MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cagey | 2025-04-19 19:27:47+00:00
Ebooks and Internet sources of all forms of media have rendered public libraries moot as book providers: every person alive (in the US) has a cell phone, and most have laptops, and can with a modicum of bootstrapping access these sources, without having to travel to a special building (partially) filled with paper books, to obtain a copy of almost any book in existence.

> Today’s dangerous librarians are much more. They are part educator, part tech wizard, part data analyst, and part myth-slayer.

> They host storytimes, teach kids about misinformation, explain how to 3D print a prosthetic hand, and calmly help a grown man named Todd recover his Gmail password for the seventh time. All before lunch.

> [Librarians] are dangerous to: Misinformation, Censorship, Outdated printer settings, Small thinking, apathy, loneliness

Who asked them to play these roles? If the public school system has failed to the extent that people are incapable of using online methods to find books or other resources, or login to their Google account, why is it the role of a librarian to backfill these gaps (and for taxpayers to be forced to fund such a peculiar backfilling approach)?

And some of the touted roles ("dangerous to: Misinformation, Censorship, Small thinking, apathy") are clearly social activist in nature; the meaning of all of these is in the eye of the beholder. So why are taxpayers obligated to (unquestioningly) fund people who clearly perceive their role, at least in part, as activist in nature? IMO you are welcome to engage in activist activities on your own dime, not mine.

So I certainly wonder where the value is in "libraries" since, say, 2010 (and yes, I read the article). If not for "book banning" stories, I doubt librarians would be a topic of conversation. Libraries and librarians are like some weird 20th century anachronism which persists into the 21st century largely because it's part of a (by definition well-established) bureaucracy (and lobby/union).
by memsom | 2025-04-19 19:27:47+00:00
Those words are used, but a lot of people on the island use a massively watered down version of the dialect now. When I was a kid we said "baw" for "ball" "vis,va' 'n fing" for "this, that and thing" and "dinny/din/dinlo" (simpleton/idiot), "mush/musty" (a person, you may know, but don't want to name - a bit like "mate"), "kark it" (died), "lairy" (as in cheeky, obnoxious, pushy - hard to describe.), "lakes" (originally "cool" but started to be ironic), "wew X" as an emphasis ("wew" being "well", so "wew smar'" (really "smart", as in really good), "wew lairy" (really "pushy/cheeky/whatever it means"). "Giving i' aw va'" ("Giving it all that", being lairy/trying it on.) "kushty" (great/good). And much more. I can't write down everthing unfortunately.

As I said, you still here all this when Parkies speak, but on the Island it is a lot less heard these days.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-19 19:28:38+00:00
It's a bit jarring having my (usually prolix) writing described as "concise", but thanks. From your "Necessity" article, the point about minimising any ancillary screen elements is another that I strongly support. I'll almost always hide system menus and even the Onyx BOOX navigation ball when I'm reading in depth.

As much as EinkBro's paginated navigation is an improvement over scrolling (to the extent that I keep trying to navigate other apps similarly, and am disappointed), eInk Mode's more complete pagination is a huge step up from that.

I'm admittedly biased, but the newspaper layout really is calming, and looks great on my 13.3" Max Lumi. I'm also viewing it on an iMac 27" display, windowed, full-screen, and resized smaller. A large eInk display would make a cool demo.

For a static or paginated display it's possible to reduce the lede context (displayed story paragraphs) to include more headlines within a single page, or so that each page shows most of a sections' content. I've though of having an automatically-advancing display as well, though sorting how to do that through a Web browser might be challenging (a sequence of URLs most likely).

But yeah, I'm having fun and would like to incorporate your tool into this.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-19 19:28:59+00:00
The GP mentions "staple crops". In the US, azoles are used more on corn, wheat and soybean seeds than they are the actual crops themselves. Rice, on the other hand, and others get direct applications to the crops.

Presumably, applying it to the seeds going into storage is safer than applying in the open environment, but it's probably redundant since the Google claims azole use in the US is increasing.
by JasserInicide | 2025-04-19 19:29:02+00:00
Yeah I see this kind of paternalistic condescending style of writing in many left-leaning circles. It sounds like it's geared for children but no they're actually writing for adults. They see themselves as moral beacons and they need to proselytize the stupid unwashed masses because they just don't know any better.

I despise it.
by chewz | 2025-04-19 19:29:18+00:00
My attempt is - Do not use Claude Code at all, it is terrible tool. It is bad at almost everything starting with making simple edits to files.

