MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duskwuff | 2025-04-05 19:54:18+00:00
There's a system for describing that - the "Game Cruelty Scale": https://www.ifwiki.org/Cruelty_scale

A lot of early adventure games were Cruel - requiring the user to replay the game over and over because they got something wrong was a cheap way to extend play time without having to add more content. Thankfully, most modern developers have realized that players hate having to do that.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-05 19:55:04+00:00
Just from the headline alone: oh please dear god yes.

The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages.

While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we cannot withdraw from even with ad and script blockers, because so much of society is built upon the advertising sector that it’s impossible to fully escape them. People like the OP and us are mocked for moves to block billboards in space as being “alarmist” or out of touch, yet driving along any highway in the USA will bombard you with ads on billboards, on busses, on rideshares, on overly-large signs with glowing placards, in radio and television, on streaming providers who raise our rates on what used to be ad-free packages.

Advertising is cancer, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not. Let’s get rid of it.
by vessenes | 2025-04-05 19:55:12+00:00
It’s going to take a while to see how good this window is for real use; they’ve used a couple new ideas to get to 10M token context. Right now the only really good long token model out there is Gemini Pro - and its effectiveness does start dropping maybe in the 200k token range. I imagine insiders at GOOG have access to more than the published 1M token range there.

It will be fun to see what we get here, but I have no doubt the extra tokens will be useful - lots of use cases can do almost as well with summary-level accuracy memory.
by kelnos | 2025-04-05 19:55:24+00:00
I've been saying this for years. It would be great to make advertising illegal.

Advertising is just psychological manipulation. Any argument that there's "good" advertising that respects the target and is merely informative... well, maybe there is, but it's overshadowed by the other 99.9% of the garbage.

Implementing this feels impossible, though. There would be disagreement as to what constitutes an ad. I disagree with the author that advertising isn't an exercise of free speech; I think that would be a huge roadblock in any country that enshrines free speech rights.

But man, that would be great.
by thinkharderdev | 2025-04-05 19:55:29+00:00
I think the answer is obvious, no? Because there may be products that can make your life better but you don't know about them. It's a bit like asking "why would you ever want a medical treatment you didn't know existed?" Because I, not being a doctor, don't know of the existence of most medical treatments but some may be able to cure diseases or other ailments I have.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-05 19:55:36+00:00
Scout outperforms llama 3.1 405b and Gemini Flash 2.0 lite and it's MoE so as fast as a 17B model. That's pretty crazy.

It means you can run it on a high-ram apple silicon and it's going to be insanely fast on groq (thousands of tokens per second). Time to first token will bottleneck the generation.
by davidwritesbugs | 2025-04-05 19:56:20+00:00
It's stunning to think how well these missions have done and what we've learnt. I'd love to see new missions aimed at much greater longevity with more modern instruments. I wonder how long one could make the mission? 100 years? 200? Would new generators reduce the power loss to less than 4W/year, or would it just need more/much bigger ones?
by gameman144 | 2025-04-05 19:56:34+00:00
Let me give you an example: I don't mind raking leaves, but I hate the step where you have to use the rake in one hand and your hand in the other to pick them up, spilling leaves on the trail to the bin.

My wife saw an ad for "rake hands" -- I had never thought that a solution to my gripe would exist, but for twenty bucks a significant source of friction in my yard work is gone, and I would have never even thought to look for such a solution.
by lukev | 2025-04-05 19:56:51+00:00
I think a market without advertising is sufficiently "alternative reality" that it's difficult to say what it would look like. The giant incumbents are only giant incumbents because of ads to start with.

In a world without advertising, our entire cultural approach to consumption would necessarily be different. Maybe it would be as you say. But, maybe we'd be more thoughtful and value-driven. Maybe objects would be created to last longer, and less driven by a constant sales cycle. Maybe craftsmanship would still be a valued aspect of everyday goods.
by ndr | 2025-04-05 19:56:58+00:00
Almost every single time speech is limited someone finds a way to weaponize that limitation.

In most jurisdictions there are, at times weaponized, limitations, and that's the tradeoff those jurisdiction landed on.

I don't see how this proposed limitation could produce acceptable weaponizations.

Just think for a second how outlandish these would sound with such limitation in place:

- The ban on "persuasive content" is used to shut down political dissent labeled as "unwanted influence."

- Independent journalists are silenced when their reporting is categorized as "promotional advertising."

- Fundraising for humanitarian causes is outlawed as "solicitation advertising."

- Religious discussions are prohibited as "advertising spiritual beliefs" or "donation to the organized religion."

- Medical awareness campaigns are shut down as "advertising health concerns."

- Environmental activism is criminalized as "advertising eco-agendas."

