MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindcrime | 2025-11-06 19:42:23+00:00
How much time do you spend reading books?

It varies from year to year, month to month, and even week to week. But for quite some time now I've been really focused on doing a lot of "deep dive" backgrounding on various AI topics. During this period I've read probably 30'ish books (it's been 2+ years now).

For the most part, I carve out time to study very specifically. I'd say a normal week is reading/studying for 3-5 hours on Friday evening after work, then putting in 8 or 9 hours on Saturday, and then probably 3-4 hours on Sunday (during football season) and maybe 6-7 hours on Sunday (non football season). Then maybe another aggregate total of 3-5 hours throughout the rest of the work-week. And then mix in maybe another hour or two a week for reading fiction (that's more sporadic though, so don't take this bit too literally).

Totaling it all up, that's something like 20-30'ish hours as week. Keep in mind, most of this stuff is textbooks which are pretty dense and don't read real fast. I used to read a lot of novels, but I've largely fallen off on the fiction reading lately since I've been so research focused. I think I've read maybe 4 novels this year and am working on the 5th now (Book One of the "Bobiverse" series).

I feel that it's important to build the habit of reading books to improve my cognitive skills. Are there any tips for me please?

Hard to say. I've been an avid reader for basically my entire life, so it comes very naturally to me. The one thing I will observe though, is that over the past 5+ years I've noticed that I find it harder and harder to stay focused on one thing when it comes to video content. I can't watch a movie or tv show without constantly stopping to check Twitter, Facebook, HN, email, news.google.com, etc. But when I sit down with a book, I can just "lock in" and read for hours at a time mostly uninterrupted. My experience may not generalize, but if you try to make yourself read a bit, you may find that reading (paper books) might help you have similar periods of focus? That is, assuming such a thing is important to you.

In either case, read if you enjoy it and derive value from it. But don't read just because you feel like other people are telling you ought to read. "To thine own self be true" and all that jazz...
by vel0city | 2025-11-06 19:42:41+00:00
> Crew need to navigate long distances in open ocean

Not incredibly difficult these days with GPS. Especially if they're doing an Atlantic crossing, its not like there's a lot of things to hit. They're all diesel-electrics, they spend a lot of their time practically at the surface. When they need to dive, its usually only for a few hours at a time, a compass heading is good enough for those times especially in the open ocean. Its not like they're trying to read complicated sonar outputs or anything like that. They're not busting out a sextant to figure out their latitude. They also aren't explorers trying to chart out a new path, they're pretty much going to follow the known good routes other boats have gone before.

> perform docking/unloading

I imagine there are more than just the people operating the boats at the docks. I also don't think it takes a lot of training and skill to pick things up and set things down. And its not like they're having to be some certified harbor pilot bringing in the boat into the shipping lanes, its going to be some little dock off in the middle of nowhere far away from other traffic.

They could learn the ropes of how to operate this thing in a few days along with some good basic documentation, assuming the farmers are literate. Its not like its that hard figuring out "this handle makes us dive, this handle makes us go up, don't go deeper than this, make sure batteries stay within this range, follow the GPS route".

I'm not saying these couldn't possibly be well-trained people operating these vessels, but it doesn't take too much training to figure out how to operate one of these things.
by lateforwork | 2025-11-06 19:42:42+00:00
My favorite part of that story:

He said a security guard approached him and asked what he was doing.

“I said, ‘I’m standing on the sidewalk looking at this project for review.’ He said, ‘Well, we’d appreciate it if you could move on,’” Mr. Baltay recalled. “I was pretty shocked by that. It’s a public sidewalk!”

Zuckerberg could have built a fancy house in Woodside or Atherton which is where billionaire CEOs live. Instead he bought property in the middle of regular people and disrupted their lives.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-06 19:42:43+00:00
> In LLMs, we will have bigger weights vs test-time compute tradeoffs. A smaller model can get "there" but it will take longer.

Assuming both are SOTA, a smaller model can't produce the same results as a larger model by giving it infinite time. Larger models inherently have more room for training more information into the model.

No amount of test-retry cycle can overcome all of those limits. The smaller models will just go in circles.

I even get the larger hosted models stuck chasing their own tail and going in circles all the time.
by runjake | 2025-11-06 19:43:20+00:00
Sometimes 1-3 hours a day, sometimes never. It is important to build the reading habit.

My tips? Make a goal of reading a single book for 30 minutes somewhere quiet. If you have a smartphone and/or smartwatch, put them in a different room. Now resolve to read an interesting book for 30 minutes.

If you are looking for engaging recommendations, check out Replay by Ken Grimwood[1]. Try not to read too much about the plot before reading it. If you're a younger person, the book will serve as a warning. If you're an older person, it will hit hard.

