MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Moru | 2025-09-29 05:39:57+00:00
Sorting dates: This is why there is an international standard of having YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss in the order we have it. We got to learn this in school in the 80-ies because sorting paper documents would be more logical and easier to find stuff. So way before most people got computerized.

It just happens to be the most logical way to sort for computers too, as long as humans are involved in the usage of the data.
by wmf | 2025-09-29 05:40:22+00:00
Crypto mining energy is wasted relative to proof of stake that provides the same security for no energy. But AI inference has no real alternative so the energy isn't wasted. It is unfortunate that politicians refused to allow abundant clean energy even after we told them exactly what to do, but now it is what it is. The market wants AI, they are willing to pay for it, and they are getting it.
by _davide_ | 2025-09-29 05:40:45+00:00
I have been using Gentoo 10+ years, you can save time using other distros but you'll waste an insane amount of time as soon as you want to properly configure a yubikey or set up a modern compilation stack (or update specific drivers or fixing the kernel). Compiling everything seems like an overkill, but remember it's unattended time, just start the upgrade before dinner twice a week and you'll be good to go. (Failure to compile in Gentoo are extremely rare, less than once a year)

The upside is deciding exactly which packets you want and which versions, and whenever you want to customize( or fix) a specific thing it's trivial.
by brunooliv | 2025-09-29 05:41:13+00:00
I both agree and disagree with this post, but I might be misunderstanding it. Near the end, it states:

“Enjoy writing it, it doesn’t have to be nice or pretty if it’s for you. Have fun, try out that new runtime or language.”

It doesn’t have to be nice or pretty EVEN if it’s NOT for you. The value in prototyping has always been there and it’s been very concrete: to refine mental models, validate assumptions, uncover gaps in your own thinking (or your team’s), you name it.

Unfortunately it feels that the pendulum has swung in the completely opposite direction. There’s a lot of “theatre” in planning, writing endless tickets and refining them for WEEKS before actually starting to write code, in a way that’s actively harmful for building software. When you get stuck in planning mode you let wrong assumptions grow and get baked in into the design so the sunken cost keeps rising.

Simply have a BASIC and SHARED mental model of the end goal with your team and start prototyping. LLMs have made this RIDICULOUSLY CHEAP. But, the industry is still stuck in all the wrong ways.
by drnick1 | 2025-09-29 05:41:16+00:00
I personally don't want to see ads at all, be it on websites, Youtube, or anywhere else. I only use uBlock with a very restrictive policy (block ALL third party content), and also block a very large number of malware domains (Hagezi's Ultimate blacklist) at the DNS level. I don't see think I have seen a single ad in years, unless it's a sponsored segment in a YT video or similar.
by MountDoom | 2025-09-29 05:41:23+00:00
> But the moment that the AI can exceed a human programmer, at something as narrow as coding, then the company that has that AI shouldn't sell it to replace humans at other companies - it should instead use it to write programs to replace the other companies.

I'm not sure this is a good take. There's a reason why Microsoft employs 200,000+ people, and you can be sure most of them they're not cranking out code 9-to-5.

Companies are living organisms more than they are pieces of software. In fact, the source code for Windows has been leaked a number of times over the years, and it resulted in approximately $0 revenue lost.
by tacitusarc | 2025-09-29 05:41:55+00:00
Specialization tends to preclude this. Why doesn’t TSMC just fab the chips and not create their own? Why do (effectively all) farmers sell grain rather baked goods? Why don’t lumber yards sell furniture?

