MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xTJ | 2025-04-24 13:13:23+00:00
Sending mail being a challenging or difficult thing does come across as odd to me, being in Canada and born in the late 90s. Sure I haven't mailed a letter in a couple years, but when I do the main hassle is just finding where I put my stamps. I can however understand that finding return postage would be a hassle; I'm not sure why the UK and Canada (amongst others) don't do IRCs anymore.

It's also much easier these days to find out how to correctly format an address for a given destination. (At least for alphabet-based languages; I recently tried to decipher a Korean address in a business park and got nowhere fast.)
by Symbiote | 2025-04-24 13:14:00+00:00
In most/all of Europe, letter volumes are reducing but they're still used. Even where email is common, letters are usually possible.

In your country,

- how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires?

- how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?

- how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
by greatgib | 2025-04-24 13:14:14+00:00
I have mixed feeling about this.

On one side, it is good to have consumer friendly regulation like manufacturers to be forced to support right to repair. But on the opposite side, lots of bullshit requirements again like the energy labelling, that will do that we have less products, mostly from big actors only, and more expensive due the then useless regulation barrier.

And the mixed feeling is stronger for things like manufacturers that needs to provide support for the os for 5 years and more. Sure, I'm happy that it applies to big tech like apple, Google and Samsung, when it is what I'm expecting. But, I, as a consumer, I would like some times to be able to buy other products, cheaper, crappier (for a burner or test devices for example), and to have small actors being able the try innovation without needing a 500 millions backing to be able to see in Europe.

What I would have preferred is a law more oriented on consumer rights than manufacturing regulation: Forbidding more clearly explicit monopolistic behaviors like what is done with app store; and for right to repair and co, not needing the company to provide support for repair for 5 years but that if they don't, or after 5 years, that they have to release in open source the software, blueprints or tools that are needed to be able to support your own device yourself.
by graemep | 2025-04-24 13:14:23+00:00
It is a weird mix in the UK, distances are measured in miles, and speed limits are set in miles per hour, but fuel is sold in litres, for example.

People get very worked up about it too. People got very worked up about a government proposal to allow people to put imperial units on food in larger type than metric (at the moment it has to be metric larger - or at least the same size).

Everything in engineering and science has been entirely metric since the 80s.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-04-24 13:14:25+00:00
In economics perfect markets mean that your company that raises spherical cows has no moat against others doing the same. If you do something to gain profits to become rich someone else joins the market to compete those profits down to zero. This reduces inefficiency and makes everyone rich.

Deregulation is sold as getting closer to this, in reality it means the money collects wherever the market breaks down, monopolies, network effects, externalities, concentrated special interests, middlemen, oligarchies, gangsters, landlords etc.
by freeAgent | 2025-04-24 13:14:29+00:00
Toys R Us also sold stuff like video games and collectible/trading cards…and bikes, etc., I think, at least when I was a kid. I’m sure their product mix would have continued to evolve, but if you do have children, you probably know that they still love physical toys like Hot Wheels, dolls/action figures, LEGO, etc. That will probably never change.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-24 13:14:37+00:00
I've never quite understood the appeal of ActivityPub.

Looking at the list of goals in the article, the only benefit in addition to what can easily be done with RSS is knowing who follows me. Maybe its just me, but if I'm writing to a blog or a microblog I just don't really care who follows me or even who reads it.

There are more social features built into ActivityPub, likes and shares for example, but at that point I'm likely not running my own server and am trusting a third party to do it for me. The idea that there are multiple hosts I can choose to trust rather than one centralized one feels more like a principled argument than one based on real benefits of, for example, owning my own content or censorship resistance.
by brk | 2025-04-24 13:14:50+00:00
Not sure why you're being downvoted, I'm exactly the same. House locks are already electronic/automated, haven't carried a physical house key in year. Cars use fobs, for newer vehicles there is no option for physical keys anyway. When I leave the house I take my phone, plus the solo fob for whatever vehicle I am driving. I have no desire to have a ring of multiple physical keys and fobs with me.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-04-24 13:14:51+00:00
> Today, after the Council of Niceae by Constantine 3 centuries after the events, nearly all Christian denominations follow Pauline doctrine. But where is his authority from? How is he any different from, say, Mohammad?

All religions based on books have discrepancies within themselves that allow people to pick whatever they want and adapt it to their personal wants and actions.

