MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bcantrill | 2025-12-15 17:02:02+00:00
I don't agree that we have been "bashing" Postgres. As far as I can tell, Postgres has come up a very small number of times over the years: certainly on the CockroachDB episode[0] (where our experience with Postgres is germane, as it was very much guiding our process for finding a database for Oxide) and then again this year when we talked about our use of statemaps on a Rust async issue[1] (where our experience with Postgres was again relevant because it in part motivated the work that we had used to develop the tooling that we again used on the Rust issue).

I (we?) think Postgres is incredibly important, and I think we have properly contextualized our use of it. Moreover, I think it is unfair to simply deny us our significant experience with Postgres because it was not unequivocally positive -- or to dismiss us recounting some really difficult times with the system as "bashing" it. Part of being a consequential system is that people will have experience with it; if one views recounting that experience as showing insufficient "respect" to its developers, it will have the effect of discouraging transparency rather than learning from it.

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/whither-coc...

[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/when-async-...
by rcrowley | 2025-12-15 17:02:06+00:00
We run on the same instance types the larger PlanetScale Metal sizes offer as whole instances. For Intel that's r6id, i4i, i7i, i3en, and i7ie. For ARM that's r8gd, i8g, and i8ge. (Right now, at least. AWS is always cookin' up new instance types.) Same story will soon be true for GCP.
by kreetx | 2025-12-15 17:02:06+00:00
The number can be anything, is there a number at which "we don't know" starts?

The model's parameters are in your RAM, you insert the prompt, it runs through the model and gives you a result. I'm sure if you spend a bit of time, you could add some software scaffolding around the process to show you each step of the way. How is this different from a statistical model where you "do know"?
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-15 17:02:09+00:00
They could improve the design and get people to replace their machines with the improved ones, repeat and repeat.

Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.

The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.

Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-15 17:02:10+00:00
How much debate about this stuff still happens, outside of academics who need to publish or perish? From a quick check the only papers being published on this stuff are all variants of "if we add another variable <X> to some model we can conclude the difference in tax incidence is <Y>" where Y is some minor variant of pre-existing beliefs that may or may not hold in reality. Outside of that there are occasional flareups caused by old-guard left wing politicians or activists getting into fights about it with economists, and not much else.

A lot of the debate on this topic is tedious anyway because it revolves around semantic distinctions that only exist in specific kinds of ideological discourse.
by dhosek | 2025-12-15 17:02:11+00:00
It’s kind of funny that I was just thinking (as in ten minutes ago) it would be really wonderful to be able to wirelessly access login information from my Apple Watch to whatever computer I happen to be using (ideally in a way that doesn’t expose my credentials to a MitM attack). Of course it would have to be an OS-level integration across both Mac and Windows to be really useful, which means that it will probably never happen because capitalism, but I can still dream.
by indymike | 2025-12-15 17:02:26+00:00
Internal culture changes on budget cycles, and right now, most companies are being pushed by investors to adopt AI. Have your sales team ask about AI budgeting vs. SaaS budgeting. I think you'll find that AI budget is available and conventional SaaS/IT budget isn't. Most managers are looking for a way to "adopt ai" so I think we're in a unique time.

> people deeply integrated into physical infrastructure move 10x slower than you'd expect.

My experience is yes, to move everyone. To do a pilot and prove the value? That's doable quickly, and if the pilot succeeds, the rest is fast.
by scottlamb | 2025-12-15 17:02:30+00:00
> I don't expect [the 5% of students who end up going into research] would have called the program particularly optimized either

This. I went to the University of Iowa in the aughts. My experience was that because they didn't cover a lot of the same material in this MIT Missing Semester 2026 list, a lot of the classes went poorly. They had trouble moving students through the material on the syllabus because most students would trip over these kinds of computing basics that are necessary to experiment with the DS+A theory via actual programming. And the department neither added a prereq that covers these basics or nor incorporated them into other courses's syllabi. Instead, they kept trying what wasn't working: having a huge gap between the nominal material and what the average student actually got (but somehow kept going on to the next course). I don't think it did any service to anyone. They could have taken time to actually help most students understand the basics, they could have actually proceeded at a quicker pace through the theoretical material more for the students who actually did understand the basics, they could have ensured their degree actually was a mark of quality in the job market, etc.

