MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OutOfHere | 2025-04-13 12:55:40+00:00
The whole insurance system is a scam. Britain does it better.

For non emergencies, I would much prefer we go back to patients paying cash, and getting medical loans when they need. For emergencies I would prefer the government cover them directly without any intermediary. Because of the insurance system, things cost 10x more than they should, which makes it an actively harmful system. If it were to go away, competition and efficiencies would drive down prices 10x.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-13 12:55:49+00:00
> An AI-powered bot pretending to be a human, lamenting AI-powered bots who pretend to be human, to gain human trust, so that it can covertly market AI-illustrated books

It’s a typical get rich quick scheme on Amazon. Generate garbage books or “illustrate” classics. I keep seeing adds about it on youtube.

One of the more engaging themes today is alienation, AI, society being fractured, etc. so they figured to use that. I’d give them some points for “cleverness”, but even that is LLM generated most likely.
by m0llusk | 2025-04-13 12:56:27+00:00
Kind of interesting that I spend way too much time on Reddit but have not seen this. This is likely because I mostly read small and specialized subreddits and avoid junk like I am allergic to it or something. I would never have found the fake book link in the article, for example. Just a contrast, but given that some are saying the Internet is gone and it is necessary to leave it is potentially interesting to note that it isn't that way for all. Possibly some psychosocial equivalent of buoyancy and swimming ability?
by fsiefken | 2025-04-13 12:56:38+00:00
I tried something like that 2 decades ago with a 640x480 monocular strapped to my sunglasses, with interpolation i could use a 1024x768 resolution in combination with a arm based pocketpc with host usb and compactflash video-out. I used it for reading and 'fast' offline wikipedia/tr3 database search with both frogpad and twiddler2 and some voice commands.

The problem is that you can see the foreground and depth ok as the monocular screen on my left eye 'merged' semi-transparently due to brain processing. I assume this is a bit worse on the XReal. The main issue was that when walking you make a slight sinus wave up and down compared to the foreground. You don't notice this usually, but with a paragraph of text or code positioned in front of your eyes it becomes very distracting.

One solution, using a mode of transport that doesn't involve moving up and down slightly, for example using a bicycle or car for transportation. In both circumstances, the latter being the most problematic, it's not advisable safety wise (or even illegal) and a screenreader solution is better. I had the idea of using Emacsspeak for this, or do a smart speakup echo from the commandline.

Another solution is using RSVP, or using both RSVP and text to speech. Samsung DeX is great though, Motorola, Huawai and recent Android have support for desktop mode too (if the phone supports video-out).
by EffrafaxOfWug | 2025-04-13 12:56:42+00:00
It was some time ago, so I unfortunately can't remember all the details. It occured during a normal system update that ran without problems at first, but when I rebooted the phone to finish the update it couldn't boot anymore (I can't remember the error messages). I don't know what exactly went wrong or was corrupted during the update. I definetly rebooted the phone multiple times and tried to fix the issue, but after some time I realized it was futile.

Maybe there still was a way to salvage it, but I really can't tell in hindsight.
by mrkeen | 2025-04-13 12:57:27+00:00
> external world has tendencies to fail, needs to be retried, coordinated with other things.

This is exactly why I'm so aggressive in splitting IO from non-IO.

A pure function generally has no need to raise an exception, so if you see one, you know you need to fix your algorithm not handle the exception.

Whereas every IO action can succeed or fail, so those exceptions need to be handled, not fixed.

> You have to fake all these issues.

You've hit the nail on the head. Every programmer at some point writes code that depends on a clock, and tries to write a test for it. Those tests should not take seconds to run!

In some code bases the full time is taken.

handle <- startProcess while handle.notDone sleep 1000ms check handle.result

In other code-bases, some refactoring is done, and fake clock is invented.

fakeClock <- new FakeClock(10:00am) handle <- startProcess(fakeClock); fakeClock.setTime(10:05am) waitForProcess handle

Why not go even further and just pass in a time, not a clock?

let result = process(start=10:00am, stop=10:05)

Typically my colleagues are pretty accepting of doing the work to fake clocks, but don't generalise that solution to faking other things, or even skipping the fakes, and operating directly on the inputs or outputs.

Does your algorithm need to upload a file to S3? No it doesn't, it needs to produce some bytes and a url where those bytes should go. That can be done in unit-test land without any IO or even a mocking framework. Then some trivial one-liner higher up the call-chain can call your algorithm and do the real S3 upload.
by dzaima | 2025-04-13 12:57:29+00:00
Fair point on CSRs, though I'd count that as a subset of unsupported/not-yet-specified instructions; pretty sure all of the "reserved"s in the spec are effectively not-yet-defined instructions too, which'll have equivalents in any architecture with encoding space left for future extensions, not at all unique to RISC-V.

