MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by underlipton | 2025-10-30 17:29:17+00:00
The only time deprioritization has been a problem for me is when I've run out of data on my limited plan. With the major carrier, it was still usable; with the MVNO, it was not. As long as you stay below your plan limit (or, for those on unlimited, don't try to tether and use hundreds of gigabytes a month), it's essentially the same service.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-10-30 17:29:22+00:00
> When I want to stick a NA into one of these, I often have to give it the right type of NA, or it'll default to NA_boolean and I'll get type errors.

Yeah, I know. I hit this when I was building S4 classes, which are similarly type-strict.

Again, I think this was the right decision (pandas's decision was definitely not), but it was pretty confusing the first time.
by natmaka | 2025-10-30 17:29:50+00:00
IMHO the main difference between PostgreSQL and any 'competitor' is that in most cases a software developer will quickly find not only how to use it quite properly for his use case but also why some way he adopted isn't right and triggers some non-negligible problem.

There are many reasons for this: most software developers have more than a vague idea about its underlying concepts, most error messages are clear, the documentation is superb, there are many ways to tap into the vast knowledge of a huge and growing community...
by gspencley | 2025-10-30 17:30:32+00:00
A lot of this type of stuff boils down to what you're used to.

My wife is not particularly tech savvy. She is a Linux user, however. When we started a new business, we needed certain applications that only run on Windows and since she would be at the brick and mortar location full time, I figured we could multi-purpose a new laptop for her and have her switch to Windows.

She hated it and begged for us to get a dedicated Windows laptop for that stuff so she could go back to Linux.

Some of you might suggest that she has me for tech support, which is true, but I can't actually remember the last time she asked me to troubleshoot something for her with her laptop. The occasions that do come to mind are usually hardware failure related.

Obviously the thing about generlizations is that they're never going to fit all individuals uniformly. My wife might be an edge case. But she feels at home using Linux, as it's what she's used to ... and strongly loathed using Windows when it was offered to her.

I feel that kind of way about Mac vs PC as well. I am a lifelong PC user, and also a "power user." I have extremely particular preferences when it comes to my UI and keyboard mappings and fonts and windowing features. When I was forced to use a Mac for work, I honestly considered looking for a different position because it was just that painful for me. Nothing wrong with Mac OS X, a lot of people love it. But I was 10% as productive on it when compared to what I'm used to... and I'm "old dog" enough that it was just too much change to be able to bear and work with.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-10-30 17:31:00+00:00
The US seems to be at risk of becoming a Japanese style economy in the coming years. As in they focus on tech that sells well locally, but is of no interest outside the country. And that can work for their economy and is a nice way to package protectionism. But eventually, people years down the road see how much better tech is in the outside world and jump to it and never look back. Then your own industry starts to drown and is only held up by a class of elderly people afraid of change.

Examples are the strange Japanese flip phones and the computers with CF card and floppy drives with a 1.5 ghz single core CPU selling for twice the price of a MacBook Pro.

With BYD selling globally now, and Boeing losing its reputation, American vehicles of all sorts are at risk.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-30 17:31:04+00:00
Musk chronically over-promised and terminally under-delivered. There was no world where he didn't end up being a twit, just one where we aren't stupid enough to fall for his lies.

Tesla, in particular, boils down to how Americans respond to marketing. We love the idea of buying organic, environmentally-friendly technology that makes us part of the solution. It doesn't matter if Congolese children are dying in the cobalt mines to make EV-grade lithium ion batteries, us Americans need to virtue signal with our wallet. Buy the latest iPhone, save up for a Tesla, it's all part of the new-age jewelry we wear to make ourselves feel worth something.

It was damn good marketing.
by epistasis | 2025-10-30 17:31:23+00:00
Agreed that the sanctions aspect is an important part here. But the sanctions are only for the personal and partisan benefits of President Trump, there was no benefit to the United States here.

The tariffs in your second link are not sanctions, and in fact the President levying tariffs as a normal course of business is illegal and unconstitutional in the United States. But it's a good example of the lawlessness of the current President, and his grabs at more power in an attempt to become a tyrant.

> But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump."

Yes, it absolutely was closed at the request of Trump, via sanctions. That's the entire point. The President of the United States can and will target anybody he does not like for whatever minor reason crosses his mind on a random afternoon. That makes it risky to engage in any sort of long-term transaction with a US company.
by Y_Y | 2025-10-30 17:31:40+00:00
They made me stop reading halfway through.

It didn't help that they make meaningless claims like

> Physically Accurate: Our deformable solver is driven by the Finite Element Method.

