MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Suppafly | 2025-04-24 16:20:54+00:00
>On don’t worry, they also show PC LOAD LETTER in the US even when the correct paper size is loaded :)

Only if there is an issue with the rollers or something and it can't feed the paper from the paper cassette. No one ever wants to read the manuals or do basic troubleshooting though. Hell newer ones have a menu on them that will walk you through each of the troubleshooting steps, but people would rather put a post-it on it saying it's broken.
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-24 16:22:01+00:00
But also there were actual benefits to loyalty that don’t exist anymore. Labor union participation was huge in the post WWII, pre-Welch time frame. They used that leverage to negotiate benefits, many of which rewarded loyalty. Pension plans vs 401ks, significant pay raises based on seniority, clear paths to promotion, job security prioritizing senior workers, etc. Those things permeated through job markets and companies without unions as well, given the labor force competition. People were loyal because they had real tangible compensation and benefits for it.

I think another shift around Welch was that companies used to focus more on long term value, which would result in stock price increases in the long term, even if not in any given short term. That if a company was healthy and valuable, one of the many benefits would be rising stocks. The shift to focus on short term stock increases as almost the only goal, means companies will pull the copper piping out the walls and destroy the house if it means a juicy bump in the Q3 earnings call.
by jorblumesea | 2025-04-24 16:22:16+00:00
tbh that feels completely backwards. In large orgs, you are a number and transparently so. People come and go, processes are set up that assume attrition.

In a smaller shop, there's less flex overall for departures and more incentive to abuse the personal relationships built.

You are right that loyalty changes depending on org chart, but it's how senior you are. Senior execs have more vested in the company, both in their career and stock options.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-24 16:22:25+00:00
> I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.

Back in the old days when people still wrote by hand, they also made mistakes, but just scribbled them out and kept going. Starting over was only necessary with doing something special.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-24 16:22:31+00:00
I can taste the mold in bread before it's grown big enough to become visible.

For most foods evolution has graced us with the ability to see, smell or taste any issues well before they actually become a problem. There are some things you have to look out for like botulism or salmonella, but for simple foods like bread and milk there isn't much point in taking precautions
by jerf | 2025-04-24 16:23:23+00:00
The missing ingredient here is that there is a gulf between what people really need, and what they do. Capitalism/market forces/etc. optimize on that "what people really do" and not what they need, and especially not what they say they want. See also, for instance, the layout of your grocery store.

The good news is that capitalism is in fact really good at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through your actions, and there are ways in which that is good. The bad news is that the farther away we get from our "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but that enticement to it is very new.

The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people lived reasonably happily without, to a necessity to thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans have never, ever been collectively good at that.

And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your pocket and resisting darned near every vice simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.

For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a new example as the frontier expands there, too.

I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find one, because we will have to. The systems can't just keep getting better and better at enticement to the short-term with no other social reaction.

[1]: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...
by belthesar | 2025-04-24 16:23:30+00:00
The key thing that Facebook Groups and Pages solved was the network effect. If you were on Facebook already, you could join a group or a page without signing up users. If a post from a Group or a Page came in, it came in through a common notification platform. It was the place where people already were, and if they weren't there, eventually there was enough pressure to join because "everyone else was already there". And all of this was good for Facebook, because it was at the time when they were trying to capture more users, which brought more eyeballs to ads.

I think any startup trying to solve this problem is going to have a really hard time because it will ultimately be external to the platforms where people already are, and user behavior has shown that they're inherently sticky to platforms. I wish it wasn't this way, because I think it'd be great for folks to be able to do this on their own.
by whartung | 2025-04-24 16:23:48+00:00
I love the entry on my '14 Jeep.

Walk up, put your hand in the handle, and it unlocks. Get in, press the button, and it starts. This is a fabulous "happy path" that is seamless.

Nothing happens without an actual action, but the actions are natural and organic to the task. The sensor is inside the door handle, combined with the key fob, and it just opens when you slide your hand into. It's a, truly, marvelous experience.

My keys stay in my pocket. Since I open the door for my wife anyway, it just works. (She can open the door, I just have to be close.)

Similarly, when we open the rear lift gate, it just opens. This also unlocks the rest of the vehicle (in contrast to if I push the gate open button on the fob, only the rear gate is open, not the rest -- which I find odd).

When leaving, I press a lock button on the handle to lock the car.

It's a great compromise, and works really well.
by m10i | 2025-04-24 16:24:11+00:00
> The one chapter that stood out very clear, especially in a college setting, was how inefficient flash cards were compare to other methods like taking a practice exam instead.

