MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-09-20 17:47:33+00:00
It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people.

Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video.

Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular.

If you don't have a huge viewership or dynamic content then yeah, it's actually pretty easy to setup and run videos sites (infowars has managed it). Target h264 and aac audio with a set number of resolutions and bitrates and viola, you've got something that's pretty competitive on the cheap that can play on pretty much any device.

It's not optimal for bandwidth, for that you need to start sniffing client capabilities. However, it'll get the job done while being pretty much universally playable.
by throwpoaster | 2025-09-20 17:48:10+00:00
> The Road and No Country for Old Men both do not contain quotation marks for speech, and he omits the common speech tags like "he said" or "she exclaimed" which makes it a challenge to know who is saying what.

I am reading NC4OM right now and this is not, technically, the case. He does use those “speech tags”.
by boricj | 2025-09-20 17:48:16+00:00
I recently wrote a paper for a conference that ended up being rejected, with a split review (2 for, 1 against).

As a non-academic that wrote a paper for the first time, I'll say that writing a good science paper takes an absurd amount of time, even on a topic you are very well versed in. It is also way different than other forms of writing, like blogs or technical documentation.

Frankly, I'm astounded I've even managed to get that result, working on it just one month from the submission deadline (a ridiculously massive time crunch) and only in my spare time, not having touched LaTeX in almost a decade. But if a proper heretic like me managed to get that far on their first try, then everyone who's considering writing a paper for the first time ought to have hope.

I might've somehow got an invitation to present a poster out of this, but that's a story for another day (still wrestling with Inkscape on that one).
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-20 17:49:11+00:00
I never had a CRT die on me. A $100 Best Buy TV is disposable junk. Is that factored in to your index? Modern product lifespan is at least half, and repairing something is no longer an option or is 'replace $1000 board' not the $50 fix it used to be. The current price should be at least doubled to try and match in some way. For 30 years my parents had the same TV, is that factored in? My TV has an explicit shelf life. Apps have already stopped working/being supported even without the TV breaking.

My parent's TV never sold any data. My new, much more 'expensive' TV spys on me 24X7. You would not have been able to PAY my grandparents enough to put a TV like that in their house, yet alone consider it an 'upgrade'.
by visa-vasanth | 2025-09-20 17:49:14+00:00
Not really. The H1b and O visas were never used for "genius" talent, they are typically used by the WITCH companies to pay people bottom-rate wages (40k-60k for HCOL city) so companies can underpay market wages.

If you have to pay 100k, you might as well hire an American worker. The "shortages" will mysteriously disappear.
by unionpivo | 2025-09-20 17:50:53+00:00
C is 50 years old or something like that, and it still doesn't have a standard hash map.

Sure its not impossible for C to get that, but at the same time, they are trying to write git not fix C.

* My point is, that hash maps and data structures like that are clearly not the priority of C or they would **exist by now.

** by exist I mean either in C standard, or a at least a community consensus about which one you pick, unless you need something specific.
by askonomm | 2025-09-20 17:51:28+00:00
Well here in Estonia we already are getting bunker test drills and flyers in our mailboxes on what to do in case of a bombing / nuclear attack. Sad thing is that since we don't really have any underground places, and Estonia is as wide as the current Russian occupied line in Ukraine, we're all pretty much going to evaporate no matter what we do.
by llm_nerd | 2025-09-20 17:51:39+00:00
https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/us-official-clarifies-100...

The specific quote can be found in a number of media sources-

"Those who are visiting or leaving the country, or visiting India, they don't need to rush back before Sunday or pay the $100,000 fee. $100,000 is only for new and not current existing holders"

EDIT: Weirdly the parent edited in the "unnamed official" bit after I made my comment, then replied as if I'm illiterate.

Regardless, if "unnamed officials" are being cited by every major media source, it's obvious policy, especially given how vague and uncertain so many details of this are.
by suuuuuuuu | 2025-09-20 17:52:13+00:00
I like a lot of the advice here, except

> Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.

Repetitive sentence structure is not engaging and lulls a reader to sleep, no matter the context. Clauses and transition words and nontrivial sentence structure allow for qualification and clarification, juxtaposition and contrast, and emphasis, often with many fewer words than if written as a series of single independent clauses. A short sentence following longer ones punctuates its point and can effectively lead into subsequent sentences that express more complex ideas/explanations.

In my own scientific writing I also frequently use compound sentences to indicate that the ideas are related (causally or otherwise). It's also unclear to me how one could more efficiently communicate logical or causal flow between ideas than with transition words like "thus" or "therefore."
by milch | 2025-09-20 17:52:24+00:00
Is there a standard that all software must be developed in ANSI C that I missed, or something? The git developers are saying - we want to use Rust because we think it will save us development effort. NonStop people are saying we can't run this on our platform. It seems to me someone at git made the calculus: the amount that NonStop is contributing is less than what we save going to Rust. Unless NonStop has a support contract with git developers that they would be violating, it seems to me the NonStop people want to have their cake and eat it too.