I don't know or care if they used an LLM to write that readme, but it's hot garbage. A pity because it seems like a decent sim otherwise.
by 8note | 2025-10-30 17:31:57+00:00
fraud/abuse/compliance is a good usecase for this kinda thing - an abuse vector is kinda like a bug, except that the system does what its expected to do.

testing for abuse stuff ive always found quite difficult, since to work well, you need to both create some real resources so you can delete/clean them up, and also you need to create a new test identity, since your abuse detection system should be deny listing found bad actors. the difficulty is that those sessions probably want to be open for like a week, so they can process both payments and refunds.

can the agents check their email? other notification methods?
by darth_avocado | 2025-10-30 17:32:00+00:00
I’ve said this before on HN. Behind all the AI enthusiasm and evangelism on HN and tech industry in general, people forget: When most people are out of a job, AI won’t be Doordashing you $15 burrito from Chipotle that cost $30 to deliver. You need a backup plan for when things go South and so far, there doesn’t even seem to be a conversation going on about it.
by xeonmc | 2025-10-30 17:32:27+00:00
Nit: It’s an unfortunate confusion of naming conventions, but Fourier Transform in the strictest sense implies an infinite “sampling” period, while the finite “sample” period counterpart would correspond to Fourier Series even though we colloquially refer to them interchangeably.

(I had put “sampling” in quotes as they’re actually “integration period” in this context of continuous time integration, though it would be less immediately evocative of the concept people are colloquially familiar with. If we actually further impose a constraint of finite temporal resolution so that it is honest-to-god “sampling” then it becomes Discrete Fourier Transform, of which the Fast Fourier Transform is one implementation of.)

It is this strict definition that the article title is rebuking, but it’s not quite what the colloquial usage loosely evokes in most people’s minds when we usually say Fourier Transform as an analysis tool.

So this article should have been comparing to Fourier Series analysis rather than Fourier Transform in the pedantic sense, albeit that’ll be a bit less provocative.

Regardless, it doesn’t at all take away from the salient points of this excellent article which are really interesting reframing of the concepts: what the ear does mechanistically is applying a temporal “weigting function” (filter) so it’s somewhere between Fourier series and Fourier transform. This article hits the nail on the head on presenting the sliding scale of conjugate domain trade offs (think: Heisenberg)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-30 17:32:38+00:00
These were Brian Niccol decisions before he parachuted over to his ~$100M pay package at Starbucks as their CEO.

> In 2018, Niccol became the CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, replacing founder Steve Ells. Although Niccol had moved west to Newport Beach, California to join Taco Bell, he did not move back east to Denver when he joined Chipotle. Rather, under his leadership, Chipotle moved its headquarters from Denver to Newport Beach. During his tenure, he helped double Chipotle's revenue while its profits increased almost seven times. The stock price of Chipotle has increased by almost eight times under Niccol. Niccol also increased salaries for Chipotle's retail staff and expanded employee benefits. In 2023, Niccol's total compensation at Chipotle was $22.5 million, or 1,354 times the median employee pay at Chipotle for that year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Niccol#Chipotle_Mexican_...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CMG/chipotle-mexic...

https://sherwood.news/business/chipotle-sales-grown-since-20...

(he's also staunchly anti labor/anti union)
by lchoquel | 2025-10-30 17:33:24+00:00
When the business logic becomes complex, our motto which is to break it down into smaller problems, until they are manageable.

Regarding large docs, I know what you mean and we've been there: at one point we considered focusing on that feature, build a kind of agentic system to master large docs. At the time in 2023-2024, everyone was relying on vector store RAG and embeddings to solve that problem but we always thought that solution wouldn't bring enough reliability. We wanted the LLM to actually read the whole docs, in order to know what's in there and where. The idea was to read and "take notes" according to different aspects of what it's reading, and synthesize hierarchically from bottom to top. So, that part of the work could be done once and the structured "notes" could be exploited for each use case, pretty efficiently thanks to the zoom-in/out provided by the architecture. We went pretty far in building that solution, which we called "Pyramid RAG" internally, and the aim was to build AI workflows of top of that. But at some point, the building of the pyramid became pretty complex, and we realized we needed AI workflows to build the pyramid itself, and we needed to to do it right. That's when we decided to focus on what would become Pipelex. Now, in our new setting, solving the "large docs" problem is a large problem we can break down into a collection of Pipelex workflows. So it's part of our plan to provide those building blocks, and we hope to involve the community as much as possible, to cover all the possible applications.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-30 17:33:34+00:00
> Musk chronically over-promised and terminally under-delivered