Some flavours want people to interpret the scriptures themselves, while other flavours only allow some specific scholars to interpret it and you must follow blindly.

By design, religions have a de facto tendency to control people's behaviours and beliefs and fill the gaps wherever they are.

Cultural contexts shifts can't be addressed quickly as their traditions are rooted in centuries of small interpretations that can't be undone.

I guess that's why so many people have a tendency to leave religion, just by seeing how much of the past can they carry before it starts weighing them down more than it lifts them up.

For the bible, the simple definition of righteous needs interpretation :

James 2:24 : You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.

Ephesians 2:8-9 : For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast.

Everything surrounding Paul could be described as the first interpretation and it's often easier to follow an existing idea than make your own.
by bzzzt | 2025-04-24 13:15:30+00:00
There's the law of conservation of energy. If you want a nice bright big screen there's no way around consuming a lot of electricity. If your baseline is a 32 inch LED screen it's not surprising a 65" OLED will have a worse energy label.

Seems most people want that nice TV more than a small, dim picture that uses less energy.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-24 13:15:59+00:00
I think regulation like this is just strictly good (even from US perspective/priorities), because you can not realistically "vote with your wallet" for environment-friendly products when relevant info is obfuscated, falsified or not available at all.

Just ignoring energy efficiency/repairability labelling is always an option for consumers on the other hand.

> If they paid German gas and electricity prices for example while having European wages, they'd care a lot more.

I'm not so sure on this; I think environmental concerns are mainly culture driven I think, because even after all the price increases over the last decade, especially electricity is still dirt cheap compared to e.g. rent, basically everywhere.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-24 13:16:04+00:00
> to have small actors being able the try innovation

Yes. While I'm generally in favor of the EU regulatory approach they need to learn about and understand the concept of "small business", including the fact that you can't get a new large EU business without it going through the small business stage. There should be a lot more de minimis exemptions from the whole CE marking system.
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-24 13:17:15+00:00
> in terms of "they can basically turn these folks' lives into a living hell of back-to-back hearings", pardons don't help with that one

Trump has so thoroughly poisoned the well on the "weaponized DOJ / weaponized IRS / weaponized Congressional investigations" that the Democrats, having no spine, won't bother doing any of that.
by freeopinion | 2025-04-24 13:17:31+00:00
Oh this is definitely for rich people only. I thought that was a given. Who else spends $1200 on a laptop every two years? Who else spends $300 on a watch? We're looking for people who spend $200-500 on sunglasses--the non-electronic kind.

You ask where to find these people? Visit your closest Apple store. Or a rodeo arena. Or a Tesla charging lot. Or a Whole Foods market. The United States is crawling with these people.
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-24 13:17:33+00:00
LLMs are all bad at math. But there are worse ways Google fails.

Like people asked "does Lululemon use <name of some chinese company> to make its products" and Google says "yes", with no source except one tiktok video that falsely claims it to boost sales in face of tariffs. (Ignoring that it's not in the actual supplier list published by lululemon on their site)

Which means basically people would see that tiktok, go to fact check on google if it's true, and google overview will say "yes" (+ paragraphs of text that no one reads) citing that tiktok.

Vicious circle of LLM factchecking. Google used to be immune to it until it started to shove chatbot output to people's faces.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-24 13:17:38+00:00
That wasn't the point and you've completely misread it. The very first point was "family and friends" and for me, travel is something that helps me experience the broader world. It's not a bucket list, it's the fact that this world is immense, filled with experiences and that we only have one lifetime to find those experiences that enrich our short time here.

The hypothetical question is is whether this individual has already experienced everything there was to experience and decided "No, working 9-9 is what I value in life!"
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-04-24 13:17:41+00:00
Squirrels and pigeons don't regularly weigh 120 lbs, don't like to eat the grass on road shoulders at dawn and dusk, and as a result they don't total nearly as many cars.