In order to take a practice exam, you need to understand the terms being used in the exam ahead of time. That's where flash cards come into play.

That said, to achieve mastery, I think you probably need both.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-24 16:24:58+00:00
>but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month..

I'm sure I do too, but I couldn't actually tell you what I used it for. Probably to cross items off a shopping list or sign my name on something. Actually we got a new car and I needed to sign the form at the DMV to get license plates, so I guess that was it.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-04-24 16:25:27+00:00
The article says it does subqueries:

> Getting the AST is a big step forward, but we still need a way to take your cursor position in the editor and map it to a path through this AST. Otherwise, we can’t know which part of the query you're interested in previewing. So we built some simple tools that pair DuckDB’s parser with its tokenizer to enrich the parse tree, which we then use to pinpoint the start and end of all nodes, clauses, and select statements. This cursor-to-AST mapping enables us to show you a preview of exactly the SELECT statement you're working on, no matter where it appears in a complex query.
by btown | 2025-04-24 16:25:46+00:00
Perhaps not "absolutely done for," but there was meaningful action here that resulted in a 4.3 billion EUR fine (of which only 200 million was reversed on appeal).

The action was based partially on the Anti-Fragmentation Agreements (AFAs) mentioned above: https://www.clearyantitrustwatch.com/2022/09/the-general-cou...

IMO there should be mechanisms that prevent this kind of thing from ever occurring, but regulating this in a way that doesn't meaningfully impede other (benign) certification programs is a complex design space indeed!
by fiatlux5762 | 2025-04-24 16:25:56+00:00
I cannot understand. Has the country collectively lost its mind? Yes, there are certain professions that must occasionally come into an office building like say a surgeon. Accountants, computer programmers, clerical staff, and a ton of other professions are more productive working from home. Not to mention all of the tons of gasoline, air pollution, road rage and other issues that are largely solved by simply enabling remote work.

What is driving this insanity? The gas companies?
by h3half | 2025-04-24 16:26:17+00:00
I think your final sentence would be a more specific/more correct to say "five acres away", but in reality I don't think I've ever heard anyone use a furlong as a serious unit in conversation.

I have heard sentences like "the property line is two acres into the woods" and it was understood that he was using acre like you might use "block" in a city - "the property line is two acre widths into the woods". As you say, that's just a furlong, but I doubt either of us knew that at the time.
by mannyv | 2025-04-24 16:26:29+00:00
What you're saying is that "creating a tool requires validation, but not creating a tool and winging it doesn't."

Which is engineering-speak ridiculous.

To debug anything you need a mental model of the thing in question. With that mental model you can build a software-based model of it (a simulation), you can document it, or both. But for some reason you believe that documentation doesn't require validation, but the tool that expresses a model represented by the documentation does not.

Realistically speaking, they have 2 days between command and response, so they have plenty of time to write a simulator.
by keerthiko | 2025-04-24 16:27:06+00:00
this is a very good point, and a blind spot in my comment because IME people who left the small pond in the first place were dissatisfied and unfulfilled there.

it is absolutely possible that after experiencing the bigger pond, people can develop purpose in their "original" pond based on values like community and relationships, or even simply dislike the vibes in bigger ponds and want to undo as much as they can. this is a super valuable thing to society and humanity for the most part, as perhaps more change can happen this way than big things happening in big places.

personally i struggle with this, because whenever i re-enter a smaller ecosystem (including/such as the one i grew up around) i feel like everyone has a distorted view of the bigger pond and self-limit themselves, which is a contagious energy i can't stand.
by Majromax | 2025-04-24 16:27:18+00:00
> All futures should be settled by the actual commodity!

Why? The legitimate hedging role of futures and options is often financial in nature, even for physically-settled contracts.

Take West Texas Intermediate as an example. That's a physically-settled contract, with delivery in Cushing, Oklahoma.

What if I want to lock in a future price of oil but I'm not in Cushing, Oklahoma? Nobody's going to create a liquid futures market with delivery to my loading dock, but most of the time I can get oil on the spot market from a local supplier that already includes/amortizes the transportation cost.

