MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pdimitar | 2025-04-06 09:53:39+00:00
Why would "last one wins" be dumbing down the tool, exactly?

You're doing a big assumption that people are averse to reading documentation.

You are likely downvoted because you prefer to make your opponents look irrational so you can easily defeat them.

Tearing down a straw man is not a welcome discussion tactic around here. Maybe that can help you.
by YurgenJurgensen | 2025-04-06 09:54:45+00:00
What matters is solicitation, which is fairly easy to evidence. Running successful entertainment business while pretending to be a consumer advice business sounds pretty hard, since you still can’t take money for product endorsement, you can’t SEO for your real purpose, and you can’t promote your real purpose. And somewhat pointless, as you’re running a paid subscription service either way, so your funny video site would probably get more customers if it could claim to be a funny video site.
by miles | 2025-04-06 09:55:54+00:00
Some of the higher ranking previous discussions:

2017, 441 points, 97 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035

2019, 820 points, 131 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802

2022, 1578 points, 256 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215324

2024, 701 points, 154 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38831219
by pdimitar | 2025-04-06 09:57:02+00:00
I have a feeling you were waiting to say that for a while. :D

Glad to make your day. You are welcome.

Ultimately we all end up reading the manual. I'd still prefer if I didn't have to remember how a certain C stdlib function works vs. what seems intuitive.

But that's a lost cause with a lot of people. They'll happily point out how "intuitive" differs among different groups of people and all that, merrily missing the point on purpose.

Oh well. At least I found out without locking my self out of my servers.
by spwa4 | 2025-04-06 09:58:16+00:00
The fire retardant ... actually does retard the fire, right. A tiny bit of extra toxicity in trade for much less stuff getting burned may be worth it.

If you're looking for some negative on anything, you will find it. Always. The question should be if it's a net positive or not.

In reality people are just looking for something bad, so they can find something that was wrong/against the law, so they can blame them, so they can get money from them.
by cjs_ac | 2025-04-06 09:58:23+00:00
The web is becoming professionalised: if you want to publish user-generated content on the web, you will need to moderate all of that content. The Internet is going the same way as radio: for most people, you'll be tuning in to regulated, commercial services. For enthusiasts, there will be a separate space where you can do whatever you want, but you can't offer laissez-faire services on behalf of the great unwashed. It's a great loss of theoretical freedom, but it'll have no impact on anyone's real life.
by dcminter | 2025-04-06 09:59:57+00:00
Eh, maybe? But English grammar is consensus based. This is arguably bad grammar because people not knowing the cliché of "there there" had trouble understanding the intent, not because it's "wrong" under some hard citeable rules.

Moreover I think you could argue the author is using the phrase as an abstract noun. Consider:

That there's a solidity to it.

That there's a "there" there to it.

The first turns naturally to my ear; the second is a bit forced but works IMO.
by dash2 | 2025-04-06 10:00:11+00:00
You are defining marketing as manipulative. In fact, marketing is just "bringing a product to market". For example, it includes having booths at a trade show. The line between objective information and "puff" is impossible to draw. I googled "strollers" and got:

Joolz strollers with ergonomic design, manoeuvrability, compactness, and storage space. compare and choose your favourite Joolz pushchair model.

Is this manipulation or information?
by wruza | 2025-04-06 10:01:01+00:00
I never managed a fleet. I mean I occasionally manage up to 30 instances, does that count?

Either way, my notion about doing it properly is to have a set of scripts (ansible/terraform?) that rebuild the configuration from templates and rewrite, restart everything. Afaiu, there's no "let's turn that off by rm-ing and later turn it on again by cat<<EOF-ing", cause there's no state database that could track it, unless you rely on [ -e $path ], which feels not too straightforward for e.g. state monitoring.

(I do the same basically, but without ansible. Instead I write a builder script and then paste its output into the root shell. Poor man's ansible, but I'm fine.)

