MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by npalli | 2025-12-22 21:08:22+00:00
Three things:

1. The Rise: 2005 - 2010
Google hired Guido van Rossum in 2005 (stayed on for seven years) and gave corporate blessing that made everyone comfortable with moving from Perl to Python. It was seen as the language of scientists and smart people so a lot of people working in misc. languages like Fortran, MATLAB, Perl moved here. To remove the speed issue the official Google mantra was "Python where we can, C++ where we must". AI heavy weights like Peter Norvig (I think he was the chief AI scientist at one point and co-author of the famous AIMA book), promoted Python to be an acceptable Lisp.

2. Near Death: 2010-2015
Python almost died due to self inflicted wound from the 2 -> 3 transition and there was a good chance it would have gone nowhere like many languages before. Guido also moved away from Google and Google seemed to have shifted it's attention to Golang (apart from the standard C++ and Java). BTW, Python's dominance was not seen positively within Google hence they stopped actively promoting it. For ex. a leaked transcript from Eric Schimdt had him saying this

So another definition would be language to Python, a programming language I never wanted to see survive and everything in AI is being done in Python.

https://gist.github.com/sleaze/bf74291b4072abadb0b4109da3da2...

3. Resurrection: 2015-Now
Data science and ML took off and Python was right there thanks to the initial sponsorship from Google and ecosystem of scientists and engineers who were familiar (including working in the two-language mode). There was no language that could rival at this point.

Most of the syntax, power considerations etc.. are side shows as most scripting languages just tap into very powerful libraries written in c/c++/fortran or wrappers around shell. Doubt that distinguishes Python to the point where it has become so dominant.
by globular-toast | 2025-12-22 21:08:37+00:00
I haven't read much "deeper" than the stuff in the list and most people I meet read way less than I do. Many read approximately zero by my estimations. I have a PhD so I know how deep the rabbit holes goes. I just think between TV, social media, kids etc. most people don't have time to do something that demands complete attention, sadly.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-22 21:08:44+00:00
Yes, either Rb, Cs, or H standards depending on which GNSS system you're using.

For the most critical applications, you can license a system like Fugro AtomiChron that provides enhanced GNSS timing down to the level of a few nanoseconds. There are a couple of products that do similar things, all based on providing better ephemerides than your receiver can obtain from the satellites themselves.

You can get AtomiChron as an optional subscription with the SparkPNT GPSDO, for instance (https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkpnt-gnss-disciplined-oscillato...).
by chaboud | 2025-12-22 21:08:50+00:00
I had the opportunity to meet with folks from Histosonics at a Canopy Cancer Collective (pancreas cancer focused group - https://canopycancer.org/) annual meeting a couple of years ago. They had shown very promising results (and approval) with liver cancer, and the applicability to any soft-tissue openly-addressable masses (e.g., not brains in skulls, not lungs full of air) seemed very likely, based on the physics. (Note: I'm a consumer electronics and ML engineer, not a medical devices engineer).

I'm excited to see this option become more broadly available. The ability to precisely target and illicit an inflammatory response is impressive, and Whipples are no joke.
by vkou | 2025-12-22 21:08:58+00:00
Pussyfooting around this issue is the worst of both worlds.

Why on earth is a government-protected monopoly entitled to 10% margins? Or even 6% margins? It's risk-free money with a captive market.

What is the point of all this bullshit? Why not just call it a day, and run it as a crown corporation?

> The companies pointed to the January wildfires in Los Angeles County, saying they needed to provide their shareholders with more profit to get them to continue to invest in their stock because of the threat of utility-caused fires in California.

What utter nonsense. The shareholders need nothing. Take out a bloody loan.

The firm's entire concern, as reflected in the article - is it's stock price.

> Under the state’s system for setting electric rates, investors provide part of the money needed to build the infrastructure and then earn an annual return on that investment over the assets’ life, which can be 30 or 40 years.