It's far better for me to use the liquid futures market for hedging and still buy on the spot market, closing out the futures contract before delivery. For me, it's as if the futures market is cash-settled, even with a completely non-speculative transaction.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-24 16:27:30+00:00
>now my passport got a signature I won't be able to replicate ever

I'm not sure I could ever prove I am who I say I am using my signature. My wife signs my name most of the time when it's necessary for a check or a health form for the kids or whatever. Whenever I go to vote, I try to sneak a look at their copy of the form to see how I signed it when I registered. I think my credit union has one 'on file' for me, but I'm sure it's nothing like how I actually sign my name and is from ~25 years ago.
by IMTDb | 2025-04-24 16:27:45+00:00
> “When I’m on my deathbed, I won’t look back at my life and wish I had worked harder. I’ll look back and wish I spent more time with the people I loved.”

On the other hand; when they interview people and ask them to "give advice to your younger self", I can't count how many times the guy / girl said: "work harder in school".

Ultimately it's all about balance, money absolutely does buy happiness; and so does doing an interesting job. Reach a point where you have enough money that it does not occupy a significant portion of your mind; and work hard enough to reach a position where you don't look at the clock the moment you arrive at your workplace.
by conradev | 2025-04-24 16:28:05+00:00
Attesting that a closed source device meets arbitrary closed source standards is a necessary evil.

One real world problem is that some existing systems are built relying on the integrity of the components within, i.e. BART in the bay area relies on the BART cards being honest and secure. If iPhones are to be allowed into the system, they also have to be honest and secure.

The capability is being over-used and abused, and we should design systems to never need it, but some do.
by rafram | 2025-04-24 16:28:05+00:00
We’re talking about copyright here. A typeface on its own isn’t copyrightable. The judge ruled that turning a typeface into a digital font involves writing a nontrivial computer program, which is a creative work under US copyright law. That simply is true. It doesn’t matter whether you can write “apps” in TrueType; you can write digital fonts in it.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-24 16:28:19+00:00
But what if it's not a technical decision? What if there are legal implications around data retention that it's not your job to be aware of?

I've been parts of teams where features had to be totally thrown out and rebuilt because developers made big assumptions that turned out to be wrong, because they didn't think it was worth it to check with the product owner. Because they assumed it was only a "technical decision", or they assumed they understood the customer needs despite never actually asking the customer.

This doesn't mean checking with product around each line of your code, obviously. But deciding what information gets stored in the database, what level of event tracking you do, whether deletes are hard or soft -- these have massive product implications, and potentially legal ones.

And it is additional effort. Now you have to write tests for all those things. Are the timestamps being stored correctly? Are the permission bits being stored correctly? Is "created_by" coming from the right user? Are we sure a malicious user can't spoof that? Do we care? Is "updated_at" actually being updated on every row change? But are we making sure "updated_at" is not getting changed when we import data from a separate table? How often do we remove soft-deleted data in order to comply with privacy policies and regulations, and with what cron job, and who maintains that? Where do alerts go if the cron job fails? What happens if that employee leaves? I could go on and on and on.

So that's what I mean by additional effort. It's not "around a few seconds". Because it's not just a technical question, it's a product one. It's a proper feature that needs to be properly defined and properly scoped out and properly tested.
by rglullis | 2025-04-24 16:28:53+00:00
This is an issue with Mastodon (and most of other software that implements only the push-based processing of inbox), but there is nothing on ActivityPub that prevents a client to directly read the actor's outbox.

As a matter of fact, I am working on a fork of a elk right now that is meant to function as a pull-based reader of AP data, so pretty soon you will be able to have your SSG generate an outbox for you and I would get all updates, boost it, etc
by dkarl | 2025-04-24 16:29:29+00:00
> It is what people wanted though, from Facebook

Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what was going on with people, and if something big happened (like a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out with congratulations or condolences.

But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for me, and I left.

If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead, I'd use that service.
by hbsbsbsndk | 2025-04-24 16:29:41+00:00
Contrary to people's expectations, it's not actually possible for "number go up" to continue forever. Privileged people have extracted value from marginalized people, the global south, the environment, and increasingly just domestic wealth inequality. There are fewer and fewer externalities you can profit from.

Not to sound Malthusian, but it was never going to happen that 9 billion people on the planet could live with a North American standard of life, and we stop global warming, and deforestation. It would be a sort of heat death for capitalism with no gradient of inequality left to extract value from.