But all of these are far less dangerous than a 500 lbs reindeer, 600 lbs elk, or 1400 lbs moose!
by 2rsf | 2025-04-24 13:18:13+00:00
Which makes you dependent on a third party, that doesn't necessarily have the motive to keep it updated. Having a mobile as a secondary key is a better idea, my Polestar 2 has keys, but also an app that can use Face ID (or the equivalent Android security measure) to drive the car. Once the app is set up you don't need to carry the physical keys.
by zoezoezoezoe | 2025-04-24 13:18:28+00:00
I dont know if I fully agree. Sure, there is definitely an argument the be had about whether or not `continue` is the best word to use in this instance, but why avoid it entirely? Every programmer is able to easily understand what code like this would do:

``` for (Node node : nodeList) { if (node.isBad()) { continue; } processNode(node); } ```

Every keyword in any programming language is largely arbitrary in my opinion let's take a look at the beginning of the codeblock `for (Node node : nodeList)` also completely arbitrary, though it's clear to anyone who's ever written C++ that it is equivalent to saying "for every node in nodeList".

Continue is not meant to read as "continue execution" it's meant to be "continue to the next item of the list", and I think avoiding it entirely is a pointless effort.
by wingertge | 2025-04-24 13:18:30+00:00
There's infrastructure in the SPIR-V compiler to be able to target both OpenCL and Vulkan, but we don't currently use it because OpenCL would require a new runtime, while Vulkan can simply use the existing wgpu runtime and pass raw SPIR-V shaders.

One thing I've never investigated is how performance OpenCL actually is for CPU. Do you happen to have any resources comparing it to a more native CPU implementation?
by umanwizard | 2025-04-24 13:18:36+00:00
Right, but why does that make letter size confusing?

Even if every other country in the world used A4, the only people in the US who would even notice would be people who commonly do business with other countries or who live near the border. And in reality, Canada and Mexico also use letter so the border thing doesn’t apply.

So why should letter confuse us just because other people use something else?
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-24 13:18:50+00:00
> Your trees are not someone else’s trees

I never said they were; only that life is short -- find your forest. Quoting myself:

> Had they already experienced everything good there is to experience in this one lifetime that they were so bored of it that they would prefer to work instead?

And I'm pretty certain that forest isn't exchanging your limited time in life for money. I'm giving concrete examples, not exclusive examples.

Touch grass, my friend, and find your forest.
by imiric | 2025-04-24 13:19:09+00:00
Way to assume what my attention span is.

Speaking of which, if you watch the (nearly) full interview[1] instead of that 5 second clip, you'll realize that the chair jumping bit had nothing to do with the reason he walked out of that interview. I couldn't find the full version, but you can see that towards the end he gets annoyed at the constant prodding to get him to admit some wrongdoing. The entire segment is made to portray him as some out-of-touch rich guy and tyrant that abuses his employees and competitors. Just poor television all around, more interested in promoting sensationalism for engagement purposes, than showing an honest image of the person. The chair jumping bit is proof of this, given that it's the only thing the public remembers.

Extrapolating that bit to make some grand assumption about his personality is beyond ridiculous.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgwHIwEwGLQ
by sharemywin | 2025-04-24 13:19:14+00:00
I'm not sure what you used for it to tell you that?

what should I do with my camping stove if I want to avoid the rain

ChatGPT said: If you want to avoid the rain while using your camping stove, here are your best options:

Shelter Options: Use a Tarp: Set up a tarp high above your stove area with good airflow. Make sure it's not enclosed and water runs off away from you.

Camp Kitchen Tent: Lightweight pop-up canopies or dedicated camp kitchen shelters are perfect. Just make sure it’s ventilated.

Picnic Table Shelter: Many campgrounds have covered areas you can cook under — check for those.

Vestibule (Cautiously): If you have a tent with a large vestibule, you can use the stove there, only if it's very well-ventilated and you're extremely cautious (fire and carbon monoxide risks are real).

Important Safety Tips: Never use a stove inside a closed tent — risk of carbon monoxide poisoning and fire.

Keep the stove on a stable, flat surface.

Avoid cooking right under trees with low-hanging branches.

Ensure your shelter is tall enough — heat rises.

Would you like a quick sketch or image of a tarp setup that works well in rain?
by mikeocool | 2025-04-24 13:19:58+00:00
Interestingly, it's actually codified in US law that the metric system is the "preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce" -- however it wasn't a mandatory change so most industries didn't make the change, nor did the government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
by sega_sai | 2025-04-24 13:20:46+00:00
As a scientist, I actually greatly enjoy the AI assisted coding because it can help with the boring/tedious side of coding. I.e. I occasionally have some new ideas/algorithms to try, and previously I did not have enough time to explore them out, because there was just too much boring code to be written. Now this part is essentially solved, and I can more easily focus on key algorithms/new ideas.