Wait, why is this financed by investors and not lenders, like it is in the rest of the civilized world? Is this some kind of novel California-specific innovation, and if it is, what value has it produced for the world?
by chaps | 2025-12-22 21:09:03+00:00
Not directly an answer to your question, but installed Shotspotter locations are generally "not shared with police" and installations are done in a way where the location is obfuscated away from the police/city through Shotspotter contractors. It's not actually true that the device locations aren't shared with the police, but shotspotter/police testimonies in shotspotter cases say so anyway.
by nkrisc | 2025-12-22 21:09:27+00:00
It's unfortunate that accessibility is so often neglected, but at the same time this tutorial seems to be more about the basic concepts of how a UI library works, not a complete overview of every aspect.

They also didn't include text rendering for scripts that are written right-to-left, nor for scripts that are written vertically, and that affects far more people than those who use screen readers.

Clearly they are not intending to provide a complete and comprehensive course on every aspect of the ideal UI library.
by Msurrow | 2025-12-22 21:09:45+00:00
The construction on some of these windmill farms started years ago. Before that permits & legal has been in the works for a long time. This surely included security clearances.

The orange shrimp pulling the “national security” card now, on the same day as he also creates a new Greenland debacle, is very clearly simply an attempt to strong arm the danish govt into Greenland concessions (in turn simply to please his fractile lille ego)
by com2kid | 2025-12-22 21:09:45+00:00
> Same level of ragebait as things like vegetarian “meat”balls.

There is some amazing vegetarian food out there. Both Buddhist and Hindu cultures have been making amazing vegetarian food for literally thousands of years and they are really good at it.

Also, vegetables are just yummy!

Fake meat, no thanks. Incredible vegetarian and vegan food exists, stop trying to fake it. Same with gluten free foods, almond flour is an amazing ingredient but it is different than flour. It is funny that the keto community had amazing gluten free recipes years before the gluten free communities figured it out.
by afavour | 2025-12-22 21:10:47+00:00
> With an annual budget of more than $47 billion, NIH is the largest single public funder of biomedical and behavioral research in the world. In fiscal year 2023, NIH funding generated an estimated $92.89 billion in economic activity.

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/impact-nih-research/serving-so...

The US isn’t doing the world a favor by funding this stuff. The country directly benefits from it.
by tremon | 2025-12-22 21:11:09+00:00
This doesn't say what you think it does. It says that every binary package should only depend on its declared source packages. It does not say that source packages must be constructed without an upstream connection.

What the OP was referring to, is that Debian's tooling stores the upstream code along with the debian build code. There is support tooling for downloading new upstream versions (uscan) and for incorporating the upstream changes into Debian's version control (uupdate) to manage this complexity, but it does mean that Debian effectively mirrors the upstream code twice: in its source management system (mostly salsa.debian.org nowadays), and in its archive, as Debian source archives.
by tsoukase | 2025-12-22 21:11:10+00:00
My totally amateur take:

Python is C/C++ but without syntax decorations and pointer problems and who cares about speed when CPU cycle is so cheap.

Python is shell but you can build large projects with a shebang change

Python is Java but with less verbosity and no company behind

If one only affords to learn/master a single language (which holds for the majority), this should be Python.

The only drawback, there is no Python interpreter in browsers (like JS and PHP). But then Python might have faced anticompetitive measures :-)
by derriz | 2025-12-22 21:11:10+00:00
Agree that Pandas is horribly irregular - the only worse query language I’ve had to work with is Mongo’s. After about a decade of regular Pandas use, switching to Polars was such a relief. It’s not perfect since it’s slightly limited by being a Python library rather than an embedded query language but it’s so much better designed than Pandas - even ignoring the huge performance improvement. In my circle, Pandas is being abandoned en mass for Polars.
by throw310822 | 2025-12-22 21:11:42+00:00
I might be completely off road, but I can't help thinking of convolutions as my mental model for the K Q V mechanism. Attention has the same property of a convolution kernel of being trained independently of position; it learns how to translate a large, rolling portion of an input to a new "digested" value; and you can train multiple ones in parallel so that they learn to focus on different aspects of the input ("kernels" in the case of convolution, "heads" in the case of attention).
by nospice | 2025-12-22 21:12:15+00:00
So?