There would be just no end of these.
by hbogert | 2025-04-05 19:58:22+00:00
this was after 5 years

It was so significant that one of the 2 strings, 6 panels each, simply shut off especially during peak hours because the inverter's minimal input voltage wasn't met (during peak voltage usually drops due to negative heat coefficient). 1 simply was broken and was bypassed by the.. bypass diodes i guess. And another was at a third. But again, the lower voltage was a much bigger problem than the input.

problem is, you can only measure this very well under load. So taking your multi meter to the place of sale might not say that much. `It might though for the really broken ones.
by fleek | 2025-04-05 19:59:12+00:00
I have spent years of my working life interacting almost solely through text and email, so this is believable to me.

If you live and work at home alone and don't order out food or socialize it is entirely possible to go days without speaking a word.

I used to spend entire summers alone as a child walking the forest in my backyard with my dog. I would speak to my parents at dinner but most of my world was quiet.

Speaking in person was very difficult for me as college student and something that I know I will never master because of the lack of verbal communication in my youth.

It's obviously not super common, but it is relatable to me that some people do live this way.
by vessenes | 2025-04-05 19:59:14+00:00
Nah, it’s been true from the beginning vis-a-vis US political science theory. That is, if you deliver something like https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/quiz/political-typology... To models from GPT-3 on you get highly “liberal” per Pew’s designations.

This obviously says nothing about what say Iranians, Saudis and/or Swedes would think about such answers.
by tinthedev | 2025-04-05 19:59:21+00:00
Hah, I was about to criticise the text for far too lightly conflating markup and punctuation, just to see the afterword.

I actually do think the author has a point, in that must solutions today are inelegant, I also don't think this is a problem which has a real elegant solution. Where to draw the line? Why not encode fonts into the standard too, if we're doing bold? Etc.

I'm still mostly in favour of keeping everything markdown (in my own writing), however much it pollutes the "purity" of text.
by watwut | 2025-04-05 19:59:22+00:00
Who will be dumb enough to believe American security promises anymore? America won't defend anyone no matter what they promiss.

If they wanted to sell defense, threatening annexation of countries they are supposed to have current defensive arrangement with is inconsistent with that. Allying yourself with Russia is inconsistent with that too.

And above all, an attempt to use past help as a reason to make the other country your colony for materials extractions while trying to sell their parts to Russia ... makes you untrustworthy.

Greenland is not threatened by China right now, they are threatened by America.
by Henchman21 | 2025-04-05 19:59:27+00:00
This is precisely the sort of statement that derails the discussion and makes it impossible to even have. I imagine there’s a name for this sort of thing, perhaps some exquisitely long German word?

So lets do this: ban all ads in print, video, and in-public. Make the fine so high that you’re going to have to declare bankruptcy and close up shop. Or just straight up revoke corporate charters. There’s your line. I’m happy to start here and negotiate backwards. But this needs to be in effect while we work it out. Advertising is killing us. I don’t need or want myself or my family constantly assaulted by ads.

Finally, to be frank I find advertisements a sibling of propaganda. I don’t want either.
by echoangle | 2025-04-05 19:59:42+00:00
Because they could improve your life. To come up with good examples, one would have to know more about your preferences.

But imagine there's an event (party, fair, game jam) and the only way to know it's happening is to specifically search for it, there are no posters or advertisements online. Don't you think that some people that would have wanted to go would miss it because they never even noticed that there was an event?
by Viliam1234 | 2025-04-05 20:00:14+00:00
Why did I have to scroll down so far to see the correct answer?

"You should understand the reason why the rule exists, so that you can decide when to follow it" -- yeah, then why is the reason not explained in the book containing the rules, including an explicit note that if the situation does not match the example, you are allowed to ignore the rule?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-05 20:00:41+00:00
Even if they did it would take a tour de force to make reality. The whole iOS development stack very heavily depends on macOS — Xcode is written in Objective-C/Swift + AppKit for example and the iOS Simulator just runs the iOS userland in a phone frame and lets macOS furnish the Darwin half.

Practically speaking, they’d at minimum have to beef up the internal Yellow Box descendant they’d been previously using to make Safari and iTunes run on Windows (essentially porting large chunks of macOS to Windows) to be able to support Xcode, or following the direction of their more recent iCloud, Music, and TV apps write a WinUI-based version of Xcode for Windows paired with an all new iOS Emulator from scratch.

It’d be a huge investment with returns that are unclear at best.
by jasode | 2025-04-05 20:01:10+00:00
>I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is [...]

The discussion got muddied because in this subthread, it morphed from "What if we made _all_ advertising illegal?" (original article's exact words) ... to gp's (imiric) less restrictive example of "acceptable" advertising such as "product catalogs".

