MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-10-01 13:51:56+00:00
You're not alone, but I find it interesting that not too long ago[0] there was a common sentiment of "if it's not Boeing, I'm not going". I heard that often after the Air France 447 crash [1]

[0]OK, I guess 2009 is not as recent as I remember...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
by andsoitis | 2025-10-01 13:51:58+00:00
> We need to start paying people to leave Florida.

I won’t repeat what others have said about risk profile isn’t uniform across FL.

I think tax dollars would be better spent:

- educating and making more transparent the realities that business and private citizens face due to global warming and what actions are being done at the individual and societal level (eg special taxes to fund projects that fight against global warming and its effects)

- make it very very expensive to build in flood zones, with limited, if any, bailouts
by trilogic | 2025-10-01 13:51:59+00:00
We communicate via email exclusively with our already users and clients which in 99% of the cases contact us first (from same gmail address that mark our service as a spam), we don't have time to spam which anyway will damage our reputation. The funny thing is that, All this happens mostly with traffic in our own continent in our own country (we are not even trying to get intercontinental clients)!
by bsenftner | 2025-10-01 13:52:00+00:00
"Software engineering" is a communications problem, and software engineering degrees do not even teach or approach teaching communications. That's a huge disconnect. I still can't understand why the larger industry does not see what our entire industry does is a communications and translation problem/solution/service. So much of what people try to do breaks down at the basic communications level, yet nobody seems to realize it is the communications at fault. And that effective communications is a teachable formal subject.

(So, anyway, what I'm doing now is creating class courseware that teaches effective communications for developers.)
by captainmuon | 2025-10-01 13:52:03+00:00
> this just hasn't been the case for some time now

Which I find sad actually. The idea of C++ as a superset of C is really powerful, especially when mixing C and C++. A while ago I had a C project (firmware for a microcontroller) and wanted to bake the version and the compilation time into the firmware. I didn't find a way to do this in plain C, but in C++ you can initialize a global struct and it gets statically linked into the output. This didn't even use constexpr, just preprocessor trickery. Then it was just a matter of renaming the c file to cpp and recompiling. I guess you could also do that with C, but there are things like RAII or constexpr or consuming a C++ library that you can't do without.
by nsajko | 2025-10-01 13:52:12+00:00
> Number isn’t an interface—there are no operations common to all numbers.

When creating a new type, it should be more clear cut when is subtyping Number (or Real, etc.) valid. Should unitful quantities be numbers? Should intervals be numbers? Related: I think there are some attempts by Tim Holy and others to create/document "thick numbers".

Furthermore, I believe it might be good to align the Number type hierarchy with math/abstract algebra as much as possible without breaking backwards compatibility, which might making Number, or some subtypes of it, actual interfaces.

> Subtyping Number is a way to opt into numeric promotion and a few other useful generic behaviors. That’s it.

OK, but I think that's not documented either.
by iamleppert | 2025-10-01 13:52:34+00:00
What people fail to realize is that 2D works. It's the optimal configuration of information for the human brain. Adding a third dimension, although possible and supported natively by human brain hardware, adds little to no value to almost everything people do with computers.

Where does it add value? Entertainment, but not nearly as much as 2D entertainment. It also takes a lot more processing power to decode the 3D experience. It's why people get fatigued after spending any reasonable amount of time in VR. Some of that is due to the synthetic nature of the experience, but even a theoretical perfect device would require more energy consumption for the brain to decode than an equivalent 2D interface. The experience in 3D might be more intuitive because it borrows from already learned spatial relationships and behaviors from the real world, but long term it's going to take more energy to accomplish the same task in a 3D environment than a 2D one.

For the vast majority of people, what we have now is optimal. It's like trying to train a model when its already converged.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-10-01 13:52:40+00:00
Yeah, SQL is not the issue. At least not mostly.

The relational model has shown itself to be exactly the flexible and powerful model that Codd said it was, even in its relatively-debased from in SQL.

In fact the potential of it as a universal and flexible data model that abstracts away storage still remains to be fully unlocked.

Now as for existing SQL databases, yes, many of them were built on foundational assumptions about the nature of memory and secondary storage that no longer hold true.

Many of us in this industry still have our heads stuck in the past world of spinny spinny magnetic disks on platters with heads and cylinders and grinding noises. Real world hardware has moved on. We have a couple orders of magnitude higher IOPS generally available than we did just 10-15 years ago.

So I'm excited about products like CedarDB and others (Umbra before it, etc) that are being built on a foundation from day one of managing with hybrid in-memory/disk.

Throwing out SQL is not really the recipe for "performance" and the lessons of separating the storage system from the data model is still key, since the 1960s.