There's no rule that the internet is limited to a single explanation. Find the one that clicks for you, ignore the rest. Whenever I'm trying to learn about concepts in mathematics, computer science, physics, or electronics, I often find that the first or the "canonical" explanation is hard for me to parse. I'm thankful for having options 2 through 10.
by immibis | 2025-12-22 21:12:18+00:00
I believe LTE and 5G networks require it to coordinate timeslots between overlapping cells. Of course, they can use whatever reference they want, as long as all the cells are using the same one - it doesn't have to be UTC. Some (parts of) networks transmit it across the network, while others have independent GPS receivers at each cell site.

Synchronization is also required for SDH networks. Don't know if those are still used.

Someone else referenced low power ham radio modes like WSPR, which I also don't know much about, but I can imagine they have timeslots linked to UTC and require accuracy. Those modes have extremely low data rates and narrow bandwidths, requiring accurate synchronization. I don't know if they're designed to self-synchronize, or need an external reference.

When multiple transmitters are transmitting the same radio signal (e.g. TV) they might need to be synchronized to a certain phase relationship. Again, don't know much about it
by mythoughtsexact | 2025-12-22 21:12:30+00:00
I keep seeing this crap ass design where developers or some product a-hole decides their schema for users needs a field in their table where it shows the last_login_time. It's a shit design, it does not scale, nor is it necessary at all to get that one piece of information.

Use a damned log/journal table if you absolutely must, but make sure it's a fire away and forget non-transactional insert because you morons keep writing software that requires locking the whole users table and that causes huge performance issues.
by metalman | 2025-12-22 21:12:40+00:00
It might turn out that there are more portrait artists, brush in hand, working today than at any point in history, in real numbers.
This is certainly true for riding horses, and most definitly for musicians.
But as the sole sources of those services, that is no longer true, or as percentages of total's, but with 9 billion people, the internet, and a big of effort, almost anything is viable.
by qayxc | 2025-12-22 21:13:00+00:00
> To be clear, we are not discussing small toy models but to be fair I also don't use consumer cards.

> if you don't see the performance uplift everyone else sees there is something wrong with your setup and I don't have the time to debug it.

Read these two statements and think about what might be the issue. I only run what you call "toy models" (good enough for my purposes), so of course your experience is fundamentally different from mine. Spending 5 figures on hardware just to run models locally is usually a bad investment. Repurposing old hardware OTOH is just fine to play with local models and optimise them for specific applications and workflows.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-22 21:13:27+00:00
It's just a re-invention of kernel smoothing. Cosma Shalizi has an excellent write up on this [0].

Once you recognize this it's a wonderful re-framing of what a transformer is doing under the hood: you're effectively learning a bunch of sophisticated kernels (though the FF part) and then applying kernel smoothing in different ways through the attention layers. It makes you realize that Transformers are philosophically much closer to things like Gaussian Processes (which are also just a bunch of kernel manipulation).

0. http://bactra.org/notebooks/nn-attention-and-transformers.ht...
by DrPimienta | 2025-12-22 21:14:00+00:00
No, the average 30 year old American owns far less than the average 30 year old American did in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Owning a home in a safe community is what is most important, and most young men can't seem to get that. Things are getting worse.
by mannanj | 2025-12-22 21:14:46+00:00
As a former apprentice shaman and an engineer-by-profession, I see consciousness and awareness in these entities just like that of what I was trained to detect in mindfulness and meditation with the plants, nature, and in people. I trained sober, and in my engineering profession after my apprenticeship I saw lots of examples of human's in their consciousness/awareness putting themselves on the pedestal to cope with their unsettling of their place in the world when other conscious entities exist that could be capable of uprooting humans from their place in the status hierarchy.