1. https://www.amazon.com/Replay-Ken-Grimwood/dp/068816112X
by mk89 | 2025-11-06 19:43:27+00:00
It'd be nice to use it for server side too, but the ecosystem is really not mature and the build system is not on the same level of Gradle or similar.

Plus, most of the open source libs are one person's weekend projects, from 3 years ago...

It's a great language, but nowadays tooling/ecosystem and build systems are key to success.
by troupo | 2025-11-06 19:43:32+00:00
> I am a bit jealous as my go to language C# / .NET is recently not announcing fancy things.

Depends on what you think fancy things are. Both C# and .net are busy releasing a lot of features.

You're forgetting that C# is a 25-year-old language at this time. The exciting features they release are things like "access native memory allocation in a GC language", "native Arm64 support", "support for post-quantum cryptography", "tensor support" etc. while already running on all the platforms that Swift is only now announcing as achievements.
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-06 19:43:48+00:00
The mutual borrowing between both languages is really amusing when visiting Montreal.

I sat down in a restaurant in the historic part of the city, and the menu was loaded with "apostrophe s" and "le Hamburger". I then looked at my server and said, in plain English, "My high school French teacher used to make fun of this as 'franglais'".

The server then laughed and told me, "oh, we mix English into French here all the time and don't care."

The next day I walked by a youth American football league in a city park.

Even my mother's household, which was Quebec-French speaking in the US, would say "poe-tat" instead of "pomme de terre." ("Potato" with a French accent instead of the literal "apple of the earth" word that I learned in school.)
by zh3 | 2025-11-06 19:43:48+00:00
Bertrand Russell: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

That's actually from "The triumph of stupdity" [0] rather than Conquest of Happiness but perhaps more appropriate to this particular discussion.

* [0] https://russell-j.com/0583TS.HTM
by randycupertino | 2025-11-06 19:44:04+00:00
I think it's more that he disregarded residential zoning and opened a school for 30 kids, with a full docket of “residential support staff” including “childcare, culinary, personal assistants, property management, and security" without any permits.

If your next door neighbor opened a 30+ person school or other large business next to your property without any permits and against what your neighborhood was zoned for you might not be happy.
by downut | 2025-11-06 19:45:06+00:00
Back in the early '80s we ate a lot of English nettle cheese that we bought in the Dekalb Farmers Market in Atlanta. It was delicious. I've watched but never found it in the US since.

It looked like this: https://www.northumberlandcheese.co.uk/nettle-cheese

Wasn't expensive.
by jimnotgym | 2025-11-06 19:45:08+00:00
911 would get you nowhere in the UK;)

I have no phone signal in my village, a few miles from a major town. I have to use WiFi calling to talk on the phone. Our local politician campaigns against it, it is such an issue. Especially since analogue phone lines are due to be turned off soon. We still have a working red phone box though!

I travel around a bit in the area and blackspots are very common
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-11-06 19:45:14+00:00
I only very rarely read articles from these sites, and on these occasions I tend to get a lot of value out of it. I’d be happy to pay a dollar (or a couple bucks) per article. But I tend to forget about my subscriptions, and don’t read enough articles to justify it, so I’ll be wasting a lot of money buying it.
by margorczynski | 2025-11-06 19:45:33+00:00
That's a very simplistic view of what Microsoft offers. They don't sell an office software package but a very robust solution for running the software side of a business.

The OS, office package, email (server and client), calendar, cloud & backup, BI, etc. all aligned work almost seamlessly with each other (compared to the alternatives for sure).

Nothing on the market comes close and that is the reason they are worth trillions, not because they use closed formats.
by exasperaited | 2025-11-06 19:45:34+00:00
> Tell me you don't understand how maritime law works without telling me you don't know how maritime law works.

I will tell you that I don't understand how maritime law works in any great detail, but I do know what unprovoked murder without any discernible basis in fact is.

If they wanted to stop these boats and turn them back, or stop these boats and arrest the people on them, they could do so with exactly the same justification they are using to murder the people on them. i.e. zero justification. And it still wouldn't be unprovoked murder. Wouldn't that be better?