And most of all Claude Code is overeager to start messing with your code and run unnecessary $$ instead of making sensible plan.

This isn't problem with Claude Sonnet - it is fundamnetal problem with Claude Code.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-19 19:29:22+00:00
That’s in a lot of way a reversal. The default state of thing before World War II was very little data collection and even less aggregation.

Everything pretty much started in the 30s with data processing mechanisation and World War II didn’t end with more protection. It ended with states having the tools to collect and feeling ready to use them with things like the generalisation of passports, social security numbers becoming standard.

It has actually pretty much gone down hill from there since. I think people overestimate what’s appropriate to collect and misunderstand how things used to work which is why they tolerate so much monitoring.
by JojoFatsani | 2025-04-19 19:29:37+00:00
Brother, you are missing the point entirely. Maybe not entirely your fault you don’t understand if you did not grow up in the US or Mexico.

WWE is a soap opera, not a sport. There are impressive feats of athleticism/death defiance (Shane O Mac jumping off a 20 ft cage, etc), but nobody over the age of 6 thinks for a minute it’s actually a real competition.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-19 19:29:59+00:00
I vote for Raymond Chen to be a National Treasure, to rank with other NTs like Michael Kramer/Kate Reading (audio book narrators). I sadly can't name other treasures atm.

In leu of that I'd settle for a [Raymond Chen] flag on HN. It would have the effect of emphasizing the text in the post title.
by oxidant | 2025-04-19 19:30:00+00:00
Think about what you would do in an unfamiliar project with no context and the ticket

"please fix the authorization bug in /api/users/:id".

You'd start by grepping the code base and trying to understand it.

Compare that to, "fix the permission in src/controllers/users.ts in the function `getById`. We need to check the user in the JWT is the same user that is being requested"
by epolanski | 2025-04-19 19:30:42+00:00
Stories about airport security and officers demanding access your phone is one of the reasons I will never come to the US.

An (Italian) friend of mine was stuck in Newark for 8 hours after he refused access to his phone, dragged in some room and questioned for hours along his wife while split from him own kids, even though he later gave them the password (he initially said no because he thought it was out of the line, he had nothing to hide).

He left livid for Italy 16 hours later despite being free to go on with his vacation.

Land of the free my ass.
by dventimi | 2025-04-19 19:31:12+00:00
"the only reason it’s believed to exist at all is because a lot of otherwise well-understood equations and observations require it to exist."

I mean...those are pretty good reasons. If a particular theory successfully predicts more out of "a lot" of observations than any other competing theory does, and is a smaller departure from "a lot" of existing theory than any other competing theory is, would you choose to spend your career researching those competing theories?
by colleagueRiley | 2025-04-19 19:31:22+00:00
I made RGFW, which calls Objective-C MacOS's API functions in Pure C.

BUT I would also like to mention a project a friend and I made called Silicon. Silicon is a single-header C wrapper around the Pure-C calls, which makes it far more convenient to use.

https://github.com/eimamei/silicon

I no longer use it in RGFW because I wanted to remove the extra dependency.
by colanderman | 2025-04-19 19:31:29+00:00
In the US frequency allocation within each band (including repeaters) is left up to regional spectrum management organizations (which have no legal authority). So it varies by region.

Here is the allocation for eastern New England for example: https://nesmc.org/docs/nesmc_bandplans_2023.pdf On the crowded 2m band we have 20 kHz for major repeaters and 9 kHz for smaller ones.
by sightbroke | 2025-04-19 19:32:35+00:00
I hope I am not wrong in imagining you may consider grouping quantum mechanics (QM) with research that has no way to ever benefit "humanity's well-being". (Even if I'd argue like art pure science & maths benefit humanity's well-being for it's own sake). This is relevant since accelerators like which was used for the Higgs Boson discovery are also used in general QM research:

https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsquantum-mechanics

> Quantum mechanics led to the development of things like lasers, light-emitting diodes, transistors, medical imaging, electron microscopes, and a host of other modern devices.

Additionally, it's ironic that you mentioned the Higgs-Boson, while perhaps many years before it's discovery and maybe not research CERN was anticipating in doing it did come up with the first webserver:

https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...
by breadwinner | 2025-04-19 19:33:18+00:00
> Tariffs came as a surprise to no one that was paying attention

During election when Trump said outrageous things, and Trump supporters downplayed Trump's comments: he's trolling... he is bluffing... it is just a distraction tactic... it is a negotiation tactic... and so on.

