MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rambambram | 2025-04-26 11:21:47+00:00
I'm on HN for years now and what I slowly came to realize is that people here (maybe more than somewhere else, maybe not) like to spend time and energy explaining how stuff is, like it's still some sort of school test that gives one points for all the correct answers. Thereby easily forgetting what has been and still is, what works, what one can do about stuff in a positive way, what choices people have (instead of constantly pretending there is no choice, or someone else already chose for us), etc.

Even pointing out that people have a choice - with some work, yes, but only a little work - elicits some counter response that basically comes down to: no, you don't have a choice. I don't like that, and it also signals creative laziness.

P.S. Zoom out a little. The open web is also client/server (although peer-to-peer would be nice), that's not the point. We all need some infra, some trust, and a clear rule of law for the internet and the web to work. We just don't need big tech's view of 'social media' (there's nothing social about that) or platforms that present themselves as being an alternative as long as we have the perfect alternative - called the open web - being around for thirty years, battle tested and actively maintained by millions.

P.P.S. This is in reply to you, but read it as a general opinion, it's not a personal attack on anything you said.
by soapdog | 2025-04-26 11:23:33+00:00
Seeing many posts here talking about how their feed reading experience is overwhelming cause it is a firehose of things they might not be interested in. So I wrote a little post about alternative experiences in RSS reading:

https://andregarzia.com/2025/04/rss-doesnt-necessarily-means...

You can have feed readers that provide a calmer UX. My own feed reader, BlogCat, lets you configure how many posts per website you want to see in the reader page and how often to fetch each site (with the default being daily). Without notifications or background fetching, you're in control of how often and when you want to see the posts from a website.
by SalariedSlave | 2025-04-26 11:24:04+00:00
>Some of these students are dishonest. Many aren't. Many genuinely believe the work they submit is their own, that they really did do the work, and that they're learning the languages. It isn't, they didn't, and they aren't.

People are quite poor at this kind of attribution, especially when they're already cognitively overloaded. They forget sources. They mistake others' ideas for their own.

This attitude is common not only among students, in my experience many people behave this way.

I also see some parallels to LLM hallucinations..
by fmajid | 2025-04-26 11:24:18+00:00
No, but if you are doing something like rebuilding a distro's worth of packages from source from scratch, the configure step starts to dominate. I build around 550, and it takes around 6 hours on a single node.

Most checks are common, so what can help is having a shared cache for all configure scripts so if you have 400 packages to rebuild, it doesn't check 400 times if you should use flock or fcntl. This approach is described here: https://jmmv.dev/2022/06/autoconf-caching.html

It doesn't help that autoconf is basically abandonware, with one forlorn maintainer trying to resuscitate it, but creating major regressions with new releases: https://lwn.net/Articles/834682/
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-26 11:24:41+00:00
>> ?- phrase(pal, "racecar") true.

Off the top of my head but I think that should be backticks, not double quotes? So that `racecar` is read as a list of characters? I might try it later.

>> Prolog goes in order, and goes deep. This is notoriously problematic, because it's incomplete.

Yes, because it can get stuck in left-recursive loops. On the upside that makes it fast and light-weight in terms of memory use. Tabled execution with memoization (a.k.a. SLG-Resolution) avoids incompleteness but trades off time for space so you now risk running out of RAM. There's no perfect solution.

Welcome to classical AI. Note the motto over the threshold: "Soundness, completeness, efficiency: choose two".
by literalAardvark | 2025-04-26 11:26:26+00:00
From my reading this is wrong in principle.

Evolution is really slow on average, but locally it moves quite quickly and probably explains the large variation between members of a species.

Add strong selective pressure to that high local speed and you can change a good part of the genotype within a couple of generations. See: animal husbandry. You can breed a new race of dog within 5-10 generations.

Ethics aside we could probably breed people who can sniff out Alzheimer's in less than 250 years.