So when the person crafting a reply is using the article author's absolutist position of no ads, the distinction doesn't matter.
by varispeed | 2025-04-05 20:02:49+00:00
Yes, many countries have rules affecting contractors, but the UK's IR35 is unusually aggressive and damaging. It wasn't designed to stop "abuse" - it was designed to limit economic independence for individuals running small service - based businesses.

The idea that "too much working freedom" is unsustainable in high-tax countries reflects a deeply top-down, corporatist mindset. It assumes that ordinary people being in control of how they work is somehow a problem to be fixed - especially if they start competing with entrenched players.

In reality, IR35 wasn't about tax fairness. It was a response to small businesses becoming too competitive - delivering the same services as large consultancies, but with more agility and less overhead. The legislation didn't level the playing field - it tilted it to protect big corporations from small rivals, using misleading narratives to justify it.

Other countries may have similar pressures, but few have responded by attacking independent economic agency as directly as the UK has.
by gameman144 | 2025-04-05 20:03:36+00:00
This feels very similar in my mind to blanket concepts like "let's ban lobbying". There are certainly specific modes or practices in lobbying that are damaging to society, but lobbying itself (specifically, informing lawmakers about your specific perspective and desires) is a valid and desirable function.

Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.

In both cases, it seems totally fine to have strict guardrails about what kinds of practices we deem not okay (e.g. banning advertising to children, or banning physical ads larger than some size or in some locations), but the extreme take of the article felt like it intentionally left no room for nuance.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-05 20:03:46+00:00
My mother in laws Jetta she got brand new a few years ago needs an engine after something like 10 years, both mechanical and electrical. Dies randomly like something electrical. Consumes a quart of oil every few hundred miles and getting worse. This thing was driven regularly but lightly (several times per week but few miles) by a little old lady who took it right to the dealer for any little thing. Oil changes and other maintainance strictly and religeously on schedule and performed by the dealer. The quote for the engine was ridiculous too but I don't remember what it was exactly because I only heard 2nd hand and I wasn't taking notes in prep for a post like this. But they are getting another car rather than fix this one. The rest of the car is in excellent condition, so it's not like some beater, yet it's still not worth doing the engine.

You can see right through my 97 4runner from all the rust and it's running and working fine. Does not drink oil. I neglect the piss out of it. I haven't changed the oil filter in probably 3 years, just add a new quart once or twice a year, probably 5 to 10k miles. It has needed repairs. I put a new starter in a few years ago. Pulled the injectors and had them rebuilt a couple years ago (basically they just clean them and put new screens and o-rings on them). couple hundred bucks each time.

Anecdata, sure. All anyone has is their own experiance.

I think VW are unreliable and expensive to repair and nice looking.
by gcp123 | 2025-04-05 20:04:17+00:00
I've been following Voyager since the late 70s when my dad (who worked at Ames) would bring home printouts of the Jupiter images. This interview captures something profound about these missions that non-space folks often miss.

The most striking part isn't the technical achievement of keeping 1970s hardware alive for half a century. It's the human infrastructure behind it - the institutional knowledge passed through generations of engineers like some ancient priesthood maintaining a temple.

Think about it: We're teaching 2020s engineers to understand machine code written before MS-DOS existed, working with 50 year old documentation on yellowing paper, and bringing retirees back to decipher systems they built when Nixon was president.

Our space exploration legacy is being maintained by the engineering equivalent of oral history. This is why we need consistent funding for these long-term missions - the value isn't just in the data, but in maintaining the unbroken chain of knowledge transfer that makes missions like this possible.

The sticky notes on diagrams trying to revive a silent probe 15 billion miles away just broke me. This is humanity at its finest.
by WillPostForFood | 2025-04-05 20:04:56+00:00
There are scores of grocery chains in the US, not 5. There are thousands of independent grocery stores. And literally hundreds of salt options, even at Kroger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_supermarket_chains_in_...

https://www.kroger.com/search?query=salt&searchType=default_...
by rthnbgrredf | 2025-04-05 20:05:07+00:00
I think something around those lines:

Write a comprehensive technical blog post targeting small and medium-sized businesses that use Hetzner Cloud and are evaluating lightweight Kubernetes alternatives. Compare and analyze the following solutions: k3s, MicroK8s, Docker Swarm, and Minikube.

Structure:

Start with a title and abstract introducing the comparative scope.

Provide sections such as:

Architectural Requirements, Deployment & Lifecycle, Management, Cost Analysis, Security & Compliance, Developer Experience, Strategic Recommendations and end with a clear conclusion and deployment advice.

Style:

Technical but accessible to DevOps engineers or small startup CTOs.

