MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palata | 2025-04-11 10:01:24+00:00
> Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument.

Because your sarcasm was constructive, maybe?

> my implicit argument is that

Next time, maybe consider making it explicit and without using sarcasm.

My explicit answer was that if you consider that regulations are fundamentally against freedom, then I disagree. To me, it's perfectly fine to regulate unicorns if we believe it is better for the society. You can disagree with the fact that it would be better for society, but that's not what you said. What you said is that regulating against unicorns would be against freedom.
by rockmeamedee | 2025-04-11 10:02:50+00:00
Oh this is great! I always have this problem. I find that's one of my biggest barriers when reading queueing theory content. I'm only doing it intermittently so I don't have memorized the meanings of ρ,σ,μ,λ...

Visually I also often confuse rho and sigma, and math texts will use psi ψ and phi φ in weird fonts and I can never tell them apart.
by i_like_robots | 2025-04-11 10:03:11+00:00
I've seen visualisations similar to this before, but this one is by far the most beautiful and I could watch it all day.

I echo the sentiments on the TfL API, I've built the same Tube Tracker app over and over for more than 10 years[1] as my go-to for learning new tools[2] or testing changes to frameworks[3] and I'm not sure it's ever improved. A chap called Chris Applegate wrote extensively about his battles more than a decade ago[4], did they ever add the stations between Latimer Road and Goldhawk Road on the Hammersmith & City/Circle line?

[1]: https://www.matthinchliffe.dev/2014/03/05/building-robust-we...

[2]: https://svelte-tube-tracker.vercel.app/

[3]: https://github.com/i-like-robots/react-through-time/pulls

[4]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150620042340/http://www.qwghlm...
by sdkgames | 2025-04-11 10:04:17+00:00
How to play is explained here [1]

By the way you can run the games locally. Just download all files.

For the forest game you would have a local directory:

├── Build │ ├── Build_7_30_F.asm.code.unityweb │ ├── Build_7_30_F.asm.framework.unityweb │ ├── Build_7_30_F.asm.memory.unityweb │ ├── Build_7_30_F.data.unityweb │ ├── Build_7_30_F.json │ └── UnityLoader.js └── index.html

then just run the following in the directory

python3 -m http.server

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a74KM792gbo
by adrian_b | 2025-04-11 10:05:08+00:00
The important point is that this mechanism works only for the so-called semi-crystalline plastics.

Even if they are less frequently encountered, there are also completely amorphous plastics and completely crystalline plastics, and these appear to not be prone to fragmentation into micro-plastics.

The conclusion is that there should be efforts to develop alternative plastics to the more frequently used semi-crystalline plastics, which have this serious disadvantage of generating persistent micro-plastic fragments.

Therefore this article offers a potential solution to the micro-plastic problem, which might work, like when freons have been replaced with less harmful refrigerating agents, even if those may have a slightly less refrigeration efficiency.
by userbinator | 2025-04-11 10:05:19+00:00
Even asbestos divides into several families with very different levels of carcinogenicity. Crocidolite "blue asbestos" was first banned long ago due to its severe effects, but chrysotile (white asbestos) is far less dangerous.

There is this interesting study from last year that looks at the health effects of chrysotile, in a population exposed to far more of it than possibly anywhere else on earth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38247448/
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-04-11 10:05:27+00:00
>1. Your “could” is nonsense.

quote: Do you know what the most popular Vietnamese sites are? I don't either. Do that for >200 languages.

was the example given, it's true I do not know what the most popular Vietnamese sites are, and the person who posted that and pretty much anyone on this site does not know what the most popular Vietnamese sites are or the same thing for 200 plus languages, but there are a few companies out there for which finding that out is pretty much child's play. One of those companies makes the Chrome browser.

Also testing against the entire web, obviously asking people to report problems is not really testing against the entire web, it is testing against a subset of the web. This should not really need to be pointed out to the H part of HN, but here I am. A similar thing would be if you had a big index of the web and you tested against that.

