) at least one of them has an account.

It might be more informative to see how many men actually use their sports betting accounts. Technically I have an account, but I haven't used it in over 2 years. Won a bet that the Heat would beat the Celtics in the conference finals, realized I was now net-positive by several hundred dollars, cashed out, and uninstalled the app. Never looked back.
by pixelpoet | 2025-09-25 10:55:37+00:00
Let's bear in mind that Australians call their best friends Good Cunts, and try to take it the best possible way :D I don't even disagree with him, it's just too easy to do better.

The friction/damping term you've added is absolutely necessary to counteract the systematic energy gain from Euler integration, and with better integration, you need less / no unphysical damping, leading to more of that delicious chaotic behaviour we're all looking for.

You can even cheese this with infinite amount of computation if you wanted to do it braindead style (which is still super instructive!), by just repeating the step function with a scaled-down dt until the position components agree to within some tolerance.

The rest is an incredibly deep rabbithole, which I've been enjoying since decades :D
by williamdclt | 2025-09-25 10:56:37+00:00
My personal philosophy, which isn't shared by many but I'm yet to find it failing me: (almost) never use default arguments. It's bad design and causes real issues, between bugs and incidents I've been involved in dozens of situations where I've found that "this would never have happened if this argument didn't have a default value".

First, there's very rarely a value that really makes sense to be the "default". People often use a default value when it's a "commonly used" value: I don't think it's a good reason, other values usually are just as valid and important as the most-commonly-used value. It's like saying someone in Sweden is "white by default" because it's the most common case: it's going to be often correct but _why would you do that_ when you could just make it explicit. The typing you're saving isn't worth it.

Second, it makes your API less easy to use. Devs _should_ read through all the available arguments anyway to make your function do what they want, including these default arguments (even if they decide not to set them), so what did you gain from making them optional? A bit of typing, a bit of screen real estate? Sure, but devs _do not actually behave like that_ and often don't read or don't pay enough attention to optional arguments. They just (consciously or not) hope that the default values will be reasonable for their specific use-case. Well, too often it's not and that result in a bug or incident: the typing and screen estate you gained are not worth it. FORCE devs to think about what's the correct value, that's good design.

Third, it's much less readable. The reader doesn't know that there are invisible arguments with an implicit value, despite these arguments modifying the behaviour of the function. Make everything explicit and no-one needs special implicit knowledge to know what a function is doing (even Python says "explicit is better than implicit").

Fourth, what would make sense as a default at some point might not make sense later. You pick a default that seems to make sense, people use this default value all over the place, things change and actually new use-cases usually need a different value... well sucks to be you. Now you have a footgun, as it's not even a good default for new use-cases and it's more likely to be misused, or you need to go over all previous use-cases to give an explicit value so that you can change the default... might as well have never made it a default.

There's exceptions of course: I wouldn't want `key` or `className` to be explicit in React, but for 99% of backend stuff, default values are a bad design. I hate Go for this: zero values have caused _countless_ issues to almost everyone I know, whether they acknowledge it or not.
by constantcrying | 2025-09-25 10:58:20+00:00
DSLR describes the basic operation mechanism of the camera. The A6700 does not have that mechanism, it has no optical viewfinder.

DSLR is an obsolete technology, just like your phone modern cameras can use their digital sensors to give a preview of the actual image on the sensor. Saying that some camera is a DSLR means something, namely that it uses an optical mechanism to project the light through the lense into a viewfinder. It is a technical term with a clear meaning, calling the A6700 a DSLR is wrong.
by seviu | 2025-09-25 10:59:19+00:00
When we propose alternatives the answer is that they want to protect customers.

But they don’t protect their cash cow from massive daily influxes of scam apps. It’s better one million scam apps generating 50k per month and drowning my two or three apps for which I spent months of work than a few thousand quality apps from which everybody would profit.

Let’s be real it takes a special kind of mad developer to try to make a business that relies on the AppStore. First if you are unlucky you get rejected on day one or two. And if you aren’t and are wildly popular you risk Apple copying your business model.

Because deep down some people at Apple despise the App Store developers and think they can do much better. This has been at the core of Apple culture for ages.