For sure, there are some fantastically successful, vertically integrated companies. But mostly it’s less risky to sell the shovels rather than mine the gold.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-29 05:42:29+00:00
> Hell, python type annotations were only introduced in python 3.5

Mypy was introduced with support for both for Python 2.x and 3.x (3.2 was the current) using type comments before Python introduced a standard way of using Python 3.0’s annotation syntax for typing; even when type annotations were added to Python proper, some uses now supported by them were left to mypy-style type comments in PEP 484/Python 3.5, with type annotations for variables added in PEP 526/Python 3.6.
by smsm42 | 2025-09-29 05:43:04+00:00
If that is true - which I don't think it is - then I am happy I live in a country run by lawyers. I am not a huge fan of lawyers, but at least lawyers do not put millions of people into concentration camps and don't disassemble them into organs. Maybe it's appropriate to call those people "social engineers" but I wouldn't like to be a subject to that kind of engineering.
by hakfoo | 2025-09-29 05:43:51+00:00
Budget 2025-09.ods and Budget 2025-10.ods would sort reliably.

The options explode infinitely if you start trying to guess what people want in terms of semantic grouping. One user might want to see "September Budget" beside "September Sales Projections" and "September Calendar", and another might want to group it with "October Budget" and "November Budget".

If you have simple, stupid, but predictable tools, people can work around that, by picking naming conventions and even directory groupings that achieve what they want.

The worst is when you have an enforced sort that's not what you want. I think in Windows now, even if you say "Sort by name" in the Downloads directory, it insists on sub-grouping by age. I want every version of the Foobaz spec I downloaded, and no, I don't remember if all of them were in the last 3 months!
by Woodi | 2025-09-29 05:44:28+00:00
That must be thanks to abundance of freedom.

And somehow sentence from "The good, the bad and ugly" movie (state by Italy born actor) fit on that subject: "If you want freedom you become a priest or a bandit"...

And remember to all the time stick a smile to your face and, internet even, conversations. That is sure fire way to have everything look positive.
by rkomorn | 2025-09-29 05:44:37+00:00
> I find I end up at any given level of bug freeness with less effort and time with Python-with-types than Python-without-types

Same.

Type hints also basically give me a "don't even bother running this if my IDE shows type warnings" habit that speeds up python development.

Absence of warnings doesn't guarantee me bug-free code but presence of warnings pretty much guarantees me buggy code.

Type hints are a cheap way to reduce (not eliminate) run time problems.
by muzani | 2025-09-29 05:45:01+00:00
I do think you need the dream to be happy. Money/career is a prerequisite of dreams.

Some want to live on the seas. They can be perfectly happy as a sailor, even if poor and single.

Some want a family, educated children, respect. They would likely need a nice house, enough resources to get a scholarship, a shot at retirement. This is obtainable working in public service, even without money.

But most have multiple dreams. That's what makes things complex. The man who wishes for a wife but also wishes to be on the seas will find much fewer paths available. Sailors also don't generally get respected by most in laws.

To mix the two, they try to find the dream-job. Perhaps work for a big oil company and be 'forced' to go offshore.

Eventually people learn that desire is suffering in some form and cut down on the number of dreams. They may even see this as mature and try to educate others that this is the way. Those who have kids often are forced to pick kids as the dream. So there's a selection bias as well.
by some_guy_nobel | 2025-09-29 05:46:02+00:00
What were they reluctant to learn? Why do they need to learn it?

Plenty of engineers have to take an introductory stats course, but it's not clear why you'd want your engineers to learn bayesian statistics? I would be surprised if they could correctly interpret a p-value or regression coefficient, let alone one with interaction effects. (It'd be wholly useless if they could, fwiw).

It'd be nice if the statisticians/'data scientists' on my team learned their way around the CI/CD pipelines, understood kubernetes pods, and could write their own distributed training versions of their pytorch models, but division-of-labor is a thing for a reason, and I don't expect them to nor need them to.
by adwn | 2025-09-29 05:46:35+00:00
I don't understand the table under Benchmark Results. To compare the quality of two toolchains, the device architecture needs to be the same. "LUT6" vs "LUT4" doesn't cut it, there's much, much more to the architecture of an FPGA than the width of its look-up tables [1], and even for the "LUT6" category, I see four different devices.

[1] Consequently, there's more to FPGA synthesis than LUT mapping, so take the reported results with a huge grain of salt.
by tomhow | 2025-09-29 05:48:07+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by anilgulecha | 2025-09-29 05:48:11+00:00
F-droid has been stellar in steering the alternative app store environment over the past 15 years or so, and I'd heed their call on this.

