MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by umanwizard | 2025-10-08 20:39:48+00:00
> The problem with pursuing "identity" is that these rules don't anchor the identity of pieces so far as I can tell.

Again, the identity of objects is assumed in all sets of rules or laws, as the apple/banana example was intended to show. When you write the rules for board games, you do not need to re-derive the entire foundations of metaphysics and discuss what it really means for an object to have identity. You assume these words have the normal meanings commonly associated with them.

> The only way anyone could tell which token was used in place of a normative queen shaped piece would be if there were video or photographs of the actual board at that phase of the game.

Whether people can tell that a rule was violated has no bearing on whether or not it was actually violated. I thought we were talking about what the rules say, not how easy or difficult they are to enforce. Of course if you are by yourself and there are no spectators or official arbiters then you can do whatever you want; nobody is going to stop you.

> In a formal setting it seems like an arbiter or judge or proctor or whomever should also be informed for accurate record keeping.

But if you're already pausing the clock to inform the arbiter anyway, why can't the arbiter just give you another queen? I thought the entire point of this whole rook-as-queen exercise was to avoid having to stop the game and talk to the arbiter?

> The fruit analogy raises the stakes to fraud while the use in a game, unless a player tried to cheat, is inconsequential to those players.

We're not talking about the stakes or importance. I agree that what token chess players use as the queen is less meaningful than actual crimes, but that wasn't the point of the analogy.
by blackbear_ | 2025-10-08 20:39:52+00:00
I would have expected this to be exceedingly obvious to anybody who ever went to a shopping center, but anyways...

> The Global Anti-Aging Products Market size is [worth] USD 47.4 Billion in 2023

> Women Dominate Anti-Aging Products Market with Over 80% Share in 2022

https://market.us/report/anti-aging-products-market/
by tim333 | 2025-10-08 20:40:06+00:00
I think you can explain Russia's poor performance somewhat from Clausewitzian principles:

"primordial violence, hatred, and enmity" - weren't really there - most Russians viewed Ukrainians as their brethren.

"Chance and Probability" - the Russians have proved pretty inflexible. I mean after they failed to take Kyiv in three days they could have gone home and saved a lot of bother, maybe keeping some lands in the south.

"Reason and Policy" - didn't make much sense. Few Russians wanted to go to war so Putin could lord it over the Ukrainians as well as the Russians. This looks more like a political move by Putin to keep power.

If Russia had actually had a clear objective to annex Ukraine they could have mobilised and knocked them out in no time but instead we have a mess and kind of stalemate which to me seems to be moving in Ukraine's favour as they can now hit most targets inside Russia.
by jrowen | 2025-10-08 20:40:56+00:00
Yes? The law is not some absolute arbiter of morality and it does change across time and jurisdictions. It's really only an expression of consequences that may be enforced by a body of power.

In many situations an individual does not feel represented by a certain law and it's equally ok for them to choose to follow their own moral compass as it is for the people who put that law in place to attempt to enforce their ways.
by eevmanu | 2025-10-08 20:41:17+00:00
I think the approach to evaluate how the candidate use the tool, prompt quality, prompt optimization techniques, how to provide the right amount of context (context engineering), how de-pollutes the context, etc., is a good path (on top of generating a working proof of concept for the problem tackled in the interview process, of course).

Basically focus on the thinking strategy (with or without the AI enhanced tools) is a good way to go.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-08 20:41:57+00:00
I don't think it's exactly "MAGA" here.

I would guess that it's the normalcy bias engine erroring out in many people's minds.

We are living through the greatest "Emperor Wears no Clothes" moment in my somewhat long lifetime. It's really interesting to see how poorly we are dealing with this as a society.

Is there some Slavic word to describe a hilarious public tragedy? Seems like there would be. I suppose it's time for English to invent one now.
by landl0rd | 2025-10-08 20:42:09+00:00
I've used plain react for a few things in the past few years. I strongly prefer it to next/nuxt/all this other stuff. Preact and an understanding of best practices can make it fairly performant with a more or less drop-in replacement if you're willing to sacrifice compatibility with absolutely all the ecosystem.

