MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by famouswaffles | 2025-09-19 18:10:58+00:00
Ants, bees, and wasps operate on a genetic system called haplodiploidy. It works like this.

Queens don't actually mate to produce male offspring.

Females are Diploid: They are created from a fertilized egg. They have two sets of chromosomes - one set from the mother (the queen) and one from the father's sperm, which the queen releases from the spermatheca when she wants a female.

Males are Haploid: They are created from an unfertilized egg. They have only one set of chromosomes from the queen located in the nucleas of the egg. The queen does not release the male's sperm when she wants a male offspring. They have no father. They hatch from an egg that contains only the mother's genetic material, meaning they are essentially a haploid (single chromosome set) version of the queen.

The M. ibiricus queen produces 2 kinds of offspring with the M. structor:

Sterile Female Hybrid Workers: These are produced in the standard way. The queen lays an egg (containing her genes) and fertilizes it with the sperm from the M. structor male. The resulting worker has DNA from both parents. It's a true hybrid. There is no "dominance"; it's a merger of two different species' DNA.

Fertile Male M.structor Clones: This is where things get really bizzare.

Remember that in the normal case:

- The queen does not use a male's sperm to produce male offspring.

- Joining both DNA always results in a female (males do not have two sets of chromosomes)

There can only be one conclusion. The queen creates this special clone from the male's DNA only, probably by somehow purging her DNA from the nucleus of her egg.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-09-19 18:11:16+00:00
Having seen someone else build and tinker with a 7 node Pi cluster it seems like an absolute waste of time. 1Gb/s networking, PCIe 3.0 x1, slow RAM, slow CPU. And with all the hats and accessories needed it’s not that good of a deal.

Getting some NUC-like machines makes a lot more sense to me. You’ll get 2.5Gb/s Ethernet at the least and way more FlOPS as well.
by zorpner | 2025-09-19 18:11:24+00:00
Specifically, it was in a meeting called by Jason Fried to address people who were concerned about the ongoing existence of an internal list of "funny customer names" (which by all accounts was extremely racist), in which Ryan Singer (who had reportedly previously posted a fair bit of politically right-wing content on internal forums -- those were all deleted when the "no politics at work" policy was rolled out) repeatedly asserted that white supremacy/privilege did not exist (he then resigned).

In the aftermath, DHH dug through old chat logs to find a time in the past when one of the people complaining about the list participated in a discussion about same without complaint, and posted it in a way that was visible to everyone saying that their prior participation meant that their current complaint was invalid.

Then they rolled out the no-politics-at-work policy in this post dated April 26 2021 -- I would encourage anyone interested in the specifics to read through the various versions and edits of this post made in the week following, all without noting that it was being actively changed: https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-19 18:11:28+00:00
The web used to be so much more DIY. Everyone used jQuery but it wasn't prescriptive, it was just a holistic tool (to use Ursala Franklin's framing) to enable us to do whatever. There weren't established practices, there weren't big toolkits/frameworks/libraries under-feet.

The maturation & industrialization of development means that developers no longer are puzzling out the world from first principles. We aren't evaluating each library that comes along to figure out how it might fit into our bespoke apps.

> You become a Next.js developer, a React developer, a Rust developer etc

React in particular is such a distinction of development. It is it's own Terra Firma, solid ground, upon which developers stand, only barely coupled to the underlying platform. Knowing the web itself is still enormously good and helpful, but there is such a huge engine at your back, doing so much work, that is extremely hard to take as more than a black box. Even if you know the web very well, there is still a huge opaque engine between the code you write and the web actual that's targetted.

We don't have the raw experience anymore to be broader developers. Vs React, I think it's more ok to consider oneself a Rust developer, where one is still quite close to the metal, where the only focus-narrowing is to a general purpose language that's good for anything (especially with Rust being such a fore-runner at WebAssembly!).

