MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrewrogers | 2025-10-01 05:58:56+00:00
As someone who actually worked for the Federal government when it shutdown in the past, people are exaggerating the implications for narrative purposes. This happens semi-routinely, there is a boring reality that goes along with it.

The people worst off are Federal contractors. They are effectively unemployed during these periods. Many actual employees, like me in previous shutdowns, are essentially on irregular paid time off. In theory it is unpaid, but it is always retroactively paid in practice and everyone knows this. People that are “critical” kind of get a raw deal because they still have to work while people deemed less essential don’t have to work.

It is unfortunate that it happens but I wouldn’t get overly caught up in the theater of it all.
by laidoffamazon | 2025-10-01 05:59:00+00:00
As I've gotten further in my career I've started to wonder - how many engineering quarters did it take to build this for their customers? How did they manage to get this on their own roadmap? This seems like a lot of code surface area for a fairly minimal optimization that would be redundant with a different development substrate (like running Windows on Stadia like how Amazon Luna worked...)
by rkomorn | 2025-10-01 05:59:11+00:00
I wasn't super informed on the Apple silicon laptops, so I was kind of disappointed when my last job gave me a 2-3 year old M1 Max laptop.

It blew the doors off every other laptop and desktop I've had (before or since).

When I think back to how quickly obsolete things became when I was younger (ie 90s and 00s), today's devices seem to last forever.
by throwup238 | 2025-10-01 05:59:18+00:00
> More importantly, this video is too short. It doesn't talk about why this paper can last a thousand years other than saying that it has.

In case anyone is wondering, it’s because it’s a more complex process that removes a lot of the impurities that degrade plant fibers like acids. The fibers are also significantly longer, get damaged less during the process compared to machine made, and don’t have lignin which tends to degrade the fibers in wood based paper.

That 1000 year number depends on controlled environmental conditions or getting left in a desert. You leave some washi paper in a rainforest and it won’t last much longer than other plant fibers.
by rusk | 2025-10-01 05:59:20+00:00
> Dell or HP

HP: nicely designed lemons Dell: citrusy with a note of quality but you need to know which ones to get. Sometimes you need a few but they get there in the end

> gaming-oriented ones

Generally nicely powered but garishly designed and flimsy

> just parts

No. That should have been clear.

> they offer good discounts and benefits for businesses buying in bulk

Also outside the market. You need to know who to talk to.

Another brand that do good laptops are Lenovo but, they also have their lemon lines which you can end up buying from again if you don’t know what you’re doing.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-01 05:59:38+00:00
> a Senate rule and the Senate sets is own rules via simple majority.

Right, each house of the US legislature starts the session with a >50% vote to re-adopt a slowly mutating package of rules that it used last time and has carried forward for decades, defining how work is scheduled, what committees exist, how seniority is calculated, who gets the nice office with the window, etc.

This leads to the "nuclear option" of a special >50% vote to remove the underlying rule which imposes the larger vote-margin for certain situations.
by ascorbic | 2025-10-01 05:59:58+00:00
OK, but that's not true, pretty much anywhere. If it's illegal to provide a service to people in a country, it's illegal wherever your site is based. It may be hard to enforce, and in most cases the authorities won't try, but if it's serious enough then they totally will. This is the same basis for extraditing people who sell rootkits or CSAM, or for when the US imprisoned the bosses of European gambling companies on charges of providing services to US customers. BetOnSports was a listed companies in London, and sports betting is legal in the UK. Didn't stop the US authorities arresting and imprisoning the CEO for years when he took a flight that connected via Dallas. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8339338.stm)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-01 06:00:08+00:00
That won't work as a first pass. That gets you results like "there's also a lot of influence from French" being 2/3 semantics and 1/3 grammar†, with there holding just as much semantic content as influence does. It also disqualifies pronouns from counting as grammar at all, which is much more defensible than disqualifying semantically empty words, but not a common perspective.

I tend to take the perspective that if a foreign speaker is unlikely to have any trouble learning how to use a word correctly, that word is semantic, and otherwise, the word is grammatical.