I am willing to grant that a specialized transaction/ledger system like TigerBeetle might have its place as an optimization strategy in a specific industry/domain, but we should not make the mistake of characterizing this as a general problem with the relational model and data storage broadly.
by hannofcart | 2025-10-01 13:52:50+00:00
> especially so for people who can't code.

And for those who can, Appscript gives your spreadsheet super powers.

For those who don't know, you are not stuck with writing JS in the Appscript integrated web IDE that comes with Google sheets (though honestly it's not too bad itself).

Using clasp, you can develop your code locally in an IDE of your choice, in typescript and have a build step compile those to js, and have clasp push it to spreadsheet.

Once you have the tool chain set up the DX is quite nice.
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-01 13:52:53+00:00
Yep they were the original "killer apps" and still are. They are the reason that PCs gained traction in businesses in the 1980s. I helped my chemistry teacher in High School back then to use Visicalc on a TRS-80 as a gradebook. Almost anyone who has used a computer for work has used a spreadsheet for something, whether managing simple lists, or something much more complicated.
by jorangreef | 2025-10-01 13:53:29+00:00
And to be fair, those are all great general purpose solutions. For example, you could also use Postgres or Redis as queue, instead of say Redpanda or Kafka.

But our customers need separation of concerns in their architecture. While they could put the cash in the general purpose filing cabinet, they actually want the separation of concerns between OLGP system of reference (string database, i.e. PG) in the control plane, and OLTP system of record (integer/counting database, i.e. TB) in the data plane.
by oefrha | 2025-10-01 13:53:34+00:00
They’re talking about 100-1000 TPS for transactions all locking a single row, which is not wrong, just not reflective of most workloads. They’re not talking about TPS of the entire database with simultaneous operations on many independent rows. This should be reasonably clear in context, but of course when you publish grandiose claims (when viewed in isolation) and very vague graphs backing said claims people won’t be happy.

TFA contextualizes this better:

> This gets even worse when you consider the problem of hot rows, where many transactions often need to touch the same set of “house accounts”.
by surajrmal | 2025-10-01 13:53:36+00:00
Move fast and break things was the Facebook motto. I've never really felt it was a Google embraced concept. What Google's values have always lied with investing heavily on testing to ensure folks can be productive by knowing that if they would break something a test would catch it.

That said it's good to make sure you're building for requirements that exist. Engineers have a habit of inventing requirements and causing delays unnecessarily. Building something and placing it in the hands of users so they can give you feedback which you can react to is far more valuable than building products in a bubble.
by bluGill | 2025-10-01 13:53:43+00:00
Anything is too strong, but everytime something is a cause we should look at that option along with others. I'm against divorce - but marriage to someone who is abusive is even worse and so I'm forced to allow for divorce despite being against it. There are many many other things in life that are far more complex (even my example is far more complex, but you wouldn't read the 100 volume books if I wrote it - I don't even have time to think about all the details that would need to be in it)
by Hizonner | 2025-10-01 13:54:14+00:00
> Do you also support a blanket ban of CCTV in public spaces?

I'm not sure I support anything. I'm just pointing out that there is a path available if you don't just assume that you should be allowed to take video.

But it wouldn't bother me at all to have, say, a rule that you couldn't have a surveillance camera covering any space you didn't own, and furthermore that if you had a camera covering a space that you did own that was open to the public, and recordings would be deleted after say 24 hours unless there was special justification to keep a specific one.
by sjw987 | 2025-10-01 13:54:16+00:00
I just sort of wanted to learn how to build (rudimentary) versions of the same apps I've always used made by other companies/people, and like the idea of the data being as clean as possible. I'm a bit of a data purist, so I store all of my photos unedited, and keep all of my text documents as simple as possible (minimal formatting, data-heavy).

I'm also wary of just moving from one product to another, with the hassle of transferring things over constantly, security breaches, product sunsetting and all of those sorts of things.

I'll give Nextcloud a look out of curiosity.
by Twey | 2025-10-01 13:54:26+00:00
Category theory is popular in computer science because, at a fundamental level, they're very compatible ways of seeing the world.

In computing, we think about:

- a set of states

- with transformations between them

- including a ‘do nothing’ transformation

- that can be composed associatively (a sequence of statements `{a; b;}; c` transforms the state in the same way as a sequence of statements `a; {b; c;}`)

- but only in certain ways: some states are unreachable from other states

This is exactly the sort of thing category theory studies, so there's a lot of cross-pollination between the disciplines. Computation defines interesting properties of certain categories like ‘computation’ or ‘polynomial efficiency’ that can help category theorists track down interesting beasts to study in category theory and other branches of mathematics that have their own relationships to category theory. Meanwhile, category theory can give suggestions to computer science both about what sort of things the states and transformations can mean and also what the consequences are of defining them in different ways, i.e. how we can capture more expressive power or efficiency without straying too far from the comfort of our ‘do this then do that’ mental model.