It seems like big companies are doing some great things with WebComponents, but there's still so little broader attention, and little cultural energy for them. The lack is cyclical: there's scant developer culture around webcomponents, and so scant webcomponent acceptance & knowledge. It feels like such an opportunity for shared knowledge, for excitement, for figuring things out & making patterns, for a more grounded closer to the firm earth potential, and one that obviously needs the curiosity and excitement. But it's React Uber Alles, React on and on.
DuckDB saved our data analysis engine
by vinserello | 2025-09-19 18:11:49+00:00
Our demo totally crashed on a spreadsheet. We knew the old engine wasn't it, so we just yeeted it and rebuilt with DuckDB and WebAssembly.

Basically, we put a whole analytical database inside your browser with WASM. Now parsing and queries run parallel, no cap.

It's actually wild now: 500MB CSV in ~2s. Charts on 100k+ rows are just live.

Peep it here at https://datastripes.com/
by Animats | 2025-09-19 18:13:22+00:00
(For those not familiar with Second Life, every object that does something has a little program in it. Every chair you can sit on, every door you can open, and every clothing item where you can change colors has a small program written by some users. Most of those programs are almost always idle. But there's a tiny amount of CPU time consumed on each frame for each idle program, about 1us to 2us in the Mono implementation. A region can have 10,000 little programs, each eating 1us on each simulation cycle, 45 times a second. This adds up.)
by StTerryADavis | 2025-09-19 18:13:32+00:00
I've read the list of the canceled grants, so far it looks like an even mix of Biden-era stereotypical DEI sounding programs that are mostly STEM focused like:

2215554 EDU Pacific Resources for Education and Learning Investigating the impact of youth's inductive exploration of local technologies featured in Indigenous stories on their engagement, self-efficacy, and persistence in STEM $2,683,413

and mixed with it are specifically Harvard's grants for about everything, not even DEI related. like:

2426105 BIO Harvard University Understanding within-cell plasmid evolution with synthetic systems $1,100,000

Is this related to the Trump-Harvard beef?
by FredPret | 2025-09-19 18:13:37+00:00
> with Woz doing far more of the work

He definitely was the magic ingredient early on. But it's because of Jobs and his drive to make Apple huge that I'm typing this on a Mac.

You need line level employees who churn away at Tesla & SpaceX & Apple, but you also need the visionary maniac to force those companies into existence. Some things can only be done by large companies, and those simply don't just appear without a massive driving force.
by dualogy | 2025-09-19 18:14:17+00:00
> We need to build better native UI libraries that just open up a WebGL context and draw shit to that. DearIMGUI can probably already do like 85% of what modern webapps do.

Would be totally into that! But then as soon as you're developing for a worldwide paying audience (or your employer is), one manager realizes the need for ARIA stuff, another for SEO, another for fully-native input controls (textboxes, checkboxes, radios, buttons etc) for most-fluid&familiar UX on every OS, another for embedding externally loaded markup+scripts (whether that's social media sharing widgets, auth providers, Google Maps / OpenStreetMaps etc), for supporting user-generated `<img>`s and `<video>` in all the various formats the browser natively furnishes, and on and on and on =)
by Derbasti | 2025-09-19 18:14:19+00:00
The only tangible difference between then and now is that many more problems have already been solved. This certainly leaves fewer holes where an enthusiastic developer can flex their muscle.

Then again, I did spend some time in e.g. lisp and Haskell just for the heck of it. And there ate still plenty more unsolved problems outside of the mainstream today.
by non_aligned | 2025-09-19 18:14:53+00:00
I think you're addressing the wrong part of the argument. Of course there are loose associations between concepts that manifest on abstract word-association tasks.

It is a considerably stronger yet less-supported statement that these biases fundamentally corrupt your thinking: that you look at Australia and can't help yourself but think it's 10% worse than Greenland.

It is an even stronger and even less-supported statement the world is going to be better off if we stop using certain tainted words or drawing maps in a certain way - i.e., that these biases hurt people and can be excised with one simple linguistic or cartographic trick.

