MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by p_ing | 2025-04-07 01:25:53+00:00
Comrade, do you like bread? How about lines?

Great question. This is punishing anyone but those in the highest bracket. Unbelievably stupid that people are losing thousands (or more) dollars because of one single orange chucklefuck. The other middle finger goes to Congress for sitting on their thumbs in a closed bathroom stall.

I'm sure I'll be getting my American-grown-from-America coffee any day now.
by dathinab | 2025-04-07 01:26:37+00:00
I don't think such out of context nihilistic arguments are helpful at all, actually I'm pretty sure they are harmful to getting any change done.

I also never said there aren't many other things bad about Musk.

And comparing doing decisions out of greed which will straight forward risk the live of many and you aren't even gaining that much from it (compared with what you already do gain from the same source) with "we as a society could if we where a hive mind life more frugal and help another society else where" is just a very pointless thing.

But even if they where the same, what does that change, just because you also do something bad doesn't mean it's less bad or more tolerable or should be tolerated.

> We could all slightly decrease our disposable incomes (spent on shit we don't need) and increase the life expectancy or QoL for someone in a poor country.

But we can't, or more specifically any specific individual can't, they can at best try to influence things by voting with their money and votes. But that is a completely different context.

And that doesn't mean you shouldn't spend you money with care and donate money if you can afford it.
by cookiengineer | 2025-04-07 01:26:53+00:00
Imagine this being an automated workflow. Where the microSD card is both a bootable image and also an encrypted recovery / LUKS partition, which includes the BIOS flashing mechanisms and OS install mechanisms.

The temporary OS must keep some personal data in tact, otherwise you'll end up with a full search. So the "not so private data" has to be discoverable.

That would be tails on steroids, and help a lot of journalists and reporters while crossing borders.

Flashing the BIOS would probably be the hardest part, considering that libreboot will raise suspicions.
by nobody9999 | 2025-04-07 01:27:19+00:00
>Well, in between step 1 ("ban billboards") and step 3 ("ban advertisement") you'd need step 2 ("repeal the First Amendment of the United States Constitution"). Let me know how that goes!

For most of US history, Commercial speech was not afforded full free speech rights. Nor does it currently enjoy them, although it is more protected than it used to be[0]:

Commercial speech, as the Supreme Court iterated in Valentine v. Chrestensen (1942)[1], had historically not been viewed as protected under the First Amendment. This category of expression, which includes commercial advertising, promises, and solicitations, had been subject to significant regulation to protect consumers and prevent fraud. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the Supreme Court gradually recognized this type of speech as deserving some First Amendment protection.

As such, it wouldn't require repealing anything. Just reinterpreting how the First Amendment applies (or not) to commercial speech. And given the wholesale tossing out of precedent by recent SCOTUS personnel, it's certainly possible (albeit unlikely -- and more's the pity -- in this configuration) for them to do so.

[0] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/commercial-speech/

[1] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/valentine-v-chresten...
by BrenBarn | 2025-04-07 01:27:32+00:00
A less extreme version of this other recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

Billboards are banned where I live and it's great. It's interesting that this post says that where the author lives "someone can put up a 48-foot advertisement wherever they want". From other things I read I got the impression that in some (maybe many) cities a reason they're not banned is because they provide revenue, since many are on land like road medians that are controlled by local government. I'm not sure to what extent the designs themselves are reviewed but the ability to erect a billboard is regulated in such cases.
by technothrasher | 2025-04-07 01:28:54+00:00
> flight attendants in aisles physically demonstrating and making eye contact with passengers has something of an effect of guilting you into paying attention.

I certainly felt that guilt the one time years ago I was the only passenger on a 737 on what was effectively a dead leg from ORD to ROC. The flight attendent just came right up to my seat and did the demo staring straight at me. It was very uncomfortable. After she did it though, she was very nice, and told me she wouldn't bother coming through the cabin but that she'd be right up front if I needed anything.
by djoldman | 2025-04-07 01:30:10+00:00
LLM's are pre-trained to minimize perplexity (PPL), which essentially means that they're trained to model the likelihood distribution of the next words in a sequence.