Then after he got elected and actually started doing the things he said he would the same people are like... "Trump is delivering exactly what he promised what he would deliver when he started this campaign. This is what the American people voted for!"

Here's a Peter Thiel quote for the ages: "The media always is taking Trump literally. It never takes him seriously, but it always takes him literally. I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously, but not literally."

He should have been taken literally.
by throwaway150 | 2025-04-19 19:33:19+00:00
> That is the literal definition of a world record here, my guy.

I don't dispute that. If you read my comment carefully, you'll find that I'm calling them "world records" too. My point is that nobody in the math community uses "world record" for finding trivial non-counterexamples like this. There are infinitely many such "world records" and each one is trivial to surpass in under a second.

Compare that to something like the finding a new Mersenne prime or calculating more digits of pi. Those records hold weight because they're difficult to achieve and stand for years.

This post could've been one of the infinite, uninteresting "world records" if the OP had applied more rigor in the implementation. But due to gaps in verification, this post is not a world record of any kind because the correctness of the results can't be confirmed. The OP has no way to confirm the correctness of their data. You'd get better context by reading the full thread. This has already been discussed at length.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-04-19 19:34:37+00:00
> You don’t hear about it because everybody understands that disabled people exist and the broad consensus is that we should accept them, and assist them to a reasonable degree. There’s little reason to discuss it. If people born with less than 4 limbs were subjected to the same treatment trans people get, you’d better believe we’d be out here talking about how not everybody has 4 limbs and we should accept that.

Not intending to debate the ethics of abortion, but one of the reasons foetuses are aborted is due to disability, down syndrome being a notable example.
by spondylosaurus | 2025-04-19 19:34:58+00:00
I mean, congenital limb differences are quite literally a spectrum. An entire limb can be absent, or just part(s) of it, or most of the limb can be present but irregularly formed...

You can even mix and match with which parts are present vs absent. I know someone with an arm that stops just above the elbow but still has several (usable!) fingers extending from it. So no joint, but sorta-yes hand.
by throwawayb299 | 2025-04-19 19:35:20+00:00
> a serious self-compiling compiler

Well, virtually every production-grade compiler is self-compiling. Since you bring it up explicitly, I'm wondering what implications of begin self-compiling you have in mind?

> Meaning the LLM is able to program itself without training data about the programming language...

Could you clarify this sentence a bit? Does it mean the LLM will code in this new language without training in it before hand? Or is it going to enable the LLM to programm itself to gain some new capabilities?

Frankly, with the advent of coding agents, building a new compiler sounds about as relevant as introducing a new flavor of assembly language and then a new assembly may at least be justified by a new CPU architecture...
by oxidant | 2025-04-19 19:35:24+00:00
Multiple terminal sessions. Well written prompts and CLAUDE.md files.

I like to start by describing the problem and having it do research into what it should do, writing to a markdown file, then get it to implement the changes. You can keep tabs on a few different tasks at a time and you don't need to approve Yolo mode for writes, to keep the cost down and the model going wild.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-19 19:35:44+00:00
It’s not the existing auto makers to compare them to, it’s the entire auto market.

2023 was Tesla's best year. They sold just under 2 million vehicles --- about 12% of the global total of 14 million EVs sold.

Earlier this year, Tesla's market cap peaked at over $1.5 trillion --- more than virtually all the major auto manufacturers in the world COMBINED.

Since then, Tesla has lost more than 50% of this outrageous market cap --- and what remains still defies reasonable justification based on actual product and market performance.

Even the most optimistic projections suggest it will be another decade before EVs take a majority of auto sales. So even if you assume Tesla will own 100% of the EV market (instead of 12%) for the next decade, you still can't justify their current outrageous stock price.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-19 19:36:28+00:00
The advice provided on this website for staying private is mostly wrong.

The Mac uses secure enclosures along lines that many others do, and there are workarounds that allow full decryption, while at the same time preventing you from actually setting up private spaces via the undisclosed hardware and evolution of the variant of ME they happen to be using.

Signal is not private by default. You have to know exactly what you are doing.

Many of the other recommendations are untested, with no consensus.
by anonym29 | 2025-04-19 19:37:21+00:00
Good thing I don't use Element as my Matrix preferred client. Discord and all Samsung software are more or less indistinguishable from spyware the way I see it, as most closed-source proprietary software is. That's a major if not primary reason why it's closed source: it's doing naughty stuff against the interests of the user that the developers want to conceal from their victims.

