MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EMM_386 | 2025-09-04 23:12:38+00:00
The strategy is throw a little bit of money at everything, hope one of them will become a unicorn, everyone gets richer.

Rinse and repeat.

You're right though ... these YC batches are not what they used to be. AI is hot right now, so it seems YC is throwing money at anything that seems like it can at least actually do something (not that it is necessarily good). If that product doesn't get hot, who cares? Plenty more money to go around on the next batch, because one of them probably will!
by makeitdouble | 2025-09-04 23:13:20+00:00
To my knowledge, even before HP-48 level calculators came in the classroom nobody cared about arithmetic past middle school. The core of the teaching was proofs and a lot more theory, and that went on into CS for me.

I'd compare it to the ability to write and run basic assembly. We did it, and got checked on it, but that was not what we were there for.
by PKop | 2025-09-04 23:14:30+00:00
What about the tax implications of every transaction being a taxable event?

Are you tracking all of this for tax purposes? These transactions all have to be reported to the IRS even for stable coins. This is the biggest thing making crypto payments a non-starter. What's the story here from the end-user's perspective?

I as an individual have no interest in stacking stable coins if when I spend them to businesses, I have to meticulously track each transaction and report it. Whatever you're doing for businesses doesn't seem like it would solve this problem for individuals, if you're even solving it for businesses themselves that is.
by DrillShopper | 2025-09-04 23:15:01+00:00
> NFL is artificial and arbitrary literally by definition.

If so, then why does no other sport match its popularity in the US when NFL football isn't in season? If it's so goddamn arbitrary the something like baseball should make as much as it does. Basketball should make as much as it does. Hockey should make as much as it does. However, as marketed as those sports are in the US (and they are heavily marketed), then why don't they match the NFL in viewership and revenue?

>> I enjoy NFL football because it is a showcase of brain

> You enjoy it because you were brought up by society to enjoy it and it was pushed on you from all sides. If you grew up in, say, Iceland, you probably wouldn't know anything about it or care at all.

You don't know a goddamn thing about me. I grew up in The Netherlands watching (the other kind) of football, not in an area where the NFL existed. Maybe stop trying to pidgeonhole people that like things you don't.

Is there a lot of marketing around sports? Yes. There's a lot of marketing around software, video games, pharmaceuticals, fiscal policy, food, and automobiles. Would you say anybody who enjoys cooking for their family "brainwashed by Tyson into liking something they wouldn't like?

Fuck you for assuming
by citizenpaul | 2025-09-04 23:15:20+00:00
>elective medical procedures.

Are not covered by Insurance.

Where have you been seeing medical costs come down the last 20 or so years that makes you think the relentless constant increasing prices is going to change? My medical costs are nearly double what they were 10 years ago and I have no medical issues, I doubt I'm an outlier.

There is no competition in a captured market with artificial supply limitations. ie the number of medical professionals that are legally allowed to sell or use the service.
by kjs3 | 2025-09-04 23:15:37+00:00
I think they're winding it down, but NEC still sells (or until recently sold) a version of their SX line of vector 'supercomputers', the latest iteration of which comes on PCI-e cards. Runs Unix and has things like a CUDA-compatible stack.

The SX arch is a couple of decades old now, and racked up a bunch of notable accomplishments back when a 'supercomputer' meant more than "keep piling commodity chips up until you get the benchmark numbers you want". An elegant weapon for a more civilized time.

https://www.nec.com/en/global/solutions/hpc/sx/index.html
by _mlbt | 2025-09-04 23:15:39+00:00
So you would like to have the government take over all the houses and become your landlord instead?

When they seize these properties, how should the government determine who gets to live where? Should it be based on your profession? Your family size? Your standing within the Party, Comrade? Perhaps your ability to bribe the government agent who is responsible for assigning housing? What if there’s not enough housing for everyone and the government is behind on building more? How many random strangers are you okay with sharing your apartment with?