But yeah, no try-running-potentially-unsupported-things-to-discover-what-is-supported; essentially a necessary property for an open ISA as there's nothing preventing a vendor from adding random custom garbage in encoding space they don't use.
by sandreas | 2025-04-13 12:57:36+00:00
I currently use flatnotes[1] as a Frontend with a background cronjob to add, commit and push every night.

Works pretty well so far with some acceptable nitpicks. It was a quick and dirty solution to overcome logseq couldn't run in a Server that time... Never needed anything else until now :-)

1: https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes
by mr_mitm | 2025-04-13 12:57:48+00:00
> People can't even be bothered to read docs but will just blindly install a package just because someone was able to package it and upload it to PyPI.

That's a straw man argument. No one said "blindly". You can very well carefully consider the pros and cons of adding a dependency and arrive at the conclusion that it makes sense. Many PyPI packages are in the Debian stable repositories, you could use that as an additional barrier as well.
by sumanthvepa | 2025-04-13 12:58:54+00:00
As opposed to the way SpaceX does it?

Let huge rockets blow up over active airspace?

This looks like a bunch of college kids building small little rockets. I'm probably taking a much bigger risk walking on the street, where I live in India.

It's a little risky. But do the stuff far enough away from people and they'll be fine.
by titaphraz | 2025-04-13 13:00:09+00:00
After Reddit's API fiasco 2 years ago, things started to degrade really fast. Today, everything is more bland, less insightful comments and more aggravated/toxic comments. I mostly visit due to habit and mostly I feel worse afterwards. It wasn't like that.

Even on communities like r/woodworking, which used to be a bunch of nice people. I mean, how can you be toxic and a woodworker at the same time? Sure, occasionally you'd get someone that hammered his thumb but that was the exception.
by sureglymop | 2025-04-13 13:00:19+00:00
This has happened to me when the battery ran out during the reboot/upgrade. One time I had to let it charge and reboot for a good 30 minutes and eventually it booted again.

I totally understand giving up there though as it sucks to not be able to use the phone for a while and is very inconvenient. Let alone if this happens at an inconvenient time/during a work day, etc.
by pfdietz | 2025-04-13 13:01:07+00:00
There are also tidal accelerations due to not being in the center of mass of the space station.

Robert Forward had a scheme for nulling these over a larger volume using a heavy ring, a technology related to the one he used in the novel Dragon's Egg (which used SFnal superdense matter to enable a space station to exist in close orbit to a neutron star without the tidal forces killing the occupants.)
by 0x38B | 2025-04-13 13:01:42+00:00
This phrasing from the home page is odd:

> When I publish my next piece I will personally write you an email, with some of my thoughts on the post.

‘My next piece’? Maybe for a part of a book or a long article, but for a blog post?

The next oddity, ignoring ‘personally’, which is inappropriate for a mailing list, is ‘…with some of my thoughts on the post’; you’re going to send me a piece with some of your thoughts on the post?

I’d expect more accurate phrasing from a med student.

Edit: tone down the criticism, I wrote without much thought that some one made the site; my apologies if I came off as overly critical.
by i_don_t_know | 2025-04-13 13:01:48+00:00
> When I did my 20% on Go at Google, about 10 years ago, we already had a semi-formal rule that channels must not appear in exported function signatures.

That sounds reasonable. From what little Erlang/Elixir code I’ve seen, the sending and receiving of messages is also hidden as an implementation detail in modules. The public interface did not expose concurrency or synchronization to callers. You might use them under the hood to implement your functionality, but it’s of no concern to callers, and you’re free to change the implementation without impacting callers.
by belter | 2025-04-13 13:02:57+00:00
"EHang’s much-touted, recently granted certification comes with numerous flight restrictions that it has failed to fully disclose to investors. The restrictions invalidate the bulk of its potential commercial use cases, including restrictions against flying in densely populated areas, in shared airspace, and out of sight of a ground crew.

EHang claims restrictions will be progressively lifted, but according to China-based eVTOL experts, EHang’s flagship aircraft would need a billion-dollar redesign and an entirely different class of certification to avoid the limitations."

Also from the Chinese Civil Aviation Authority:

https://www.caac.gov.cn/XXGK/XXGK/BZGF/ZYTJHHM/202202/t20220...

"EHang EH216-S Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System Special Conditions.pdf" (in Chinese) - https://www.caac.gov.cn/XXGK/XXGK/BZGF/ZYTJHHM/202202/P02022...
by randcraw | 2025-04-13 13:03:27+00:00
I've found my ability to recall names (or proper nouns) to decline as I entered my 60s more than any other cognitive facility, both names of people as well as objects that have one-off names, such as 'Montessori' schools or 'Schroeder', the musician in the Peanuts comics. I suspect such name recall is done using a minimum of secondary cues and associations, relying entirely on a very limited subset of neurons and pathways to drive the retrieval.