This latter is really helpful in computer science, especially in programming language or API design, because in general it's a really hard problem to say, given a particular set of basic building blocks, what properties they'll have when combined in all the possible ways. Results in category theory usually look like that: given a set of building blocks of a particular form, you will always be able to compose them in such a way that the result has a desired property; or, no matter how they're combined, the result will never have a particular undesired property.

As an aside, it's common in a certain computer science subculture (mostly the one that likes category theory) to talk about computing in the language of typed functional programming, but if you don't already have a deep understanding of how functional programming represents computation this can hide the forest behind the trees: when a functional programmer says ‘type’ or ‘typing context’ you can think about sets of potential (sub)states of the computer.
by ajross | 2025-10-01 13:55:32+00:00
> Plenty of reports of people getting locked out of their Workspace accounts

None substantiating the "most AI-kafkaesque process imaginable to regain access" upthread though. I mean, I don't know what you're citing specifically, but yes, obviously: business relationships like everything else get tangled up sometimes. People's electricity gets shut off incorrectly, people's Doordash orders arrive with the wrong stuff, phone bills arrive without the promised discounts; everything sucks, kinda.

But if you're paying the solution is to call your support contact and have them sort it out. And that works at Google the same way it does everywhere else.
by TechSquidTV | 2025-10-01 13:56:25+00:00
Not related to Sora but, I have been looking for / hoping for an AI powered motion tracking solver. I've used Blender and Mocha in AE and both still require quite a bit of manual intervention, even in very simple scenes.

I saw some promnise with the Segment Anything model but I haven't seen anyone yet turn it into a motion solver. In fact I'm not sure if can do that at all. It may be that we need to use an AI algorithm to translate the video into a more simple rendition (colored dots representing the original motion) that can then be tracked more traditionally.
by jplusequalt | 2025-10-01 13:56:52+00:00
>The crisis part is that I can't justify this belief with words

Reading thousand page novels requires actively engaging with the material as you grow your vocabulary, and explore new ideas.

Scrolling TikTok on the other hand is a passive process. Could you recall even a quarter of all the videos you see on your TikTok feed in a single day? I would doubt it.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-01 13:57:33+00:00
> ..it took OP 8 months of "rolling the gacha" and waiting to get a clean IP; no mention of costs.

I dont see anything about it taking the OP 8 months to get a clean IP? They were on Hetzner, and can presumably keep making new VM's for a while until they get a clean one. Hetzner bills based on hours used, so I imagine that total cost would be quite low.
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-01 13:57:46+00:00
There isn’t a good one. The city of East Grand Forks, MN moved entirely after the 1997 floods when they realized that fighting nature is impossible, particularly on the Red River, which flows northward and virtually always floods due to ice dams downstream in Canada.

The old town of East Grand Forks that was built on the floodplain is now a park, which is the best use for most river floodplains.
by aeon_ai | 2025-10-01 13:58:32+00:00
At some point -- sometimes early, often too late -- we realize we're going to die. Our time is finite. We have only so many days to do anything, let alone something that matters.

Meaning is found in how and why we spend that time.

When we're fooled into believing money matters more than time, we trade far too much of the latter for the former. Worse, we can mistake the monetary value of our time for its actual value, and then optimize our entire lives according to that myth.

The idea that AI destroys meaning is a false framing. Many people are already experiencing a meaning crisis, and AI is simply an easy scapegoat.

Purpose comes from discovering our own values through living, not from accepting meanings imposed by others.
by sjw987 | 2025-10-01 13:58:48+00:00
It took about a week for me to completely de-Google from scratch.

Drive was easy enough to download everything off, but the real pain in the arse was Google Photos. I had something like 250 individual 2GB zip files and the supplementary metadata was separated off of the image files themselves. I had to put together some Python scripts to clean up all the different file naming formats over the years (PIXL_YYYYMMDD, IMG_YYYYMMDD) into just YYYYMMDDD, and reattach the metadata, and then check through that everything was safely downloaded before deleting the Google Photos.

Google Photos had some weird caching issues where it kept showing images I'd deleted and emptied from the bin, which was a little concerning. They were only appearing on my phone and persisted multiple times after clearing the cache. I couldn't find them anywhere in the phones internal storage.
by moralestapia | 2025-10-01 13:58:50+00:00
You have a function that does A() and another function that does B().

Upon careful inspection or after just writing/using them 10,000s of times[1] you realize they are both special cases of one general function f()[2]. Congrats, you're likely doing CT now, but barely scratching the surface, though.