The amazing thing was that minimizing PPL allowed you to essentially guide the LLM output and if you guided it in the right direction (asked it questions), it would answer them pretty well. Thus, LLMs started to get measured on how well they answered questions.

LLMs aren't trained from the beginning to answer questions or solve problems. They're trained to model word/token sequences.

If you want an LLM that's REALLY good at something specific like solving math problems or finding security bugs, you probably have to fine tune.
by stitched2gethr | 2025-04-07 01:30:18+00:00
Meh. I've been using 2.5 with Cline extensively and while it is better it's still an incremental improvement, not something revolutionary. The thing has a 1 million token context window but I can only get a few outputs before I have to tell it AGAIN to stop writing comments.

Are they getting better, definitely. Are we getting close to them performing unsupervised tasks, I don't think so.
by bigger_cheese | 2025-04-07 01:30:25+00:00
>1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish.

I think it's hard to understate how much traction Linux had in the late 90's/ early 2000's. It felt like ground breaking stuff was happening pretty much all the time, major things were changing rapidly every release and it felt exciting and genuinely revolutionary to download updates and try out all the new things it really felt like you were on the bleeding edge, your system would break all the time but it was fun and exciting.

I remember reading Slashdot daily being excited to try out every new distribution I'd see on distrowatch, I'd download and build kernels fairly regularly etc.

Things I can remember from back in those days:

- LILO to GRUB boot loader changes

- Going from EXT2 to EXT3 and all the other experimental filesystems that kept coming out.

- Sound system changing from OSS to ASLA

- Introduction of /sys

- Gentoo and all the memes (funroll-loops website)

- Udev and being able to hotplug usb devices

- Signalfd

- Splice/VMsplice

- Early wireless support and the cursed "ndiswrapper"

Nowadays Linux is pretty stable and dare I say it "boring" (in a good way). It's probably mostly because I've gotten older and have way less free time to spend living on the bleeding edge. It feels like Linux has gone from something you had to wrestle with constantly to have a working system to a spot where nowadays everything "mostly works" out of the box. I can't remember last time I've had to cntrl + alt + backspace my desktop for example.

Last major thing I can remember hearing about and being excited for was io_uring.
by Teever | 2025-04-07 01:31:01+00:00
This is obviously an uncharitable interpretation of the comment that you're replying to.

A better question would be how is seeing ads for sports betting in between periods of a game promoting bad behavior.

And the answer to that is very obvious -- the legalization of online sports betting and the nonstop barrage of ads for it on tv and social media is bad for individuals and society as a whole.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-04-07 01:31:02+00:00
> Some of these don't strike me as particularly pragmatic. E.g. are overflow checks really that expensive

Did you read the article? Rust includes overflow checks in debug builds, and then about a dozen methods (checked_mul, checked_add, etc.) which explicitly provide for checks in release builds.

Pragmatism, for me, is this help when you need it approach.

TBF Rust forces certain choices on one in other instances, like SipHash as the default Hasher for HashMap. But again opting out, like opting in, isn't hard.
by bitwize | 2025-04-07 01:31:23+00:00
> So true. Lisp was designed to give individual programmers tremendous power. That means Lisp programmers sometimes prefer to reinvent solutions to problems rather than learn to use some existing solution. This tendency can be an absolute nightmare on a software engineering team.

I've found that there's a world of difference between my tendency to wheel-reinvent when I'm messing around on my own vs. my tendency in an industrial setting. When I'm messing around on my own, Lisp gives me so much more reach it's incredible, and yeah, I kinda do want to reinvent the application server, or the TCP/IP stack, or something sometimes.