So far, I've not been able to devise any way to improve such recall, other than to guess the likeliest first letter of the name then step through successive letters to, hopefully, trigger remembrance. But I bery much doubt most of the memory-enhancing techniques that are in vogue will help. Regenerating a mnemonic to cue the name is no easier than recalling the name itself.
by colkassad | 2025-04-13 13:03:32+00:00
I've started using old-school forums where I can find them for communities I care about (e.g. music production forums like vi-control...sometimes Hans Zimmer shows up!). It's a joy when you find one, kinda feels like the old days. The only annoying thing is the never-die threads. Some threads on these forums are over 15 years old. But honestly, I've really soured on the voting mechanic.
by politician | 2025-04-13 13:03:34+00:00
My rule of thumb is that the goroutine that writes to a channel is responsible for closing it. In this case, a deferred call to close the channel in HandlePlayer is sufficient.

Still, this example has other issues (naked range over a channel?!) potentially contributing to the author’s confusion.

However, this post was also written almost a decade ago, so perhaps it’s a result of being new to the language? If I cared to look, I’d probably be able to find the corresponding HN thread from that year full of arguments about this, hah.
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-04-13 13:03:47+00:00
I think GrapheneOS is one of the most important projects going. Many people walk around with all-purpose spying devices in their pocket, oblivious to how much power they are giving up. They have no control over these devices, and they don't even understand.

GrapheneOS gives us a way to resist. The convenience of having a modern phone is hard to give up, and with GrapheneOS you can have 90% of that convenience while reducing much of the surveillance and attack surface. Now, we just need a pixel phone with two big hardware switches, sliders on each side of the phone: one kills the radios, and the other kills the sensors (cameras, microphones). When you want to take a call, just flip the big slider switch up to activate cameras and mics.

Thank you to strcat and the rest of the team! If you don't use GrapheneOS, I would consider it. You can donate here: https://grapheneos.org/donate And if you have the right kind of programming skills, why not help out?
by sorenjan | 2025-04-13 13:03:58+00:00
As I was doomscrolling Reddit yesterday I saw the first AI video that fooled me[0]. It's a very typical Reddit video that's unremarkable in a lot of ways, yet designed to perfectly fit in and attract engagement from a large part of the users. I guess you can say it's "too perfectly calibrated, suspiciously optimized to trigger maximum relatability" just like the post in the article. On one hand I don't care that much since I already dislike these kinds of videos even when they're "real", on the other hand the amount of slop is about to increase even more. The best time to quit Reddit was years ago, the second best is today.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1jxnau3/does_size_...
by cynical_spar | 2025-04-13 13:04:04+00:00
All commercial planes have it at this point. And most part 91 airplanes (General Aviation) have it at this point. Without ADSB you cannot fly in or near class A, B, or C airspace and must stay below 10,000 feet. Which largely makes having an airplane useless for most people.

There are still airplanes flying that have no electrical system but even then some of them have retrofitted a system.
by maccard | 2025-04-13 13:04:56+00:00
The bottleneck with Skyscanner isn’t not being able to enter the dates without moving my hands, it’s waiting 30-50 seconds for all the flight options to appear, and trying to figure out “which ones are actually flights with the airplane and not third party resellers”.

Similarly with IDEs and programming - saving 0.5-2 seconds for 10-20 operations isn’t my bottleneck once I’ve decided to do the thing; waiting for the corporate antivirus to scan the chrome executable that has self updates since it last saw it, plus the VPN timeout because I haven’t logged into a corp site in 3 hours is.

Besides, visual tools can and do have very powerful shortcuts. ‘Make run’ takes longer to type than pressing F5 does, in visual studio. Photoshop, Maya, Nuke, ProTools, Final Cut, even Unity/Unreal are all graphical tools that have powerful widely used keyboard shortcuts.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-13 13:06:20+00:00
Really neat proof of concept—I’m just trying to understand what tradeoffs come with bending general-purpose tasks into the NPU shape.

One thing I’m curious about: when expressing algorithms like this as static computation graphs, does that change their computational complexity in any meaningful way? For example, could certain problems end up with worse asymptotic behavior (O(n²) instead of O(n log n)) due to being flattened into a fixed graph with no branching or dynamic control?
by Sammi | 2025-04-13 13:06:28+00:00
If you want to use websockets, then you are most definitely going to need some library that wraps the websocket, because websockets themselves are very simple and don't do things like reconnect on their own.