Anyway we legit indie developers who care about our products get drowned in irrelevance. Who cares.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-25 10:59:23+00:00
> I ask in all seriousness since, for example, retrofitting regular semis to electric requires millions and millions just to get started

That's because semis - just like cars - are road legal and everything has to be done by the books. The hard part isn't swapping out the engine and mounting a battery pack, car modders have done that for decades for funsies, the hard part is getting it certified for roadworthiness.

On construction sites, particularly ones fully on private property, no one gives a fuck about the equipment, at least not until someone gets hurt, maimed or killed.
by Hoshang07 | 2025-09-25 10:59:54+00:00
that's a good baseline..db rbac locks scope, but i guess not behavior. inside that schema the agent can still fire off wide scans, weird joins, or grab way more rows than needed.. Ai can write apt queries for sure but there's always a dependancy on the kinda prompt it gets. you may also lose semantic clarity and telemetry .. no way to know if it actually pulled the right data. how would you enforce “only these lookups” or “only these joins” with just db perms? is there a way?
by florianist | 2025-09-25 11:00:18+00:00
So many comments are very negative here. I'm currently using a Pi 4 as my home desktop computer and I will probably replace it with a Pi 500+. I really want to avoid a pre-installed Windows, want my computer to be 100% silent, low energy, and I fancy the computer-is-in-keyboard feel. Sure, I might get a mini PC for a bit cheaper but I like to support Raspberry Pi. The products are easy to get into, have great and lasting software support, and a large community behind it.
by lordkrandel | 2025-09-25 11:01:16+00:00
No, I don't really think so, people with power are listened to because they have power. Not because they say anything good or meaningful. Sometimes they speak hate. And even if you just don't listen, others may be listening, and will take you over. So, you really have to be aware of what people say. Pushing your hands against your ears won't save you.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-09-25 11:01:24+00:00
> This is exactly why Google is clamping down on running your own choice of apps on Android, as well as pushing things like remote attestation on both phones and browsers.

Yes, Google is doing this; but I don't believe Google is doing it to squeeze an inconsequentially small boost in YT Premium subscriptions from former-account-sharers - I believe they're doing it because they want to demonstrate that YouTube is a "secure" platform for large, Hollywood-like, production studios to feel comfortable publishing first-runs of new TV content directly to YouTube - and those production companies are famously paranoid, luddite, and comically ignorant of cryptography fundamentals (i.e. they believe DRM can simultaneously allow legal subscriber Alice but deny evil pirate Bob from watching protected content when Alice and Bob are in-reality the same person (it's you, me, us!).

..and if not Hollywood studios, then certainly the major sports leagues. [The NFL's lawyers seem like real fun at parties](https://publicknowledge.org/the-nfl-wants-you-to-think-these...).
by benchly | 2025-09-25 11:01:37+00:00
I've been part of three software-adjacent product development teams where the Lead did exactly this and it did not go well all three times.

Having been team lead a few times myself now, I have learned that I am not there to be a field marshal. I'm there to act as a hub or conduit for all the other parts of the team. When they clash, I help resolve the conflict. When they question, I help assuage concerns. When they have ideas, I help evaluate the value of implementation. When they need resources, I approach the right people and do what I can. When they fuck up, I take the heat and rally them to help fix the problem.

It took me over a decade to learn this. I'm not the best. My name is unrecognized, for the most part, outside of some very specific circles. But I find that being part of the team rather than some imaginary demagogue to them yields consistently good results with significantly lower risk of talent loss and helps avoid over-promising/under-delivering.

The article does a nice job of pointing a few things out that I find essential in good leadership, but one thing in particular is saying "I don't know, but let's figure it out." Not only does it give your experts permission to be uncertain and helps avoid the trappings of getting defensive, as the author mentions, but it also reminds them they are not alone in this fight. That's powerful.

I'm sure many of you reading this have felt unsupported by your leaders in the past, a cog in a machine that will stress you to the point of breaking and simply replace you with another when that inevitably happens. Maybe my experience as a tech/troubleshooter colors my view here, but people, just like machines, need to be cared for if you want them to keep operating at a level that allows them to make a meaningful contribution to the team.
by esad | 2025-09-25 11:03:22+00:00
Maybe it's just me, but from time to time I try latest Servo build and it never survives more than few minutes of usage before crashing. Last time I did it was 3 days ago, I opened a website and it crashed with "RefCell already borrowed" in what seems to be a logger module. This always strikes me as weird because one of the selling points for Rust is memory and thread safety (quote from the website: "eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time").