To be fair, most CEOs does that, but I think his downfall was really everything that he did besides just over-promising and under-delivering. He could have continued as-is, without all the political stunts and activities, and I'm sure Europeans would still have bought Teslas sometimes. Now the brand is poisoned pretty much world-wide, which wouldn't have happened just because of "over-promise and under-deliver", it takes a lot more for stuff like that to happen.
by mlinksva | 2025-10-30 17:34:06+00:00
It's a very good thing the US has declined to sign this. The digital rights community has been campaigning against it since its proposal by Russia in 2017. The US not signing it is a small victory across a very large loss. Many explainers like https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/joint-statement-un-cyb...
by sigbottle | 2025-10-30 17:34:19+00:00
Well, in theory (and I guess more generally philosophy) land, sure, you can't really "prove absoluteness" outside of your axioms and assumptions. You need to have a notion of true and false, and then implications, for example, to do logic, then whatever the leap from there it takes to do set theory, then go up from there etc. it's turtles all the way down.

In practice land (real theorem provers), I guess the idea is that, it theoretically should be a perfect logic engine. Two issues:

1. What if there's a compiler bug?

2. How do I "know" that I actually compiled "what I meant" to this logic engine?

(which are re-statements of what I said in theory land). You are given, that supposedly, within your internal logic engine, you have a proof, and you want to translate it to a "universal" one.

I guess the idea is, in practice, you just hope that slight perturbations to either your mental model, the translation, or even the compiler itself, just "hard fail". Just hope it's a very not-continuous space and violating boundaries fail the self-consistency check.

(As opposed to, for example, physical engineering, which generally doesn't allow hard failure and has a bunch of controls and guards in mind, and it's very much a continuuum).

A trivial example is how easy it is to just typo a constant or a variable name in a normal programming language, and the program still compiles fine (this is why we have tests!). The idea is, that, down from trivial errors like that, all the way up to fundamental misconceptions and such, you can catch preturbations to the ideal, I guess, be they small or large. I think what makes one of these theorem provers minimally good, is that you can't easily, accidentally encode a concept wrong (from high level model A to low level theorem proving model B), for a variety of reasons. Then of course, runtime efficiency, ergonomics etc. come later.

Of course, this brings into notion just how "powerful" certain models bring - my friend is doing a research project with these, something as simple as "proving a dfs works to solve a problem" is apparently horrible.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-30 17:35:42+00:00
> In short, the supply of money can increase without causing inflation if productivity rises to match it.

You're actually agreeing with me. Money supply must be backed up by real wealth and production.

That's not how things work in current times. We have nearly zero interest rates, and currencies are backed up by literally nothing.

> Most people do not "put money" in loans what are you even talking about there?

Fractional reserve banking. Banks loan out the cash you deposit. They "efficiently allocate" the money in their custody.

> Inflation is not caused by "putting your money somewhere" What on earth.

It absolutely is. Banks can easily turn thousands of dollars into hundreds of thousands of dollars by repeatedly loaning out the exact same dollars numerous times.

It's some kind of society wide financial call stack. Too many defaults and everything starts unwinding.

> Bank loans do not automatically increase the supply of money.

Obviously they do.

Imagine you deposit $100 at your bank. It takes your $100 and loans out $90 of it to someone else. There are now $190 dollars in circulation.

Whoever took the loan goes off and spends it. Eventually it gets deposited back into a bank. Then the bank loans out $81 out of that $90. There are now $271 dollars in circulation.

And it keeps going.

You can inflate bitcoin via this algorithm.

> When a loan is taken out, it is (mostly) deposited to another bank

Irrelevant. Banks form interconnected systems. They all settle debts and accounts with each other.

> Increasing the supply of money requires the federal reserve to take steps.

The physical supply of money is irrelevant. It contributes only a small fraction of the circulating money supply. Money is numbers in bank databases now. They could run the money printers 24/7 and they'd never even come close to catching up to the inflation caused by banks.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-30 17:35:59+00:00
They installed 67% percent of it this year so that seems reasonable amount for them to build.

The full solar supply chain is currently being produced in the US, with low capacity but more planned.

SEIA has a solar and storage supply chain dashboard that they update with operational and planned capacities.

But clearly recent moves by the current admin are undercutting this progress.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-10-30 17:36:00+00:00
There's a good report/study about the complexity of Microsoft Word floating around somewhere.

It was something like:

- almost everybody only uses about 20% of the features of Word

- everybody's 20% is different, but

- ~80% of the 20% is common to most users.

- on the other hand, the remaining 20% of the 20% is widely distributed and covers basically all of the product.

So if you made a version of Word with 16% of its feature set you would almost make everybody happy. But really, nobody would be happy. There's no small feature set that makes most people happy.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-10-30 17:36:10+00:00
Familiarity is massively undersold in the Linux desktop adoption discussion. Having desktop environments that are near 1:1 clones of the commercial platforms (preferably paired with a distribution that's designed to be bulletproof and practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window) would go so far for making Linux viable for users sitting in the middle of the bell curve of technical capability.