So as I understand it, these dirs are only really useful for manual management, not for fleets where you just re-apply your "provisioning", or what's the proper term, onto your instances, without temporary modifications. When you have a fleet, any state that is not in the "sources" becomes a big problem very quickly. And if you have "sources", there's no problem of turning section output on and off. For example when I need a change, I rebuild my scripts and re-paste them into corresponding instances. This ensures that if I lose any server to crash, hw failure, etc, all I have is to rent another one and right-click a script into its terminal.

So I believe that gp has a point, or at least that I don't get the rationale that replies to gp suggest itt. Feels not that important for automatic management.
by glimshe | 2025-04-06 10:01:25+00:00
I joined MSFT ~25 years ago and worked there for 10 years. It was a great place to work. Everybody (in Redmond) had their offices, great outdoor areas for walking and meeting people, great conference areas, decent and relatively affordable places to live nearby (some within walking distance), some of the best Engineers in the world etc. I don't think there is a company life like MSFT used to have anywhere on Earth nowadays. :(
by relyks | 2025-04-06 10:01:27+00:00
Besides ethernet cables providing more stability to your network connection than WiFi, it isn't mentioned in the article. Not many people know about this: most houses have coaxial cable lined throughout. If your router is located in a different location in the house, you can use the coaxial cable to help create a network. You need two MoCA adapters (coaxial to ethernet) on both sides (one at the router/switch/gateway and another at your computer). Connect it all up… bingo, bango, bongo, and you got stable and fast internet! This is how I have the most stable connection in my house :)
by conaclos | 2025-04-06 10:03:13+00:00
I kinda disagree with the conclusion. Punctuation is important to humans, it makes it more parsable/readable. I just accept that in a multi-line context they are not so useful, because the newline acts like a kind of punctuation. So I could make them optional and provide some recommendations: use them in a single line, and don't use them when a newline follows.
by a3w | 2025-04-06 10:03:25+00:00
Looking at what science tells us about the world, the left seems to be correct, while the right seems to often believe things that violate observations about the world for the sake of doctrine.

Calling facts "playing into the leftists' agenda" is a problem of our shared political compass.

LLMs and humans need to do more work to implement doublethink, i.e. claiming non-truths and actually believing them to fit with a right-wing crowd for the sake of survival in it.
by microtonal | 2025-04-06 10:03:50+00:00
I am very skeptical that it's primarily caused by the focus on Intel CPUs. FreeBSD already fell into obscurity way before RISC-V. And even though they missed the ARM router/appliance boat, Linux already overtook FreeBSD when people were primarily using Linux for x86 servers and (hobbyist) desktops. The Netcraft has confirmed: BSD is dying Slashdot meme was from the late 90ies or early 2000s. Also, if this was the main reason, we would all be using OpenBSD or NetBSD.

IMO it's really a mixture of factors, some I can think of:

- BSD projects were slowed down by the AT&T lawsuit in the early 90ies.

- FreeBSD focused more on expert users, whereas Linux distributions focused on graphical installers and configuration tools early on. Some distributions had graphical installers at the end of the 90ies. So, Linux distributions could onboard people who were looking for a Windows alternative much more quickly.

- BSD had forks very early on (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi). The cost is much higher than multiple Linux distributions, since all BSDs maintain their own kernel and userland.

- The BSDs (except BSDi) were non-profits, whereas many early Linux distributions were by for-profit companies (Red Hat, SUSE, Caldera, TurboLinux). This gave Linux a larger development and marketing budget and it made it easier to start partnerships with IBM, SAP, etc.

- The BSDs projects were organized as cathedrals and more hierarchical, so made it harder for new contributors to step in.

- The BSD projects provided full systems, whereas in Linux distributions would piece together systems. This made Linux development messier, but allowed quicker evolution and made it easier to adapt Linux for different applications.

- The GPL put a lot more pressure on hardware companies to contribute back to the Linux kernel.

Besides that there is probably also a fair amount of randomness involved.
by godelski | 2025-04-06 10:04:01+00:00
There's a 5 minute timer you can effectively guess all permutations in that time. Ignore the timer. The only real limitation is coming from you.