>2. Better not to get salty about some downvotes

your and my definitions about saltiness seem to vary a great deal.

on edit: Noting really that the thing to determine is how many sites actually use the UA styles for H1 instead of overriding, which would also be child's play for Google, and determining the most popular sites or pages that do so. I believe that the sites that do so are few and far between and not exceptionally popular, as well as probably very simply styled, if this belief is true it would also be relatively simple for someone to figure out what side effects were likely - if they had the data and processing power to do so. But Mozilla does not, therefore they must ask people to tell them if they have problems.
by closewith | 2025-04-11 10:06:00+00:00
> They taught us to triangulate using pencil and ruler, but no one has time for that when it's starting to get dark.

I was a military land nav instructor (although not for the US military) and this was one of our biggest challenges, especially once smart phones become common. People would consider position fixing to be an unbearable waste of time and would inevitably waste hours of time and effort because of it.
by anticodon | 2025-04-11 10:06:23+00:00
You can always find a way to eliminate an undesirable candidate. E.g. declare that they're "paid by Putin". That's all you need to eliminate the undesirable politician, there are usually exactly zero proofs. Declaring that someone is "pro Putin" is enough.

Actually, the range of methods is slightly wider. E.g. there was a French politician investigating the сase of corruption of Ursula von der Leyen. That politician died from "heart attack" just a few days before the hearing. Ah, that's a "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theories" are explicitly forbidden now in several EU countries. Also, very convenient.

Same for comments in the Internet. E.g. if you writing something western people doesn't like on Reddit/Facebook/whatever, the only reaction you'll get will be "you're a Kremlin troll"

No need to think and analyze yourself. There's only one truth in the world and it comes from Bloomberg/CNN/BBC.
by jhbadger | 2025-04-11 10:06:40+00:00
This wasn't just a "academia" thing, though. All business executives (even low level ones) had secretaries in the 1980s and earlier too. Typing wasn't something most people could do and it was seen as a waste of time for them to learn. So people dictated letters to secretaries who typed them. After the popularity of personal computers, it just became part of everyone's job to type their correspondence themselves and secretaries (greatly reduced in number and rebranded as "assistants" who deal more with planning meetings and things) became limited only to upper management.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-11 10:08:21+00:00
My understanding is that unicorns are typically so highly valued because investors believe they will be able to corner their market and achieve monopolistic control over it. This is often their long-term strategy: undercut the market, drive out or buy out competition, and eventually increase prices and enshittify service while continuing to buy or legally destroy any potential competition.

There are a lot of links in that chain that strong pro-competition regulation could break.
by palata | 2025-04-11 10:08:23+00:00
> Actually it's the first time you have stated that, but I'll bite.

Fair point, I said it in another comment :-).

> How do you propose that would work

I don't. I merely state the fact that I don't like the way it's going with systemd, which is that many projects now assume that you have systemd and depend on it. And if you don't have systemd, you're screwed.

Similar to projects that assume that you have Ubuntu and depend on Ubuntu specificities.

And again I'm not saying that it should be illegal; just that I don't like it.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-04-11 10:08:24+00:00
The author seems concerned about AI risk -- as in, "they're going to kill us all" -- and that's a common LW trope.

Yet, as a regular user of SOTA AI models, it's far from clear to me that the risk exists on any foreseeable time horizon. Even today's best models are credulous and lack a certain insight and originality.

As Dwarkesh once asked:

> One question I had for you while we were talking about the intelligence stuff was, as a scientist yourself, what do you make of the fact that these things have basically the entire corpus of human knowledge memorized and they haven’t been able to make a single new connection that has led to a discovery? Whereas if even a moderately intelligent person had this much stuff memorized, they would notice — Oh, this thing causes this symptom. This other thing also causes this symptom. There’s a medical cure right here.

> Shouldn’t we be expecting that kind of stuff?

I noticed this myself just the other day. I asked GPT-4.5 "Deep Research" what material would make the best [mechanical part]. The top response I got was directly copied from a laughably stupid LinkedIn essay. The second response was derived from some marketingslop press release. There was no original insight at all. What I took away from my prompt was that I'd have to do the research and experimentation myself.