by microtonal | 2025-04-24 13:21:27+00:00
availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)

This is so great! A lot of manufacturers were counting from the date of introduction. A lot of phones only had a 3 year support period. If they are on the market for two years, the people buying last would only get one year of support. This swaps to the last date of sale, which is much more consumer-friendly. I still have to read up on what operating system upgrades entails.

rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market

Awesome!
by lolinder | 2025-04-24 13:21:28+00:00
AI models aren't really iterative in the way that other software is. Llama 4 is a completely different product from Llama 3, with different parameter counts and even different modalities. The only reason it gets to be called Llama 4 is that the company that made it is the same and it's convenient to not have to come up with new names all the time, not because there's any sort of continuity with Llama 2.

Fine tunes are the correct analogy to iterative software development—they take the existing code (weights) and improve upon it and modify it—and fine tunes can be produced with what Meta has released.

The bigger problem with Meta's claim that it's open source is that they've attached a bunch of strings to the license that prevent you from using it in a bunch of different ways. It's not open source because it's not open, not because weights aren't source.
by rascul | 2025-04-24 13:22:15+00:00
> one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address

I'm an American and I've used envelopes that have lines to write addresses on. I used to see them every now and then. In fact, I have about half a box sitting in my filing cabinet next to me that I probably haven't used for years.

Many envelopes don't have the lines, though.
by pixl97 | 2025-04-24 13:23:00+00:00
You mean "us jealous poor people who are mad that he is bright and successful".

I've known a few people in the hundreds and millions of dollars in wealth category and that seemed to be their go to response when anyone had to say anything negative about their behaviors.

In the US at least, never underestimate the amount of calvinism and prosperity gospel that has creeped into every facet of our lives.
by diggan | 2025-04-24 13:23:36+00:00
An updated version would say to make sure every email address you use/show in the application/terms/policies are usable and someone receives it.

When reviewing stuff that introduces new emails and whatnot I always spend 10-20 seconds sending an email with "Please respond if you see this" to verify it actually works and someone receives it, as I've experienced more than once that no one actually setup the email before deploying the changes that will show the email to users.
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-24 13:23:58+00:00
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.

I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.

But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.

It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
by mmastrac | 2025-04-24 13:24:06+00:00
Elect a ___ expect a ___.

Honestly this next four years is going to be great everywhere else now that we're becoming desensitized to the news again.

I've never seen such a unifying figure in my life -- and the opportunity for Canada in the next decade is huge.

Decoupling is a surgical procedure we've been putting off for too long.
by NotBoolean | 2025-04-24 13:24:26+00:00
That’s an interesting analogy but I do disagree with it.

I would say that programming without an AI is like riding a motorcycle. You’re in complete control and it’s down to your skill to get you we’re your going.

While using AI is like taking a train. You got to plan the route but you’re just along for the ride.

Which I think lines up to the article. If you want to get somewhere easily and fast, take a train. But that does take away the joy of the journey.
by makomk | 2025-04-24 13:25:17+00:00
In addition to the laws of physics and the engineering required to build TVs working against this, the EU deliberately changed the energy efficiency scale for things like TVs a few years back to specifically make an A hard to get and something that wouldn't be achieved by products currently on the market. They were probably too optimistic about future improvements too - a lot of TVs had to add special eco modes that aren't really designed to be used to meet the minimum efficiency now required by EU rules.
by xeromal | 2025-04-24 13:25:55+00:00
The do anything to win mentality often includes bending the rules where they can. Someone listed some top people in their various sports below but I'd include Lebron too. Dude is the best basketball player the world has ever seen at least when considering longevity but he still flops often to get what he wants even though he doesn't need to to win. He's just going to get every edge.
by nottorp | 2025-04-24 13:25:58+00:00
> There should be a lot more de minimis exemptions from the whole CE marking system.

There are a lot of EU wide requirements that create barriers to entry. Before Altman's scareware campaign to "regulate" "AI", there was:

Exhibit 1:

https://pcengines.ch/recycle.htm

See the blurb about not being able to sell direct to customers in the EU.

[Think the company has shut down or is shutting down, possibly because of that too.]