skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With any Ruby code under load, it's important to have a proper understanding of what's happening in memory -- if adding memoisation is yielding significant gains, there's likely much more potential for optimisation

Many in the Ruby community have taken a 1974 quote from Donald Knuth out of context and used it as a justification for minimal or zero effort on memory efficiency

The article is a very interesting read, but implementation is heavily reliant on metaprogramming magic that can be something of a grenade in realworld projects especially if anyone fairly new to Ruby has to fix it later

Almost none of the gems I used 10 years ago still exist today -- taking a small penalty for hand-rolling initially will usually save days or more later -- the author even says a similar earlier Gem he built is long gone
Cast iron pots and pans
No argumentation, just downvotes... as I said, seems a lot of people bringing out their worst.
I always think iterated functions are more interesting, and iterated hashes are no exception.

I added 3 modes of hash 'mining' (based on prefix pattern mining) to my Rain hash dashboard for the web, (with hash internals in WASM):

- Chain mining: the hash outputs are concatenated and hashed

- Increment 'nonce' mining: a counter is incremented and hashed

- True random nonce mining: cryptographically secure random bytes are generated and hashed

In all cases the pre-existing input box is prepended to the mode's hash data.

It's just fun to see how a has behaves 'in motion'.

Also added is a KH/s counter (admittedly not very faster for in browser with wasm, but hey).
I've no idea why they chose teabags to study - one has to start somewhere, presumably - but I can answer the second question. The distinctive feature of plastics is the synthetic polymers that they contain, which classically feature bonds between oxygen atoms. These are extremely difficult for any organic process to break apart. Wood, however, can even be digested in small quantities, so 'microwood' will just break down into its constituent parts in the human body. The body can cope with metals and indeed has evolved to require a small amount, for instance in hemoglobin.

We aren't fully aware of the implications of microplastics on health, but the main cause for concern is that we have no easy way of getting them out (either naturally or medically) in the event that they are harmful.
We already have that. It's called civilization.

Maybe you mean quadrillions of AGIs?
The return of glfighters: porting a 23-year-old game to WebAssembly
But is it? How confident are you that this is your greatest exposure? Odds are there is something else in your life at least 100x as bad. And what does it mean that cellulose, a naturally occurring compound, releases 15x more microplastics than nylon? Or does iy? This study didn’t measure nanoplastics.

That’s what a lack of context does. No harm in just avoiding anything any study has found to be potentially harmful (especially tea bags, which are a crime against good tea and easily replaced). But… it’s impossible to know if this is the equivalent of stopping smoking, or of brushing teeth three times a day instead of two.
I’m thinking “tables” are part of some kind of “extend, extinguish” strategy?

I.e. reducing compatibility with Excel to make it harder to just leave with your data.

I could be wrong.
There are many open source "auth in a box" projects that you can self-host, such as Ory (https://github.com/ory/), Zitadel, Keycloak, and many other small projects.
They all have small differences but for small to mid scale projects its definitely manageable.
No comment on if output analysis is all that is needed, though it makes sense to me. Just wanted to note that using file size differences as an argument may simply imply transformers could be a form of (either very lossy or very efficient) compression.
From the study linked in the article: "Overall, our findings contribute to a growing body of evidence on the pervasive nature of plastic pollution and its potential implications for human health. As the usage of plastics in food packaging continues to rise, scientific research and policymaking must address the challenges posed by MNPL contamination to ensure food safety and consumer well-being."

> I find it impossible to put this into any kind of meaningful context.

So? Your inability to find meaningful context in something is not important. Who are you and why should this article or study cater to you? Are you in the business of doing research on this topic? Or are you just an HN commenter?

Your ignorance is not a sign of anything other than you being ignorant, and your inability to do something is just that: lack of skill.

> First of all, what's with the focus on tea bags?

Because you can't just assume. You test. That's science. Just assuming (your suggestion) is anti-science. And something we should NOT base our science off of.

> Second, how do "microplastics" compare to micro-everything else?

That's not what this study is trying to determine. It set out to determine how much microplastics came from tea bags. Why increase the scope. Other people are studying that.

You really don't seem like someone who understands how this works. You don't put the puzzle together all at once, you put it together one piece at a time.
True for any performance claim, in any library, in any language.
I spent some of the formative time in my career at Lexmark. They sponsored my GEM Fellowship for grad school, and I worked there for 4 internships in 4 years in the mid 2000s. It was an interesting window into the business world.

- Lexmark came into existence when IBM wanted to spin off their declining printer, keyboard, and typewriter businesses, which were headquartered in Lexington, KY, hence the name.

