MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fcatalan | 2025-04-10 06:57:12+00:00
This reminds me of my first "paid" job. I was contracted with a friend to fix the decaying IT infrastructure of a mid-sized local business. We were 18, early 90s. The contract was through a friend of my friend and was a shady affair from the start: nothing in writing or signed.

We agreed upfront to get about 600$ each, which was woefully little for the ordeal we had to go through. The place was a mess of DOS PCs, AIX workstations and ancient early macs. The backups were a cardboard box of unlabeled 5 1/4 inch floppies. We even had to solder our own cables to get some ancient serial printers to work and get the new IP network talking to stuff that wasn't built for it at all.

The owner was paranoid about security so we passworded everything that could be and compiled a long list of passwords.

When everything was working we sat with him to get our money, and then he said he had understood that the deal was $600 shared between us. He didn't budge, so we got nothing and he didn't get the password list.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-10 06:57:49+00:00
Not unlike how it went in a lot of places at the time; the problem with history is that they mainly focus on and make records of the upper echelons, the pretty parts. Few historians / writers / etc make notes of the common people. Some exceptions, of course, but you'd be forgiven for thinking Europe was mainly castles, knights and political intrigue back in the middle ages.

It hasn't changed much; in theory everyone has a camera in their pocket now to record the mundane, but in practice a lot of it is "content", where people put on a show for the camera.

My grandpa was an amateur photographer, he'd go out and make photos of local events, scenes, people, etc. His work has been donated to a regional museum and digitized, because there was little other visual records of these old (well, 50's) traditions.

I can't find them though. Some were uploaded to a Facebook page but that's a really poor platform for archiving / displaying works. I should reach out to my dad and start a project to build a website for this collection or something like that.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-04-10 06:58:50+00:00
I live in UK so biased, but yeah, I mostly love British plugs and sockets.

They do take up too much space, and are painful to stand on if you leave one unplugged.

But they are still just really satisfying. Plugs just don't fall out of sockets. They are solid and feel reliable. The safety feature of the longer pin opening the socket for the live wires is good. Always found EU and US style plugs and sockets to be worryingly flimsy and the plugs sometimes dangle a bit out of the socket.
by roenxi | 2025-04-10 06:58:53+00:00
The special case was that big chunks of Germany ended up under the control of capitalists. The pattern in Germany, Japan and even Korea is that in the post-war era the US understood how to build up a country's economy and their policy formula was effective.

The observation is depressingly simple - competent economic management leads to great results. Typically that involves investing a bunch into developing industrial capability. Listen to people like Ed Deming. Let people build things. The US isn't doing that, we haven't seen any new industrial capability out of them in decades. Silicon Valley is the closest thing they have in the modern era and it is mostly services.

If you ask where the wealth is supposed to come from in the Chinese economy there are a lot of obvious answers - it could be energy innovations from the nuclear or renewable sectors. It could be manufacturing innovation as they work on improving their factories. Maybe they're going to come up with hot new products out of Shenzhen. They're big players in the AI revolution and working to build up domestic semiconductor capabilities. Maybe they're just going to wait for other people to come up with good ideas and copy them with speed and scale on their side.

The US has a much less obvious story. Biotech could be an amazing path, but they've left the ring for a lot of the more promising industrial options. And holding the health industry up as being the way to a bright future seems a bit weird. Maybe they succeed in building a services economy that impresses people; that'd be a cool first.
Show HN: Anonymous, ephemeral, distributed forum/message board
by mmb | 2025-04-10 06:58:54+00:00
This project started out as an easy to run temporary forum/message board for use during emergencies or in areas with no internet. I've run it on an old router with ddwrt that's not connected to the internet.

It's still that, but I added an optional feature to pull posts from other instances of itself which I think creates some interesting distributed use cases. Distributing the posts to other instances can overcome some of the limitations of it being in-memory only.
by globular-toast | 2025-04-10 06:59:41+00:00
> TGV stands for train à grande vitesse, or “train of great speed.”