But when I'm getting paid and there are milestones and deadlines? Fuck it, I'll just use what's available to build what's needed. The difference is that in a Lisp codebase, some really smart people have come before and built some really cool abstractions. Like a test framework that makes automated testing so much simpler it's ridiculous. Like, two lines of code and you have a test for a new feature. You get access to tools and techniques that let you close the gap between "ticket lands in your lap" and "done" much faster than you would in Java.
by ivraatiems | 2025-04-07 01:31:31+00:00
This is exactly the problem. Consider an order processing system that processes a million orders a day, and retains them for ninety days. What percentage of those 89-day-old orders are actually needed at 89 days old? It could be quite low, maybe a couple thousand out of a million.

But if those orders aren't there, shit hits the fan. PCI compliance audits fail. The ability for customers to reconcile their charges with their purchases breaks. In that 0.01% of cases where the order was fraudulent, placed by mistake, or just didn't have what the customer thought it had in it, not having that data makes the order processor read as, if not malicious, at least incompetent.

The real question is, how much data do we need to store inefficiently, in a way that uses a lot of power and space?
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-07 01:31:37+00:00
<< You're not my friend.

Shame, I personally have no ill-will towards you.

<< I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't exist. I'm suggesting that we, as a community, shouldn't allow you to participate in debate, because it simply helps spread your hate, and it makes the community as a whole worse to allow you to participate.

I suppose it is helpful that you are so open about it, but, ngl, you are making a solid argument to not bother. Not exactly a recipe for kumbaya future, I must say.

<< If you have a bar and let nazis hang out, you're a nazi bar.

I will ask the question in good faith, because I saw this phrase pop up before followed by rather complete lack of understanding of what some words actually mean. Can you define what a nazi is?

<< If your disagreement is about whether someone should be allowed to exist because of the way they were born, then it's not OK to disagree.

Mkay. Lets test that definition a little. Must aborted fetuses be allowed to exist? Yes, I am setting you up a little bit, but I am now genuinely curious if you are gonna go for born part or attempt to dismantle the argument in a different way.
by tombert | 2025-04-07 01:34:14+00:00
I agree; I don't think it's realistic to tell them not to invest at all. The only real way to preserve your money is to invest it somewhere.

I think if the only thing that they could invest in was total-market index funds (or something similar), that would not have too much of a conflict of interest. They'd have the incentive to make the entire market happy, not just individual stocks, which benefits nearly everyone.

If the only stock that politicians owned was VTI or something similar, I think most people would mostly be fine with that. That would still have problem in terms of the uneven weighting, but it would certainly better than what we have right now.
by lesuorac | 2025-04-07 01:36:09+00:00
So when say Comcast owns a sports team and runs videos promoting the idea of buying a ticket to see that sports team it wouldn't be an ad because Comcast didn't pay itself?

I'm all for banning whole forms of advertisements (ex. Billboards) that don't actually educate the consumer about the product. But _all_ advertisements is too knee-jerk.
by SR2Z | 2025-04-07 01:36:16+00:00
The econ is clear on this: subsidies are taken by whichever side (of supply and demand) is more elastic, and taxes are paid by whichever side is less elastic.

For things like housing or fuel there are obvious answers for who's who.

For something like this it's a little murkier. My guess is that Netflix will end up paying, if only because every Netflix show is also easy to pirate.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-07 01:36:46+00:00
The U.S. (indeed to some extent, the West more generally) still has a robust manufacturing sector where it matters, such as military. The stuff is expensive because the jobs involved pay so well, which also creates a further incentive to push for quality over quantity. This is a success story, at least if seen from the POV of manufacturing workers. It's not clear that artificially expanding this beyond military to other stuff would have much effect. The fact is there's plenty of other high-paying jobs around e.g. in services, and it's not possible to just put this cat back in the bag.
by studio1057hack | 2025-04-07 01:36:56+00:00
I started it as a dance instructor (after competing since I was 13 years old) then I saw that the dance studio director still shared a room (!!) with somebody else in a really crappy part of New York City, so I got a job on the airport from a classified ad my husband clipped from NY Times and I got really interested and passionate about aviation. Took a few lessons and went through a course for my dispatcher license.