Resources are fundamentally finite and unequally distributed, even under communism.
by sunshine-o | 2025-09-04 23:15:45+00:00
> Sometimes humble regulation is enough. Take SEPA as an example: I can transfer money free of charge to any European bank account, in a few seconds.

SEPA was a success but it was only a first step to modernise the banking system. The following regulations/directives like PSD2 failed in my opinion.

The ECB also had one of those CBDC built much earlier than people have been told. They already had something quite advanced around 2020, with a optimist launch date in 2022 I believe.

It obviously failed miserably and I read a few weeks ago that they are "exploring Ethereum and Solana for digital euro launch".

I would be curious what happened exactly but my guess is the banks just said "NO WAY".
by SeenNotHeard | 2025-09-04 23:16:31+00:00
One limitation not mentioned is that Action! didn't support recursion. This had to do with how local variables were stored.

Whether it was the best language for 8-bit programming, it certainly was a great fit for the 6502, as the language targeted the peculiarities of that chip. Accessing hardware-specific features of the 8-bit Atari's was a snap, which was necessary in order to do anything more interesting than sieves or print loops.

Action! probably could've been ported to the Apple line, but 8-bits were winding down by the time it was released. Porting to 16-bit machines like the IBM PC or Mac (or even the Atari ST) would have been a tougher sell, since Pascal and C were better established by that point, and worked well on those machines.

Two bad things about Action!: Charging a license fee to distribute the runtime, and that dumb bang in the name.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-09-04 23:16:36+00:00
In the given example, if you click two squares down from the 3 in the 2-3-4 at the bottom, if you get a 3 it may reveal a 3 that will open up all the spaces around it. Which in the process may reveal what kind of 4 it is.

If you click on the square three to the right of the top 1, if that shows a 1, then a lot of surrounding squares can be revealed and again you may "walk up" to a more definitive mapping of the bombs.

I'm not even sure those are the optimal examples, but when I minesweeper it was for speed.

The real advantage, especially at this stage of the puzzle, is that those squares might quickly lead to another big field to be revealed.
by rolph | 2025-09-04 23:16:40+00:00
2 possibilities come to mind:

1) double or triple down on your take, by trafficking a bunch of people that want to be somwhere out of venuzuela.

2) when the boat is close to shore, people start grabbing a package or two, and jump out and run for it. maybe a couple miles apart or until the gig is up and the last few run or get caught.
by watersb | 2025-09-04 23:17:39+00:00
I'm reading "Tomorrow!" by Philp Wylie, a novel published in 1952 about the preparation (or lack thereof) of the citizens of a fictional Midwestern US city, and the aftermath of nuclear war.

Wishful thinking, terror, social climbing, anti-American activities... and bravery, civil defense, common decency.

Wealthy owners of mass media don't want the government telling them what to do, so they destroy civil defense efforts.

The good old days.
by jerf | 2025-09-04 23:18:40+00:00
If you just want independence, just start collecting MP3s or CDs or whatever. I've been collecting physical music since the mid 90s and my whole MP3 collection is still under 128GBs, so I just copy it anywhere I want it now. Unless you really put some effort into it, storage will probably grow faster than your collection will.

Also, you don't need to think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, or something you need to drop in one month. Just start. Peck away every so often and in 5 years you'll have enough independence to tell any streaming service what it can do with itself.
by const_cast | 2025-09-04 23:19:22+00:00
> On the gas side, we’re both forcing ratepayers to spend billions on conversion from low to high pressure gas mains AND prohibiting new gas service.

On the gas side, Trump's one BBB greatly increased the caps on natural gas exports.

The reality is that the companies extracting NG are not going to be giving it to Americans, they're going to sell it abroad and rake in way more money.

Which would maybe be fine... if we also weren't currently (and severely) artificially limiting the supply of renewables. Um, oops. There's nothing left.

All of our lobbies are fucking stupid.
by cortesoft | 2025-09-04 23:21:47+00:00
So the author talks about how little money per stream artists make... but how much SHOULD they be making? What is fair compensation for writing a song?