There needs to be some limit like how wordle limits the number of guesses. The timer is good in that it can put pressure in especially considering how simple the game is. The long length means almost everyone has enough time
by halgir | 2025-04-06 10:04:09+00:00
> the definition is clear enough.

It really isn't though. There's so many different forms that we can't reduce it to "I know it when I see it" territory and depend on case-by-case enforcement.

Do we ban outdoor billboards? Product placement? Content marketing? Public relations? Sponsor logos on sports uniforms? Brand logos on retail clothing? Mailing lists?

I do love the idea, but doubt its feasibility. Implementation would have to be meticulous, and I expect the advertising industry would always be one step ahead in an endless race of interpretation. We can still try to curtail the most disruptive forms though, we don't have to destroy all advertising at once to make a positive difference.
by defrost | 2025-04-06 10:05:44+00:00
Is it?

Many countries only publicly release coarse totals, eg: in the UK the 12,000 annual police actions specific to this law are bundled in with ~465,000 other public order offences publicly released and totalled in: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

> beyond taking the BBC's word when it summarizes something

Multiple individuals, media outlets, stats nerds, etc make these requests and publish or blog if discrepencies are seen.

For example, this FOI request was made by The Times .. not the BBC.
by dash2 | 2025-04-06 10:05:45+00:00
Hardly a corner case. It's such an obvious question that the failure to cover it means the author isn't serious.

Knowing what you need is not magic, but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic. Advertising targeting, which people quite reasonably find intrusive, exists because advertisers desperately want to find people who may potentially want to buy their product.
by topspin | 2025-04-06 10:07:47+00:00
I've had to deal with too many Eloi that are in desperate need of learning about the benefits of a solid, wired connection. If this story moves the needle on that while neglecting Ethernet's long history of mediums, it's fine with me.

If any of those are reading this: Your WiFi makes you sound bad in conference calls and video meetings, and people think you're a low status worker that can't afford a good laptop or internet. Hurry up and get a Ethernet thingy.
Show HN: View Raycast Extension by Downloads
by wtoa | 2025-04-06 10:07:58+00:00
When I started using Raycast, I found that it was difficult to discover extensions, so I spent some time this weekend making this site to help you search extensions and have a peek at trending extensions too!

I only have data for the last 2 days so the best I can do is to show trending downloads from the last day / week :)
by mpweiher | 2025-04-06 10:08:37+00:00
> is considered to be supporting Hamas.

No it is not. Even if it almost certainly is. These protests used to run almost daily, and were often allowed to proceed even if actual calls for genocide were included.

And of course you are also wrong on the content: those accusations are largely untrue, and Israel is an absolute leader in avoiding civilian casualties in urban combat, achieving a 1:1 ratio of civilian to combatant deaths, whereas the world average is 10:1. And this despite Hamas's openly stated and obviously carried out policy of creating as many civilian casualties in their own population as possible.

And no, calling for genocide does not become legal if it rhymes.
by makomk | 2025-04-06 10:08:48+00:00
It's certainly not the only evidence of problems at NPR. For example, they managed to basically accuse Trump Jr of lying to Congress in a story that should not have survived basic fact checking: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/npr-issues-correction-after...

That Fox News piece actually understates how big of a screw-up this was. The key quote that supposedly showed Trump Jr claiming his dad's possible real estate deal in Russia had faded away by 2016, the one that was supposedly contradicted by Cohen's court testimony about ongoing negotiations, was in response to questioning about any possible deals other than the one Cohen was involved in - and in particular one specific potential deal with a different group of people. It's not just that it was brought up elsewhere in other answers that NPR missed. Merely looking at the immediate context of that key quote, the most basic thing we should expect of old-fashioned fact checking, should've been enough to flag the problem. The fact those other negotiations had in fact been brought up was literally the whole basis for that line of questioning.
by poorts | 2025-04-06 10:09:04+00:00
There were around 51000 deaths in New York from March 2020 to March 2021. For a population of 8.258 million that gives a rate of one death per day per 59101 people. The largest apartment building I found in NYC is London Terrace with 1700 apartments which would need 35 people per apartment to give 59101 people. Deaths were presumably skewed towards the oldest and sickest, and probably correlated with poverty, so if you stayed in a lower-income apartment building with a lot of old people who were likely close to death, then it could be 1 or 2 ambulances per day to take people away "never to be seen again", but it seems improbable.

