MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apercu | 2025-04-22 14:14:42+00:00
The US government has seemingly been adversarial to their citizens for a long time. Not just in this, but in extremely onerous and expensive demands, like requiring expatriates to file US taxes - that alone cost me nearly $15,000 over 18 years in tax preparation fees (I'm self-employed).

Further, the FBAR reporting requirements. I have retirement money in Canada that makes no financial sense to divest yet, and I spent 5-6 hours filing an FBAR this year because the online form doesn't support OSX at all, and I simply could not get an Adobe Acrobat Reader to install on Apple silicon, so I had to rebuild a crappy Dell laptop in order to meet my legal requirements.

Now, I get requiring some sort of reporting requirements to stop tax evasion and the like, but the tax filing requirement is not based on anything like net worth, but rather if you are a US citizen you must file (US is one of I think 2 countries in the world with this requirement). And the FBAR requirement is anything up to or over $10k in a foreign bank.

For real?

If I sound like I am complaining, why don't you walk a mile in my moccasins.

#Edit - fixing an autocorrect typo.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-22 14:14:47+00:00
> The problem is that in 1931, say, it wasn't obvious that Hitler was actually going to become what he became

1923 was the Beer Hall putsch. It was clear to those who knew what they were looking at and didn't agree with the goals.

In 2016 people predicted Trump wouldn't leave office peacefully, and they turned out to be right. But people said "no your p(doom) is too high, you're deranged." But they were not calculating p(doom) they were calculating p(doom | narcissistic psychopath). The posterior probability skyrockets when you factor in the person has the same personality disorder in leaders that has spelled doom countless times throughout history.

Hitler wasn't the first Hitler, people had seen his type before, and we will continue to see his type in the future. Know the signs, they're not hard to spot if you know what to look for. Pretty much if someone's main complaint is "those people" then you have a good idea what they're all about.

When they start calling "those people" murderers, drug dealers, rapists, terrorists, gang members, then it's a foregone conclusion what they're all about. Hitler told Germans who he was in 1920 when he started giving public speeches against Jews. Trump told us who he was in 2016 (and arguably for decades before). They had no excuses then, and we have no excuses this time. We see it coming.
by tacticalturtle | 2025-04-22 14:15:03+00:00
In my state (Massachusetts) community college is in fact free.

In other states, for example Texas, it’s a little over $3000 a year on average for in state:

https://www.communitycollegereview.com/tuition-stats/texas#:...

That’s much cheaper than the tens of thousands for a public 4 year university.

And we should point out that for trades, you are getting paid in an apprenticeship. That’s better than cheap or free.
by Nevermark | 2025-04-22 14:15:09+00:00
Imagine that at some small distance, space itself is quantum, so quantized. I.e. at the bottom, space is a discrete graph with incredibly small edges. Possibly very tangled and not even layed out in obvious dimensions over short distances.

We don’t know if that is the case. That is only one possibility.

But it seems very clear that whatever happens at the Planck distance or lower isn’t simple smooth space as we model it for larger scales.
by mvieira38 | 2025-04-22 14:15:26+00:00
Catholics are not obliged to follow the pope in matters not related to faith and morals, and even then not when he speaks as a private person instead of in the voice of the Church (the same sex marriage interview as a prime example where he directly states it is his own private opinion). Though every catholic IS obliged to pray for the pope and defend his legitimacy and claim to power, which I suppose could constitute a degree of obligatory support
by immibis | 2025-04-22 14:15:52+00:00
We had this - it was called variables. You could do:

x = iter(data);

y = filter(x, w=>w.isAlive);

z = map(y, w=>w.id);

return collect(z);

It doesn't need new syntax, but to implement this with the existing syntax you do have to figure out what the intermediate objects are, but you also have that problem with "pipelining" unless it compiles the whole chain into a single thing a la Linq.
by palata | 2025-04-22 14:16:03+00:00
> It's not something they "could" do, it's something they MUST do.

Well, maybe I just can't English :-).

They must include the copyright notice and the permission notice. Now I can imagine different ways to achieve that. They could use one or the other, as long as what needs to be included is included.

Depending on how they do it (while staying in the realm of what they MUST do, i.e. include the copyright and permission notices), it gives more or less visibility do Spegel. My point was that linking to Spegel in the README arguably gives more visibility to Spegel than alternatives that they COULD choose. And to make it very very clear: what I consider alternatives that they COULD choose are those that honour the licence.
by boraalparat | 2025-04-22 14:16:07+00:00
in turkiye, most of the places bring the "black rectangular wallet" open; so you can fill it in with cash/credit card and then close it. when it is closed it queues that your payment is ready. so there is an already established non-verbal queue without color codes or so. it also follows the verbal usage of open check and closed check per se.
by nordsieck | 2025-04-22 14:16:14+00:00
> I think the challenge is certainly the costs of enforcement.