In the old days, artists would join a label and put out an album. The artist would earn about 10% of sales or so (varies of course, but on average). So a $15 CD would earn an artist $1.50.

The article lists the 'price per stream' as about $0.005. So it would take about 300 streams of a song to earn the same amount as selling a CD used to make.

I feel like that isn't categorically less money than artists used to make per song listen? There are many albums I own that I have listened to way more than 30 times, which is what it would take for a 10 song album to get 300 song 'streams'

Is that a fair compensation? Why or why not?

I think artists should be able to earn money from creating music, but I don't know how we decide how much they actually deserve if we aren't just going based on the price the market sets.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-09-04 23:21:55+00:00
>Turns out... they are not! You can do the same thing using a different set of functions, like Legendre polynomials, or wavelets.

Yup, any set of orthogonal functions! The special thing about sines is that they form an exceptionally easy-to-understand orthogonal basis, with a bunch of other nice properties to boot.
by ipython | 2025-09-04 23:22:03+00:00
Even today though you’re still taught arithmetic without a calculator. My kids have spelling words even though we have spell check.

Why? Because otherwise they’d have no idea if the answer provided to them is “correct”. As the saying goes, garbage in garbage out. You type the wrong numbers into the calculator ? How would you know the answer is also wrong unless you knew “about” what the answer should be?
by const_cast | 2025-09-04 23:22:09+00:00
Computers use up extremely small amounts of electricity. Most people don't actually know this. Your washing machine is a good ~100 computers. A lightbulb? If it's not LED, that's a few computers. For one lightbulb.

Of course it depends on the computer, but if we're talking laptops or corpo computers it's like 25 - 50 watts. Supercomputers, like those used for AI, are different of course.
by protocolture | 2025-09-04 23:22:17+00:00
>My personal belief is that systems that allow people to get paid when they're not working are not sustainable, and therefore intellectual property has a fundamental flaw. The end game for musicians is to perform live and use their recordings as advertisements for that. That makes them very similar to jobs I've held my whole life where the second I stop showing up for work is the second I stop getting paid.

Could not agree more.
by Telemakhos | 2025-09-04 23:22:26+00:00
"No phones" was the rule back in the 2000s, when phones were flip phones or pagers for drug deals. Then helicopter parents demanded to be able to contact their children at any time, including during classes, so phones were allowed. There was the added bonus of "What if there's a shooting? I need to be able to call my kid during a shooting!" Now, phones are not allowed again.

The takeaway is that phones should never have been allowed in school. They distract from school, and kids need to learn to focus on tasks without being distracted.
by tptacek | 2025-09-04 23:23:23+00:00
From a privacy perspective, the impact is further limited by the tiny number of popular zones that are actually signed --- you're two predicates removed from a useful attack (widespread deployment of clientside DNSSEC validation, which is very rare today, and widespread zone signing).

It's a weird misissuance from that perspective! Suggestive to me of something nonmalicious (nonmalicious misissuance is still a dealbreaker).
by aeonfox | 2025-09-04 23:23:24+00:00
I was under the impression that for GPU accelerated GUIs, all windows are rendered to a render target. It might be that windows underneath have gone to sleep and aren't updating, but they would have their last state rendered to a texture. This permits things like roll-over previews and layered effects to have a more trivial overhead.

Software renderers typically do the optimisation you're suggesting to reduce on memory and CPU consumption, and this was a bigger deal back in the day when they were the only option. I think some VNC-like protocols benefit from this kind of lazy rendering, but the actual VNC protocol just diffs the entire frame.

On the GPU, the penalty for uploading textures via the bus negate the benefit, and the memory and processing burden is minimal relative to AAA games which are pushing trillions of pixel computations, and using GBs of compressed textures. GPUs are built more like signal processors and have quite large bus sizes, with memory arranged to make adjacent pixels more local to each other. Their very nature makes the kinds of graphics demands of a 2D GUI very negligible.
by kevinventullo | 2025-09-04 23:23:40+00:00
I attended high school in the US in the early 00’s and cell phones were absolutely banned from classrooms. You could keep them in your locker and use them between classes, but that was it.