Our current late reproduction style will very likely influence future generations health at older ages.
by 20after4 | 2025-04-26 11:27:56+00:00
I think the "deletionist" tendency is one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. At least it's the main thing that prevents me from making significant contributions. I say tendency, but maybe it really is more of a crusade. Deletion and rejection definitely seem to be the default "predisposition." I've seen a lot of examples of apparently well meaning contributors being pushed away by the need to establish "notability" for a subject and the expectation that all information must be referenced to a fairly limited number of approved reliable sources. These are norms which have been built over a long period of time so it would be incredibly difficult to change them now.
by pm3003 | 2025-04-26 11:29:15+00:00
The first gear that Bell made was clearly a copy of Eurocopter's, though they claimed otherwise, and because of this they couldn't / didn't want to move on with certification and production. A lot of this can be considered as not being patent infrigement (development and experimentation, prior art claims...).

They slightly modified the gear on the production models. Eurocopter claimed the slightly modified gear is essentially the same (likely true) and thus still infringes on the patent (the court ruled otherwise).

The judge said the new modified gear is okay but ordered the old ones to be destroyed.

A Pyrrhic tactical victory for Eurocopter (kept their patent at great cost) and a strategic defeat (as Bell is essentially still selling their tech).
by pityJuke | 2025-04-26 11:29:32+00:00
Ended up abandoning Fraidycat after it atrophied (a number of the integrations that weren't plain RSS, like YouTube/Twitch, didn't work well, it ended up choking my browser, and then stopped working entirely)... did not know there were so many spiritual successors. Thanks!

Now... if anyone knows of an iOS equivalent, that'd be awesome.
by gnfargbl | 2025-04-26 11:30:29+00:00
I couldn't disagree more! I think the housing cost issue is pure supply and demand, we have a country which doesn't like to permit building and an increasing population due to (legal) immigration.

I will bash Maggie all day, for her refusal to effectively manage industrial decline in Britain, for her boneheaded belief that a top-ranking economy could exist solely on services, and, most of all, for her idiotic squandering of our North Sea oil wealth. But, Right to Buy was a rare hit for me. I see it as having been a forward-looking policy which aimed to reward people for work -- play the game, and you too can have a tangible slice of society in the form of your own home to possess and care for as you wish. The problem is that we didn't replace the social housing lost to RtB.
by motorest | 2025-04-26 11:31:07+00:00
> Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers.

I think the problem is more nuanced than that. The US was effectively "the world's managers", in the sense that their economic might, entrepreneur culture, and push for globalization resulted in a corporate structure where the ownership and executive levels were US whereas non-critical business domains reflected the local workforce, whether it was the US or not.

This setup worked great while the US dominated the world's economy and influenced their allies and trading partners to actively engage in globalization.

Now that Trump is pushing for isolationism, of course things change.
by joeevans1000 | 2025-04-26 11:31:41+00:00
Really interesting to think about what would constitute commercial use in this day and age. If someone makes the track and puts it on YouTube and there happens to be ads… apparently 51% has to go to Moby. it is cool that anyone could just download and go. But I wonder if a lot of bedroom producers are just going to accept the terms without actually reading them, and not realize, based on the introductory video, that they have to do a profit share if they monetize in anyway. I do think he should've mentioned the profit share in his video.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-26 11:32:01+00:00
Patent litigation in China is mostly just a ruse designed for Western consumption. Any awards are limited by law to paltry amounts.

If China really wanted American style patent dysfunction, they would be mimicking courts in Texas, not CA.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/why-patent-troll...
by resters | 2025-04-26 11:32:35+00:00
China’s approach to funding BYD is meant to replace much of the capital it might raise in freer markets, providing subsidies, tax breaks, and preferential policies to offset limited access to liquid equity and debt markets.

This support, totaling $10-12 billion from 2018-2022 plus in-kind benefits, mirrors the role of U.S. automakers’ $160-220 billion in public market raises and $50-100 billion in private capital, but with less financial risk for BYD due to state backing.