IMO, this is fundamentally a mismatch between how software is developed in practice and how copyright works.

If software was like a book, where it's finished and published once, then simply registering it with the copyright office would be all anyone needs to do: up to $10k/copy statutory damages is a stiff enough deterrent that few large companies would want to take the risk. And even if they did, it'd be easy to find a lawyer to take the case on contingency.

As a non-lawyer, that doesn't seem to match nearly as well with software as a constantly evolving work. But I'm not an expert - maybe periodically submitting versions is enough.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-04-22 14:16:51+00:00
> Now that you got caught you are fixing it and writing fancy PR fluff. An org the size of MS should have clear policies and processes of how to handle open source forks like this. Unless we assume “bad faith” here. This is a pretty bad look.

What would you prefer them do? A public flogging? Bring back the stocks?

I agree with the sentiment with these types of comments (I hate PR fluff too), but the aggression when a company has screwed up and not only admits it but tells you their plan going forward is silly. The best case scenario is it does nothing, worst case it encourages them to ignore it next time it happrns.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-22 14:17:16+00:00
Imagine the universe is made out of graph paper, with only the points of intersection of the lines being actually "real". That is, space is actually discrete. If that is true, then you cannot meaningfully talk about things being "half a square" apart.

People (some people) think that the universe really is that way, at the Planck distance. Actual experimental confirmation is somewhat lacking at this time...
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by thawkth | 2025-04-22 14:19:19+00:00
The closest I know of is Blue95. I have only run the live environment but it worked pretty well and was impressive.

"Blue95 is a modern and lightweight desktop experience that is reminiscent of a bygone era of computing. Based on Fedora Atomic Xfce with the Chicago95 theme."

https://github.com/winblues/blue95

Depending on your chosen desktop and era, there are also things like TDE (trinity desktop environment) a fork (or spiritual successor) of the KDE 3.x environment: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/media/screenshots/large/tde3....

And if you like Gnome 2.x, there's MATE: https://mate-desktop.org/
by zahlman | 2025-04-22 14:19:26+00:00
First, `__closure__` is a plain data attribute, not a function. It isn't callable, and isn't being "called" here.

Further, in the cases you're talking about, the functions specifically are methods which you can implement in your own class. But you aren't doing this in order to avoid calling them directly; rather, you're doing them to implement functionality for that class (i.e., there's some other bit of syntax already which will call it indirectly for you). And `__init__` isn't much of an exception; normally you only call it explicitly where necessary for subclassing (because the corresponding syntax would create a separate base class instance instead of initializing the current base).

But the point here is to inspect an implementation detail, for pedagogical purposes. There isn't a better way to do it in this case, exactly because you aren't ordinarily supposed to care about that detail. There's no question about whether you'd inspect an object's `__closure__` directly in production code - because not only is there no alternative, but it would be extremely rare to have any reason to do so.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-22 14:19:35+00:00
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 and https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 get quite close if you use them together. The B00merang one has presets for the GNOME/Cinnamon/MATE desktop and a GTK+4 theme (which adds terrible padding compared to the usual GTK+3 one, but at least it has visible and properly 3d-shaded widgets).
by dangets | 2025-04-22 14:19:43+00:00
I felt the same - have to relearn/lookup everything every time I went back to a project or wanted to do some operations that are simple to describe in SQL but I couldn't wrap my mind around e.g. using multi-indexed dataframes & aggregations properly. These days, I always jump to Polars instead of Pandas - much more intuitive and consistent API. Tons of props to Pandas for all that they did (and continue to do) in the data space, but their API did not evolve very well IMO.

I've also been wanting to play with Ibis[1] recently, but Polars has been sufficient for me.

[1] https://ibis-project.org/
by specialist | 2025-04-22 14:20:03+00:00
Agreed.

When asked if they observed etiquette, even when alone, Miss Manners replied (from memory):

"We practice good manners in private to be well mannered in public."

Made quite the impression on young me.

A bit like the cliché:

"A person's morals are how they behave when they think no one is watching."
by InfinityByTen | 2025-04-22 14:20:08+00:00
Getting a machine and setting it up for local usage as storage accessible over your home network is very different from having to install bunch of duct taped software and hoping it reliably works all the time without fail are two very different things.

I'm a full time dev and even having my home assistant breaking every time I think of upgrading it, is annoyance enough. My home lights and what not are down for two hours and I'm mostly installing HA from scratch and recovering from the backup that I've started to take since the last collapse.

A NAS is a way more critical device and I don't want to lose my data or needing to spend 2 weeks recovering data under an anxiety attack because I hastily did one upgrade.
by codr7 | 2025-04-22 14:20:14+00:00
Even delegating just the boring parts doesn't appeal to me.

Generating boilerplate code - getting frustrated about code is what drives new ideas and improvements, I don't want to lose that friction.