According to git docs they seem to try to make a best effort to stick to POSIX but without any strong guarantees, which this change seems to be entirely in line with: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/CodingG...
by wenc | 2025-09-20 17:52:44+00:00
> Anyone who has used AI tools has seen cases where the first 80% of a project came together like a bolt of lightning, but the last 20% is next to impossible for the AI to accomplish

Offtopic: doing the inverse works better.

If you rely on AI to write 80% of your code, you end up with code you don't understand, so the last 20% is really difficult. You can't even guide the AI correctly at that point.

I actually do the opposite. I write 80% of my code, have an LLM read it, and it helps me iterate faster on the last 20% (which are mostly tedious things like unit tests, corner cases, optimizations, etc). This works surprisingly well because now the AI has a structure to start from, and it's only doing incremental code completion. As a human, I'm also not that great at detecting corner cases -- this is where an LLM really helps because it has seen patterns I've never seen.

In fact, I use coding agents to combine multiple sources of information (not just code) like design docs, LaTeX, etc. and I ask the LLM to detect if the code actually implements the math in the LaTeX correctly. Claude actually does a pretty decent job at that.
by dave333 | 2025-09-20 17:53:01+00:00
Was laid off in 2001 during the dotcom bust. Was self-unemployed buying and selling used docking stations and power adapters until 2007 when I aced a job interview for a small start up after mostly giving up the job search. Six months at the startup gave me experience in an in-demand tech stack that landed me a job at a large tech company that saw me through to retirement 10 years later. If I had it to do over right now I would be creating something with AI as my own business - probably not very lucrative but good experience that might get you hired someplace.
by throwaway7783 | 2025-09-20 17:53:56+00:00
That's what I said. This is not the intent of H1b and exploiters must be punished. Classifying countries into low trust/high trust without understanding the full context of history and exploitation (by the so called high trust societies) and saying they are "gleefully" exploited, is disingenuous. Also see https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe... , and it's not just WITCH. In fact American companies have the biggest slice
by alephnerd | 2025-09-20 17:55:09+00:00
I'm American. I literally did an AB in CS with a secondary in Government back when Obama was still in office. It was an Ivy and we were not required to take OS or CompArch classes (the OS class is now a requirement recently from what I've heard).

Outside of 10 universities (Stanford, MIT, CMU, Cal, UIUC, GT, UMich, UCLA, UW, UT Austin), there isn't much of a point to run campus hiring events or building a pipeline unless alumni help build that pipeline (B10s not mentioned are a great example of that) or it's a local school (SJSU for the Bay, NCSU for RTP).

For cybersecurity and DevSecOps at least, it's legitimately difficult to justify campus hiring in the US when you can hire or fund an IDF, PMO, or Police cybersecurity alum who went to TAU or BGU for around 70-100% of what you would pay an American new grad.

An experienced hire in the US ends up becoming much more expensive and still has a skill gap compared to an equally mid-career hire in Israel.

And if I want to cut costs, it's easy to poach from the various OS development teams in CEE and India, because much of the IBM-Red Hat, IBM AIX, Oracle Linux, and MS Windows Kernel orgs were offshored decades ago.

If I can hire a new grad from IITB (India) or TAU (Israel) for a base salary between $30,000 (India) to $90,000 (Israel) it's much cheaper than hiring the handful of new grads in the US with a similar skillset for $120k-140k base, especially when HFTs like Citadel or HRT are targeting the same candidates at the same unis for their SWE roles.

> and computer engineering programs

CE/ECE programs do require those classes, but the total number of grads from these programs is around 19k [0] for all degree levels (from BS to PhD), and most of the Masters and Doctorate candidates are themselves in the OPT-to-H1B pipeline.

[0] - https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-engineering
by logicchains | 2025-09-20 17:56:29+00:00
>Safety not important in HFT? You'd better make sure those precious microseconds buy you enough to make up for when things go awry.

Memory safety bugs are very rare in modern, well-written and tested C++. The key difference is that there are no adversarial inputs, while something like a browser or server needs to deal with potentially adversarial inputs, making absolute memory safety much more important (as even a single memory safety issue could be exploited).
by applied_heat | 2025-09-20 17:56:35+00:00
Thanks for the reply and the link.

A machine with infinite inertia would resist any frequency change and instantly go to maximum or minimum power upon any grid frequency deviation.

A 25s inertia constant is impressive. The hydro units I work on are anywhere from 1s for newer units to 7s for older ones intended to run isolated networks. And then the ease of frequency regulation on the unit is dictated by the inertia of the water in the water conveyance system “water starting time”

So 25s inertia constant would appear to be a response to frequency change much faster and greater than the typical 5% droop implemented by the governors controlling mechanical power applied to the shaft.