It's a lot easier to interpret these debates as the manifestation of a bad personality trait: the desire to get sanctimonious about how other people are living their lives.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-19 18:15:25+00:00
> The guidelines provide tips, such as advising workers to dress neatly for U.S. customs interviews, bring invitation letters from their U.S. business partners and avoid saying "work" in the interviews.

> "Using the word 'work' to describe the purpose of your visit can cause suspicion and lead to U.S. entry denial," the guidelines say.
by bpt3 | 2025-09-19 18:15:57+00:00
You're missing the point. Your good friend has to work on his music outside of his paid profession. It's a hobby that is not financially viable for him as a career.

You expect someone who writes software for 8+ hours a day professionally to go home and do more of it for fun?

Those who are interested in doing that are free to do so, but most people have more than 1 interest or would like to be compensated for the additional hours they are effectively working in their profession.
by sjclemmy | 2025-09-19 18:16:05+00:00
I have visited 2x - Once recently and it was very impressive. But I also climbed the towers in a thunder storm in 1990. Which was a terrifying experience. The stairs had about 50cm of stone balustrade on the inside which was not enough to feel safe. I was on my hands and knees by the very top. It was either real or vertigo but I swear I could feel the tower sway as the lightening and thunder crashed all around. A most treasured experience
by constantcrying | 2025-09-19 18:16:35+00:00
LLMs are great for learning, I am using them regularly for that purpose. I am skeptical about the images though, those usually turn out not very good, especially when understanding often hinges on details.

What I find curious is why there is no emphasis on asking questions. This is the single greatest benefit that I have found, giving examples or clarification is, in my experience, very helpful to learn any subject.
by aa-jv | 2025-09-19 18:16:42+00:00
Broome for a few days with family, then into the deep desert with Aborigine family members for a few months of walkabout and general western-society detox. I was very lucky to have been invited to see things most whiteys have absolutely no clue about. There are parts of the Kimberley/Pilbarra that are, quite simply, among the most spiritually rewarding places on the planet.

I would spend my days in serious anticipation of the night sky, a glorious spectacle which majesty is yet to be matched by any human thing I've seen since then.

It was awesome and something I do hope to do again before I perish. Probably the most impactful event in my life was waking up on a dry creek bed surrounded by camels, who had come in the night to sleep at my side, sharing the warm creek stone bed.

Catching snakes for tucker was fun too. ;)
by horsawlarway | 2025-09-19 18:17:01+00:00
So 83 days for payback at the 2k sticker price for the 4090? Sounds like a good time to buy a 4090...

Like, if you buy that card it can still be processing things for you a decade from now.

Or you can get 3 months of rental time.

---

And yes, there is definitely a point where renting makes more sense because the capital outlay becomes prohibitive, and you're not reasonably capable of consuming the full output of the hardware.

But the cloud is a huge cash cow for a reason... You're paying exorbitant prices to rent compared to the cost of ownership.
by snerbles | 2025-09-19 18:17:14+00:00
> All their competitors are doing a lot more with a lot fewer people.

According to Wikipedia, for FY25:

Intel: 102,000 employees

AMD: 28,000 employees

Nvidia: 36,000 employees

I'm pretty sure the latter two have been growing headcount lately, and even then combined they still have fewer employees than Intel.
by foldr | 2025-09-19 18:17:18+00:00
It is not correct to think of garbage collection as malloc + free + GC overhead. For example, allocating memory is much faster in many GC designs than a call to malloc (it can just be a pointer bump on the fast path).

I think you are assuming that a garbage collector calls malloc and free and then does a bunch of additional work on top of that to keep track of memory allocations, but that's not really how it works.
by htek | 2025-09-19 18:17:19+00:00
IIRC, reflection of the sun off water is 5% when directly overhead to about 65% when at a glancing angle (low on the horizon). I prefer to close my eyes and aim my face at the sun for about 10 minutes a day if I'm working indoors all day plus whatever incidental sunlight I get. I have SAD during the winter months and use a full-spectrum lamp, then.