Summarizing documentation - Reading and making sense of written material is a skill.

Explaining complex concepts - I don't want explanations on a silver plate, I want to figure things out. Who knows what great ideas I'll run into on the way there.

Helping debug tricky error messages - Again, a skill I like to keep sharp.

Drafting unit tests - No one knows better than me what needs testing in my code, this sounds like the kind of unit tests no one wants to maintain.

Formatting data - Maybe, or maybe whip out Perl and refresh that skill instead.

Keep delegating everything to AI for a year and I suspect you'll be completely worthless as a developer without it...
by gruturo | 2025-04-22 14:20:22+00:00
> I expected this accuracy at km or greater.

On the ground? Sure. Orbiting? I'm amazed they reach sub-mm. The gravitational field of a planet or star is not uniform, subtle variations in their density are enough to impart tiny variations to an orbiting object, and they add up over time.

Can't find a reference right now but I recall someone proposed even a positioning system relying only on accurate gravimetric sensors and a (very good) map of the strength at every relevant location on Earth. Good for submarines, GPS reception is not so good underwater.
by roflyear | 2025-04-22 14:20:30+00:00
It's a great case study of someone having no knowledge of something coming in and saying "we can save half the budget" then, oops - saying maybe they can do 5% of the original promise, lol.

I wonder how much DOGE is going to cost at the end of the day? I hope not literally billions of dollars, so maybe the $100b-200b they save will be net positive after the lawsuits, etc..
by vips7L | 2025-04-22 14:20:44+00:00
Personally I find ?.let et al to be terrible for readability; most of the time you're better off doing a standard != null check. The same with nullable extension functions; they hurt readability.

> Null is a valid state, not something incredibly scary best dealt with with a full reboot or better yet throwing away the container. Kotlin is about making peace with null, instead of pretending that null does not exist. (yes, I'm looking at you, Scala)

I honestly find this to be such a weird thing to say or imply. No one is "scared" of null.
by 9dev | 2025-04-22 14:21:01+00:00
Hey, this is cool! I’m working on an open source, self-hostable ebook library, made to solve the 80%-usecase of Calibre. I also built a command line interface to interact with its database, but this is stock-Full of nice ideas. I might steal some! :)

If you’re curious: https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri

(I have been working on this for years on and off, but now it’s finally going somewhere. Still not usable, though.)
by bwfan123 | 2025-04-22 14:21:34+00:00
I thought ceos are more like coaches who motivate, and inspire. But not dictate employees on how they should execute. Since, engineers are expected to be far more capable than the ceo on their daily work (if not, the ceo needs to evaluate hiring practices). Tying ai-use to perf review and compensation is just more unnecessary process which incentivizes behaviors which may be counter-productive - "Oh, look, I am such a brilliant prompt-engineer"

So, the memo seemed to baby-sit adult engineers. It goes without saying that engineers will use AI as they see fit, and the least a company would do is to make copilot subscriptions available for the staff if needed.
by tomhow | 2025-04-22 14:21:38+00:00
This is false.

This story spent 18 hours on the front page seven days ago, and attracted over 1100 upvotes and over 600 comments. It also attracted dozens of community flags, but we turned off the flags in order to give the story full visibility.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43691142
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-22 14:22:02+00:00
Caffeine is the classic.

As others have said, the sugar without fiber is probably net bad for you and most of the things that benefit your life probably aren't dietary.

There is no greater thing you can do for your physical health and especially your mental health than be below 20% bodyfat, that becomes asymptotically true if you are obese.

If you lift then some form of protein, or potentially creatine.

> one ingredient to add to it

Reflection.

Journal about your previous day/make a plan for the day ahead.
by zahlman | 2025-04-22 14:22:40+00:00
The reference I usually offer people is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/739654/ . Admittedly the encyclopedic length answer there, while historically highly praised, barely addresses the actual question. But there's no real way to ask a suitable question for that answer - it's just way too broadly scoped. It's just one of those artifacts of the old days of Stack Overflow. Just, you know, good luck finding it if you don't already know about it.
by lowkj | 2025-04-22 14:22:50+00:00
Do you ever use your phone to pay anywhere? It's possible the process has evolved since you last used it. I use Apple Pay for 99% of all transactions and it's by far the fastest, most convenient for all parties method. They ask how I want to pay, I say credit, I double click the side of my phone and wave it over the reader. The entire process takes approximately 2 seconds.

Sometimes when traveling my credit card will get blocked and only then is there much fussing and apologizing as I attempt to find cash or pay with a physical credit card.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-04-22 14:23:08+00:00
I hate this to be honest, if only because it's never frictionless for me. At the very least I generally need to create an account and verify my phone number or email address, often they also want me to download some shitty app that doesn't work properly. I will actively prefer a place where I can just order and pay with a human like the old days.
by close04 | 2025-04-22 14:24:11+00:00
The comparison to phones is shaky here. Phones bring substantial performance and feature improvements over 6 years, HW and SW. Synology on the other hand still uses a 5-6 year old CPU and 1Gbps connectivity in their home "plus" line. The OS development is mostly security updates with substantial feature releases few and far between. I expect this from a NAS but it's not at all comparable to a phone.