Point is, I don't think that LLMs are capable of coming up with terrifyingly novel ways to kill all humans. And this hasn't changed at all over the past five years. Now they're able to trawl LinkedIn posts and browse the web for press releases, is all.

More than that, these models lack independent volition and they have no temporal/spatial sense. It's not clear, from first principles, that they can operate as truly independent agents.
by userbinator | 2025-04-11 10:08:41+00:00
Plastics have gone from niche to absolutely ubiqutous worldwide in ~100 years. Even if it turns out to be totally and completely harmless to humans and every other animal, wouldn't you want to know that for sure?

So have radio waves. There was a lot of paranoia back then, much like with plastics today, and a similar amount of studies showing that exposure to RF radiation causes cancer, but that has mostly died down as people realised the truth.

As time goes on, the harmlessness only proves itself.
by Ukv | 2025-04-11 10:09:07+00:00
> In these circles, false quotes have been repeated as true again and again for years.

Even if people did go on to repeat it as if it were a real quote (can't find evidence of this, from a quick search), I don't feel the fact that not everybody got the satire should turn it into defamation, so long as a reasonable person would recognize it as satire and the intent is humor opposed to deception. Should the fact that The Onion/Clickhole articles and quotes have often been circulated by people believing them to be real result in sentences for their editors?

> A simple “satire” in the article would not have been enough, but it would have had the same effect.

Confused by what you mean here. To my understanding Bendels posted the meme on X/Twitter, not in an article. By "would not have been enough" do you mean that even if it were explicitly labelled as satire, it would've still been defamation?
by lproven | 2025-04-11 10:09:13+00:00
> I still wonder what would have happened had Jean-Louis Gassée been less greedy and Apple acquired BeOs instead of Next.

I'm paraphrasing an old blog post of mine, but...

In today's world, spoiled with excellent development tools, everyone has forgotten that late-1980s and early-to-mid 1990s dev tools were awful: 1970s text-mode tools for writing graphical apps.

Apple acquired NeXT because it needed an OS, but what clinched the deal was the development tools (and the return of Jobs, of course.) NeXT had industry-leading dev tools. Doom was written on NeXTs. The WWW was written on NeXTs.

Apple had OS choices – modernise A/UX, or buy BeOS, or buy NeXT, or get bought and move to Solaris or something – but nobody except NeXT had Objective-C and Interface Builder, or the NeXT/Sun foundation classes, or anything like them.

The meta-irony being that if Apple had adapted A/UX, or failing that, had acquired Be for BeOS, it would be long dead by now, just a fading memory for middle-aged graphical designers. Without the dev tools, they'd never have got all the existing Mac developers on board, and never got all the cool new apps – no matter how snazzy the OS.
by huntertwo | 2025-04-11 10:09:26+00:00
Yes I suppose the question is 1) did it rise to the illegal level of harm (I would say no in the example of the meme) and 2) was it intended to believed (I would also say no here). These would vary country to country here based on precedence and culture.

Defamation is still not a criminal statute in the US - it’s a civil statute. The other things I mentioned are actual crimes that the US government can imprison you for - I actually don’t think your example of the fake video is a jailable offense in the USA without some sort of conspiracy attached to it.
by redczar | 2025-04-11 10:09:41+00:00
As stated I like the phrasing OP used. You are free to use another phrasing. What I’m not going to do is get into a debate on how to precisely define the terms used. One can nitpick any phrasing of any law/regulation. That’s why there are lawyers in every society. But I’m not engaged in a legal discussion at this time. If you don’t like OP’s wording then don’t use it.
by zokier | 2025-04-11 10:10:16+00:00
I don't think interfaces like ASGI/WSGI etc are that similar to FastCGI. The crucial difference is that FastCGI is a protocol, something you need to do IO for and crucially something you need to parse. In contrast ASGI etc by virtue of being in-process and specific to the language can provide an true API. In many ways FastCGI is closer to HTTP than ASGI.
by fredoralive | 2025-04-11 10:11:42+00:00
The Waterloo and City was transferred to London Underground in 1994, as part of the privatisation (or not in this case) of British Rail.