I think a lot of thinking and consideration I hear about "LLMs aren't conscious nor human" fall into this encampment to avoid our dissonance of feeling secure and top-of-the-hierarchy.

Curious what you think.
by jandrese | 2025-12-22 21:14:53+00:00
The weird thing is China is absolutely jam packed with small companies. Go to a trade show and you'll find dozens of companies selling basically the same products with minor variations. It's absolutely cutthroat.

In the US we tend to see small companies get gobbled up by huge incumbents regularly, but in China the situation is much more in flux and it's not always obvious who the winners are going to be. It's the opposite of what you would expect from a command economy, at least in the tech and consumer product sectors.
by firloop | 2025-12-22 21:14:58+00:00
Maybe I was too hyperbolic, but when I read the original Anna's Archive announcement post, I appreciated their dedication to archiving content that may be lost one day. They called the effort "Backing up Spotify" and emphasized the good that opening the data could do. It's not about enabling piracy.

Following Anna's logic, I was calling on Spotify to stop "investigating" archivists. Spotify could instead be engaging constructively here, with Anna's Archive, Internet Archive, or other groups.
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-22 21:14:58+00:00
It isn't an appeal to emotion. Jimmy Lai stood up for free speech in Hong Kong, factually and it paying with his life. I'm simply pointing out that you have probably never seen real courage or conviction in your life and aren't in a good position to judge Jimmy Lai.

Your whole posting history is just inflammatory claims that you rarely stand behind. I keep bumping into you doing this, it's a bad look.
by pedalpete | 2025-12-22 21:15:14+00:00
It seems they are initially focused on pancreatic cancer, which has a very low survival rate ~14% [1].

In theory, this may mean that metastisizing this tumour could destroy it in the pancreas, but allow the cells to spread to more treatable locations?

1 - https://www.canceraustralia.gov.au/cancer-types/pancreatic-c...
by baobun | 2025-12-22 21:15:37+00:00
> do you believe that Sweden of all countries is under Trump's direct influence re: wind aversion?

It looks increasingly like a US vassal state for every year so that part wouldn't be so surprising.

Besides, the article you posted does not support your claim that Sweden blocked all offshore wind construction. On the contrary it refutes it by mentioning some greenlit offshore wind construction projects.
by vitruvian_man | 2025-12-22 21:15:49+00:00
I don't have much feedback on the project or space you're in but wanted to note that find this interesting.

I've read mixed reviews about OCR-3. I'm a bit surprised this hasn't been your experience. Many others note Gemini is good at this type of task. Curious how you came to find that OCR-3 was best suited for your needs?

Maybe a 1x payment option or token-based option for individuals who just want to use this service 1x? You could also workshop it with smaller legal firms to see if they'd actually find it useful.
by zdragnar | 2025-12-22 21:16:33+00:00
All that case settled is that AI cannot hold a copyright. Humans can still claim copyright if they put their name on a largely AI produced work.

Your original complaint was that humans were saying "I wrote this", and those people are definitely going to be claiming copyright for it in court at some point... In fact, Thaler v. Perlmutter only makes that more likely as AI programs definitely cannot claim copyright themselves.

Hence my confusion. In principle I definitely agree with your original point though- people should produce content to express themselves, rather than becoming an expression of AI.
by the_sleaze_ | 2025-12-22 21:16:41+00:00
I know this is tongue in cheek, but writing functional code in an object oriented language, or even worse just taking a giant procedural trail of tears and spreading it across a few files like a roomba through a pile of dog doo is ... well.. a code smell at best.

I have a user prompt saved called clean code to make a pass through the changes and remove unused, DRY and refactor - literally the high points of uncle bob's Clean Code. It works shockingly well at taking AI code and making it somewhat maintainable.
by inerte | 2025-12-22 21:17:04+00:00
Yes! 100% this. I was talking to friends about this and there's gotta be some value in the sessions leading to the commit. I doubt a human would them all while reviewing a PR, but some RAG tool could and then provide more context to another agent or session. Sometimes in a session I like to talk about previous commits and PRs and sessions, and I just wish this all was automatically done.
by mgh95 | 2025-12-22 21:17:06+00:00
> Once one decides to ration healthcare based on estimated remaining QALY, the same logic says we shouldn’t subsidize, e.g., healthcare for people who suffer from cystic fibrosis, or HIV, or aggressive cancers, or. . .