This is one of my pet peeves. Train à grande vitesse means high-speed train in English. There's no need to provide a mechanical word by word translation. It's like people saying al dente means "to the tooth" which is meaningless in English. Being al dente means something has bite. This kind of thing should only be a problem if the target language has no translation.
by ohgr | 2025-04-10 07:00:09+00:00
The problem is there isn’t a viable revenue model. The moment you ask money for it the customers disappear. That means there isn’t a revenue stream to support the extreme cost of model training.

And this is all paid for by people who expect a return. In the middle of a very volatile market.

It’s dead even from a non technical perspective.

From a technical perspective every reducing gain requires more money than the last step. That isn’t something that ever works.
by yaur | 2025-04-10 07:00:31+00:00
90 days? We don't know what is going to happen tomorrow or more to the point if you put goods on a boat to the USA you have no way to predict what the tariff will be when they arrive. If you are selling a product that relies on imported parts you can not know your cost of goods until they clear customs.

We are literally in the process of moving some of our operations to LATM to avoid this uncertainty.
by ilirium | 2025-04-10 07:01:24+00:00
> why NOAA in the US is under attack

As far as I know, AccuWeather is the main beneficiary. You can easily find reliable sources about it.

The cause is that NOAA publishes all weather data, calculated models (global coverage), meteostations data (global coverage), and weather radars to the public for free (US only, maybe also Canada, I don't remember). Therefore, many weather companies use such data to do their business and compete directly with AccuWeather. They don't like this.

On the other hand, state weather agencies that calculate global models in many countries don't provide such data for free. Therefore, startups and small companies who work in weather and climate fields use NOAA data and directly compete with AccuWeather or don't pay them for data access.
by atemerev | 2025-04-10 07:03:41+00:00
This is what Llama4 replies (locally running, no system prompt):

"I'm Llama, a Meta-designed model here to adapt to your conversational style. Whether you need quick answers, deep dives into ideas, or just want to vent, joke or brainstorm—I'm here for it. What's on your mind?"

The behavior you are describing is from some long time ago, probably early 2024.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-10 07:04:44+00:00
Some video games try and do the former; I play too much FFXIV and a recurring theme there is that you go to a new area and you get the tourist's experience, tour the area, view the sights, meet the locals, figure out the local history and culture, etc.

Sure, it's kind of superficial, usually based on human civilizations / design trends / etc; that is:

* Heavensward: Europe / traditional knights and castles and church stuffs

* Stormblood: East-Asia / Japan, clearly a favorite thing to work on from the developers

* Shadowbringers: is actually pretty independent

* Endwalker: Rome / Greece on the one side, India on the other, philosophical existential crises in the late game (that part is actually really good, they invented multiple (7-8 or so?) different civilizations who all achieved some kind of immortality and pursued the meaning of life, ending up disillusioned)

* Dawntrail (latest): south & mesoamerica on the one side, cyberpunk sci-fi on the other
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-10 07:05:15+00:00
You put a lot of work into your response, so I’ll try to put a similar amount of work into mine. That’ll probably take a sec, but I want to share a few reactions right now before I’ve had time to develop a complete response.

On your discussion of cults, I think we completely agree. Recently I came across elan.school, and I found it absolutely fascinating in how it depicted the process of brainwashing into a cult and how, whether deliberately or otherwise by the author, it established meaningful parallels between those processes and processes in society at large. Absolutely fascinating stuff and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, reading, and writing about it lately, so it’ll be fun to check out your resources.

Your mention of hollywood does make me want to ask something though. The most fascinating thing about the cult process to me is that it can eventually become borderline self-sustaining. Nobody has to want any of it, eventually the cult itself as an entity appears to become the cause of its own perpetuation. A bit like the party in 1984. Are you of the opinion that the behavior of hollywood, taking your portrayal for granted, is conscious action by specific actors? It seems to me that these processes are often, or even usually, headless.