I attended college in the late 00’s, and I don’t think I took a single digital exam. Quizzes, sure, but for final exams even CS was pencil and paper (or a final project, which admittedly will have issues in the post-LLM era).
by wubrr | 2025-09-04 23:24:07+00:00
> If so, then why does no other sport match its popularity in the US when NFL football isn't in season?

What does popularity have to do with artificialness? But, anyway, this is where it would be helpful for you to know a little bit about the history of the sport - the answer to your question is readily available with a bit of googling.

> If it's so goddamn arbitrary the something like baseball should make as much as it does.

Basketball is also an arbitrary and artificial sport. Many sports are. By definition.

> I grew up in The Netherlands watching (the other kind) of football,

That's good for you. But it is very obvious that the popularity of american foot ball is mostly due to societal influence. That is why it is popular in the US and almost nowhere else. The history of how and why it is so popular in the US is also readily available - if you're actually interested in that.

> Fuck you for assuming

Relax buddy, we're just having a civil discussion where we happen to disagree, no need to get emotional.
by XorNot | 2025-09-04 23:24:18+00:00
This is as wrong as everytime someone says "the benefit of Bitcoin is you can just walk all your assets across the border!"

It fundamentally misunderstands how foreign exchange works, or how government backed currency works.

You cannot "opt out" of the local currency: period. It is the only currency which can extinguish tax obligations. And even if it wasn't government backed, you can't trade in a currency no one wants in the first place.

This should be trivially obvious from the observation that how much water a gold bar in the desert buys you is going to be pretty highly variable.
by slg | 2025-09-04 23:24:34+00:00
Yes, I have made the same argument elsewhere in this thread saying there is little reason to believe Saquon's record of successful investing is due to anything but luck (and access due to his celebrity)[1], but at the very least he does have a track record of actually making those investments while your comment was purely a retroactive hypothetical.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45131713
by ashwinsundar | 2025-09-04 23:24:37+00:00
I want to do this too, and have a feeling that it's not as hard or time-consuming as it seems. 15 years ago, all my music lived in a /Music folder and I could play anything in there, instantly. It should be easy to just move that folder to a networked drive, get some sort of mp3 player app on my phone/devices, and point it at that folder. If the app is allowed to download files as well, that's even better. Otherwise, plugging in my phone/mp3 player and uploading songs manually was never particularly difficult, even back then.

If I remember correctly, all my playlists were really just text files used by Windows Media Player or iTunes, so it should be easy to support that type of functionality as well.
by spaceman_2020 | 2025-09-04 23:25:16+00:00
I sold a blog in early 2021. The seller offered to pay via wire transfer or via Bitcoin.

I chose wire transfer. Which meant going to my bank, getting approval to get paid, fill out two forms, and making three total trips.

I now have contractors in Nigeria and Philippines who want to get paid in USDT. It's instant and there is a thriving local scene of P2P sellers for instant liquidity.
by seemaze | 2025-09-04 23:25:42+00:00
My own self hosted audio journey ended with Lyrion Music Server[0], formerly Logitech Music Server. It is now open source and run by the community.

There are plugins for Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, local radio, song lyrics, and more. It also does great multi-room audio syncing via DLNA, Airplay, and Squeezelite. I recently setup transcoded streaming so I can listen to my library remotely on Apple Carplay at a reduced bitrate.

It's certainly not perfect, but more perfect than any other open or commercial platform I've trialed. Can't recommend it enough!

[0]https://lyrion.org
by orlp | 2025-09-04 23:25:51+00:00
It doesn't seem that hard to solve to me either. It's solvable with basic linear programming.