† Assuming that the omission of verbs from your list of semantic words was a mistake. Otherwise you're up to 44% grammar. I did count "is" as being grammar, but I would certainly not extend that judgment to all verbs.

--- results ---

By your standard, English is 61% of the semantics and 91% of the grammar (if verbs have no semantics), or 62% of the semantics and 96% of the grammar (if verbs do have semantics).

French is 21% of the semantics and 6% of the grammar (if verbs have no semantics), or 20% of the semantics and 4% of the grammar (if verbs do have semantics).

I don't think much of your methodology, but it's worth noting that your overall numbers are almost identical to mine. (When verbs are meaningless; still very close but distinguishable otherwise.)

In reality, of course, many verbs such as sharing are rich in semantics, and many others such as do are more or less empty.
by exidy | 2025-10-01 06:00:44+00:00
I think there might be some confusion here. The vertical stabiliser (not the tail) was extended by 40 inches [0] to combat concerns about poor yaw control.

Although the Wikipedia article cites the UK ARB as the influence, it was also in response to the 1959 crash [1] of a 707 being used for training, in which Dutch roll was induced and later became so violent it ripped 3 engines off the wings.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_707#707-420

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Washington_Boeing_707_cra...
by btilly | 2025-10-01 06:01:51+00:00
You really think that the public will connect the dots.

Trump's "big beautiful bill" makes a lot of those painful cuts. But it also keeps them from taking effect until too late in 2028 to affect the next election. Between now and then, the standard Republican line can be, "Democrats told you that all this will be cut. Have your benefits been cut?" They get to use that in 2026 and 2028. The cuts will have arrived by 2030, but the bill will be old news. There will be a new controversy. And people's opinions of the bill won't change.

This is all on purpose.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-01 06:02:54+00:00
> There WILL be impacts, most certainly.

Amusingly—or perhaps worryingly—I can't help but "hear" that as Bob Page saying "Oh yes, most certainly" in the Deus Ex intro cutscene. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feY5KhdXsUQ&t=16s
by sturadnidge | 2025-10-01 06:03:01+00:00
Always good to come across fellow Australians in here!

I’d probably argue for an exception on that one, given the Whitlam government didn’t have a senate majority… but at the very least, I feel like a single case in the last 50 years is pretty supportive of my argument. The US government is on the verge of shutdown so often these days that I wonder how many people are desensitised to the situation!
by rented_mule | 2025-10-01 06:03:13+00:00
I was just mentioning that any feedback loops have the potential downside of coupling things together in ways that make experiments (and analysis, improvements, etc.) difficult.

I used control theory as an example of another type of feedback loop because we were using controllers in other parts of the system. One was roughly the proportional term of a PID controller. Another was both the proportional and integral terms, but with a lot of domain specific heuristics added on (e.g., ML models to set baselines that help the controllers understand how quickly to move values). This was all incredibly powerful, but also required experiment design and analysis that was far more complicated than we would have liked.

This was not a ride-sharing company, but you can imagine dynamic pricing for Uber or Lyft working this way. Use a controller to try to keep the number of available riders and drivers in balance. If riders exceed drivers, increase payment to drivers (and therefore cost to riders), thereby attracting more riders. If drivers are sitting idle, decrease payment. Ideally, this is done constantly to respond to time of day, weather, traffic, etc. (with some predictive baseline expectations to keep it from being too slow to respond). When you get it right, riders get the cheapest price that ensures a driver is available. In economic terminology, this is finding the market clearing price. A controller can get you a long way in a hurry on such a system. But it's certainly not the only approach that can work, and it takes a lot to get it right (I have no idea how Uber and Lyft actually do any of this).
by rusk | 2025-10-01 06:03:27+00:00
> Brand capture is powerful but maybe only if you’re willing to eat the propaganda.

Correct. The brand stays solid. The keyboard, the ribbon, there were a few citrus aspects to that generation but they rolled it back in the next generation. Crucially, it only affected a small (but vocal!) niche market so the brand remained solid.