I still prefer svelte but it's less mature and universally-known. React is still a pretty good choice if you need something that will more or less work and that anyone can write.
Ask HN: Why not base a tech company in a LCOL area as a hiring incentive?
by alexathrowawa9 | 2025-10-08 20:42:13+00:00
What would happen if a tech company/startup based itself in a LCOL area like the US midwest or south?

Then the company offers say only 70% of tech salaries because it can't compete but with the incentive that everyone can easily afford houses?

The actual salary would be lower but the overall lifestyle could still be better

Have any startups tried this?
by tokioyoyo | 2025-10-08 20:42:25+00:00
The beauty you see in the chair will not be noticed by people who are not design enthusiasts. It’s comfy, looks decent, and functional enough for people to make a purchase.

My point was, we should encourage copycats if it will reduce the price point even if it brings 80% of the joy to the buyer, compared to owning the designer chair, which is not attainable for them.
by throw234234234 | 2025-10-08 20:42:28+00:00
Industrialization actually helped the middle class insofar as you needed "skilled workers" to work the industrial equipment, make decisions, and process. The fact that production had scaled in a world of scarcity meant that your worker had greater leverage. They often knew each other as well, went to the same schools, etc which meant less info asymmetry as to their worth/value. It moves the value to something that takes time, skill and sometimes luck to achieve that being skills and experience. This was hard to replicate (e.g. our school, college, university systems), required significant training and created "pets not cattle" with hard to get skills meaning the new skilled middle class could rise and exercise their new found negotiating power.

Somewhat unprecedented in human history. All because intelligence had scarcity. AI changes that.

AI is the real dream of the capital classes. It makes intelligence cheap potentially undoing the very thing that gave birth to the last century's middle class. In the long term, given current trends, I wouldn't be surprised if these AI technologies revert us back to most of human history -> where the world is very unequal, meritocracy dies and most of us are trying to just exist/survive whilst the capital holders have abundance. It explains the large valuations as well of AI/Tech lately and the weird deals going on; this isn't a game of economics anymore; its an arms race of power in the new world structure. I suspect to these people no amount of money is enough; if you win you win for the next era of humanity.
by zbentley | 2025-10-08 20:43:04+00:00
It works well. I didn’t know what language it was written in, nor did I care, until months after starting to use uv. I still don’t care.

Sure, it’s a bit silly (I don’t think I’d go as far as “pathetic”, just silly) that the implementation language is above the fold in the description/readme. That’s a cosmetic gripe; it’s still a good tool.

Rust or not, writing a tool to manage installation of a language platform in something other than the language it manages is a good idea, it avoids bootstrap problems. Using something statically-ish linked is also good; it avoids problems caused by the bootstrap dependencies. Tools like pyenv have taught us that shell is a poor choice of bootstrap language. Rust seems as good a choice as any given that.
by pydry | 2025-10-08 20:43:14+00:00
>If this was remotely true, they'd have won the war already.

They're invading the largest country in Europe armed by a military bloc constituting 60% of world military spending. Which part of that screamed quick to you?

>Russian operational and strategic decision-making has been a bonfire of blazing incompetence

They somehow managed to achieve a body bag exchange ratio of 44:1 and an extreme busification crisis in Ukraine with a volunteer force.

It's a more impressive showing than Iraq.

>led to things breaking down into WWI-style attritional warfare.

Putin announced the strategy of attritional warfare in March 2022 after the land bridge was secured, so one could hardly argue that this wasnt the plan.

Ukraine has done a good job of playing into their hands by trying to cling on to land long past the point where it becomes defensible and getting enveloped in cauldron after cauldron.

Hence the issue where Ukrainian civilians are now more afraid of their own government's roving kidnapping gangs than living under Moscow's rule.

That part is probably going to be the real kicker in the end.
by piskov | 2025-10-08 20:43:26+00:00
My nation-wide C# Silverlight app lasted almost 12 years. And it had grid, animations, what have you in 2010 better than most html5 in 2018. Not to mention tooling.

And you know what? No matter the browser, no matter the OS it all worked and rendered the same.