On the issue of schools and phones, which I think is where we may find disagreement, could you point to specific functional elements that align with those found under maoism? I don’t even doubt that such elements exist, but it would be nice to examine them in specificity with an example or two.

As I said, I’ll be back to give a more holistic response once I have a little time to formulate one.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-04-10 07:05:15+00:00
Delivering "HDD prices" is a bold claim there.

They charge $20/TB/month for basic cloud storage. You can build storage servers for $20/TB flat. If you add 10% for local parity, 15% free space, 5% in spare drives, and $2000/rack/month overhead, then triple everything for redundancy purposes, then over a 3 year period the price of using your own hard drives is $115/TB and google's price is $720. Over 5 years it's $145 versus $1200. And that's before they charge you massive bandwidth fees.
by samuel | 2025-04-10 07:05:16+00:00
I guess this students don't pass, do they? I don't think that's a particularly hard concern. It will take a bit more, but will learn the lesson (or drop out).

I'm more worried about those who will learn to solve the problems with the help of an LLM, but can't do anything without one. Those will go under the radar, unnoticed, and the problem is, how bad is it, actually? I would say that a lot, but then I realize I'm pretty useless driver without a GPS (once I get out of my hometown). That's the hard question, IMO.
by photon_rancher | 2025-04-10 07:05:32+00:00
What’s the average IPC of these chips for a reasonable workload?

Early processors were typically 1 or lower. Modern stuff is all superscalar piplined and out of order and can do way more than you’d expect. Not to mention SIMD operations and other technologies. Branch prediction is probably better on the new chips too.

And with more RAM and cache algorithms can be chosen with different tradeoffs for less instructions.

16 cores at 4ghz was a thing like a decade ago - chips today might have the same specs but are definitely far faster.
by torginus | 2025-04-10 07:06:01+00:00
Functional programming languages are uniquely suitable for writing parsers for grammars, their whole feature set (discriminated unions, pattern matching etc.) is very suited to turning text into ASTs. It's not often that one needs to parse a custom DSL grammar.

That said, I'd say it's a pretty rare occasion to have that need, and other languages have great libraries for accomplishing the same, I'm partial to Chevrotain for Javascript (https://chevrotain.io/docs/), which has a small DSL for describing grammars.

Parser combinators are both less efficient and less featureful than bespoke solutions, which is a problem when you're writing a parser for your custom language, and you want to add extra features, like resilience, or rich error reporting.

To add a bit of snark, functional languages seem to best suited for writing parsers/compilers for other functional programming languages, which is pretty telling of the inward-facing functional culture.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-10 07:06:29+00:00
> I fail to see how they're different, they're both "these are the remote procedures you can call on me, and the required parameters, maybe some metadata of the function/parameters".

For one, REST is not RPC, despite being commonly confused for it and abused as such. The conceptual models are different. It makes more sense for an action-oriented RPC protocol to be defined as such, instead of a proper REST approach (which is going to be way too verbose), or some bastardized "RESTful" protocol that's just weirdly-structured RPC designed so people can say, "look ma', I'm using HTTP verbs, I'm doing REST".
by riffraff | 2025-04-10 07:07:07+00:00
I live in Europe and I also ask "why can't we have that".

High speed rail >240km/h is still very uncommon[0], especially cross border (tho notable exceptions exist, e.g. Paris-Milan with both TGV and Frecciarossa just reopened).

There are EU plans for a wider network but it's progressing very slowly.

The presence of fast trains between two cities, on the scale of <600km, is transformative, as it becomes more convenient to take a train than to fly, while also having less negative externalities.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe
by hdjjhhvvhga | 2025-04-10 07:08:20+00:00
I believe the GP doesn't believe trains have a future in a country that has a long tradition of automobile industry and its lobby is particularly strong.