- According to some of my coworkers, IBM brought all the most dynamic leaders back to the mothership, so Lexmark was left with whoever stayed behind or was left behind. These folks weren't highly respected by the engineers I knew, but I can't really judge, personally.

- As many of you all know, some IBM/Lexmark manufacturing folks arranged a deal to take the keyboard business independent, as Unicomp.

- In a major settlement with HP over patents, the two companies had a full exchange of printing technology, resulting in Lexmark gaining cutting edge laser printing tech. According to people I know, this turned a moribund company into a player.

- Lexmark became most well known for bringing the "razor blade" business model to consumer inkjet printing. They would literally give printers away with a manufacturer's rebate, hoping to make the money back on supplies (e.g. ink cartridges). Unfortunately, there were so many printers floating around that many people would just throw out the old one when it was out of ink. It was a catastrophe.

- When I was working there, one of the major initiatives was to create the cheapest possible inkjet printer. On the other hand, there was still a lot of pretty cool R&D going on. Just nowhere near the level of investment HP was making.

- Lexmark became infamous for attempting to enforce DRM on its supplies to prevent people from refilling ink cartridges, forcing them to buy high margin supplies. While I was there, we were shipping cartridges with write-once memory for tracking usage.

- In parallel to consumer inkjet, Lexmark had an almost completely separate business unit doing business printers, based on laser printing technology. In this market, you sell full on documents capabilities and services, with the printer merely being the central piece of hardware.

- A few years after my last stint there, Lexmark exited the consumer inkjet business and became solely B2B. I didn't follow the company closely after this point.

Working at Lexmark was one of the things that convinced me to leave tech for education. I enjoyed my short stints there, but just found the environment completely uninspiring as a place to really establish my career. Being my main exposure to the tech career (along with previous internships at manufacturing companies), I assumed that this was what the whole industry was like. (I returned to tech a few years later, but that's a whole other story.)
Returning a 3xx redirect to an generic error page is even worse than 200.
> but that overwhelmingly doesn’t work.

MCTS will be the next big “thing”; not agents.
IMO this is an underappreciated advantage for Google. Nobody wants to block the GoogleBot, so they can continue to scrape for AI data long after AI-specific companies get blocked.

Gemini is currently embarrassingly bad given it came from the shop that:

1. invented the Transformer architecture

2. has (one of) the largest compute clusters on the planet

3. can scrape every website thanks to a long-standing whitelist
This is why I read more comments than articles.
Also because the micro-climate of the penninsula, SF proper, and a decent bit around the bay is almost identical to the rest of the PNW. The culture is also nearly identical.
And plastics are full of endocrine disruptors, which are pretty bad for human health too.
This is the plot of my favorite novella by Brandon Sanderson: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_(novella_series)
In a way, I guess? One of the three people suffering from schizophrenia who I know had their first episode when he, in the peak of COVID, could not get any information about his mother who was taken to hospital with COVID. She died, but he didn't learn that before a week after her passing.

Such events leave emotional scars on anyone, but can trigger schizophrenia in those who have a family history of the disease.
You never have food or drink that was stored or served via plastic containers? How? I ask seriously - how do you live your life to entirely avoid this, while also not living a life so separate from society that you are drinking tea made from tea bags?
NCR PC4i
Sharp made an auto-reversing turntable, it played both sides, front-loaded like a CD player. I have never seen one, despite being an old guy who is of that era. There were but a handful of turntables that could do this, so that’s a lot of production effort for a joke but a few were equipped to get.

There were a lot of eight tracks during that time, though, so sibling comment is more likely correct.
Original source was from 404 media: https://www.404media.co/copyright-abuse-is-getting-luigi-man...
Science loves proving science wrong. I'm glad science overcame science on the issue of blqck plastic
Isn't the wet paper towel and EM reflector? I use wax paper fwiw.
Nvidia is the one who went to an industry standard before their competitors in this space. It was created in 1999 and is called infiniband:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniBand

Infiniband is extremely popular in the HPC space, which is why Nvidia adopted it. Everyone else saw Nvidia adopt it and said "Let us make a new network standard to be incompatible". This is mind boggling.

Even more mind boggling is that many of the companies in the Ultra Ethernet Consortium are members of the Infiniband Trade Association, AMD included:

https://www.infinibandta.org/member-listing/

This would be like the automotive industry forming a consortium to invent new incompatible wheels to exclude a successful upstart that adopted their existing standard wheel designs. With trillions of dollars in revenue on the line, you would think that companies would use existing networking standards to focus on building competitive hardware with reduced time to market, yet they are instead reinventing networking standards just because they can. This is a huge gift to Nvidia, since it means that everyone else is wasting time and money instead of being competitive.
Yeah, well when I lived in the urban center everyone complained after festivals and other events where the suburbanites would descend and treat the city like their trash can.