To be clear. I’m not making the case that Apple haven’t made mistakes or lemons, but that they have not entered the “lemon market” and continue to demand, and receive a premium for their goods.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-01 06:05:58+00:00
I attempted to do this and discovered an irregularity.

Many of the systems claiming to have that CPU were actually VMs assigned random numbers of cores less than all of them. Moreover, VMs can list any CPU they want as long as the underlying hardware supports the same set of instructions, so unknown numbers of them could have been running on different physical hardware, including on systems that e.g. use Zen4c instead of Zen4 since they provide the same set of instructions.

If they're just taking all of those submissions and averaging them to get a combined score it's no wonder the results are nonsense. And VMs can claim to be non-server CPUs too:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q...

Are they actually averaging these into the results they show everyone?
by tomgp | 2025-10-01 06:06:00+00:00
I think the reason is that Bitcoin et al were sold as having practical uses but their ‘success’ has been as a vehicle for speculation. Though the two things are linked (hype for the former drives adoption for the latter) and it’s possible to both hold that crypto currencies are of no practical use and a great investment opportunity. (FWIW, with a long enough time span I believe neither of these is true)

[edited to correct a couple of typos]
by slaterbug | 2025-10-01 06:06:00+00:00
Of course not, I just think the idea of little humanoid robots being controlled remotely, running around doing deliveries and such would be amusing.

The potential applications of this tech in war is concerning of course, but we don't have to allow that. And the more I've thought about it over time, I find the prospect of combat robots much less terrifying than the FPV drones we've been seeing used in Ukraine, or being obliterated by an unseen, unheard drone flying kilometers up in the sky before you even know what's happening.
by vintermann | 2025-10-01 06:06:04+00:00
Sitcoms are a tried and true language promotion tactic. I remember when I was young there was a French teenage-sitcom, "Helene", which my mother would watch because her students watched it religiously (she was a language teacher). It was outrageously soapy, but even I noticed the relatively accessible language. My mother told me the show was a subsidized export of France's language evangelization program. Apparently teaching French was a lot easier when that show was popular.

Friends wasn't that, but close enough. I think I recall Simone Giertz saying that she learned English from it, and I can't be the only one who has noticed that there's something uncannily Lisa Kudrow-like about her stage persona.
by fakedang | 2025-10-01 06:07:28+00:00
https://www.statista.com/statistics/380963/london-crime-rate...

COVID had a bigger impact on crime lol. I don't trust the numbers from the London Mayor's office when Sadiq Khan tries to skew and skewer numbers in various ways to his advantage. I do trust my rich Arab friends though, when they tell me they're not visiting London anymore for summers because they've been mugged.
by bbkane | 2025-10-01 06:08:45+00:00
Thanks for writing - I found the Power of Two Choices algorithm particularly interesting (I haven't seen it before).

From the recent grpConf ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj6h78yzYM2On4kCcnWjl... ) it seems gRPC as a standard is also moving in this "proxyless" model - gRPC will read xDS itself.
by 3036e4 | 2025-10-01 06:09:30+00:00
There is a chapter in the Blue Book about how the GW-BASIC byte code is structured, and from what I understand it used pointers to lines, not just offsets? But I did not look too carefully (guess the answer is in the source code: https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC).

That book is full of interesting facts and fun low-level tricks for (GW-)BASIC programming. Available for download here: https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-gwbasic

Before reading that I never considered how primitive early BASICs were. There is a lot of linear-searching for things (variables, line-numbers) that has to be considered when optimizing.
by palmfacehn | 2025-10-01 06:10:21+00:00
Guilt by association is a poor substitute for an argument. The partisan takes on this site have eclipsed actual discussion. Mearshiemer has also appeared with a variety of think tanks, because he is widely respected. It is easy to cherry pick one. It should be obvious how this line of reasoning is flawed, especially in the context of non-prescriptive realism.