1. Add a variable for each node, and a variable for each output edge from stations. 2. For each reservoir add equality constraints to the sum of incoming edges with the coefficients given in the problem. 3. For each station add equality constraints between the weighted sum of its inputs (which is 1 for the root station) and its outputs (which are the variables we added). 4. Add an out_edge >= 0 constraint for each output edge on stations to forbid illegal negative flows. 5. Add a variable m which is constrained to be less than all the output station variables. 6. Maximize m.
by alphazard | 2025-09-04 23:26:00+00:00
Relationships with suppliers and customers are what gives any business most of its value.

I don't consider that to be part of a moat because you don't have to cross it before you begin competing with the business. Establishing suppliers and customers is just competing with whatever businesses would also want those deals.

A technical moat is knowledge that you have to have (maybe across multiple employees) before you can even begin to start competing. It's rare to come across any technology that couldn't be cloned by a few smart engineers in 6 months. Much more likely that you aren't allowed to build or sell the technology, or you don't have enough capital, or no one will sell you the parts, or it's illegal to start the business in the first place.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-04 23:26:19+00:00
A useful example to consider might be an uninitialized integer in C++

In C++ 98 "int x; foo(x);" is Undefined Behaviour. We said there's an integer named x, then, without initializing x, we passed it as a parameter to the function foo, evaluating the uninitialized value, literally anything is allowed to happen. Program crashes, deletes all the JPEGs large than 15 kilobytes, displays "Boo!" on the screen, anything the program could have done is something it might now do.

In C++ 26 "int x; foo(x);" is merely Erroneous Behaviour. The value of x is Unspecified, but it does have a value. This program might pass any integer to foo -- perhaps your compiler provides a nice compiler setting to choose one, maybe the person building the program picked 814 and so this calls foo(814)

This constraint is an enormous difference. In a sense the Unspecified behaviour is defined, it's just not specific. That variable x will have some integer value, so, maybe zero, or 814, but it can't be a string, or negative infinity, and evaluating it will just do what it would do for its value, whatever that was.

If you don't find that example illuminating enough, try another from a very different language, a data race in Java

Now, in C++ (or Odin though of course Ginger Bill will insist otherwise ad nauseum) the data race is UB. Game over, you lose, anything might happen.

But in Java the data race has Unspecified behaviour. Specifically, when the race happens the variable we raced has some definite value and it's a value it definitely could have had at or before this moment in a sequentially consistent program. So e.g. maybe we're counting clowns, we started from zero, thread A is counting 800 clowns, thread B is counting 600 clowns, but the threads race the same counter, legitimate values we might see at the end include zero all the way through 1400 clowns. -1 isn't possible, 1600 isn't possible, but 1234 is entirely plausible. That's Unspecified behaviour.
by al_borland | 2025-09-04 23:27:01+00:00
I've gone back and forth on this.

I recently signed up for a streaming services again (Apple Music), but I'm being very intentional about how I use it. I'm currently going through the 500 greatest albums ever made, according to Rolling Stone. I don't necessary agree with their rankings, but it's giving me exposure to things I normally wouldn't listen to, gets me out of the algorithms, and feels much better than having it play a bunch of random stuff no one has ever heard of, just to fill the void.

I'm treating the online catalog more like a store, only listening to albums I've added to my library, and deleting ones I don' think I'll listen to again. This has helped avoid falling into the algorithms when overwhelmed from near infinite choice.

It is likely some of the albums I run across in venture will be purchased and added to my local library so I have them and am not only renting. I do want to support things like the iTunes Music Store, because I don't want to end up in a future where the only options for music are streaming and piracy. Since it's DRM free, I don't have an issue buying from there, but I like that I can sample full albums for extended periods of time (as long as I keep paying) via streaming.

From my attempts with YouTube Music and Spotify, the library wasn't really setup well to do what I'm doing, and if I were to get these albums through other means, like the poster who I can only assume is pirating everything now, I wouldn't ever want to delete anything, and my library would be full of junk I'd never listen to.

The most seems to also really glaze over the cost of the setup and storage. I have a NAS at home, and not even counting the initial investment in the hardware, the cloud backup alone costs me $30/month. Assuming a person wants backups, having your own library may not be the money saver it sounds like, depending on the setup.