I think what people are missing is that EVs can be dramatically simpler to manufacture than internal combustion vehicles. This leverages manufacturing advantages and so with or without subsidies, China has big advantages due to its advancements in manufacturing tech.

Recall when China started making hoverboards for a fraction of the price of a Segway? Making EVs at scale required largely the same manufacturing pipeline.

It is the foresight of China’s industrial policy, not the amount of subsidy that has created the manufacturing powerhouse China has become.

US attempts are crude (sledgehammer) methods that leave the market far less free with mostly downside for everyone and no industrial policy goals, only domestic incumbents being protected from reality.
by elric | 2025-04-26 11:32:42+00:00
> Screening for this disorder is simple: use a thermal camera and compare testicular temperature sitting up (or standing) versus lying down, in each case waiting five minutes or so for temperatures to equilibrate, and taping the penis up so that it does not affect the measurement.

Interesting. I wonder how many how many other issues we could screen for using such simple, low cost tools. Some scales can already detect reduced blood flow in the feet (which can be a sign of all sorts of nastiness).
by sethammons | 2025-04-26 11:33:52+00:00
Instead of statements, I favor questions. Instead of "I, me, you, etc,", I favor communal "we, the code, the team." Be specific when possible. I try to focus on what should be done vs what shouldn't be done.

"Why did you not handle $situation" -> "how does this code handle $situation?"

"You shouldn't do $thing" -> "$thing has sharp edges, see $link-to-more-info. The general approach used in the code base is to $alternative."
by Neku42 | 2025-04-26 11:33:54+00:00
Programming in D after C++ is like the opposite of death by 1000 cuts - its just a constant stream of finding nice little things that simplify your life or avoid footguns. You become accustomed to all the niceties very fast and its hard to justify going back haha.

D is by no means perfect (and over the years it has accumulated lots of warts) but if you know what you are doing it enables amazing productivity and almost never gets in your way. If you have an idea about solving a problem in a particular way there's almost always a path available to do just that without running into "computer says no" situations (stares at Go).
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-26 11:34:38+00:00
Yah, well, let me reframe it then. It is insane what we have lost by that war.

And by that I'm not meaning the countries which have lost that war, but the world as a whole.

Because that established certain economic realities. Which led to bland architecture and interior design. Shaping miserable cities.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau with much of what is normal and contemporary now.

Let that sink in, and ask yourself in which environment you'd rather live in?

Excessive mass production of goods because of retooling of the now useless war machinery/factories.

Shism between Capitalism and Socialism/Communism. Propaganda.

Leading to the Cold War and the real rise of the Military Industrial Complex.

Car culture. Consumerism. Environmental destruction. More Propaganda.

Reinforcing of economical realities and the ways https://thecorporation.com HAS TO work, because otherwise it faces failure.

Leading to new oligarchies, overlords, corruption of weakened governments, destruction of the middle class, and so on...

More propaganda?
by lanyard-textile | 2025-04-26 11:34:56+00:00
You have a very insightful comment here — one small caveat however: it’s the crowd that is biased towards criticism, not the forum structure.

And this just made me realize why I don’t like HN very much. We live in a bizarre state of mind here with a common interest of creation and furtherance, but simultaneously inside the belly of the beast, it is a forum of unconditional criticism.

It’s in good faith obviously. People see an idea and critique it to the edge of existence with the desire help or further an idea; but it becomes a tick/tock that pulls the original idea apart beyond recognition.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything productive come out of the comments on HN, ever. It’s just a slew of people who say you can always do better after taking a long look at your idea, assuming your intended goal is perfection.

The irony is present because of the poster. It is explained by the contents of the post, not by the thread order in which it resides.