Wild stuff!
by HPsquared | 2025-09-20 17:56:54+00:00
A lot of engineering of hydraulic brakes goes into minimising the pedal stroke, i.e. the distance the pedal moves when you press it hard. It makes it easier to control , supposedly. Also it's hard to tune the feel and response of hybrid braking systems where there's a transition between regenerative and hydraulic brakes. Maybe removing the mechanical link actually could simplify a few things.
by inglor_cz | 2025-09-20 17:56:55+00:00
It seems that famines in China were commonplace even pre-19th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China

Political system may be one of the reasons (feudalism doesn't have a great record in preventing famines either), but the most salient explanation might be that a pre-modern economy with high density of population is inherently prone to famines - a bad drought will easily topple the precarious balance between demand and supply towards lack of food, and without a railway network it is nearly impossible to move food easily among places that don't have good ports.
by duckerude | 2025-09-20 17:56:57+00:00
rustc is only loosely tied to LLVM. Other code generation backends exist in various states of production-readiness. There are also two other compilers, mrustc and GCC-rs.

mrustc is a bootstrap Rust compiler that doesn't implement a borrow checker but can compile valid programs, so it's similar to to your proposed subset. Rust minus verification is still a very large and complex language though, just like C++ is large and complex.

A core language that's as simple to implement as C would have to be very different and many people (I suspect most) would like it less than the Rust that exists.
by seanhunter | 2025-09-20 17:57:07+00:00
Cormac McCarthy was an amazing writer. For anyone with a strong stomach I would recommend "Blood Meridian". It's one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. At times achingly beautiful, at times utterly horrifying. It's a really remarkable journey and the memory of it still troubles me.

David Foster Wallace wrote a memorable review of it once in a piece for Salon, which read (in its entirety)

"Don't even ask."[1]

If you've read the book, you know.

[1] The article is "Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels > 1960." https://www.salon.com/1999/04/12/wallace/
by Manuel_D | 2025-09-20 17:57:23+00:00
Data ingestion and visualization. They ingest data from a variety of different sources and make it easier to correlate data that might previously have been separate. As in, workflows that might have involved analyzing one data set, writing stuff in Excel, and then looking at a different data set, and cross referencing that excel spreadsheet manually can be done much more easily in Palantir's products

Here's an example of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q8bwhAW2Mg

It's hard to describe because each customer usually has some set of customization to their workflow. One palantir customer probably uses the tool in a way unrecognizable to the next customer.

The other, perhaps more significant, asset Palantir has is a team that's gotten really good at interfacing with legacy systems and ingesting data into a more modern one.

One thing to note is, Palantir doesn't collect any data. People so often just assume that it does. The data collection is done by the government. Palantir just builds a fancy browser for data that the government already owns. So if people are angry about data being collected, go blame your government not Palantir.
by makopoison12 | 2025-09-20 17:57:30+00:00
Maybe I should follow you every time you post this. This post is absolutely cope. Mastodon is competing with Twitter. It literally was made due to the creator not liking how Twitter was ran, it used Tweetdeck design, Home feed like Twitter and more. It’s not just some textbox. You clearly don’t know the history of mastodon as I’ve seen others. Or maybe you do and like others you’re attempting to rewrite history. The creator of mastodon himself in a podcast (Dot social)said he wants growth 100/150 million mastodon users. That sure sounds like competing and wanting growth, not staying small
by Nasrudith | 2025-09-20 17:58:01+00:00
Correction. It has become fashionable to claim that GDP doesn't matter, mostly from the people who are greatly losing the GDP race and whose policies will be bad for GDP and they know it. I mean, the fox at least has excuse for finding the grapes sour because they are toxic to vulpines.

They also remain willfully ignorant about the context of GDP - namely that it was derived as a proxy for military productive and research capacity. It specifically isn't just raw industrial capacity because the intellectual research and development work is also very relevant in military match-ups.
by ghoul2 | 2025-09-20 17:58:06+00:00
I don't agree. At all. My father is right now in a very bad state: he can't recognize me, doesn't know if he is at home or in the hospital, is being fed thru a tube, and entirely dependent. He no longer has the mental ability left to decide on this on his own, but if he were, I am sure he would choose to go rather than live like this. He is not in excessive pain - he just has nothing left that can be called "life".

Unfortunately, in the place we live, there is no legal framework for choosing this anyway. So he is unable to chose, and I am unable to chose for him either. I absolutely hate to have him be in this state - such a brilliant man, reduced to this.