A small call to any googler on the thread - put your support towards this internally. I understand the internal dynamics, and it may seem current option is best amongst imperfect choices, but in this case F-droid is right in that closing out anonymous (but good) software is a line crossed with peril for any open ecosystem. Today it's play store, tomorrow it will be the web, and that will have a significant negative impact on Google.
by hakfoo | 2025-09-29 05:48:16+00:00
I had a similar fun problem with a little tool for use with an ATSC TV tuner.

For context, while NTSC program selections were typically indexed by channel ("ABC here is channel 4, NBC is channel 6"), ATSC uses "subchannels" like "12.1" or "21.5". I had assumed these could be safely stored as a decimal type.

Then one of the broadcasters here introduced both "42.1" and "42.10" and it broke the key model in the underlying SQLite database I kept the channel info in.
by usr1106 | 2025-09-29 05:48:17+00:00
I already use 2 Android phones. One for main usage without the evil company. Another one with 2 apps from Playstore installed; it would cost me significant money not to use one of the duopolists there. I really hate having to pay the Google/Apple tax. The only choice I have is to decide which bad actor receives it.

(Typing this on my 3rd phone, Sailfish OS. Unfortunately the software lacks sufficient maintenance efforts and the hardware does not suit me for primary phone use)
by wmf | 2025-09-29 05:48:26+00:00
"Demand" for inference seems infinite because you can always think harder or insert AI for free into some workflow where the customer didn't request it (e.g. Google search). It's like a gas that expands to fill the container. Then during the crash people are going to discover that some fraction of that demand wasn't needed and they'll just turn it off.

It would be a good sign if paid demand exceeds supply but I don't know if we can measure that.
by randycupertino | 2025-09-29 05:50:26+00:00
Reminds me of Todrick Hall who gave a "tour of the $7 million house he just bought, OMG can't believe I'm a home owner in Beverly Hills!" on his youtube channel then got evicted for unpaid rent and sued for $100k of back-owed rent money. https://people.com/home/todrick-hall-ordered-to-pay-100k-in-...

He later had a $126k lawsuit for unpaid furniture: https://radaronline.com/p/todrick-hall-sued-126000-unpaid-fu...
by rramadass | 2025-09-29 05:50:46+00:00
I pointed you to the mapping of the concept of Prana/Qi/Chi/Ki in today's scientific context. They were framed in a different cultural context with a different concept of "Science" and it is up to you to map them to concepts in modern science.

For example they had a different model of Anatomy/Physiology in spite of the fact that they were aware of the various circulatory and nervous systems. Their approach was more holistic and empirical rather than reductionist and analytical. So even though you might not have a one-to-one correspondence to concepts in modern science there is enough studies/research done to establish that there is something to those ideas and hence their various practices (especially Yoga and Acupuncture) are now used in Healthcare to treat various ailments.

Some resources;

1) Perception of Subtle Energy “Prana”, and Its Effects During Biofield Practices: A Qualitative Meta-Synthesis - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10498708/

2) The Science of Tai Chi and Qigong as Whole Person Health-Part I: Rationale and State of the Science - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40091656/
by lloda | 2025-09-29 05:51:33+00:00
The main reason I voted against was because it is tied to smartphones with only the vaguest promise that it won't stay so. Ironically one of the arguments in favor was independence from megacorporations (or foreign countries for that matter). But you couldn't find this point in the main opposition website. The opposition was very weak with weak arguments and the parliament was massively in favor.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-29 05:51:45+00:00
> Lots of boilerplate, less readable code and throwing away many of the features that make python powerful.

IMO, that complaint almost always goes with overuse of concrete types when abstract (Protocol/ABC) types are more accurate to the function of the code.