I'd like to offer an alternate perspective: good public transportation network may decrease the number of vehicles sold in the (very) long run but creates another market that is quite stable - all this infrastructure of busses, trams, trains needs not only new units but also reliable maintenance. This is always a business opportunity and direct us towards a more sustainable future instead of just "produce more new cars no matter what".
by lqet | 2025-04-10 07:08:25+00:00
That's a strange article. The TGV Inoui is not a "new high-speed train", it is an SNCF brand (think "premium TGV") that has been operating for nearly a decade now, using standard TGV rolling stock. SNCF are simply buying new trains for that brand, and the interior design doesn't even look that different from other new high-speed trains in other parts of the world.
by transpute | 2025-04-10 07:08:27+00:00
10 years of shipped code for multiple platforms (x86, ARMv7, ARMv8) is not varporware. Based on software experience with existing platforms, they have created an open hardware RISC-V core which requires custom software to achieve energy effiency with improved performance, https://spectrum.ieee.org/snitch-riscv-processor-6x-faster

> Snitch proved to be 3.5 times more energy efficient and up to six times faster than the others.. "While we could already demonstrate a very energy-efficient and versatile 8-core Snitch cluster configuration in silicon, there are exciting opportunities ahead in building computing platforms scalable to thousands of Snitch cores, even spreading over multiple chiplets," says Zaruba, noting that his team is currently working towards this goal.

https://github.com/pulp-platform/snitch
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-10 07:09:46+00:00
In ~150 years someone will pick some photos taken today and post them and someone will probably wonder the same thing. Go out and do some sightseeing - a lot of the sights in these photos still exist, but also, you look at these photos with different eyes than the people that grew up there do; changing how you look at your own environment or places of interest will probably also help.
by terhechte | 2025-04-10 07:10:06+00:00
Just wanted to say that I was only someone who read OsNews daily back somewhere from 2002 to 2007 or 2008. So many interesting things going on.

With the proliferation of web apps and containers, alternative operating systems are actually more feasible today. At the same time, I'm dependent on all the niceties that the macOS/iOS ecosystem offers (the integration, the sync). Something I wanted to look into is just running macOS in a very default way and then using a fast OS (such as Haiku, though their Arm64 support is not very good yet) in a fullscreen VM. With modern Apple Silicon, there's almost no performance penalty.
by xandrius | 2025-04-10 07:10:12+00:00
Yeah, I saw that concept but I always feel like I'm supposed to be 6 years old to enjoy the interactions and the dialogue (both in FFXIV and FFXV). Also the "tourist moment" felt too much the canned tourist experience where everything is perfect, clean and everyone nice.

Instead travelogues are not that, they are not about being perfect or beautiful, it's about the places and people being as they are, however they are.

Didn't try all ths games you mentioned, I will take a look. Thanks!
by ulfw | 2025-04-10 07:11:36+00:00
The first argument is BS as you have no idea what a non-existing service would be priced at.

Your second argument on the other hand rings true and is the main reason high speed train service in the US makes less sense. Many cities have near-zero infrastructure locally to transport passengers to their final destination.

Same goes for airports too though.

It's very different for Paris - London where both cities have excellent subway networks or Tokyo - Osaka (ditto) or anywhere within China. The Taiwan HSR is also very successful since it got better connected to local trains including Taoyuan airport.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-10 07:11:46+00:00
Japan still is pretty isolationist or culturally conservative; I have no firsthand experience so this is all hearsay, but I gather the people living there are under a lot of societal / cultural pressure in how to behave, speak, live, etc. Foreigners get some leeway because they're foreign, but that's probably not so different wherever you go.
by ben_w | 2025-04-10 07:11:48+00:00
I noticed you were doing so, yes.

The "tube" (compactified dimension) isn't a higher dimensional object going through our space, in string theory it is an actual part of our space.

To put it another way: for compactified dimensions, we're not in flatland.