As the only way to get trains on and off the line involves craning them out of the depot[1], they did retain their Network South East livery for about a decade after formally becoming an Underground line though, until repainted at an off line overhaul.

[1] There used to be a lift that could take a carriage at a time to surface tracks, but the Eurostar extension at Waterloo did for that.
by usef- | 2025-04-11 10:12:03+00:00
I was thinking that.

Was FastCGI a child of a world where we had neither good library use ("import net/http"), nor (much) layering in front of the server (balancers / cdns / cloudflare etc). So it made sense to assume a production-level layer on the box itself was always needed?

I remember the vigorous discussions comparing security of Apache vs IIS etc
by lproven | 2025-04-11 10:12:47+00:00
I beg to differ.

I am a techie, I travel a lot, and I've worked for both the 2 biggest enterprise Linux vendors.

Windows boxes are in use in both of them, and Windows laptops are everywhere -- but the second most popular platform after Windows, and the 2nd most popular after Linux inside Linux vendors, is macOS.

It's everywhere.

The partial exception was when I moved to Czechia. A decade ago it was still relatively poor. Few iDevices, few Android phones, lots of Windows Mobile then. Not many Macs except inside big companies.

But that's changed. Now they're everywhere there, too.

MacOS is huge. I see Macs everywhere, far far more than I ever see ChromeBooks in the real world. I think most ChromeBooks are probably in schools.
by DocTomoe | 2025-04-11 10:13:11+00:00
When you get old enough, you realise the cycle turns around and around

A new dev tech shows up. Old devs say: That's not real programming. Real programmers use the old ways. You take all the skill out of it. You'll never learn to do it the "right way". And then, it becomes standard, an no-one wants to go back but a few hobbyists.

It's been this way with switching from assembly to more human-readable languages.

It's been this way with syntax highlighting.

... and with IDEs.

I remember when we scoffed at IntelliSense over the Water Cooler because them kids didn't have to memorise stuff anymore.

I kept cursing at Docker and npm insanity, having colourful languages for people who hid behind abstraction because they did not understand basic functionality.

And today, it is AI. Right now, it divides. Those who love it, those who consider it 'cheating' or 'stealing other people's code'. In reality, it is just another level of abstraction in the development stack. Tomorrow, it'll just be 'the standard way to do things'.

I wonder what comes next.
by ralferoo | 2025-04-11 10:13:52+00:00
I'm surprised that they admitted that their cost to produce the phone in China is $550 and they sell it for $799, while the cost to produce the phone in the US is $650 and they sell it for $2000. That's a 45% markup on one and 207% markup on the other.

Taking just those figures in mind, they shouldn't be at all worried about tariffs - anything more than an 18% tariff, it's cheaper for them to build in the US than China for US customers. Honestly, that's much lower than I expected, especially considering they're even more restrictive in their component sourcing than most companies would need to be because they're catering to a security-focused group.

I guess the real issue is that they don't have any more production capacity in the US, rather than it just being a cost issue.
by immibis | 2025-04-11 10:14:32+00:00
Mastodon is not using ActivityPub. Firstly, the AP specification is so terrible you can't actually implement it practically. Secondly, Mastodon mostly ignores the spec anyway and just does something similar. For instance, AP specifies the use of JSON-LD for documents and Mastodon uses plain JSON, so every other application also uses plain JSON and the spec doesn't matter.

As for the rest: I don't see the problem in people not seeing things they aren't interested in.

The right way to treat the Fediverse is as a collection of completely separate servers with some interoperability features. In this aspect it's more like old internet forums, than like Twitter. Unfortunately this isn't obvious at all until you've used it for a while, and the Twitter interface does make you assume it's like Twitter. I do not suggest Mastodon to people any more - I suggest Kolektiva if they're into politics or chaos.social if they're a hacker.