There was a time that that was a limitation in Python typing, but that that hasn’t been true for almost as long as Python typing had been available at all before it stopped being true.
by modeless | 2025-09-29 05:53:08+00:00
It's not against YouTube's ToS to run pre-roll ads of any length, of course. But I think he was just selling get-rich-quick schemes or something. At the time YouTube ads were more rare and generally short, like 15 second TV commercials, so it was weird to see long-form content as ads. He absolutely saturated the site with this ad for a while to the point that it became a meme. I'm guessing a significant percentage of YouTube's user base at the time was served that ad at least once.
by throwaway422432 | 2025-09-29 05:53:31+00:00
And when on the receiving end of the deliverables list, it's always a good idea to make sure they are actually deliverable.

There's nothing worse than a task where you can deliver one item and then have to rely on someone else to be able to deliver a second. Was once in a role where performance was judged on closing tasks; getting the burn-down chart to 0, and also having it nicely stepped. Was given a good tip to make sure each task had one deliverable and where possible—be completed independent of any other task.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-29 05:54:00+00:00
The reality is that wealth is inversely correlated with fertility. As are intelligence, education, secularity, and so on. IQ is a decent proxy for intelligence. What many people don't know is that it's not a raw score, but relative. The mean of a population is always set to 100 and a standard deviation is generally 15 points. So an IQ of 115 means you performed better than 84% of people, one positive standard deviation.

It was discovered some time back that the 'raw score' for IQs was increasing over time - meaning the mean kept going higher and higher. This is called the Flynn Effect. [1] People were getting smarter. The section I linked to is about the fact this trend reversed some time around 1990 in the developed world. Wiki uses weaker language 'possible end' but it's been tested and verified repeatedly at this point - we're getting dumber, and quite rapidly. This remains true even after controlling for obvious explanations like immigration.

This is yet another reason why fertility is, in my opinion, the issue of the century. The world is going to look so absurdly different, and not in a good way, in 50 years, owing to fertility rates alone. We're very likely living on the tail end of a societal golden age.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
by sjs382 | 2025-09-29 05:54:32+00:00
Just like that, but offer a timeframe for a response. That is what builds trust and confidence.

You can also offer a "back of a napkin" answer if it's appropriate, but make it clear that you will give it the proper consideration and give a better considered answer. Maybe specify a large margin of error.

All that said, not everything requires rigor. In some cases, "fuzzy" answers are good enough. Learn to identify them and not to waste time giving less important things extra attention.
by VohuMana | 2025-09-29 05:54:42+00:00
Similar perspective from me, I really don’t understand why people in authority are allergic to making the correct decision and punishing bullies or even worse punishing the victim.

From my own personal experience being bullied. I went to teachers and the principal to speak up that I was being bullied, the teachers themselves witnessed it many times and acknowledged it was happening but the bully suffered no consequences other than being told to stop. My parents were awesome and got involved but even after that the school refused to do anything because the bully was “sorry”. Finally my parents told me they had my back and would support me if I wanted fight back but either way they were taking me out of that school at the end of the year. Punched the guy right in the face the next time after repeatedly telling him I would if he didn’t stop. I was immediately physically escorted to the principal’s office and my parents had to pick me up. The only reason I didn’t get expelled is because the bully didn’t want to admit I got the better of him so the school saw no fault. Never got bullied again by that kid. My story isn’t to say resorting to violence is the right thing to do but instead why did it even have to get to that point to begin with? So many members of authority could have issued consequences for behavior they witnessed but chose not to.
by tux3 | 2025-09-29 05:56:00+00:00
They seem to be making their own eFPGA architecture, so there's no vendor tool to compare against for their primary purpose.