It's one of those situations where "close enough" isn't. The fine details matter.
by epistasis | 2025-10-30 17:36:13+00:00
Right, it is definitely whining. But it also makes the case that it's risky to depend on services from a US company, as the whims of a tyrant may force all US companies to cut ties.

I doubt Trump even knew how the sanctions would play out, in terms of all the effects on the ICC. But the IT services are a clear one for the HN crowd to pay attention to.
by lamontcg | 2025-10-30 17:36:45+00:00
> UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app...

Which is also why UI/UX on open source projects are generally going to suck.

There's certainly no money to pay for that kind of experiment.

And if you include telemetry, people lose their goddamn minds, assuming the open source author isn't morally against it to begin with.

The result is you're just getting the author's intuitive guesswork about UI/UX design, by someone who is likely more of a coder than a design person.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-10-30 17:36:47+00:00
I really like EVs, and the Congolese kids dying to make EV-grade lithium has always been FUD made up by the anti boomer crowd (77% of the world's lithium comes from Australia and Chile, and I know they aren't importing Congo kids to mine it, and then China, Argentina, and Bolivia, again, completely Congo kid free). You probably meant Cobolt, and they are transitioning to LFP chemistries because it is impossible to force the Congolese to use industrial mining rather than small holder artisanal mining (where parents are likely to make their kids mine without supervision).

> us Americans need to virtue signal how much we love green energy and saving the planet.

Again, more FUD made up by the anti-EV crowd. Most people who buy EVs buy them because they are just better cars. In China, EVs are more of a national security concern: they have to import oil, which exposes them to international conflict. Importing less oil = less exposure, which is a big win for the country. The US has a lot of oil-entrenched interests.
by zahlman | 2025-10-30 17:37:12+00:00
> For any random python tool out there, I had about a 60% chance it would work out of the box.

Had, past tense, because of the metadata situation and the lack of pre-built wheels. The ecosystem has moved on.

> uv is the first tool in the python ecosystem that has brought that number basically to 100%.

Show me a Python tool that you can install and have work out-of-box with uv, but cannot install and have work out-of-box with pip.

> Ironically, it's written in Rust because python does not lend itself well to distributing reliable, fast tools to end users.

I have repeatedly shown that the slowness of pip is overwhelmingly due to its terrible (organically developed on top of legacy cruft from an era where people simply didn't have the same requirements) architecture, not due to being written in Python. Most of the work of installation is simply not CPU-bound — why would it be? — and the main task that is (optional pre-compilation of Python source to .pyc) is one of the few things where uv is dependent on the Python runtime (which, in turn, will do the work in C).
by jacobolus | 2025-10-30 17:37:13+00:00
The use of various kinds of mathematical manipulatives and concrete materials is great (including base ten blocks, cuisenaire rods, ten frames, number lines, dice, balance scales with weights, geoboards, pattern blocks, multi-link cubes, etc.). I'm a fan of all of them. But I think the counting board, per se, is a sadly neglected tool, not least because it gives a nice connection to the past.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-30 17:37:15+00:00
It's even more complex than that. The low notes are hard to tune because the fundamentals are very close to each other and you need to have super good hearing to match the beats, fortunately they sound for a long time so that helps. Missing fundamentals are a funny thing too, you might not be 'hearing' what you think you hear at all! The high notes are hard to tune because they sound very briefly (definitely on a piano) and even the slightest movement of the pin will change the pitch considerably.

In the middle range (say, A2 through A6) neither of these issues apply, so it is - by far - the easiest to tune.
by jwr | 2025-10-30 17:37:16+00:00
I hope the older versions (V2) will be maintained for a while… I can't help but worry about the upcoming ensh*ttification — I think it's inevitable that some day some exec at this now large company will come up with innovative ideas for "monetizing those free users" and things will go down the drain as usual.

I would be perfectly fine with paying for continued maintenance of V2.
by shipman05 | 2025-10-30 17:37:20+00:00
One reason for this that often goes unmentioned is the shale gas/fracking boom that made the US the world's #1 energy producer. That macro-level development allows the current administration to act as it does. If gas was less plentiful, more expensive, or primarily sourced from unstable regions, the economic math would be against them already. Western Europe and China do not have large fossil fuel reserves. For them, switching to green energy sources is not just an economic bonus, it's also a national security imperative.

Domestic sources of cheap, plentiful energy helped the US economy grow beyond expectations over the past decade, but it might prove to be a short-term boon that leads to long-term issues if the rest of the world's economy pivots away from fossil fuels.