I stay in a European country which isn't particularly known for being healthy, and I don't know anyone who died of or even with covid.

I felt that there was some terrible science coming from all directions in the pandemic years, but to me some of the worst propaganda-fu was coming from the government and traditional media.
by lerno | 2025-04-06 10:09:11+00:00
I don't have any particularly strong stance on provenance. But I've yet to see a strong argument for it in C.

There is not much of a guide I'm afraid. I translated some of the raylib examples to C3: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c/tree/master/resources/examples...

But those are straight up conversions of the original C code.

I think any C tutorial on gamedev would work fine to follow in C3, and then one can leverage features of C3 as desired.
by jamesbfb | 2025-04-06 10:13:19+00:00
In my 40s and I’ve recently been diagnosed with inattentive adhd. TFA makes a lot of sense to me given I’m one of the rare people at my company who commutes to the office every day even though we are an in-person optional workplace. Whenever I’ve had to WFH, I’ve struggled massively to gain an initial focus. Although medication has helped tremendously, I still feel much more productive in an office setting.
by pydry | 2025-04-06 10:13:26+00:00
No. You dont. The feedback cadence is then wildly stretched out.

Instead of getting notification that you made a mistake within a few seconds of making it you are told at, say, 4pm, 45 minutes after you raised the PR, 4 hours after you made the mistake and in time for you to maybe fix it tomorrow. Also, if it was a rabbit hole mistake thats a whole lot of wasted work.

With PRs I find reviewers tend to miss more stuff (especially forest-not-trees stuff) because there are usually a lot of changes all going on at the same time and because the mental tax of trying to grasp all of the necessary context is higher.

The pre-coding discussions also do NOT provide the same value because many problems only become apparent after you've started coding. Only correctly anticipated problems are caught at that stage.

Code reviews and pre coding discussions are still good practices and add value of their own (especially because for some issues you do benefit from > 2 sets of eyes), but not as substitutes for pairing.

Pairing is also effective at training juniors and onboarding, but not only.
by defanor | 2025-04-06 10:13:51+00:00
> It's such a wild idea that I've never heard it in the public discourse.

IIRC there is a Dilbert comic strip about that.

> Clickbait [...] would become worthless overnight

Advertisement is not the only incentive. E.g., the Veritasium YouTube channel's host explicitly switched to clickbait, explaining it by his intent to reach a wider audience. Another example is clickbait submission titles on HN, not all of which are for the sake of advertisement (unless you count HN submissions in general as advertisements themselves, of course).

> When I say advertising, I also mean propaganda. Propaganda is advertising for the state

Not necessarily for the state, the usual definition includes furthering of ideas in general. In more oppressive regimes, propaganda of certain ideas is actually banned, as it used to be in even more places ("heresy" and suchlike). Combined with selective enforcement, it is as good as banning all propaganda. It may be a particularly bad example of such a ban, but still an illustration of the dangers around it.

I think a better path towards the world without (or almost without) commercial advertising is not via coercion, but as kaponkotrok mentioned in another comment, via education and public discussion (which may also be called "propaganda"), shifting social norms to make such advertisement less acceptable. People can make advertisements unprofitable if they will choose to: not just by ignoring them (including setting ad blockers), but also by intentionally preferring products not connected to unpleasant and shady tactics, including those beyond advertisement: slave labor and other human rights violations, unsustainable energy sources, global warming, animal cruelty, monopolies, proprietary or bloated software and hardware are some of the common examples. Social norms and such enforcement seem to be less brittle than laws are, and harder to turn into an oppression mechanism.