People who spend more time in the sun have a low-moderate risk of melanoma, but higher risk of other skin cancers, vs those who spend more time indoors having a lower risk of non-melanoma skin cancer and a moderate-higher risk of melanoma cancer.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-19 18:17:41+00:00
Doesn’t this just mean less talent? Companies would hire locally if equal level talent was available. I doubt it’s really about saving money when these jobs earn a lot of revenue per employee. Adding this fee means companies may just not find anyone worth hiring. It would make more sense to require H1B salary to be equal to the highest paid local employee of the same role at that company than to just throw an arbitrary $100K fee on.
by empath75 | 2025-09-19 18:17:43+00:00
I am not remotely religious, but I cried when I saw the inside. It is awe-inspiring in every sense of the word. It wasn't so much the objective quality I think, more that I was _surprised_ by how beautiful it was. The outside is, like others have said, somewhat kitschy, a little dated, more like an theme-park stoner version of a church. It just didn't connect with me, but the purity of the beauty inside just completely shook me to my core. Pictures do not capture it at all.
by WhereIsTheTruth | 2025-09-19 18:17:47+00:00
NASA didn't stagnate, NASA landed humans on the Moon with 1960s technology

private space companies, despite decades of hype and funding, have stagnated by comparison

the fact that SpaceX depends heavily on government contracts just to function is yet another proof: their "innovation" isn't self sustaining, it's underwritten by taxpayer money

are you denying that NASA landed on the Moon?

Elon psyop doesn't work on me, i know who is behind it all, they need a charismatic sales man for the masses, just like Ford, Disney, Reagan and all, masking structural power with a digestible story for the masses

> blanket-blaming capitalism without good reasoning is becoming the new red-flag of "can't think critically"

it's quite the opposite, people unable to take criticism of capitalism, talk about "critical thinking", how is China doing?
by theodric | 2025-09-19 18:17:53+00:00
Depends. At full load? At Irish power prices? Just the Pi, no peripherals, no NVMe? 5 units? €13/mo.

Handy: https://700c.dk/?powercalc

My Pi CM4 NAS with a PCIe switch, SATA and USB3 controllers, 6 SATA SSDs, 2 VMs, 2 LXC containers, and a Nextcloud snap pretty much sits at 17 watts most of the time, hitting 20 when a lot is being asked of it, and 26-27W at absolute max with all I/O and CPU cores pegged. €3.85/mo if I pay ESB, but I like to think that it runs fully off the solar and batteries :)
by golergka | 2025-09-19 18:18:02+00:00
Ironically, LLMs are exactly what drives a lot of curiosity and learning without a purpose. I see it all the time on twitter — people getting chatbots into weird mental states, toying around with different systems on top of them, jailbreaking. More for the fun of the game than anything else.

You can't keep that curiosity and at the same time see one of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring technologies of the last decades as something threatening.
by bondarchuk | 2025-09-19 18:18:24+00:00
It's not just his ego though, it's the way his ego clashes with other egos of internet commenters. Why do so many people feel the need to comment that they already knew Wolfram would write about himself and then confirm that it is indeed so? If you can predict it so well and you don't like it, you could just ignore it. But somehow it triggers people even knowing that he exists and they can't let it go.
by gchamonlive | 2025-09-19 18:18:27+00:00
Thanks for the encouraging words. It really means a lot.

Yeah it feels like people default to assuming we bash on US for sport, that we enjoy it's shortcomings and would also enjoy seeing it burn to the ground. It's not. I wished I didn't have to write these kinds of stuff. I wish I only focused on my area of interest which is philosophy of consciousness. But we have to write these harsh criticism because we want to see things just because we don't wanna see it burn to the ground, but flourish and be ever more inviting for collaboration. It's illogical to think otherwise because it's counterproductive to share knowledge with an actor we'd aim to neutralize.

But when slack can change terms, when Microsoft can push spyware and nobody is accountable for anything, when what's the point of a transaction? These all feels like scams. If I'm going to get scammed I prefer not to buy anything at all.
by radioblahaj | 2025-09-19 18:18:37+00:00
Hi Dang! I help run Hack Club's moderation team, and found this comment great food for thought on moderation. I've seen this pattern in Hack Club in heated discussions, and when dealing with messy incidents.