Let's go back to the poster's super weird assertion. By definition, a provocation is something which results in a response. Observing that it is a provocation isn't the same as endorsing the response. Knee jerk categorization doesn't remove this discernment. Instead it misleads by glossing over the details. I would regard that to be a byproduct of propaganda.
by lstodd | 2025-10-01 06:11:02+00:00
There is too much variation in ingredients for any sort of formal rules.

If you strive for excellence, pasta cooking time is the least of your concerns, selection and knowledge of ingredients is. It gets internalized and feels just like intuition.

If you don't, generally just put pasta into boiling water and wait for T-1m where T is what's written on the package. It will be good enough.
by divbzero | 2025-10-01 06:12:42+00:00
China, on the other hand, did.

[2017]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/11/bitcoin-price-falls-on-repor... "Bitcoin price falls again on reports that China is shutting down local exchanges"

[2021]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/22/china-crypto-crackdown-wipes... "China’s renewed crypto crackdown wipes $400 billion off the market as bitcoin slides"
by lisper | 2025-10-01 06:12:53+00:00
> AR/VR still feels like 3D tv to me - a solution looking for a problem.

Have you tried the Vision Pro? It was a life-changing experience for me. I actually forgot that I was looking at a screen and thought that I was looking through a transparent visor. It was that good.

If they could get the weight down I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem it solves (for me, or at least would solve if it didn't weigh so damned much) is having effectively a giant monitor that I can use on a plane.
by FrancisMoodie | 2025-10-01 06:13:26+00:00
> So why is the assumption that AI will magically delete all jobs while discounting the fact that it will create careers we haven’t even thought of?

I think that in a vacuum you could reasonably believe that this might be the case but I feel like it isn't just about the technology these days, it's about the hunger c-suites and tech companies have for replacing workforce with ai and/or automation. It's quite clear that layoffs and mass adoption of AI/automation raises shareholder value so there is no incentive to create new jobs.

Will there be an organic shift away from Tech/IT/Computers into new fields? It might, but I think it's a bit naive to think that this will be proportionate to the careers AI will make redundant when there is such a big focus on eliminating as much jobs as possible in lieu of AI.
by moi2388 | 2025-10-01 06:13:52+00:00
Personally, I found I cannot learn languages through apps like Duolingo, nor through regular education.

What works for me:

- associate words with their meaning. This means not trying to translate words into their counterpart in a different language. So no flash cards with words on both sides, but with pictures.

- listen to music. This helps me develop a feeling for the language, where I understand the beginning and end of words, and intonations.

- watch simple shows in the foreign language. Kids shows, cooking shows. Stuff where the context is obvious, so once again I am not secretly “translating”.

- going on holidays or booking a conversation with a language coach. Because understanding and production are two different brain areas (wernicke vs broca), so there are languages which I can understand, but not speak.
by topspin | 2025-10-01 06:14:02+00:00
> How long do government shutdowns last?

That can't be predicted. One side or the other knuckles under at some point, but there is no schedule.

> How often do they happen?

A couple times every decade. Often enough that it one can see trends. The longest is also the most recent: 35 days in 2018. That was Trump's first term. Obama had one as well. They've been trending longer since the 1980's.
by drysine | 2025-10-01 06:14:38+00:00
>Russia sent missiles to Houthis just this year.

The article says it didn't happen, just that maybe some people disembarked.

>The meeting where Putin says they have longstanding ties with Hamas

That's not exactly what he said: "Russia’s stable, long-term relationships with the Palestinian people, their representatives and various organizations". If you deal with Palestine you have to deal with Hamas. Russia has stable, long-term relationship with Israel too.

>I meant "closely aligned" more than anything

To some degree, what degree is that is debatable. It's more like the enemy of my enemy (the US) thing if you ask my opinion.

>rumor has it, Iran's Shahed drone == RF's Geran' drone

Russia used to import Shahed drones, than organized their production domestically with Iranian help, improved the design, greatly scaled the production, created a decoy version and a jet-powered version.

>Honestly, maybe? I don't have an opinion, much less an educated one.