Probably Adobe Flash was like that also.

First app we rewrote to AngularJS. You know what happened to it. So then we rewrote it to Vue.

The same effing app just to keep the stack “modern”.

I don’t know what is wrong with all these people.

God I wish something like Silverlight returned in a way that is mobile battery friendly.
by moelf | 2025-10-08 20:43:34+00:00
on a macMini (i.e. fast RAM), time to display:

- Plots.jl, 1.4 seconds (include package loading)

- CairoMakie.jl, 4 seconds (including package loading)

julia> @time @eval (using Plots; display(plot(rand(3))))

1.477268 seconds (1.40 M allocations: 89.648 MiB, 2.70% gc time, 7.16% compilation time: 5% of which was recompilation)
by kulahan | 2025-10-08 20:44:24+00:00
An interesting example, in my opinion:

In the US, we keep on manufacturing Abrahams tanks. We're not at war. We have no use for these tanks. So to make things make sense, we give money to some countries with the explicit restriction that they must spend that money on these tanks.

Why do we keep making them? Because you need people who, on day one of war, know how to build that tank. You can't spend months and months getting people up to speed - they need to be ready to go. So, in peacetime, we just have a bunch of people making tanks for "no reason".
by electroly | 2025-10-08 20:45:38+00:00
Disclaimer: I am not plugged into the community.

The other day that old article "Why I no longer recommend Julia" got passed around. On the very same day I encountered my own bug in the Julia ecosystem, in JuliaFormatter, that silently poisoned my results. I went to the GitHub issues and someone else encountered it on the same day. I'm sure they will fix it (they haven't yet, JuliaFormatter at this very moment is a subtle codebase-destroyer) but as a newcomer to the ecosystem I am not prepared to understand which bog standard packages can be trusted and which cannot. As an experiment I switched to R and the language is absolute filth compared to Julia, but I haven't seen anyone complain about bugs (the opposite, in fact) and the packages install fast without needing to ship prebuilt sysimages like I do in Julia. Those are the only two good things about R but they're really important.

I think Julia will get there once they have more time in the oven for everything to stabilize and become battle hardened, and then Julia will be a force to be reckoned with. An actually good language for analysis! Amazing!
by gdilla | 2025-10-08 20:46:17+00:00
Yup, sw engineering is a slow march to being commoditized. Some things will remain hard (only because it's cutting edge and pushing the limits of something) but known patterns and services will be just-yell-at-ai to stand up. A lot of businesses can run on the latter, i guess - but at that point the challenge is having a viable business, not the software development of X.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-08 20:46:18+00:00
You can, just be remote first [1]. Hashicorp, Gitlab, Zapier, are some examples that come to mind, but there are more. Interestingly, I interviewed at Lockheed Martin and they are very remote friendly for some departments and roles (much to my surprise).

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/remote/ (example, not comprehensive)
by Stratoscope | 2025-10-08 20:46:34+00:00
My first girlfriend, Kate, bought an old VW Bug for $200 from someone on Page Mill Road up the hill from Palo Alto.

I drove her up there in my Toyota Corolla that I later rolled over on Summit Road. I didn't realize I was upside down until I heard a scraping sound from the roof and saw the top of the windshield crinkling.

Apparently that was a thing with the 1970s era Corollas. Several years later a buddy's girlfriend who I had a secret crush on rolled her Toyota too.

With the car upside down, someone drove up, we gave it a mighty push and rolled it back on its feet! Then someone else stopped by and held a joint out his car window and said, "You look like you could use a toke."

Back to the Bug. I followed Kate down the hill into town and noticed she wasn't slowing down much around the turns. Then we got to Junipero Serra Blvd and she didn't stop at the red light. A pickup trick sideswiped the Bug and that got it to stop.

The only real damage to the Bug was a front fender, so we bought a new one at a junkyard and bolted it on.

Besides the brakes, the engine wasn't running so great either. We bought a carburetor rebuild kit and got it running much smoother.

Emboldened by those successes, I decided to rebuild the engine too. I was a member of the Briarpatch auto repair collective, where you could rent a spot in the shop and use their tools to do your own work, or pay their mechanic to do it.