It's nice that someone at MIT is recognizing this and putting together this material. The name and about page suggest though it's not something the department has long recognized and uncontroversially integrated into the program (perhaps as an intro class you can test out of), which is still weird.
by Waterluvian | 2025-12-15 17:02:37+00:00
After a long time of being skeptical that a $1300 robot will work well enough, I bought the Eufy X10 for $500 CAD. It's insane to me that this thing sells for so little and yet it works incredibly well and has all the features I'd want. The UX is also really, really good (my full-time job is real-time map UI for robot fleets). What impresses me the most is the maintainance section that has "X hours left" for a dozen things you maintain on the robot. Tap one and it shows you a visual step-by-step for how to perform maintainance on that component. It feels like China will be very hard to compete with.
by regularization | 2025-12-15 17:02:50+00:00
Yes, I watched the BBC a few years back and saw bureaucrats ranting about what the Chinese owed the English due to English sovereignty or treaties over territory in China. Colonial craziness.

Of course this guy isn't sone factory worker but a CEO. He met with Mike Pence, Pompey and Bolton, i.e. the West so he's "pro democracy".

ICE is in my city pulling people out of their cars, then releasing them with no charges days later. Wish there was some democracy in this country.
by shadowgovt | 2025-12-15 17:02:52+00:00
Resource consumption of AI is unclear on two axes:

1) As other commenters have noted: raw numbers. In general, people are taking the resource consumption of new datacenters and attributing 100% of that to "because AI," when the reality is generally that while AI is increasing spend on new infrastructure, data companies are always spending on new infrastructure because of everything they do.

2) Comparative cost. In general, image synthesis takes between 80 and 300 times fewer resources (mostly electricity) per image than human creation does. It turns out a modern digital artist letting their CPU idle and screen on while they muse is soaking significant resources that an AI is using to just synthesize. Granted, this is also not an apples-to-apples comparison because the average AI flow generates dozens of draft images to find the one that is used, but the net resource effect might be less energy spent in total per produced image (on a skew of "more spent by computers" and "less by people").
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-12-15 17:02:55+00:00
pedantic, but "ACAB" doesn't necessarily mean every (or most) cops do horrible things all the time (that's the strawman version).

one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."

another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".

there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.
by DudeOpotomus | 2025-12-15 17:03:06+00:00
Except the data doesnt back up that assertion. Golf course employees and golfers have no higher rates of than the public at large. So what gives?

If the very people who spend most of their waking lives on the grounds and among those fertilizers and pesticides do not have any great instance, maybe just maybe its something else. Like the gallons of unregulated chemicals that are in those tract houses that were all built around the same time...

one example is the drywall was used extensively in the 90's. Its makeup banned in the country of origin, China but its product was used all throughout the US for decades.
by patrick_alves | 2025-12-15 17:03:43+00:00
Human activity recognition (HAR) using smartphone inertial sensors, like accelerometers and gyroscopes, enhances smartphones’ adaptability and user experience. Data distribution from these sensors is affected by several factors including sensor hardware, software, device placement, user demographics, terrain, and more. Most datasets focus on providing variability in user and (sometimes) device placement, limiting domain adaptation and generalization studies. Consequently, models trained on one dataset often perform poorly on others. Despite many publicly available HAR datasets, cross-dataset generalization remains challenging due to data format incompatibilities, such as differences in measurement units, sampling rates, and label encoding. Hence, we introduce the DAGHAR benchmark, a curated collection of datasets for domain adaptation and generalization studies in smartphone-based HAR. We standardized six datasets in terms of accelerometer units, sampling rate, gravity component, activity labels, user partitioning, and time window size, removing trivial biases while preserving intrinsic differences. This enables controlled evaluation of model generalization capabilities. Additionally, we provide baseline performance metrics from state-of-the-art machine learning models, crucial for comprehensive evaluations of generalization in HAR tasks.
by carlosjobim | 2025-12-15 17:04:00+00:00
Okay, ban the corporation as a legal entity. And all other companies as legal entity so that they don't become an escape hatch.

It will not take longer than until sunrise next morning before all those corporations are now different single individuals who contract their whole company structure again and now have everything from job contracts to investor contracts in their own names instead, using probably the same kind of complicated contracts that preceded the modern corporation as a legal entity. What did you benefit?
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-15 17:04:02+00:00
You picked a terrible example as a counterpoint, because ACAB is about police protecting bad police (or generally, authorities defending each other as a gang themselves).

Which is seen in every group of authorities around the country. They literally give out get out of jail free cards for cops’ friends and family in many parts of the country, that is systemic, and has nothing to do with frequency of cops committing crimes.
by watwut | 2025-12-15 17:04:07+00:00
> But that is not what is happening. Introduction to reading happens pre-school to class two, historic books come from say class 6 onwards.