I'd rather not extrapolate in both cases)
by drnick1 | 2025-10-01 06:15:47+00:00
> Not sure why very nice people on the internet are apologizing for laws that prohibit ripping off other people's work. These laws are very important.

I would argue that they are not. In fact, I don't think life without intellectual property laws would be at all that different. Ideally, IP would reward creators and inventors, but in practice, it protects the rents of publishers, Big Pharma and Big Tech instead of fostering innovation.

The fact that people, for instance, write free software, and that such software is often superior to commercial, copyrighted software clearly shows that such a model is viable. There would also clearly still be people making music, movies, etc.

Another issue is that enforcement of IP laws is very uneven. In many parts of the world, people already freely share copyrighted materials and freely copy drugs. Effectively, all of this is subsidized by American consumers who don't sail the high seas for their software and movies, and spend thousands a month for their prescriptions.
by btilly | 2025-10-01 06:15:58+00:00
There are plenty of politicians with R in the name.

That their policies don't look like Republican policies of 30 years ago shouldn't surprise. Republican policies of 30 years ago didn't look much like Republican policies of 60 years ago.

The current ones don't fail to be Republican. It is just that Republican now means something different than it used to.

The same exact comments could be made about Democrats. For example look at Joe Biden's legislative record. He was President as a champion of DEI and LBGTQ+ rights. But back in the Clinton era, he sponsored a crime bill that put a ton of blacks in prison, and sponsored DOMA, a bill that blocked federal recognition of gay marriages.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-01 06:16:47+00:00
Yeah, it's no different than if the current administration printed up some flyers with "Overstaying your visa is a civil infraction and puts you at risk of deportation." I might not like them, but they wouldn't be a Hatch Act violation either.

Naturally this assumes the flyer doesn't have something else on it like a photoshopped picture of Trump's head on Rambo's body shaking hands with Jesus, which would be wrong on... many different levels.
by Maxion | 2025-10-01 06:17:16+00:00
LDL is almost always talked about as a singluar thing, even in scientific studies when LDL comes in several flavors.

Large bouyant LDL is not associated with CVD risk whereas small dense LDL is.

You can have high HDL, high LDL and low triglycerides. This is a pretty rare pattern, but one where you do not have increase risk of CVD.

In most people, having high LDL is linked to having high small dense LDL and low aounts of large boyant LDL. Hence why LDL is used as a simple risk measure - even though it's wrong.

Statins in trials show benefits for secondary events, but for primary protection statins don't actually work that well.
by hoverbot | 2025-10-01 06:17:43+00:00
We just built a production grade multilingual RAG system and wrote up the design and what we learned in “Multilingual RAG That Actually Works: A Practical Architecture.”

Many multilingual RAG setups break in familiar ways: embedding spaces that do not line up, chunks cut mid sentence, and translation that mangles names or IDs. We tried a different path. We keep the reasoning in one base language, translate only at the edges, and guard important terms with glossaries.
by vintermann | 2025-10-01 06:18:21+00:00
The danger here is that you're not learning German - you're learning machine German. Even if the app makers have structured the machine translation so that it's smart about taking context into account, it will be at best subtly different from actual German, and at worst you'll pick up nonsense and think it's good German.

The safe way to use this would be in reverse. You shouldn't be browsing English pages and get 1 in 10 translated into German. You should be browsing German pages and get 9/10 translated into English. You'll still get machine translation artifacts, but they're much less likely to interfere with your learning, and you'll be much better equipped to spot them.
by kouteiheika | 2025-10-01 06:18:32+00:00
(insert the "First time?" meme here)

This is classic OpenAI heavy-handed censorship/filtering. Don't expect it to get any better; if anything, it'll get worse thanks to the "think of the children" types.

If you want an uncensored model that doesn't patronize you then your only recourse are local models, which, fortunately, are pretty good nowadays and are only getting better thanks to our Chinese friends constantly releasing a stream of freely-licensed models for everyone to use, unlike the "freedom loving" Western labs which don't release squat and make even Xi Jinping blush with how strongly they censor whatever they let us lowly plebs access through a paywalled API.