I would love to read some more thoughts you have on this or discuss other questions about moderation and advice. Could I email you with some questions? Happy to also look at an archive of comments where you've discussed this before.

Thank you!
by margalabargala | 2025-09-19 18:18:51+00:00
The argument goes, as one's wealth grows, your capability to prevent harm, suffering, and other general bad things in the world grows as well.

There exists some point beyond which your wealth is so large, your ability to prevent harm so large, and the impact of doing so on yourself so small, that continued wealth accumulation beyond that point indicates a lack of integrity.

Where that line exists is of course debatable. "A billion dollars" is usually referenced because it's such a large value that it's easily over the line.
by snailmailman | 2025-09-19 18:18:52+00:00
The video going viral brought the matter to the attention of texas government officials. The government officials strongly disagree with the content of the course.

It is a publicly funded school, and the government has some power to influence it, mainly control of funding. They likely could put up a fight, but government officials were threatening to fire various school administrators. They likely can’t actually do that directly, it would require a few steps, but the school doesn’t want to put up the fight I guess.

It’s the government censoring what gets taught at universities. Texas has been doing similar things at public schools too, but this is a university, which usually has more freedom in what gets taught.
by GeekyBear | 2025-09-19 18:19:00+00:00
If you promise consumers that your new platform is an "open" one, you are creating a new market where devices will be made by multiple vendors and antitrust law will apply.

Google chose accelerated platform growth in exchange for being bound by antitrust restrictions.

If you create a new platform that that customers know in advance is a walled garden, like XBox, you do not face the same restrictions.

That's how the existing law works.

If you don't like how the existing law works, you have to do what the EU did and change it.
by ndiddy | 2025-09-19 18:19:52+00:00
The modem was an external add-on, there wasn't any special support for it built into the consoles. I think one reason why it wasn't a big success was that a lot of its appeal was being able to easily do stock trades and check your brokerage account from home, and the Japanese stock market started its decline in the early 90s. I don't think many people were excited to subscribe to a service whose main purpose was showing them how much money they were losing.

Interestingly, the JRA (Japanese horse racing association) continued accepting remote bets from Famicom modem users until 2015. Here's a video of someone placing a bet in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks0JeyhZsR4
by j_timberlake | 2025-09-19 18:20:09+00:00
I think if Google trained current models on private data, confidential info would leak constantly, it would be an absolute trainwreck. If Gemini leaked your Gmail and Chrome activity, Google would get sued and regulated into oblivion.

But Google needs to leave this option open in the future, in case they have to go all-in on an arms-race against China, if Chinese AI starts becoming an actual threat somehow. And it's easy to predict the USA gov would prioritize that race over privacy concerns.
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-19 18:21:24+00:00
It's not Baumols cost disease, it's a completely captured audience.

You are getting older and can't take care of yourself. You worked hard your entire life so you have non-zero assets.

Your options are: Sign away everything you have and more to a company in the hope that they will take care of you according to the contract. Or die in your own filth or from tripping and falling in the tub.

Medicare doesn't take care of you until you are destitute, so your only option is to pay whatever a company is asking.

These companies charge $20k a month, but pay their actual laborers peanuts, like we are talking hourly wages that are barely competitive with good construction jobs despite requiring training and spending all day literally wiping down human shit. You will be lucky to have one employee taking care of 30 of you.

All that money is just fed back to shareholders. And building real-estate in the priciest parts of built up cities. Grandma literally can't leave the facility because she's got the dementia and the kids are all in another state so why even build the facility in the middle of a city with skyrocketing housing costs and real-estate prices? Because your clients will pay anything, and that will leave you with a great high value asset that a facility out in a cheaper area would not.

It's just a neat little system for ensuring all those savings and retirement accounts built up by the boomers will not be inherited, and instead will be captured by very very wealthy people.

What possible mechanism could there even be for downward pressure on prices in this system? What are you going to do, NOT need help in your old age?