He had a (brain)stroke, and my grandfather on the mothers side also died of a stroke. So genetically speaking, my chances look (relatively) bleak. I know for a fact I won't want to go-on if I ever reach anywhere as bad as his current condition. But there's no option available to me either. I will have to suffer similarly, and the people I end up being dependent on will have to suffer similarly and watch me suffer similarly.

I think being able to decide when you want to "go" is and should be a fundamental right - a natural right - every person should have. And we would, if it weren't for this false religious crap being foisted upon the world.
by pron | 2025-09-20 17:58:40+00:00
It was a joke premised on the implicit assumption that Zig must be an "anti-Rust" because it came later. Maybe you could call different approaches contrarian if Rust had achieved some great popularity or consensus, but it hasn't. Rust's adoption rate is low because many don't find it enticing enough, and so it's unsurprising that there are several other approaches in the space of low-level programming - which is due for some update - that are all different from each other. Their attempts to improve on C and C++ in different ways don't make them "anti" anything else.
by thrill | 2025-09-20 17:58:57+00:00
I do hope the pressure-sensitive pad has some “give” in it to provide physical feedback to the driver. Way back when the F-16 first began flying in production, the side stick was rigid, and more than one pilot would return with bruised arm muscles from pulling as hard as possible wondering if they had more available. While braking in a car doesn’t have the same frequency of needing full deflection (short of having to ride with my wife’s friend driving), there’s likely to be some similar discomfort from wondering how much more braking is available.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-09-20 17:59:05+00:00
I brought a family-pack of walkie-talkies for my wife and my two teenage boys to use while we were hiking around various Austrian mountains, one summer vacation.

We rarely used them much, since we were often walking in a family unit, so during one of our breaks I took one out, turned it on, and blasted off into the ether "hello hello, anyone out there wanna chat?" .. did this off and on for the afternoon, when suddenly, a voice answered back "yes! who is this?" ..

A family waaaaay the hell down the mountain rage, deep in the valley, had by chance heard my call .. so the boys spent the afternoon getting to know all of the 5 kids in that family that were all drawn to the conversation.

It was awesome, for the rest of the week, our kids and theirs just chatted away .. what had started out to be, a little bit of a mundane trip for the kids, turned out to be a hilarious social experience.

We call for them every time we're out that way - never met them, but for the past 3 years, the conversations have continued and it has been a great alternative to the mobile phones we have been troubled with up in the cabin, at times.
by foldr | 2025-09-20 17:59:05+00:00
I agree with your overall point of view, but is this defense contract really the best example? If the UK is sliding into technofeudalism it's not because we've only just started forking some of our defense budget over to morally dubious companies.

So I mean, yes, it's fair to describe Thiel as a technofeudalist of some sort, but this contract isn't suddenly going to upend the UK's political, social and economic systems.
by cess11 | 2025-09-20 17:59:15+00:00
Last time one of the hard problems of fascism was that people weren't willing to do the amount of murder and surveillance required, and this time they're on the verge of murder bots that can do it instead and surveillance is already massively pervasive and penetrating.

While the then newfangled radio was a potent method of disseminating propaganda, today the tool chains for and scientific knowledge about how to efficiently 'manifacture consent', as it is sometimes called, are quite a bit more oppressive.
by sarchertech | 2025-09-20 18:00:18+00:00
That's clearly not a solution to any of the other problems in the country. But making a bad visa program more expensive to employers abusing it is potentially a way to mitigate it.

Here's Bernie Sanders comments on the H-1B visa.

"The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire “the best and the brightest,” but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad."
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-09-20 18:00:18+00:00
It's amazing how Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc can collaborate to come up with web standards, so they can ship browsers that display apps/webpages pretty much the same across multiple platforms. But Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, Google, etc can't collaborate to come up with apis that allow everyone to make desktop apps once and they display mostly the same on all platforms.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-20 18:00:58+00:00
I think to really inspect this idea we’d have to nail down what are outliers and great achievement. It is hard to judge people by anything other than their achievements (plenty of highly credentialed and well-testing people don’t accomplish much in life, right?). But, if we say an outlier is somebody who’s accomplished great things, then the idea that they show up in groups they accomplish great things becomes a bit circular.
by oreally | 2025-09-20 18:01:13+00:00
Ironically it's original use was in political* parlance.

From wiki it's "information sent out to the media in order to observe the reaction of an audience. It is used by companies sending out press releases to judge customer reaction, and by politicians who deliberately leak information on a policy change."

Yup I have no doubt that there's a Rust 'evangelist' group somewhere aiming for inorganic growth of the language.
by zrobotics | 2025-09-20 18:01:24+00:00
FTA: "One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible."

With as convoluted as Meta's privacy pages are and how scattered all the settings are, this would be a super easy mistake to make. I could definitely believe that that mother may not have even known what Threads is, much less that her photos were being automatically cross-posted.