Given they have the tools to track them to murder them, they could also track them and wait until they arrive in US waters to arrest them. This is how it normally works. And even if that is inefficient it still does not justify killing them as a more efficient alternative.
by cycomanic | 2025-11-06 19:45:48+00:00
> For reference, that would give me in Maine the ability to buy power from a solar farm in Arizona or other literally unutilized deserts. > > Local power costs are over 30 cents per KWh, so that could be pretty competitive. > > The problem is that, no profit based organization will ever build "surplus" solar to enable that kind of thing. If we want surplus power, if we want a strong grid, if we want cheap power, if we want to enable the ability to quite literally waste solar power on inefficient processes (including things like industrial processes that produce less CO2 or generating hydrogen or methane as long term energy storage), we have to get the government to make it happen

There are huge orbortunities for arbitrage in these areas. That's why in Europe there has been significant investment into HVDC connections recently. AFAIK they are mostly (all? ) build privately without special government subsidies (over the usual ones that all large infrastructure projects always seem to get). I think this partly the beauty of the renewable revolution, it
by umanwizard | 2025-11-06 19:46:02+00:00
People massively overstate the power and influence of the Académie française. It is essentially just a cultural organization. Sure, it claims to officially regulate the French language, but its decisions are not actually binding on anyone, not even the government or the education system, and are in fact widely ignored.

In actual practice, French is about as regulated as English is (i.e., not at all) and French people use tons of loanwords from various languages, especially English and Arabic.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2025-11-06 19:46:18+00:00
Does it mean archive.org works for any sites?

My main use for archive.is is for sites that somehow cannot be archived (a message will show up mentioning this site cannot be archive or something along these lines).

archive.is is generally pretty good in forcibly attempting to get an archive, if the HTML doesn't work, the screenshot will work fine. Although archive.is doesn't seem to handle gifs/videos.
by hexbin010 | 2025-11-06 19:46:28+00:00
> we want people to shift demand away from peak times

Because governments have let energy companies fail to invest in necessary infrastructure for decades.

And who is the "we"? Definitely not me

I think a much larger conversation needs to happen about people's schedules, commitments and whether it's fair to say those who have less time and less flexibility due to work, children etc are somehow actively choosing to not be a good eco citizen. It's incredibly unfair.

I'd rather go back to root causes and re-evaluate private companies failing to provide the necessary infrastructure
by 0xffff2 | 2025-11-06 19:46:38+00:00
I don't actually care if they collect my data in that particular case. There's really nothing of significance that Amazon gets from my reading habits that it Visa doesn't already get from my purchasing the book in the first place.

I care if I see ads, even if I "don't read them". And when it comes to other devices, like IP security cameras I might care a lot more about whether the manufacturer has access to the device once it's set up.

My goal was just to point out that there is at least one existing case where you can pick between a subsidized and unsubsidized (or less subisdized if you prefer) product, and having the choice is strictly better than not having the choice.
by hypeatei | 2025-11-06 19:46:38+00:00
> In tech, there is no common protocol to speak. You are a surf of the platform you find yourself on.

Can you expand on this statement? It's a bit ambiguous and I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. Other than that, I agree with your comment.

Even doing independent contracting on the side seems like a minefield w.r.t. quarterly tax payments, estimated tax, etc.. in the US at least. I'm sure I could figure it out but just earning income for some side work seems like a liability and a big headache.
by n1xis10t | 2025-11-06 19:47:34+00:00
Oh funny, thanks for that. I was experimenting with keyword recommendation the other day, and I told a friend that the keywords which appear in 19% of the results for a query seem like the most useful and relevant to the original query.

He said something like, “Oh, 80% comes from 20%.” I didn’t get it, but he must have been referencing this.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-11-06 19:48:05+00:00
Footage of the boats to date show they aren't trying to spoof legitimate fishing vessels. They are IMHO very clearly dope haulers and anyone saying otherwise is either extremely credulous or not being honest with everyone. Fishermen don't use boats that are painted to camouflage themselves and have a bank of powerful performance engines.

The dopers probably have realized that the deception angle doesn't work and just wastes payload space, so you're better off trying not to be seen at all. I suspect what happens IRL is that boats are boarded with men with dogs and the ruse falls apart, so the doper leadership decided to stop bothering with all the subterfuge and just try to (sometimes literally) run under the radar, maximizing cargo space so the runs that get through realize the most revenue.
by ux266478 | 2025-11-06 19:48:59+00:00
Swift is absolutely not a peer to Rust. Even without GC, Swift comes with a substantial runtime to enable a lot of features that precludes such a comparison like everything to do with messages and actors. With regards to safety, Swift's data isolation system is cute, but isn't comparable to a substructural type system at all, and it's useless if you're not writing code that uses actors.

Most of what makes Rust's safety powerful is that lifetime analysis is universal and highly granular. Things like no dangling references to local variables, no 'collection cycles', handling parametric code, etc. are basic features that Swift can't provide. On top of it all, the whole system is ruinously complicated compared to Rust's type system. That's the sad reality of what happens when you try to implement something so fundamental as an extra bolt-on to a language that can't properly accomidate it.
by comrade1234 | 2025-11-06 19:49:03+00:00
Grammatical gender lets you be very precise with fewer words. I can say in German with just 4 words both "I am on the hill" and "I am passing over the hill" by just changing the case of one word. It's the same sentence but only one letter changes and it completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

German was designed by a programmer.
by jahsome | 2025-11-06 19:49:14+00:00
It appears we're kindred spirits. I identify with every one of your points.