I got the engine torn apart, with nuts and bolts and parts strewn across the shop floor.

Then I realized I was in way over my head and had no idea where everything was supposed to go. I asked the mechanic if he could take over. He looked at the mess, shook his head, and said "I'll do it, but this is the worst way to get a job."

We named our cars in those days. The Bug was named Gus, and later I got an MGB-GT that I named Maggie. And after that, a Fiat 124 Spyder which already had a cool name.

Spyder developed a different brake problem. I think there were air bubbles in the brake lines that expanded as they warmed up. Then the brakes would slowly and gradually clamp down. You'd be driving on level ground and find yourself having to press down more on the gas, as if you were driving uphill. And then the the car would come to a complete stop.

Instead of getting the brake lines flushed and fixed, I did the sensible thing: Each wheel had a brake bleeder valve, and I started carrying a combination wrench that fit those valves. When the car stopped, I loosened one of the bleeder valves and brake fluid spurt out onto the ground. This relieved the pressure in the brake lines and I continued on my way.

Kate and I also had a thing for the Porsche 914. We knew it was a joint venture between Volkswagen and Porsche, so we scrambled up those two names. When we saw one on the highway, we'd call out "There's a Vorp!"
by jjk166 | 2025-10-08 20:47:02+00:00
Australopithecus is essentially on the human branch, and likely was still several million years before the development of advanced intelligence. Our common ancestor with Australopithecus was not any more intelligent than a typical Australopithecus, as far as we can tell.

As far as we can tell, no branch developed significantly increased intelligence after splitting off from our own lineage. That's not to say it definitely didn't happen or that our lineage was always the smartest, just that there isn't any evidence demonstrating a qualitative difference which has survived to the present. But it's weird that no such evidence exists.

Conversely different primate groups did independently evolve similar levels of intelligence, like Capuchin monkeys (which are new world primates) developed their intelligence after splitting off from the old world primates some 40 million years ago. Baboons and Macaques likewise each evolved intelligence independent of the great apes. Likewise similar levels (if different specializations) of intelligence have evolved independently outside the primates, such as cetaceans, elephants, and corvids. For cephalopods, which likewise are highly intelligent, their common ancestor with us didn't even have a brain.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-08 20:47:18+00:00
You are correct in that the OP used the wrong metric. He should have written a big omega, not a big O.

> PCBs and integrated circuits are basically two-dimensional.

Yes, what pushes the complexity into Ω(n^1/2), that fits the original claim.

> Access times are limited by things like trace lengths

Again, Ω(n^1/2)

> and parasitics

And those are Ω(n)

So, as you found, on practice it's much worse, but the limit on the article is also there.
by Degorath | 2025-10-08 20:48:00+00:00
(Yeah, I'd say your messaging was reasonably clear, but in the context of the whole thread it wasn't obvious whether the poster was putting themselves in that skill bucket.)

I think there's also quite a big spectrum of skill, even when we're talking about compiler optimization and highly skilled software developers. I'd put myself up there, but still I'm no Lars Bak (for whom Google allegedly created an office in Denmark).
by tsimionescu | 2025-10-08 20:48:30+00:00
This is quite wrong. If an algorithm requires one memory read, and reading one byte from memory takes (size of data)^1/3 time steps, then the complexity of that algorithm is O(N^1/3), not O(1).

This is well known for doing large number arithmetic. For example, we typically consider that a+a is an operation that takes O(1) time to execute. This is because we know we are limiting the analysis to small numbers, even if we have a lot of them. But if the numbers can be arbitrarily large, then a+a doesn't take O(1) time, it takes O(log a) time. So, an algorithm that needs to perform O(N) additions doesn't take O(N) time, it takes O(N log K) time. And if we are doing something like adding the first N numbers, the complexity is actually O(N log N), not O(N).

The same thing happens to memory: if we assume that the problem will fit into very fast memory even for the largest sizes, we can indeed approximate memory access as O(1). But if we admit that the more memory we need to store the components of the problem, the slower memory access will get, then we need to model the cost of accessing memory as a function of program size - and the author is proposing O(N^1/3) as that cost. This means that our algorithm for adding the first N numbers actually requires O(N^4/3) time for reading N numbers from memory and then O(N log N) additions, which gives it a total complexity of O(N^4/3 + N log N) = O(N^4/3).