Not everybody gets cystic fibrosis, or HIV, or aggressive cancers. These are a risk. That is fundamentally an insurable risk. However, we will all die. No matter how much money is spent, death comes for us all in old age. Discussing how much is an appropriate cost for end-of-life care when aged is very much a societal question.

> Or if you’d rather, there are millions of children without healthcare in the United states. Would you forgo your access to healthcare for them?

This remains a question, even in Europe. See [1] for a discussion as early as 2000 regarding rationing in the NHS.

> That’s all? Musk alone is worth twice that, and who knows how many QALYs he has left but it can’t be that many. He seems pretty miserable most of the time.

That is a cost each year, and Musk is currently at 244B [2]. We have roughly 20 years of this level of spending or greater. Even if we assumed we could tax Musk 100% (which isn't practically possible because who liquidates his positions), where do you propose to acquire that level of ongoing cashflow? Within 7 years, we would fully exhaust the wealth of the 25 wealthiest American families, even at 100% tax rate. End-of-life care is mind-bogglingly expensive for the United States economy. This either needs to be a tax hike which realistically will it everybody or a benefits cut.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1173526/

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_b...
by coder543 | 2025-12-22 21:17:33+00:00
$10k gets you a Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM, which definitely can run GLM-4.7 with normal, production-grade levels of quantization (in contrast to the extreme quantization that some people talk about).

The point in this thread is that it would likely be too slow due to prompt processing. (M5 Ultra might fix this with the GPU's new neural accelerators.)
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-22 21:17:54+00:00
I mean that several professors have learned that I'm useful for resolving packaging related problems and they contact me for help with them. They expect that if they had a job in industry then there would be somebody who they would file a ticket with and then that person would help sort out the tangle.

Also, in a previous job, I was responding to tickets of that kind (e.g. "why does installing this version of foo prevent the bar from running at a all?").

Others provide support in other ways. The guy racking and stacking GPUs at a data center somewhere is doing so, at least partially, in support of some specialist wielding python to move data around.

Sure plenty of specialists do their own stunts, but plenty others do not and instead have support, institutional or otherwise, for that kind of thing.
by albert_roca | 2025-12-22 21:18:52+00:00
Valid question. The significance is that the 4^32 scaling factor emerged earlier in the model as a geometric constraint, and 4^64 appears in this equation, apparently because G is inversely proportional to the square of m_P. Hitting G within 8 ppm using a pre-existing constraint to link quantum constants with the proton mass is statistically extremely unlikely. I admit the precision was a surprise to me too, but the fact that it consistently reproduces Schwarzschild dynamics suggests it's not just a lucky number.
by DennisP | 2025-12-22 21:18:55+00:00
Yep. I started looking into sports cars recently, and the general consensus among enthusiasts seems to be that for public roads, if you're not going to drive at reckless speeds then you'll have more fun driving a slow car fast than driving a fast car slow. Fun handling with modest horsepower is the way to go, you can have a great time without exceeding normal road speeds.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-22 21:19:01+00:00
> It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy.

“Cheap” only if you exclude indirect costs due to emissions (both localized effects and less-localized.)

> we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear

nuclear is not renewable (it is low carbon, a feature that is also true of renewables in general, but it is not, itself, a renewable.)
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-12-22 21:19:20+00:00
The situation is more nuanced than your comment implies, and a lot of this due to direct product decisions from the Supabase team themselves: https://github.com/orgs/supabase/discussions/4547

The tldr is that Supabase makes this less secure by default because Security is Hard and they don’t want to scare off new users