I'd add the following at an even higher priority than those you shared:

0. Folks whose first, and often only, reply to text comms is "quick call?" are often just unwilling/unable to organize their own thoughts and instead seek to offload the cognitive load by "talking through" the issue which just results in unproductive and circular discussions.

> Unrelated: I hate to appear anti-remote work, but I've noticed that remote workers tend to send more of these ad-hoc invitations, even more than getting tapped on the shoulder in the office. Are you all doing well out there?

I chortled at this! I have made the same observation and I have the same question.
by cycomanic | 2025-11-06 19:49:40+00:00
> For reference, that would give me in Maine the ability to buy power from a solar farm in Arizona or other literally unutilized deserts. > > Local power costs are over 30 cents per KWh, so that could be pretty competitive. > > The problem is that, no profit based organization will ever build "surplus" solar to enable that kind of thing. If we want surplus power, if we want a strong grid, if we want cheap power, if we want to enable the ability to quite literally waste solar power on inefficient processes (including things like industrial processes that produce less CO2 or generating hydrogen or methane as long term energy storage), we have to get the government to make it happen >

I think what we seeing in a lot of places now is quite the opposite. There are significant opportunities for arbitrage, so private entities are building HVDC lines in Europe for example (without special subsidies over the usual ones that all big infrastructure always seems to get AFAIK). That's part of the beauty of the renewables revolution it breaks up the stronghold that only a few big corps held over generation.
Ask HN: Can people please stop commenting on whether a submission is AI?
by AndrewDucker | 2025-11-06 19:50:05+00:00
So many posts where half of the discussion is people debating whether or not the post is AI.

It sucks all of the energy out of the site, and it would be better to point out the ways that the information is wrong, rather than whether it uses phrasing and punctuation that you associate with AI.
by lelanthran | 2025-11-06 19:50:15+00:00
> Comparing a 12 month period to a 6 month period feels unfair to me though.

Okay. Let me clarify then.

The difference between SOTA now and SOTA 6 months ago is a fraction of the difference between SOTA 6 months ago and SOTA 12 months ago.

That still "plateauing". The performance of the models, should you take the time to chart them, is clearly asymptotic and we're in the flattening out phase now.

I also observe that all the models are converging on roughly the same performance, which makes me think that we are approaching some maxima with the current approach.
by gradientsrneat | 2025-11-06 19:50:15+00:00
After reading about what Rupert Murdoch did in Australia to try to claw money from search engines for simply indexing pages from news websites, I do understand that it's possible to go too far in favor of the "news" organizations (whether they are reputable or not).

I don't think the LLM companies are fully innocent here, to be fair.
by marcosdumay | 2025-11-06 19:50:28+00:00
> but fear that there is no way to make such a thing that is usable

The function declarations declare every action it can do on your system, and any change adding new ones is a breaking change on the library.

We've knew how to do it for ages. What we don't have is a good abstraction to let the compiler check them and transform the actions into high-level ones as they go through the stack.
by Yizahi | 2025-11-06 19:50:29+00:00
LLM business is not a one-shot figure it out and then collect some easy money, it a constant work and expenses just for LLM functionality. So if Apple analyzed this and decided that they would rather rent such capability, it seems quite logical. Also Google already has ties to Apple, they may even strike a deal where search on iOS is bartered (maybe partially) for Gemini service. Win-win. And Google is not going out of business any time soon, so more reliable than any pure-LLM corporation.

Another, less likely possibility is that Apple may be reluctant to steal enough data to train own LLM to a competitive level and then continue this in perpetuity. They have this notion that they are privacy oriented FAANG company, and may want to keep up this idea.

Maybe it is a sum total of a lot of factors, which in the end tilted the decision to a rental model.
by uokesita | 2025-11-06 19:51:06+00:00
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by dragonwriter | 2025-11-06 19:51:10+00:00
> But after the more recent bank and auto bailouts I wouldn't expect to see this happen again. The shareholders would really prefer to have money thrown at them but also keep their stake.

The auto bailouts did not feature shareholders having money thrown at them and keeping their stakes (GM and Chrysler shareholders, for instance, were almost completely wiped out in the bailout, with the new GM owned by the UAW and the US and Canadian governments; the new Chrysler was majority owned by Fiat with minority stakes held by an autoworkers pension fund and the US and Canadian governments.)

Bank bailouts were more protective of shareholders because they were mostly government purchase of distressed assets or extensions of credit,
by uokesita | 2025-11-06 19:51:30+00:00
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