Perhaps the real issue are all the lifeless, boring suburbs creating oppressed people that need an outlet.
It's all a bit confusing, but I think there are two separate parts to the process of joining and using Worldcoin. To join up they scan your iris and keep a record of the iris scans to stop you applying for multiple accounts. It's anonymous apart from the iris scan - they don't need your name or dob or anything like that.

The second part is once you have an account you can use it to prove you are the person with that account, and this is probably where the zero knowledge proofs come in. In this second stage your irises are irrelevant, they only come up when first applying.

The accounts are very much like crypto wallet public/private key accounts I think although they try to hide the details from you a bit in the app.
The alternative for me isn't to ask for a mug, it's an argument for skipping all that and making it at home.
Lose leaf tea is much better anyway. You can get multiple infusions out of it which is nice if you don't need the caffeine the second time around (it's quite water soluble and mostly all goes in the first infusion).

A second infusion with bags always just ends up kinda watery and sad. Something about the leaves being smaller...
Amazing. I think you're being sarcastic, but this is Hacker News, so of course people are engaging with you as if you're being serious because this is considered a perfectly reasonable opinion here.
The United Kingdom has a mixture of both types for sale in supermarkets.
Don't most mathematical papers contain at least one such error?
I’m not American but I’m pretty sure you have the same social justice (or lack there of) that enables certain types of criminals to avoid repercussions and continually reoffend.
The article is framed in a weird way. Theres a number of journals which have been deranked recently (mdpi, 'frontiers in' https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/finland-downgrades... ) Also, the author said they plan to issue a correction.

See https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/black-plastic

"Lead author Megan Liu, science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future, described the mistake as a “typo” and said her co-authors have submitted a correction to the journal. The error remains in the online version but Liu said she anticipates it will be updated soon.

“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” Liu told National Post. “The levels of flame retardants that we found in black plastic household items are still of high concern, and our recommendations remain the same.”"

The correction/corrigendum note is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...
> How does that compare with ... plastic-lined paper cups .. cling wrap that covers our food as we heat ... the Tupperware and other plastic containers we heat our food up in ... bottled water that sits inside plastic for months ... plastic bowls and utensils we use in our kitchens ... disposable serrated plastic knife...

For myself, I don't do any of the above (with the possible exception of the last one once in a while). I thought everyone knew those were a bad idea.

I do drink tea using tea bags though — and had no reason to believe there was plastic involved.
> Where did that come from?

His ass.
Watch out who you shake hands with, you might absorb micro plastics from them if they use a lot of Tupperware.
Source?

I would bet it is simply an emergent phenomenon of individual interests coalescing. Everyone wants commercial establishments near them, but not next to them.

Same as having lots of space for yourself, but also living near everything.
If you home-compost you get used to finding tea bag skeletons in the compost. For years I used to rip open the used tea bag, compost the tea and discard the bag.

In the last few years the largest two brands here (Ireland: Lyons and Barrys) have gone somewhere between "plastic free" and "biodegradable" (but not home-compostable). 95% of tea is sold in the form of tea bags here.
https://livinglightlyinireland.com/2021/02/12/plastic-free-t...
(article is from 2021, I think the title is suffering from a Wordpress date placholder)
Is there any actual study on this? I have encountered some extraordinarily strange people in places like Reno, Bakersfield, Yuma, and other desert cities. Strange in a different way from the usual wierdos I run into in places like Seattle, LA, NY, ATL, etc.

The only population I’ve encountered with a similar strangeness to them is folks who have worked their whole life in a high VOC environment. Paint shops, print shops, that kind of thing. We were shopping for some custom canvas work for a boat, and at every shop we got quotes from there was overpowering smell of polyvinyl chloride, and every shop owner had a very weird affect to them.
Just install Python locally, and copy paste the code.
Missing from this answer is the early evidence that they may be _very_ harmful. Early evidence suggests they are not non-reactive. They disrupt many of the body's systems in ways we're only beginning to understand.