:) This is nice closure for engaging less though, sincerely. I see I’ve fallen victim to this mindset with this very comment, in its own irony.
by arrowsmith | 2025-04-26 11:39:59+00:00
If you want to support your child at university in the UK, there's a particular band of middle-class income where you get the worst of both worlds. You make too much to get certain kinds of government support, but you don't make enough that you can comfortably make up the difference.

If you want to put multiple children through uni then it can get very burdensome.

One of many ways in which our system is regressive.
by rascul | 2025-04-26 11:40:16+00:00
The Snopes article confirms the comment you're replying to. The sentence you left out, before your quote:

> The University of Pennsylvania considers Musk to be a graduate of both the economics department and the physics department.

And right above that, from the University of Pennsylvania:

> Elon Musk earned a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in economics (concentrations: finance and entrepreneurial management) from the University of Pennsylvania. The degrees were awarded on May 19, 1997.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-26 11:40:30+00:00
>there are only 2 things you can't do with the music here; use it to advertise right wing politics or causes, or use it to promote meat, dairy, or other animal products. click here to view the full terms.

I'm very liberal, but this is bizarre. Apart of a society is doing business with people who don't 100% agree with you.

And Bob's Burritos can't run an ad with it because they aren't a vegan restaurant ?

I'm lumped in with the Republicans because I like burgers and pizza? Is that where the culture war is at?
by seanhunter | 2025-04-26 11:41:48+00:00
What I find really strange about this is I use AI a lot as a “smart friend” to work through explanations of things I find difficult etc and I am currently preparing for some exams so I will often give the AI a document and ask for some supporting resources to take the subject further and it almost always produces something that is plausibly close to a real thing but wrong in specifics. As in when you ask for a reference it is almost invariably a hallucination. So it just amazes me that anyone would just stick that in a brief and ship it without checking it even more than they would check the work of a human underling (which they should obviously also check for something this important).

For example, yesterday I got a list of some study resources for abstract algebra. Claude referred me to a series by Benedict Gross (Which is excellent btw). It gave me a line to harvard’s website but it was a 404 and it was only with further searching that I found the real thing. It also suggested a youtube playlist by Socratica (again this exists but the url was wrong) and one by Michael Penn (same deal).

Literally every reference was almost right but actually wrong. How does anyone have the confidence to ship a legal brief that an AI produced without checking it thoroughly?
by int_19h | 2025-04-26 11:42:44+00:00
USSR practiced a milder form of Holocaust denial by downplaying the fact that victims were killed because they were Jews. A typical manifestation of that was various monuments to Holocaust victims, the signs of which referred to them strictly as "Soviet citizens" without any mention of their ethnicity.

https://www.blavatnikarchive.org/story/forgotten-remembered
by eastbound | 2025-04-26 11:42:52+00:00
> Many people don't seem to care about any evidence or sources. They blindly follow whatever lies that their leaders say.

I’m one of those people you complain about. When I did deep research about DEI, I presented evidence and sources to people like you, including judges that I knew in my private life.

It seems you didn’t care, to a point that I had in my hand a document printed from a department of justice’s own website (about mothers’ own violence on their children, which is as high as men’s given the scope you decide to choose) and the person who in his public life is a judge, didn’t even bother discussing the thesis and just told me: “This document is false. You changed the figures before printing the document”.

You may say that Trump is bad for dismantling your administration, but you guys don’t care an inch about truth, evidence, sources, honesty, bad faith, or even for the number of children who are beaten to death by their mothers.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-04-26 11:44:57+00:00
“Competition is for losers” - A talk from Peter Thiel hosted by Y combinator (https://youtu.be/3Fx5Q8xGU8k?si=3anUMopHSJ4nKk2R)

Timestamp 13:50: “If you’re a startup, and you want to get to a monopoly, start with a really small market and you take over that whole market and then you find ways to expand that market in concentric circles”

Last I checked Zuckerberg is doing precisely what Thiel taught him to and has done it with preternatural skill.