Now, this type of analysis is not useful if we think all our numbers will fit into a single computer's memory, probably. But if we are trying to, say, figure out how our algorithm will scale from gigabytes of data to hundreds of petabytes of data, we need to model the rising cost of memory access as our data set gets bigger too. At some point as N grows to infinity, even just computing the address of the next byte becomes a complex operation that can take longer than the whole time it took to add the first 100GB of numbers.
by TheCoelacanth | 2025-10-08 20:49:13+00:00
You are just giving an example of how lack of "coherence between means and ends" leads to failure.

A military occupation (means) is not an effective way to achieve lasting control over the civilian population (ends) unless much of the population is already on your side, so it is foolish to try to use those means to achieve those ends.

Russia has also been hurt quite badly by lack of moral restraint in the war against Ukraine (which in the context Clausewitz used it I believe means more whether you have rational control of your actions than whether your actions are "good" or "bad"). Attacking civilians is usually extremely ineffective at achieving anything other than making leaders feel good that they are hurting their enemies and usually just hardens the enemy's resolve to continue fighting.
by cycomanic | 2025-10-08 20:49:39+00:00
> Walk us through how you think RealPage is going afoul of "antitrust laws". I'll presume you're talking about price fixing, which is a subset of antitrust laws but separate from them (i.e. you don't need to fall afoul of antitrust to be convicted of price fixing.)

If there is a town of 8k rental apartments and I own 4k and you own 2k do you agree that we would run afoul of price fixing laws if we get together in a room to exchange information about our vacancy rates, state of the apartment and rents that we currently charge?

If yes, how can it then be legal for a third party to take the same information and do some "statistical" analysis (the new "it's app so it is not ...") and give us suggested rent prices?

> The thing about price fixing is, it's a matter of prisoner's dilemma. If any one firm in a price fixing regime defects, e.g. they lower prices below the fixed price, they "win" the market. If a bunch of landlords collude to offer rents at $115 / mo, the first landlord to offer similar properties at $100 / mo will immediately win over all prospective tenants.

So your argument is price fixing doesn't work?

> To prove that RealPage is performing price fixing, you'd need to prove that a substantial portion of landlords are using RealPage as a pretext to setting prices concurrently. I find this really hard to believe due to the sheer number of independent landlords available. If anything the housing market is probably more sensitive to price changes because of how constrained the supply is in the US.

To put some numbers behind this, in LA independent private landlords own 33% of rental properties, that means institutional and corporate investors still own the vast majority of rental properties.

The big contention in pretty much all lawsuits is how "optional" the price recommendations really are.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-08 20:49:44+00:00
> What do you think a good faith person trying to persuade should do with this information? (Legit question...I've been wracking my brain about this)

I can tell you that but it depends on what you are trying to be convincing about. You seem to assume you have all the answers and persuasion is all that remains, but as I said, it depends, you might actually need to first figure out what's worthy of persuasion.
by axiolite | 2025-10-08 20:50:08+00:00
> Thinking they will suddenly come to their senses is just delusional.

Abstract proclamations don't affect people. Taking something away from them, affects them. That's when the rubber hits the road. That's when the public starts turning on the politicians. Even the strictest party-line voters don't support EVERYTHING (or even most of what) the party says and does.

> They don't let their kids watch educational shows.

> They have an entire "alternative" media infrastructure set up.

"PBS has also reported a diverse ideological split among its consumers [...] 26% who self-identify as Republicans and 37% who say they are independents."

https://www.thewrap.com/defund-pbs-npr-impact/

"Among those that voted for President Trump, PBS/public television has a much higher positive image rating (60%) than the traditional broadcast networks (37%), cable TV networks (41%) and newspapers (24%)."

"66% who voted for President Trump favor increasing or maintaining federal funding for public TV"

https://www.pbs.org/about/about-pbs/blogs/news/survey-shows-...