Financialization is the last gasp attempt to make something from nothing. You're just betting on taking money from another person who is betting on taking money from you. The memeification of retail investing and the entire crypto market are the most naked version where there is simply no relation to any real resources.
by craftkiller | 2025-04-24 16:29:53+00:00
I'm just a single data point, but FWIW after the first week the only time I ever (literally) dust off my librem 5 is to show people what a joke of a phone I waited 4 years for. Purism had the right goals (mainline linux kernel, no run-time loadable closed sourced blobs, user-serviceable, hardware kill-switches) but the implementation is only worthy of a participation trophy. The phone would randomly drop calls (though I've heard this is finally fixed), the UI was terrible (UI elements rendered partially off-screen, a useless maps application that complained about a missing location service), the battery life is so terrible that carrying around a 2nd battery is common advice, and the hardware was anemic back when the phone was announced which made the difference even more noticeable when the phone finally came out half a decade later.

I'm glad I own the phone for the same reason that I regret not holding on to my G1 (the first android phone): Its a neat piece of history. But alas, it will never see use as an actual phone.
by brainwad | 2025-04-24 16:30:18+00:00
It's shit even with an ad blocker. The problem is that there's just very little organic content anymore, because the fad of posting all the time on social media passed. A social media site can't subsist on birthdays, wedding and babies, but that's all people post about these days. The interesting stuff has moved (back) to topic-based groups or pseudonymous forums (like this one).
by Suppafly | 2025-04-24 16:30:22+00:00
>In other words, the 1/2-gallon container, buy two of those, and it costs significantly more than a single 1-gallon container.

Except sometimes the 1/2 gallons will be randomly on sale where you can get like 3 of them for the price of a gallon. Milk economics makes no sense to me. But yeah, it's usually cheaper to buy more than you need and just throw it out if you don't use it, as is the American way.
by uludag | 2025-04-24 16:30:50+00:00
I don't even think you have to be on the frontier for LLMs to lose most of their effectiveness. Large legacy codebases with deeply ingrained tribal knowledge and loads of idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies will do the trick. Sad how most software projects end in this state.

Obviously LLMs in this situation will still be insanely helpful, but in the same way that Google searches or stack overflow is insanely helpful.
by crustycoder | 2025-04-24 16:30:58+00:00
This is an old article and whilst there are undoubtedly still vulnerable vehicles, with the advent of UWB it seems to be a solved problem.

My car has UWB, there's a LED on the fob that blinks when it is in range and if it's stationary for a short time, it inactivates as well. Some experimentation suggests you need to be within about 5m of the car to open the doors.

The localisation seems to be very accurate, even if you can open the car from a distance it won't start unless the fob is physically within it. If I sit in the driver seat the fob has to be less than 10mm away from the outside of driver's window, otherwise it refuses to start.
by bitwize | 2025-04-24 16:31:03+00:00
Probably channels. In an IBM mainframe, each I/O device is connected on its own channel, which is actually a separate computer that handles the transfer to/from the main CPU. This has been the case going back to the System/360, which is why mainframes are legendary for their transaction throughput and reliability. There's probably a lot of redundancy in the I/O hardware, as they have to be rock solid and hot swappable while the system is running.
by clayhacks | 2025-04-24 16:31:12+00:00
> Saying you shouldn't educate the lower classes or not educate girls would be met with huge resistance from most Republicans,

They are pushing for policies that would do that in effect if not in name. They are gutting public education (which the lower class uses) and trying to force women into motherhood by preventing abortions. Many women who have abortions do so because they are trying to get an education and a child would disrupt that.

I don’t think you understand leftism or American politics
by recursive | 2025-04-24 16:31:41+00:00
How do people learn to drive manuals in 2025? It used to be that you used your buddy's/parent's beater in the back of the mall parking lot.

But no one has one anymore. I tried to learn in the 90s for about an hour, and never managed to get the car moving forward rather than bouncing. At this point, I don't have much desire to try again, but I wouldn't know how to try if I wanted to.
by jerf | 2025-04-24 16:32:11+00:00
"although it's not something that can be digested as quickly as the typical HN post"

I really want a view of HN that is something like the upvotes divided by the number of comments (although, not necessarily linear). Those aren't necessarily the "best" by every metric, not saying this is the "best" view or anything, but it would be an interesting one.
by TinkersW | 2025-04-24 16:32:27+00:00
I write a lot of SIMD and I don't really agree with this..

Flaw1:fixed width

I prefer fixed width as it makes the code simpler to write, size is known as compile time so we know the size of our structures. Swizzle algorithms are also customized based on the size.

Flaw2:pipelining

no CPU I care about is in order so mostly irrelevant, and even scalar instructions are pipelined

Flaw3: tail handling

I code with SIMD as the target, and have special containers that pad memory to SIMD width, no need to mask or run a scalar loop. I copy the last valid value into the remaining slots so it doesn't cause any branch divergence.