Let's say you find a way to do a function factory that generates explicit instances of f() -> A() and f() -> B() at runtime for your different use cases as they are needed. You do this 100 times, 1,000 times[1] with many different functions, in many different contexts. You eventually realize that if all your functions and their signatures had the same structure[3] it would be quite easy to mix some (or all?) of them with each other, allowing you to handle a perhaps infinite amount of complexity in a way that's very clean to conceptualize and visualize. Isn't this just FP? Yes, they're very intimately related.

By this point you're 99.9999% doing CT now, but remember to shower regularly, touch grass etc.

CT formalized these structures with mathematical language, and it turns out that this line of thinking is very useful in many fields like ours (CS), Math, Physics, etc.

1. Which is what happened to me.

2. Which sometimes is a way more elegant and simple solution.

3. This term is fundamental and has way more meaning than what I could write here and what one would think on a first approach to it.
by pdpi | 2025-10-01 13:58:57+00:00
> - with transformations between them > > - including a ‘do nothing’ transformation > > - that can be composed associatively (a sequence of statements `{a; b;}; c` transforms the state in the same way as a sequence of statements `a; {b; c;}`)

And this right here is that monoid in the famous "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" meme.
by ajross | 2025-10-01 13:59:02+00:00
> I confess that this kind of excuse drives me batty.

The use case was "compiling code". My assumption was that anyone buying hardware for that application would understand stuff like filesystem performance, system tuning, also stuff like "how to use a ramdisk" or "how to install Linux".

Yes, if you want to flame about the whole system experience: Apple's is the best, period. But not because they're twice as fast, that's ridiculous.
by ubermonkey | 2025-10-01 13:59:25+00:00
I didn't realize it at the time, but I my first encounter with the "solves every problem with a spreadsheet" user type came very early in my career.

I worked in a computer lab in college, ca. 1989. One of my colleagues was in the mechanical engineering program, and had a bias generally for "solve the problem" over "elegant solution" or "appropriate tool" concerns. (I love the guy to this day, to be clear.)

When he first came to work at the lab, he was the only guy to have installed FORTRAN on his workstation. It didn't work well.

Then he discovered Lotus 1-2-3 and its macro language. He DELIGHTED in making the rest of horrified by creating all sorts of boundary-pushing utilities in Lotus macros. To be clear, he was at least 50% "doing a bit", and leaning into the "engineer only knows one tool" gag we'd all been riffing on. But he was still doing absurd stuff in Lotus that would've been better built in, say, Turbo Pascal or Turbo C.

I had no idea back then that this pattern would become so prevalent.
by squidbeak | 2025-10-01 14:00:10+00:00
You're mistaken, the proposed system isn't centralized. The IDs only exist in the wallet.

The wallet uses Digital Verification Services (DVS) to poll APIs in front of the data the government already holds on you. These services check details you enter against that data and return cryptographic signatures for each. The wallet puts these together as IDs in a bespoke way, depending on what you need to prove. You can have any number of variations of ID and none of them are centralized.

Some of these signed proofs can be disclosed using Zero Knowledge Proofs (a cryptographic means of demonstrating something without demonstrating anything else) which would actually make it harder to 'correlate' you in the way you describe.

Another thing to bear in mind, the ID is backed up by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which reinforces data protection laws and actually wards against the use you describe.

There's a lot of misinformation flying around about this proposal, but the design itself doesn't match the negative characterizations. It's surprisingly good and weighted to the citizen.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-10-01 14:00:37+00:00
> Cannabis cultivars carry a similar level of confidence in suitability for purpose.

I'm really not sure what our disagreement here really is. I think we're both agreed that modern Cannabis is fairly fit for it's purpose. As you say, they've been doing 'human experimentation' with it for thousands of years and it's evolved alongside us. I just also think that we shouldn't halt progress at the level of farming a plant because it's "good enough." We have new tools available to us now, and we should use them.

To try and rephrase: All I'm really saying here is that we should try to understand HOW those cultivars work, and optimize by extracting the useful bits or by synthesizing variations on them in a lab. That way we can minimize the side-effects and maximize the benefits. Are you opposed to that? If so why?
by jeffbee | 2025-10-01 14:00:50+00:00
SQL and to an extent R were both created under the assumption that most people were not inclined to learn to program the computer. They could be expected to speak English and understand relational algebra, but they couldn't be expected to learn an imperative programming language. The existence of SQL stands as proof that at least some people 50 years ago thought there were multiple classes of user.
by alphazard | 2025-10-01 14:00:59+00:00
That does seem related, but it suggests something even more unexpected, which is that live bacteria are forming biofilms in arterial plaque. So the LDL is picking up live and dead bacteria and then adhering to the side of arteries.

Biofilms (for anyone unfamiliar) are a form of coordination used by bacteria. Through simple signaling mechanisms they are able to decide which bacteria are on the outer edge, and which bacteria are safe inside. The guys on the edge become hard and defensive, and protect the inner bacteria from threats (like the immune system).