Also, the whole Internet could do with getting used to accounts becoming more ephemeral again. It used to be that if you moved house, you had to tell everyone you knew your new address and phone number - unless your new house happened to be served by the same central office. On the Internet, you can also have a different account on every site you regularly visit. Two different forums? Two different accounts. SSO is convenient but SSO doesn't mean using one site for everything, just using one site for authentication. I did prototype a "login with mastodon".
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-04-11 10:14:52+00:00
Israel is stealing more and more Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and has no intention of ever giving up or withdrawing from those territories.

Its plan is to either confine the Palestinians into little South-Africa-style Bantustans (sorry, "Emirates," to use the preferred phrase in Israel), or to expel them altogether.

Gaza itself has been sealed off and bombed and invaded over and over again. It's a giant ghetto.

You don't need to look at the school curricula. Just look at what Israelis at all levels are saying, from the soldiers on the ground up all the way up to the Prime Minister and President. The amount of genocidal rhetoric is shocking, especially coming from a country that makes the Holocaust such a central part of its raison d'être.
by golden-gato | 2025-04-11 10:15:03+00:00
I am getting the following error when running the AI analysis: AI analysis received, but failed to parse structured advice. Raw content: "```json {"summary": "The player, LIGMA, demonstrates a high rate of missile usage, firing all 170 missiles by wave 4. Despite destroying a significant number of enemies, including two shield bombs and 23 planes, LIGMA lost a substantial amount of cities and bases, indicating potential issues with defense coverage or target prioritization.", "advice": ["Prioritize city defense. Focus on intercepting missiles and bombs headed directly for the cities, as losing four cities by wave 4 significantly hinders the score potential.", "Increase accuracy for bonus points. With only 11 accuracy bonus hits out of 170 missiles fired, practice aiming closer to the incoming targets to maximize the accuracy bonus and the score multiplier.", "Consider purchasing and using special weapons like the mega bomb or sonic wave, as the click data doesn't reflect any usage of these options which can become invaluable in later waves.", "Improve resource management by not firing more missiles than is needed to destroy any given incoming attacker. The player fired all 170 missiles indicating a poor kill/shots ratio."], "improve target evaluation speed and accuracy."} ```"

Could not parse specific advice due to formatting issues in the AI response content.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-11 10:15:11+00:00
> Second, Rust by now has an extensive tradition of people discussing memory safety invariants, what soundness means, formal models of what is a valid memory access

Rust is still lacking a definitive formal model of "soundness" in unsafe code. I'm not sure why you're suggesting that this is not a valid criticism or remark, it's just a fact.
by re-lre-l | 2025-04-11 10:15:24+00:00
> I was working in Switzerland, refactoring a C++ legacy codebase...

Such a nice place to work, where you can just decide "Let's implement thing A in a completely new stack for us that shows promise" and then, after some time, say, "Ah... this is too hard, bad decision though. Let's try another one"
by Tistron | 2025-04-11 10:15:28+00:00
I would expect people today to be quite a lot worse at mental arithmetic that we used to be before calculators. And worse at memorizing stuff than before writing.

We have tools to help us with that, and maybe it isn't a big loss? And they also bring new arenas and abilities.

And maybe in the future we will be worse at critical thinking (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484224), and maybe it isn't a big loss? It is hard to imagine what new abilities and arenas will emerge. Though I think that critical thinking is a worse loss than memory and mental arithmetic. Though, also, we are probably a lot less good at it than we think we are, generally.
by fabian2k | 2025-04-11 10:15:49+00:00
That decision might be overturned later, I'd also consider it very questionable. It's in a weird space as it was about libel, but based on edited text in a photo like often used for memes. I think that decision is wrong based on what I know about it, it should be clear enough that this is not a direct quote.

Not defending this specific decision, but you can find individual cases like this in the US as well. Overall the laws in Germany are somewhat more restrictive in certain areas, but I don't think that fundamentally affects free speech.