Use citation-style references for data (e.g., [1], [2], etc.).

Incorporate code examples (Terraform, Helm, CLI snippets).

Use tables for cost comparisons or benchmarks where appropriate.

Mention open-source tools specific to Hetzner (e.g., hetzner-k3s, hcloud Terraform provider).

Tone:

Professional, analytical, and informative. No marketing fluff.
by em3rgent0rdr | 2025-04-05 20:05:22+00:00
Yes, but the RPi is not yet quite a standard desktop/labtop workstation. And it would be nice if the RPi exposed its SPI, I2C, and UARTs over a standard mini connector like JST-SH connectors to ease plugging in peripherals (like is done with Stemma QT, Qwiic and Grove).
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-05 20:06:11+00:00
Advertising is a broad thing, which may include:

- Job offers

- Jobseeking

- Dating

- Public service announcements

- Word-of-mouth

- Sponsoring

- Political campaigns

- Fundraisers

- Endorsements

- Recommendations

And many others

If you ban all forms of advertising, society will grind to a halt, even before considering free speech. How can a business be successful if no one knows that it exists? Advertising connects people who need something to people who provide it. It absolutely essential to society and in a sense, it predates humans, if we consider mating as a form of advertising, like peacocks using their tails as some kind of a biological billboard.

I understand what the author means, he is annoyed by ad breaks, banners, and tracking, we all are, and he would like to see less of them, we all do, except whoever makes money over these banners that is.

The author suggests banning paid-for advertisement. But how far will it go? For example, you want to print flyers to promote your business. Is it illegal for the print shop to print your flyers, as they are making money on advertising. Classified ads will become illegal too, forget about craigslist and the likes.

It kinds of remind me of some "abolitionist" laws on prostitution that some countries have. Prostitution is legal, based on the idea that people own their bodies and people have the right to have sex, but everything surrounding prostitution is not, including advertising and pimping. The definition for pimping can go far, for example renting a room to a prostitute can be considered pimping. The idea is essentially to make prostitution illegal without writing it explicitly. A blanket ban on advertising will do that, but for all businesses.

As always, for every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple and wrong.
by gzer0 | 2025-04-05 20:06:46+00:00
Every time this topic comes up on HN, I always like to remind readers about the following:

One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written:

This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

I get chills every time I think about this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
by hughdbrown | 2025-04-05 20:07:26+00:00
Odd. When I look at it, the first item is my own suggestion for debugging:

> In my experience, the most pernicious temptation is to take the buggy, non-working code you have now and to try to modify it with "fixes" until the code works. In my experience, you often cannot get broken code to become working code because there are too many possible changes to make. In my view, it is much easier to break working code than it is to fix broken code.
by noworriesnate | 2025-04-05 20:08:13+00:00
There’s a strong tendency to have a bias towards the status quo because we’re afraid of things being worse. And that bias can make us afraid of even trying to change things for the better.

All of the problems you listed can be prevented from becoming endemic by having clear definitions in the law and generally reasonable judges. But if our judges are generally unreasonable, we are screwed either way. So what’s the downside to setting up a clear law against advertising?
by gcp123 | 2025-04-05 20:08:13+00:00
I built something similar a few years ago, but using a Pi instead of an Arduino. Reading through the poster's calculations brought back memories of debugging my own orbital mechanics code at 2am while questioning all my life choices.

What impresses me most here isn't just the technical achievement, but how the project transforms abstract data into physical movement. We've become so accustomed to viewing everything through screens that there's something deeply satisfying about a physical object that silently points to a spacecraft traveling 28,000 km/h overhead with humans inside.

The mathematical transformation from TLE to actual motor positioning is non-trivial - converting between reference frames always seems straightforward on paper until you're debugging at 3am wondering why your arrow is pointing at the ground. I appreciate that they shared actual code rather than glossing over the hard parts.

For anyone wanting to build this: from my experience, the hardest part is actually the mechanical design. Getting smooth movement without backlash in consumer-grade steppers and servos takes patience. The 28BYJ-48 is a good budget choice but has noticeable "slop" in its gearing, which can make precise pointing challenging.

This reminds me of those old mechanical orreries that modeled the solar system. There's something profoundly human about building machines that help us comprehend the cosmos.
by eesmith | 2025-04-05 20:09:00+00:00
I'm one of those urban people with no interactions with wolves, which statistically means I agree with you.

Ranchers, however, are not the only ones against wolf reintroduction. Hunters want to shoot elk or deer, and see wolves as a threat to game species. Rural land owners don't want the government telling them what they can or cannot do on their own land (ie, shoot wolves). Some think it's a waste of money, for something which isn't that important.

If there were a tropic cascade as described, fewer people would think it's not worth it.