This one is pretty simple and pretty great: https://github.com/lukeed/sockette

I did my own which provides rpc functionality and type safety: https://github.com/samal-rasmussen/smolrpc
Why do small teams keep getting wrecked by AWS bills?
by DeborahEmeni_ | 2025-04-13 13:08:25+00:00
Saw someone on Reddit lose $86k from a compromised AWS account. I've heard way too many stories like this: misconfigured IAM, tokens in repos, no billing alerts...

If you're on a small team, how are you actually protecting yourself from stuff like this? Is there a sane setup that works without needing a full-time AWS security person?
by regularfry | 2025-04-13 13:08:34+00:00
I really, really wanted the SimulaVR headset to work out because of th attention they were paying to text rendering. The hardware feels dead but the virtual desktop project might still have legs: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

As far as eye strain goes, I think there's room for argument: having virtual screens cinema-screen-distance away from you is less straining than something under a meter away, but only if the text rendering is up to the job.
by joshstrange | 2025-04-13 13:09:11+00:00
> I thought to write a 'house manual’

My parents are real estate agents and have seen this a handful of times. The buyers are always very appreciative. In fact, their house came with a plastic bin with filing folders containing manuals/warrantees/etc for stuff in the house (Fridge, Oven, Dishwasher, Pool stuff, etc).

I’ve not gone that far but I have a rough floor plan with the circuit breaker noted for each switch and most lights. Also a 3D version I built of the house in a cad-type app. I’d happily give it (and info about the smart home devices, like switches) to the next owner but I have a feeling it would be mostly useless.
Why do small teams keep getting wrecked by AWS bills?
by DeborahEmeni_ | 2025-04-13 13:09:43+00:00
Saw someone on Reddit lose $86k from a compromised AWS account. I've heard way too many stories like this — misconfigured IAM, tokens in repos, no billing alerts...

If you're on a small team, how are you actually protecting yourself from stuff like this? Is there a sane setup that works without needing a full-time AWS security person?
by jethkl | 2025-04-13 13:10:13+00:00
My hope is that a lib like this one or similar could rally mindshare and become integrated as the new standard, and adopted by the wider developer community. In near term, it comes down to trade-offs. I see no decision that works for all use cases. Dependencies introduce ticking time bombs, stdlibs should be correct and intuitive, but at least when not they are usually well tested and maintained, but when stdlib don't meet urgent production needs you have to do something.

Link to Tom Scott & Computerphile from 10y ago on tz madness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
by rdtsc | 2025-04-13 13:10:22+00:00
> Due to the economic restrictions of Poland under the communist regime, Lem was unable to give Dick his due royalties. Surely losing out on this potential source of income, regardless of reason, would incline Dick unfavourably towards Lem

If we pull aside the ideological grandstanding what we see is plain old jealousy, resentment and vindictiveness. That’s usually the case in any context. The ideological grandstanding is just a fig leaf.
by cynical_spar | 2025-04-13 13:12:43+00:00
This is not correct. There is no hard requirement for GPS nor anything that requires “something that transmits its location”. There is also no requirement for a flight plan or communication with ATC.

I can take off from an uncontrolled airport with no GPS, no transponder, no plan, and no radio and as long as I’m in the correct airspace I’m completely legal and within my right to do so.

There are some differences with these rules through out the world.
by fredoliveira | 2025-04-13 13:13:10+00:00
I'm not the parent commenter, but made a similar transition (years ago at this point). I have always loved outliner formats, but the obsidian ecosystem is quite strong, and because I already had thousands of notes that were just plain old markdown, it was a more natural home.

I wrote code to facilitate the migration. Nothing too crazy, but in general I wrote scripts that:

- Add lines between logseq's daily notes format and the rest of the content - Moving daily notes to month-based subfolders - Automatically adding frontmatter to files that didn't have any - Removing indentation when unnecessary - Covert everything to space-based indentation rather than tabs
by npodbielski | 2025-04-13 13:14:13+00:00
Interesting topic even if I have problem on the exactly different side of the spectrum and I usually do not know when to shut up. With the time I just learned that it is easier to ask people about their life and interests and they usually just keep talking, talking and talking happy that someone is listening.

Still problem is the same, I am bit lonely and do not have anyone to talk about stuff I am interested in and I do not know how to start polite conversation.

Because as article says, essentially everyone likes to talk about themselves, not listening about other people interests.
by mbelen | 2025-04-13 13:15:04+00:00
I was mainly referring to the levels of complexity that keep piling up in the front-end world. The main reason, I wrote this is because I spent a day debugging and trying to understand one of the newer caching-by-default behaviours introduced by Next 15 in attempts to solve previous caching behaviours mistakes they made.

But in my post I was referring to the overall state of the front-end tools right now and the frustration that comes with it. From one side it's the best time to build things and see how far we've come. On the other hand it can feel like the unnecessary complexity of our tools only increases rather than making things simpler, I was interested to hear some ideas of where we might end up with all this and how soon