I loved it and got hired internally the second try. If I tell you we were called 'flight dispatch officers' you might be able to figure out which airline that was.

In about 12 years the airlines headquarter and ops center moved to the Midwest so I opted to stay in NY and go to school for retraining. I choose WAN admin because there were no coding schools. Here I got my A+, MCSE, MCSD,CCNA,CCNP,CCIE. But in the meantime I got heavily involved in scripting and coding. So my first job was perl, PHP and SQL developer and I've been doing it for quite some time now. I must say this is the most liberal and appreciative career I've seen. As long as your work is done, you can be anywhere. Besides the great salaries, benefits, (,ok no travel) these jobs are fun. Good choice.
by bennettnate5 | 2025-04-07 01:37:46+00:00
Here's an important one: never use `mem::size_of_val(&T)`. Rust as a language strongly steers you towards ignoring double (or even triple)-referenced types because they're implicitly auto-dereferenced in most places, but the moment you try to throw one of those into this API it returns the size of the referenced reference `&T` which is very much not the same as `T`. I've been burned by this before, particularly in unsafe contexts; I only use `size_of::<T>()` now.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-07 01:38:21+00:00
> Building industrial plants close to residential housing has led to an extortionate amount of pain and suffering over the years: cancers, fertility issues, etc.

Regulating environmental effluence saved a lot more lives than zoning. You’re arguing a false dichotomy between deregulated residential permitting and unregulated industrial construction.

At the end of the day, housing unaffordability is a political choice. It is currently one the Bay Area is making at the expense of a lot of lives. Those chickens will come home to roost, and the form they will take is a loss of local political power and service cuts. (My guess is San Francisco loses local zoning and rent-control powers. People will fight and die or whatever. But more people won’t listen.)

I think it’s smarter to react today than wait for the overreaction. But I suppose I know Bay Area politics prohibit that.
by c22 | 2025-04-07 01:38:24+00:00
From [0]:

In the early 1960s, Washington was one of the first states to successfully ban billboards from freeways. An exception can be seen in the lands owned by the Puyallup Tribe along I-5 near Fife, where massive billboards and video screens now flank both sides of the freeway. (Being classified as sovereign nation, the Puyallups can have their own sign laws.) If that state ban had not passed, you would now be seeing hundreds of similar signs from Vancouver to Bellingham, from Port Angeles to Spokane.

The City of Seattle, like many other cities, later passed a law limiting the installation of more billboards, aka off-premises signs. This was an outgrowth of a national effort to reduce the proliferation of commercial advertising that was spoiling our views of mountains, lakes, forests, pastoral lands, and architectural landmarks. It also took an inventory of billboards, ordering removal of those that had been erected without permits.

The City’s law was challenged in court by Ackerley Communications, the owner of most of the billboards in Seattle. The courts upheld the law but the dilemma was that there were scores of billboards in all corners of the city. So a deal was struck that if a billboard that was near certain sensitive locations, like schools or parks or homes, and was then removed, a new one could be erected in certain acceptable locations elsewhere.

Many billboards are installed in parking lots or vacant lots that have since been developed and those could not be replaced, as sign owners lost the leases. So, therefore, over time, the number of billboards would gradually decrease.

[0]: https://www.cascadepbs.org/2012/08/hinshaw-billboards
by Taek | 2025-04-07 01:39:23+00:00
If all advertising was banned, other institutions would set up to fill the vacuum. Imagine variations of Consumer Reports but that stretch across all sorts of industries.

Essentially, to get the word out about your organization or product (whether for-profit or non-profit), you'd have to convince someone with an audience to feature you *without paying them to do it*. In other words, your organization or product or service has to be genuinely interesting on its own.