This is the standard for how you’re expected to act as a technology “leader” - which the majority of VC backed unicorn goal founders (like every FAANG founder) have been executing since day zero.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-26 11:45:24+00:00
It's not like there are many lawyers left who are willing to represent them. Either because they have behaved so utterly vile like Alex Jones, the case is so clear cut due to their own behavior that there is zero chance of achieving more than a token reduction in sentence (while risking the ire of the clueless fanbase for a "bad defense job") like in this case, or because they have a history of not paying their bills like Trump.

That leaves only those as lawyers who already have zero reputation left to lose, want to make a name for themselves in the far-right scene, who are members of the cult as well, and those who think they can milk an already dead/insolvent horse.
by sethammons | 2025-04-26 11:45:40+00:00
> In order to “win,” someone else needs to “lose.”

Only in zero sum. I don't think many things are really zero sum. The reason why both parties say thank you in a financial transaction is because the first party values the thing more than the money and the other party values the money more than the thing. Win-win.

I prefer winning as a team. I also like significantly contributing to that, but never at someone else's expense. I am the first to say "we did this" vs "i did this."
by debugnik | 2025-04-26 11:45:49+00:00
Verlet integration became the go-to method for particle effects and soft surfaces back when people wrote their own game engines, mostly thanks to the paper documenting its implementation for the first Hitman game [1]. In fact, I'd say it got cargo-culted by game devs for that purpose and that purpose only, despite it being a general method and competing with others.

[1]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15462-s13/www/l...
by technothrasher | 2025-04-26 11:45:57+00:00
Yes, you're absolutely right. I was pushing it on purpose to see if there were any guard rails. I didn't really fault it for doing what it did, and wasn't even surprised. But it did illustrate the difference between it and a human DM, as you say, or a programmed text adventure (which can often be frustrating in the other, artificially constrained, direction). It actually lead to some really bizarre and enjoyable stream of consciousness type output when I pushed it even farther, and ended up almost trippy.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-26 11:46:15+00:00
All AI will do is further divide the capable from the imposters.

Engineers measure things. It doesn’t matter whether you are producing software, a bridge, a new material, whatever. Engineers measure things. Most software developers cannot measure things. AI cannot measure software either.

So, if you are a software developer that does measure things your skills are not available for outsource to AI. There is nothing to atrophy.

That said, if I were a business owner I would hire super smart QAs at a plus 20-50% market rate instead of hiring developers. I would still hire developers, but just far fewer of them. Selection of developers would become super simple: writing skills in natural language (essay), performance evaluation, basic code literacy. If a developer can do those they are probably smart enough to figure out what you need. For everything else there is AI and your staff of QAs.
by mariusor | 2025-04-26 11:47:51+00:00
For game development? I imagine having to use only structs but not classes would be something that forces a "non idiomatic D" experience. Dynamic arrays sound like something that's very useful for a game. I don't know, there are plenty of features that are incompatible with better C that makes D, D. Generally speaking, garbage collection would be the biggest in my opinion.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-26 11:48:34+00:00
Failing or not, it still has an ongoing obligation to its enrollees. A kid attending the school doesn't really care if the school is meeting its particular metric goals. That kid is still upset that their school is closing and their education and social life is disrupted.

I also don't think that "the school was likely a failure" is a claim we can make in the modern world. Zuck (and other tech CEOs) is/are very clearly fleeing visible commitment to diversity initiatives.

"We will give out a bunch of cash to people who no longer have a school" is better than nothing, but absolutely nothing mandates that this happen the next time.
by barry-cotter | 2025-04-26 11:48:50+00:00
Right to Buy does not explain why the same trend is visible all over the Anglosphere, from Dublin, Ireland, to Wellington, New Zealand, to Sydney, Australia, to Vancouver, Canada.

The people don’t want housing built near them and the politicians listened. Lower supply than demand for decades leads to steadily rising prices. If you want to see the alternative look to Tokyo, Austin or Seattle. Build so much housing that the returns on investment are low and people can afford housing.