> Various examples of damage caused by microplastics have been reported, such as microplastic accumulation in the bodies of marine and aquatic organisms (leading to malnutrition), inflammation, reduced fertility, and mortality. The threats that microplastics present to the human body have not yet been clearly identified. However, previous reports have shown that ultrafine microplastic absorption resulted in complex toxicity in zebrafish,2 and that microplastics under 100 nm in size can reach almost all organs after entering the human body.3 Therefore, concerns exist regarding the negative effects of continuous microplastic accumulation in the human body.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10151227/

> Microplastics have been found in a variety of organisms and multiple parts of the human body. We emphasize the potential impact of microplastics on the early exposure of infants and the early development of embryos. At present, the toxicity research on microplastics show that the exposure will cause intestinal injury, liver infection, flora imbalance, lipid accumulation, and then lead to metabolic disorder. In addition, the microplastic exposure increases the expression of inflammatory factors, inhibits the activity of acetylcholinesterase, reduces the quality of germ cells, and affects embryo development. At last, we speculate that the exposure of microplastics may be related to the formation of various chronic diseases.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/envhealth.3c00052
Right, that's what makes this rabbit hole a bit wild. I'm not even expressing a disagreement, rhetorical or otherwise. What's more, there's nothing wrong with doing that either. There are circumstances where that's a perfectly appropriate thing to do.

And while I fully agree there absolutely is such a thing as smarmy commenters asking for sources in cases where it's misunderstanding something fundamental about the conversation (e.g. "Shakespeare is good", "oh really? source?!") or frivolous requests for factual information familiar to everyone ("global temperatures are rising? Source!?"), I don't know how someone could read this subthread and feel that my question falls into either of those categories.

And to use this of all things as a moment to die on the hill of advocating for fuzzy boundaries between speculation and fact, which absolutely is something that facilitates misinformation, and to be angry that such a thing would be interpreted as a favorable attitude toward misinformation, is completely baffling.
I don't think peer reviewers need to be redoing every calculation, but you might expect them to be familiar enough with the field that "toxins in kitchen utensils are close to the EPA limit" would be surprising enough that they'd question it and double check it.
some people like different things. imagine that.
"To such end, three teabags of different chemical compositions were used in this study: (1) empty nylon-6 (NY6) teabags (as a model of polyamide), (2) empty polypropylene (PP) teabags, and (3) commercially available teabags containing tea, and cellulose as the polymer composition."

The different teabag composition materials were from separate types of teabags, not composition materials of the same teabag.
> what's the "verb" form of "source available"?

"We are publishing the source code for our Wasm backend." It's not hard to work out.
I think we're simply responding to the list the OP gave — which many of us do not do.
Considering this quote from another comment:

> I saw the unrelenting pressure investors put on insurers to spend less paying out claims

I would be interested to know what we think management can do when the only goals of a for-profit healthcare business are driven by "fiduciary responsibility".
Yep, I still have a couple or three Model M keyboards, and although all are IBM branded, if you disassemble them you'll find that, depending on the year, they were IBM or Lexmark manufactured.

Also, IBM laser printers from the 4019, 4029, 4039... series started to appear branded as Lexmark. At least if I remember correctly from when my father worked at a bank. Our equipment at home was a less fancy IBM Proprinter XL24. Noisy!
I’d imagine the point is for you to pay for resources used… considering your prompt still costs money.
I trashed all my black plastic utensils and bought stainless steel ones. I can’t decide if I did the right thing or not.
I actually find LLMs lacking true expertise to be a feature, not a bug. Most of the time I'm starting from a place of no knowledge on a topic that's novel to me, I ask some questions, it replies with summaries, keywords, names of things, basic concepts. I enter with the assumption that it's really no different than googling phrases and sifting through results (except I don't know what phrases I'm supposed to be googling in the first place), so the summaries help a lot. I then ask a lot of questions and ask for examples and explanations, some of which of course turn out to be wrong, but the more I push back, re-generate, re-question, etc (while using traditional search engines in another tab), the better responses I can get it to provide.

Come to think of it, it's really no different than walking into Home Depot and asking "the old guys" working in the aisles about stuff -- you can access some fantastic knowledge if you know the names of all the tools and techniques, and if not, can show them a picture or describe what you're trying to do and they'll at least point you in a starting direction with regards to names of tools needed, techniques to use, etc.

Just like I don't expect Home Depot hourly worker Grandpa Bob to be the end-all-be-all expert (for free, as well!), neither do I expect ChatGPT to be an all-knowing-all-encompassing oracle of knowledge.

It'll probably get you 95% of the way there though!
Metamorphic rocks go on deep journeys we never can
What makes you think there isn't BPA in your paper towels?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21939283/
Just for your information, the attitude in this comment makes it hard to actually engage it in a serious conversation. It does have "conspiracy uncle" vibes and so people might avoid replying.

Maybe that's your goal all along but if not, try to reread your comments before posting them, as they might not reflect how you actually want to come across with others.
It's Boeing-McDonnell all over again. I guess Honda might have the upper hand here, since Nissan only has the Leaf and the trucks to bring to the table.
I wish there was a way to tell Chatgpt where it has made a mistake, with a single mouse click.