The closest you'll get is xc7 (Xilinx) vs vendor, one of which is surely Xilinx 7. But the Yosys xc7 support is limited and not the best supported, so it's not a great comparison either.
by anonzzzies | 2025-09-29 05:56:52+00:00
We wont get to AGI if we dont get models with both larger context and dreaming (aka distilling important parts from their 'day long' context and adding those to their neural net) with about the same effort/cost as inference. LLM models cannot do this and wont be able to, so if no one comes up with a better model, AGI cannot be reached, no matter what amounts are invested, so we will get an AI winter. So many smart minds are on this now, that if anyone had an idea how to 'learn during inference', someone would have released something. No one has a clue, so I am betting the downfall will come soon. Still, we got incredible progress from this AI boom, so it is not bad, just money slushing.
by smsm42 | 2025-09-29 05:57:38+00:00
There are 13 Senators, out of 120, who are over 75, as far as I can see. I don't think we can attribute all the problems to them - there's not enough of them. I mean, some of the elders in Congress - like Pelosi, Waters, Nadler, Durbin, etc. - would do well to retire, but not every single one of them is "not all there". By a coincidence, I've met one of those 13 about a month ago (not personally, on an event, but it was a small event and I could see and hear him very well) and he certainly wasn't a youngster but I didn't see any obvious degradation of mental facilities. That said, I don't think term limits and mandatory retirement age is such a bad idea for top politicians, just don't expect it to fix much.
by FranzFerdiNaN | 2025-09-29 05:59:15+00:00
> If the LLM boom ends then bitcoin miners can eat up all the slack grid power! You can put those ASICs anywhere

Or maybe we shouldnt use that energy at all. We're still heading towards climate collapse so just frivolously wasting energy on something that has 0 value like cryptocurrencies doesnt seem like the smartest idea.
by merpkz | 2025-09-29 05:59:43+00:00
I used Gentoo since about 2012 up until 2022 then switched to Debian mainly because lot less things used to break during updates and my old CPU ( i7 4790k ) became a bit dated to compile every new version of Golang, Rust and Chromium - just hours and hours of brutal grind. Since flatpak can provide up to date versions of a lot of desktop software on Debian there is very little point switching back. Maybe one day if I get my hands on some ridiculously powerful CPU like 7800 or 9800X3D then might try it again.
by p_l | 2025-09-29 06:01:06+00:00
USPS normal letter volumes are falling, but due to various stupid crap they are forced to deliver a lot of junk mail at low price. Political issue rather than technical.

The difference for parcel services is that, statistically, they do not deliver a parcel to everyone every time, making it way easier to do "p2p" because you're not canvassing a whole street.
by usr1106 | 2025-09-29 06:02:22+00:00
Samsung [^1] has an autoblocker. I have no idea what it does exactly. I always need to turn it off while installing or updating anything from F-droid. Then I enable it again in the naive hope it might prevent dome drive-by attack.

[^1]: My employer paid for it. I never would pay for the crapware full of uninstallable stuff I don't want. Is Pure Android still a thing if you don't want to pay The Evil Company?
by smsm42 | 2025-09-29 06:03:13+00:00
That's not a "problem" and not a "cruft" - it's how it was built by design. You may not like it - your right, of course, but don't pretend it's because it's "old" or "out of date". If the framers were alive right now, they'd insist on the same framework, and maybe made it even more robust, given how eroded those principles became over the years. They had a very particular set of ideas, how the relationship between the state and the people should work, and those ideas didn't change with time, they are still very actual and often at the center of the discussions. You may not agree with them - there was a lot of disagreement among the framers, and people who argued with them, too - but pretending you understand more just because you were born later is just arrogance. People 250 years ago weren't stupid.
by st_goliath | 2025-09-29 06:03:54+00:00
> ... don't require absurdly bloated development environments.

Outside hobbies, I've been mostly away from this field for little over a decade by now. Is it still that bad? I remember back then, every single professional electronics engineer that I met had this die hard belief that this was simply how things work:

You want to use DerpSemi micro controllers? You must install DerpStudio '98! Not the later 2005 version tough, that has some major UI bugs. You want to program a HerpSoft PLC? You need EasyHerpes IDE! What, command line toolchain? Text editor? You must be completely insane!

It's been somewhat of a personal fight against windmills for me back then. That, plus suggesting that we are actually developing software and the C/Assembly/VHDL maybe shouldn't be an undocumented, tested-only-once pile of spaghetti based off a circuit diagram inside one guys head (and no, a 50 line comment block with a German transcription of the code below is not documentation).