That is exactly what is happening. The pre-schooler do not really read books, that is an absurd claim. They puzzle out words and sentences. It takes so much effort, they loose attention one paragraph in and dont really recall what happened on the last page.

Giving historic books to grade 6 is exactly the absurd thing that will convince them books cant be fun. It will become totality of their reading and the idea that reading books could be fun will be lost on them entirely.

And unless the parents really went out of their way to introduce them to interesting books, to try again and again with different books, you are loosing them with that entirely. Because this will be the only book they read last 4 months which is "forever" at that age.
by woopwoop | 2025-12-15 17:04:26+00:00
In 2019, NPR's planet money did a segment on the Hong Kong protests that heavily featured Jimmy Lai. This segment from the end has always stuck with me.

GOLDSTEIN: China has not allowed more freedom of speech. Publications can still be shut down for criticizing the government. And yet, China has gotten richer. It started to develop its own financial center in Shanghai. Foreign money can now flow into China without going through Hong Kong, so the Chinese Communist Party doesn't need Hong Kong as much as it used to.

This has led to more and more tension between people in Hong Kong and the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government. In 2014, there was a fight over how to choose the government official who runs Hong Kong, and a million people in Hong Kong took to the streets to protest. Just last month, the government official who runs Hong Kong wanted to pass a new law that would allow people in Hong Kong to be extradited to China to stand trial. The people in Hong Kong said, we don't trust your mainland courts. Two million people protested in the streets, including, by the way, Jimmy Lai, who is now in his 70s.

What was it like? What was it like walking that day?

LAI: I was very excited - when you see so many people, you know, is fighting for a moral issue. We don't have guns. We don't have tanks. We don't have anything. The only thing we have the Chinese government don't is the moral authority we have, the moral courage we have.

GOLDSTEIN: The moral authority and courage, yeah.

LAI: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: A few weeks later, on July 1, on the anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule, protesters broke into the Hong Kong legislature buildings, smashed glass walls and spray-painted graffiti. Chinese leaders see these protesters and Jimmy Lai, for that matter, as agents for foreign influence - as, you know, basically latter-day colonialists. His house has been firebombed, and there was an assassination plot against him.

LAI: I stopped thinking about this because if I let the fear frighten me, I cannot go on, you know, because with what I have taken up, I have to sustain it. I will be the last to leave. That is like a captain who cannot jump the ship.

GOLDSTEIN: I mean, you're rich. You could leave if you wanted.

LAI: Yeah. If I'm rich but an a*hole...

GOLDSTEIN: (Laughter).

LAI: ...What my kids will think about me?

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah.

LAI: You know, being rich, you can be very poor...

GOLDSTEIN: Go on. Say more.

LAI: ...Because if you only have money, you lost the meaning, you lost the dignity, you lost everything as a human being. What else do you have?
by neilv | 2025-12-15 17:04:51+00:00
There was this one grad class taught by a professor who was also a capable programmer, and the class incidentally used this one programming language that many grad students wanted to learn.

So the word on the street was that his was a good class to take if you wanted a chance to learn the programming language. (Because you have only so much time in the day to allocate to labs.)

And rumor was also not to say to the professor that you want to learn that language, because word had gotten back to him about the off-label draw of his class to many, and he didn't like it.
by overrun11 | 2025-12-15 17:05:09+00:00
First, taxes still get paid when the individual dies as estate tax. Second, increased shareholder value typically means more corporate profit which is also taxed. Third, dividends are taxed. So your claim that the shareholder value never makes its way into the tax system is plainly false.

This is all aside from the fact that increased shareholder value means a more abundance society regardless of the increase in taxes. We could quibble over the exact distribution of who gains from the enlarged pie but it's certainly not the case the 100% of it goes to capitalists so consumers and employees also benefit.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-15 17:05:09+00:00
ACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.

If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
by pyrolistical | 2025-12-15 17:05:17+00:00
This makes the most sense. The trick is to tax all realized value.

I’m happy for billionaires have their net worth go up, as long as it can be taxed if any amount they realize.

So this includes using their networth as collateral, donations (even to charities) and passing as inheritance (which should be taxed upon death)

And if the margin all tax rate over a 1 million is extremely high, then it’s pointless being a paper billionaire. People would actually spend their wealth and contribute to the economy
by rgbrgb | 2025-12-15 17:05:25+00:00
https://www.hedgy.works/

Helping friends (and friends of friends of friends of friends) find their next startup gig without the application process. Aspiring to be Wealthfront for your career… a passive optimization that pings you every now and then with an interesting interview you could take.