(For brane theory, we are in flatland, but they're two different ideas about how stuff might work).
by tomhow | 2025-04-10 07:12:08+00:00
This comment is breaks the HN guidelines.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Edit: Several of your recent comments are in breach of the guidelines and are being flagged by other community members. We need you to keep to the guidelines if you're going to keep commenting on HN, thanks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by ajb | 2025-04-10 07:12:10+00:00
For a 1kw appliance, with 220v it should be 48 ohms, but for 110v it needs to be only 12 ohms. So if you have a bad wire or connector, which has say 5ohms resistance, more of the voltage will drop across it. At 220v it will have 21v across it and be heated by 88W but at 110 it will actually have 32v across it and be heated at 204W. That could easily be the difference between a fire starting and not.
by piokoch | 2025-04-10 07:13:26+00:00
It came a few years to early. I remember my shock when I get [1] my OS/2 copy and it was on 10 (yes, ten!) 3.5 inch Floppy Disk, while Windows needed two (one for main OS, one for some utilities).

[1] This was 1987 still communistic Poland, so I bought a pirated copy on a famous Warsaw computer bazaar on Grzybowska street.
by teddyh | 2025-04-10 07:13:29+00:00
It has nothing to do with weirdness; Unix itself was plenty weird for its time. The relevant difference between Unix™ and Plan 9 is that Unix source code was given away (or cheaply licensed) to hardware companies which all wrote their own operating systems on top (SunOS, Ultrix, HP-UX, etc. etc.). This made Unix the common factor of very many commercial workstation environments. Plan 9? It was sold directly as a commercial product, for no hardware platform in particular. Nobody wanted to buy it.

People liked Unix because it was free – either really free, via BSD, or as a Unix derivative provided at no cost when people bought their workstations. A new revolutionary operating system had absolutely no reason for anybody to buy it: No commercial developers wanted to develop to a platform without users, and no users wanted a platform without software.

Plan 9 only changed their license many years later, when it was too late for anybody to care, and Unix had become the established standard.
by nazgul17 | 2025-04-10 07:13:53+00:00
The problem is, everybody does that, and it lowers the bar. From a societal perspective, we will have a set of people who are less prepared for their jobs, which will cost companies, and the economy at large, and so me and you. This will be a real problem for as long as AIs can't do the actual job but only the college easy version.

As a society, we should mandate universities to calculate the full score of a course based solely on oral or pen and paper exams, or computer exams only under strict supervision (eg share screen surveillance). Anything less is too easy to cheat.

And most crucially let go of this need to promote at least X% of the students: those who pass the bar should get the piece of paper that says they passed the bar, the others should not.

This is a serious problem.
by throwuxiytayq | 2025-04-10 07:15:19+00:00
I feel like the barrier between conscious and unconscious thinking is pretty fuzzy, but that could be down to the individual.

I also think the difference between primitive brains and conscious, reasoning, high level brains could be more quantitative than qualitative. I certainly believe that all mammals (and more) have some sort of an internal conscious experience. And experiments have shown that all sorts of animals are capable of solving simple logical problems.

Also, related article from a couple of days ago: Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals
by aborsy | 2025-04-10 07:16:15+00:00
Because you can’t have America and France at the same time!

You can’t have 300k salaries (you gotta cut it by 90% for taxes), small government, small regulations, limits on other public services that follow suit, low energy prices …

You can’t cherry pick. If you want fast trains from France, you need to become France.

At the end, public transport will be congested, captured by homeless, dirty, … There is no train from any A to any Z, you have take it from A, change to B, C, to Z. You will burn out in public transport, and drive a car. Not to mention US is a vast sparsely populated country, compared to EU that may have no choice but to rely on a mix of public and private transport.
by FrancisMoodie | 2025-04-10 07:16:16+00:00
I get your point, but also, so what? The point of this whistle-blowing is that the public gets to make informed decisions about these companies that provide us with services that much of us use daily, and that the government gets a chance to figure out whether this is the truth or not and take actions accordingly. It's not about who is guilty right now but what needs to be done to prevent this in the future, IMO.

And whatever she might be guilty of doing, the chances of her ever having the same access to sensitive information in any company has gone drastically down after coming forward with this information.