And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape.
by t-writescode | 2025-04-07 01:41:20+00:00
I don't think the Apple Mouse is intended to compete with any power-user mouse like The Logitech MX 3 or any gaming mouse from Razer, Logitech, whoever.

It's meant to compete with the junky little thing you get with your PC that's wired, with who-knows-what DPI and 3 buttons at best. It's meant to be something that slips into your laptop bag and doesn't add *any* more bulk than the laptop itself.

So, editorialized, "of course" he's not going to be using an entry level mouse for power user usage.

That doesn't change the reality of how good or bad Apple's mouse is because it's not being sold to a power user. From what I've seen, power users tend to use that magic track pad thing, if they're Apple power users using Apple things.
by HankB99 | 2025-04-07 01:41:21+00:00
The budget for the NPS is so small that if they shut it down, the effect on the deficit would be too small to measure. But someone would still need to manage those properties so it would be "necessary" to sell them off to private interests.

I really hope that's not going to happen, but that fits with strangling the parks for the necessary resources needed to operate. (And then mandating that they remain open.)
by seagreen | 2025-04-07 01:41:31+00:00
What a great idea. I believe in this a trillion percent, due to the personal experience of watching myself and a stronger developer tackle similar problems at the same time. I relied on my brain and the standard tools of my system. He of course did the same, but also made a custom visualizer for the core of the algorithm. Night and day improvement!

So I'm a believer in the principles. But I'm also curious about throwaway743950's question. What are the things in the Glamorous Toolkit that concretely make it better for this style of programming than traditional tools? You say "[it] just happens to be a nice system of tools that make it easy to make more little tools", but that's got to be downplaying it. Switching environments is an agonizingly costly thing to do. What rewards await those who make the jump? Rubies? Emeralds? Custom views-with-nested-sub-custom-views? Curious (but not yet won over) readers want to know.
by soraminazuki | 2025-04-07 01:41:34+00:00
Distros are independent projects, so that's to be expected IMO. Though some level of interoperability is nice, diverse options being available is good.

That said, most distros have bsdtar in their repositories so you might want to use that instead. The package might be called libarchive depending on the distro. It can extract pretty much any format with a simple `bsdtar xf path/to/file`. AES is also supported for zips.

macOS includes it by default and Windows too IIRC, in case you're forced to become a paying Microsoft product^Wuser.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-07 01:42:43+00:00
(2024) Verge story Tim Cook says he uses every Apple product every day — how does that work? (https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/22/24276142/tim-cook-wsj-in...)

> I mostly use a Logitech MX Master 3 but sometimes switch to a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad for funsies.

Which references a WSJ story, but either that was edited, or the link is wrong https://www.wsj.com/style/tim-cook-interview-apple-intellige... https://archive.is/3TwLu
by tombert | 2025-04-07 01:43:09+00:00
In 2016, Trump agreed with that reasoning. He did a whole song and dance about leaving his businesses to his kids. In 2025 he didn't even pretend to hide it.

No one is saying that public officials should own nothing, but the concern is that if they own stock in an individual company, they will have an incentive to vote to benefit that company to drive up the stock price. For example, if I owned a ton of stock in Lockheed Martin, I might be incentivized to vote to declare a war that isn't necessary in order to get a bump in my income.

This doesn't mean that they actually would do this, it's possible that the politicians would have integrity and vote their actual positions, but I think for things like this the appearance of impropriety is almost as bad as actual impropriety. We need to have some level of trust in our political leaders, and having things that look unseemly is almost as bad as actual corruption.

Even if you could prove that Trump now maintaining his businesses has no effect on his political decisions, it would still be bad, because it still gives an appearance of corruption, and that erodes trust in our institutions.

I don't think most people would have a huge problem with politicians having stocks in broad mutual funds, especially if they don't directly know what's being invested in. This would encourage them to make the entire market grow, instead of just individual stocks.