Although, since I brought up monopolies and other issues, perhaps state agencies may also usefully assist with restriction of advertisement, as they do with those. Social norms and laws are not mutually exclusive, after all.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-06 10:14:17+00:00
I’ve found the template system starts to have shortcomings if you need differences between different classes of systems within your fleet (eg VDIs for data scientists vs nodes in a ML pipeline pool)

Yeah a good templating language will allow you to apply conditionals but honestly, it’s just generally easier to have different files inside a config directory than have to manage all these different use cases in a single monolithic template or multiple different templates in which you need to remember to keep shared components in sync.

At the end of the day, we aren’t talking about solving problems that were impossible before but rather solving problems that were just annoying. It’s more a quality of life improvement than something that couldn’t be otherwise solved with enough time and effort.
by kergonath | 2025-04-06 10:14:26+00:00
> as any other bureaucracy

It is not bureaucracy vs magical efficiency. There is the same issue in any large organisation, even corporations. In practice I don’t think it would be as bad as you suggest. Having an agency focused on providing support instead of sending money to shareholders also limits other kinds of inefficiencies.

> Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.

That is exactly the situation we’re in, where governments are tied and dependent on single providers (be it Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, or others). This solution would create competition opportunities by opening a market, it does not need to be a monopoly.
by user070223 | 2025-04-06 10:14:53+00:00
Never trained a model, but the precision confused me as I've never considered how many bits should be reserved for exponent/mentisa. Has anyone architected a model(somehow) such that it has a free hand at using the give bits / choosing the type, or changed types from layer to layer, I mean surely when training for example vision models the first layers deal with the "big(yet simpler) picture"(light/dark, lines etc) where as the last layers are with the fine details etc.

Even though it may not suitable for (existing) hardware impl, it may be advantageous in other place for example in learning rate speed.
by _paulc | 2025-04-06 10:17:11+00:00
> FreeBSD has committed the original sin of UNIX by deliberately dropping support for all non-Intel architectures, intending to focus on optimising FreeBSD for the Intel ISA and platforms.

FreeBSD supports amd64 and aarch64 as Tier 1 platforms and a number of others (RiscV, PowerPC, Arm7) as Tier 2

https://www.freebsd.org/platforms/
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-06 10:18:15+00:00
> Lane feels firefighters were left in the dark

That kind of thing happens a lot (see “9/11 Syndrome”).

Kind of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.

One of the things about fire, is that it alters chemistry. Perfectly safe materials, can turn into highly toxic gas, when heated. In many cases, this cannot be anticipated, or realistically prevented. There are also firefighting foams and whatnot. I think some of the foams contain fairly significant quantities of questionable chemicals. They are pretty much required, for Li-ion battery fires.

Firemen kinda take the brunt of that. I know a number of retired firefighters, and they all have health issues.
by brazzy | 2025-04-06 10:19:51+00:00
> Importantly, the Golden Record was carefully designed using universal scientific principles—binary notation, hydrogen atom properties, and pulsar maps—ensuring that any intelligent civilization might realistically decode it. The instructions etched onto its cover rely on fundamental concepts universally understandable across the cosmos.

You're describing the Pioneer Plaque, not the Golden Record: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
by MaxBarraclough | 2025-04-06 10:20:01+00:00
You missed one: hire one of the many existing providers of Postgres support services. Postgres have a big list of these providers. [0]

I can't comment on how well they perform in practice compared to the conventional monopolised support model that closed-source software tends to offer - perhaps better, perhaps worse - but at least in principle, the solution is there.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/
by Y444 | 2025-04-06 10:20:24+00:00
Unfortunately, I think ads is the most realistic way to go.

Sponsorships and/or donations would be a nice “beer money” bonus.

Subscriptions are PITA and too much hassle unless you’re doing them via some third party and they won’t bring a good amount of money at the “online daily puzzle in a browser” scale.

There are more exotic ways like licensing your puzzles to other sites, like online newspaper puzzle pages, Puzzmo is going in this direction IIRC.