Forcing their drives is a tax on top of an already existing tax. Synology already charges a premium for lower end specs than the competition. If that's not enough to compensate for the longer upgrade cycles, and they want a hand in every cookie jar it's just going to be a hard pass for me.

I upgraded my Synology box every few years and this is exactly the time I was looking to go to the next model. And I'd pull the trigger and buy a current model before they implement the policy but the problem is now I don't trust that they won't retroactively issue an update that cripples existing models somehow. QNAP or the many alternative HW manufacturers that support an arbitrary OS are starting to be that much more attractive.
by inanutshellus | 2025-04-22 14:24:45+00:00
A restaurant that's tech savvy enough to be able to pay-at-the-table-with-your-smartphone-via-applepay but somehow the bill they drop off at the table doesn't let you do so, requiring the server to scan your phone at the table.

Seems like a lot of fuss to avoid initiating contact with a human.

"Man up", Sebastian.
by mrweasel | 2025-04-22 14:25:30+00:00
The UI was very good. The tiles didn't work on the desktop (Windows 8) but it make a lot of sense on the phone. Every touchable element was large enough that you'd never miss. The UI itself ensured a very consistent experience. I assume that you could do more custom apps, but most apps I used conformed to the general look an feel of the operating system.

One thing I don't think enough people mentions is the messaging app. It integrated with Facebook, before Facebook Messenger. This might not be a big thing today, with people leaving Facebook, but it was absolutely brilliant back then. Basically like iMessage, but with Facebook as the non-SMS protocol. I think it may also have integrated with LinkedIn, I don't recall, but it was suppose to just merge all your contacts into one messaging app.

As much as I dislike Windows on the desktop, Windows Phone made perfect sense. The UI was completely tailored to the touchscreen and was so easy it use and navigate. It's a real shame it didn't take of. In some sense Microsoft should have treated it more like Windows on the desktop and aggressively offered it to OEMs.
by sokoloff | 2025-04-22 14:25:40+00:00
I’m imagining that what I see in my neighbor’s exhaust is the subsequent condensation as their exhaust gas cools to where the dew point is met and visible moisture becomes apparent.

I can see a clear difference between running my own boiler at 25°F OAT (lots of “steam”) versus 40°F OAT (almost none) while I see my cross-street neighbor showing large plumes on both. I’m not sure if I mistyped above or I’m actually thinking about it wrong, but I don’t think my observations are incorrect.

Having that water condense outside the building (giving up heat to the neighborhood) is less efficient than having that water give up its heat into the incoming (return) water.
by 0xEF | 2025-04-22 14:25:47+00:00
That's an excellent additional thing to consider and I'm a bit mad that I neglected it since I have accidentally been that guy.

My job requires me to wear hi-vis (as well as other PPE) and it is crazy how little security pays attention to me in some of the very-big-name plants I visit, often with a laptop bag full of flash drives and a bunch of other tools that allow me to get into the machines.

Early in this part of my career, I found myself in a very large plant for the first time, and my escort got pulled away on some other task (I now expect this to happen since it's such a common occurrence), leaving me to fix the machine I was working on. The place was the size of a small town, and I needed to use the restroom, but nobody was in the vicinity to ask, so I did my best to follow the floor markings and signs. Found it, but took a wrong turn coming back and found myself in a completely different area. Since I was new, I tried to find my way back without asking anyone I saw because I did not want to look stupid, but nobody stopped me, questioned me, etc.

Probably one of the best lessons in social engineering is looking like you're supposed to be there.
by apercu | 2025-04-22 14:26:09+00:00
My anecdotal experience is very different than yours. People on alcohol have issues managing their emotions and impulses, and a lot of men get aggressive and violet - and most of the people that I encounter that consume cannabis you'd never know.

Now, that doesn't cover every case, I run in to people who vape cannabis all the time, and they seem to have some emotional effects from that, but if someone is going to abuse a substance, I'd much prefer that was cannabis. Alcohol is a poison, look at the biology at work when your body processes. Re: cannabis, smoking anything is unhealthy, so maybe don't smoke.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-04-22 14:26:22+00:00
I used to be in the “clever ways to cram lots of clothes into a single case” camp. But the downsides of that are that you can’t easily find anything, everything gets wrinkled, and every pack/unpack moment is stressful.

Now I pack 3/4 of a case, max. Now I can easily find things, fewer wrinkles, and zero stress when arriving somewhere or leaving somewhere. It’s so much better when you prioritize this way.