Thinking a lot about how to recognize great matches. I think basically everyone can be talented force multipliers in the right situation / company / mission / team. Everyone here wants to do their life’s work, but it’s hard to find it.

Tactically working to scale reliable human-in-the-loop AI recruiter agents with very few humans.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-12-15 17:05:25+00:00
What do you think "evil" means? In the real world, there's no one holding up a platonic ideal of moral action and swearing to do the opposite, like some comic book antagonist. Real world evil is acting with complete amorality, because if you don't care about right or wrong in your pursuit of some goal, you inevitably will do some heinous shit.

That's not to say corporations don't come awfully close to the comic book concept of evil. By definition, a corporation's prime purpose is an uncaring commitment to making money, and if you've gone public, making all the money. That's awfully close to being the opposite of the "good" ideals of generosity and kindness.
by mannanj | 2025-12-15 17:05:37+00:00
its not in the convo because these capital high intensities are the ones lobbying and owning the politicians. they're each other friends. taxes were always intended even in this country to be a thing applied to serfdom: we weren't in reality immune from the conditions we aimed to flee from Great Britain where kings and queens gained qualified immunity and sovereign status - sometimes it seems like are just a "free" slave nation.
by flatline | 2025-12-15 17:05:40+00:00
It kind of depends on how you define "history". Before STEM dominated the hiring landscape, Universities were less career focused. No employers in these fields, as far as I know, have ever offered apprenticeships to teach new hires chemical engineering or applied mathematics from the ground up. University will not prepare you for a corporate job, exactly, but it gives you a background that lets you step into that, or go into research, etc. Lots of employers expect new hires to have research skills as well.

I think there are a number of ways in which financial incentives and University culture are misaligned with this reality.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-12-15 17:06:05+00:00
Given the eloquently natural words in this post, I conclude you must be this thread's prompt engineer! Well done, my fellow Netizen. Reading your words was like smelling a rosebud in spring, just after the heavy snow fell.

Now, please, divulge your secret--your verbal nectar, if you wish--so that I too can flower in your tounge!
by almosthere | 2025-12-15 17:06:11+00:00
I don't get the fetish of making people (or things) pay taxes more and more.

The government wants us to focus on who should pay more taxes, but I think we owe it to ourselves to spend 600 comments on HOW OUR FUCKING TAXES SHOULD BE SPENT!

Great so now AI will give the government 800 million dollars per year to do what, build non-existent homeless shelters in LA?
by nonameiguess | 2025-12-15 17:06:39+00:00
I don't think it's a mistake. Non-subscription without clear gamification and engagement tricks seems like Rosetta Stone basically and that's the longest-running, most effective language learning software I'm aware of. When I joined the Army 18 years ago, while waiting for school assignment, I had the opportunity to train provincial reconstruction teams as a role player and had to cram learn some reasonable level of conversational Pashtun and that was what we used, before smart phones were widely adopted. The only real innovation I've seen since then is conversational LLMs that allow you free-form practice without a human partner, but even back then, scripted conversational practice was pretty good as long as there was a wide enough diversity of scripts.

Problem is more along the lines of "solo developer" here. Hacker News seems to have a real thing about this niche for whatever reason, but when doing something like this that I think requires real expertise in a wide variety of subjects that aren't software development, I think you need help. There's no way something like Rosetta Stone was developed without the input of experts in language learning and teaching, for instance. Knowing the platforms, programming languages, frameworks, and app store onboarding and delivery processes is already a lot for one person, but expecting to know the target domain on top of that is expecting an awful lot from yourself. I don't think it's a great sign trying to crowdsource business strategy from a free web discussion board, as a single example. This is the kind of conversation you want to have with your private team of people you know for sure have the experience they claim to have, not anonymous comments.
by hazmazlaz | 2025-12-15 17:06:41+00:00
Petra (Obsidian CLI) and Petra-Bridge (Obsidian API for the CLI tool integration). https://github.com/H4ZM47/petra-obsidian-cli ; https://github.com/H4ZM47/petra-bridge

This was a "scratching my own itch" project that I cooked up because I was tired of Claude et al cluttering up all of my stuff with random markdown files. Just a simple Obsidian plugin to serve an API that the CLI tool can use to interact with the Obsidian vault. I use a Claude Skill to get the model to create all of those random markdown files in my Obsidian vault, and read from them when it needs context for something. It's working really well for me so far!