It doesn't matter how many other people prefer to throw their own privacy off a cliff, irrational and self-harming group conformity concerns don't afflict me the way they seem to afflict neurotypical people. One of the blessings of being on the spectrum.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-19 19:37:59+00:00
> So if you as an app developer include such a 3rd party SDK in your app to make some money — you are part of the problem and I think you should be held responsible for delivering malware to your users, making them botnet members.

I suspect that this goes for many different SDKs. Personally, I am really, really sick of hearing "That's a solved problem!", whenever I mention that I tend to "roll my own," as opposed to including some dependency, recommended by some jargon-addled dependency addict.

Bad actors love the dependency addiction of modern developers, and have learned to set some pretty clever traps.
by kostas_f | 2025-04-19 19:38:50+00:00
Congrats on the launch!

I’ve tried several AI code reviewers in the past few months and honestly, most of them fall short in the same ways - they lack proper context about the codebase and can’t remember discussions from previous PRs or design decisions.

IMO the tools that will win this space will be the ones that properly understand the codebase context and coding/architecture patterns.

Btw are you also planning to support customizable rules for code reviews?
by ben_w | 2025-04-19 19:39:00+00:00
> I think you're going to be surprised.

You may be surprised by my thinking. I'm expecting famine in the US in 2 years, if too many people are purged for saying "no" to Trump.

I have no idea if too many people will get purged. Everything's a bit crazy now.

> IMO doxxing is a TOS issue for platforms to manage, not something that requires legislation.

Musk owns the platform. What stops him?
by TomMasz | 2025-04-19 19:39:02+00:00
I bought a bunch of old film cameras in the mid-2000s fairly cheaply when people were dumping them en masse to buy digital. Film was still easy to get.

Ten years or so later, film suddenly becomes cool, prices skyrocket. Not surprising, I guess, since the supply is limited and shrinking every year. Then film itself started getting more expensive and older films discontinued.

I am able to offset some of the film cost issues by shooting mostly B&W and developing it myself. I bulk load 35mm to save even more. I use my DSLR for scanning. I do shoot color, but it's not a lot since I'm dependent on labs for the processing.

I have no idea what the Trump tariffs are going to mean for film. I love Ilford and Foma, both are imported. I'll use Kodak if I have to, but it's never my first choice.

My DSLR is a Canon APS-C model. Everything has gone mirrorless now. I don't plan to upgrade until my present camera stops working.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-04-19 19:39:21+00:00
There are two sides to this:

First—and more importantly—a professional translator’s interface is list of strings and some supplementary materials in, list of strings out. (Protip: given baseline i18n competence like not concatenating sencences out of parts, the quality of the translation you get is largely determined by the supplementary materials; screenshot every part of your UI and your translator will be willing to kiss you.) Both in communicating with clients and on the fast path of their own work (in CAT software like Across, Trados, etc.).

They do not need to see the code that fills in any placeholders, nor do they want to spend time and attention preserving it exactly as it’s been written—they just want to reorder the placeholders as the syntax of the language dictates. Arguably even %s vs %d is too much information. The ideal is {name} and {count}, and {1} and {2} are acceptable.

(By contrast, a very common issue is that like half of the sentence may need to change depending on the numeric value filled in for {count}, and two variants in English may map to anywhere between one and four after localization[1]. Template strings help with this not at all.)

Second—though this may be easier to fix—the two major ways to retrieve localized messages at runtime are integers in, strings out (most commercial tools out there) and strings in, strings out (GNU gettext), where the output strings are retrieved from some sort of data file that’s intentionally incapable of containing executable code (resource-only “MUI” DLLs, hashtables in GNU “MO”s, plain old text in Java “properties”, various kinds of XML, etc.).

Operating on pure data isn’t a strict necessity. It’s is largely a concession to the development process, which may not permit the string tables to go out to the localization contractors until principal QA is finished. The last thing you want is to insert engineering into the already-slow loop between the translators, the editors (or a translation agency employing both), and localization QA (hopefully in-house, using the actual live software to check the translations in context).

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural...
by globular-toast | 2025-04-19 19:39:38+00:00
If the Parisian apartments become undesirable and the low cost areas become desirable then, yeah, it wouldn't work out. But that's not what we're talking about. House prices going down across the board makes no difference. You sell your apartment for a lower number but you buy the new place for a lower number too.

The numbers are just made up and don't matter. You can't eat a number and it won't keep you warm or dry. It's so weird to me that even in a place like this people can't see beyond the numbers.
by II2II | 2025-04-19 19:40:32+00:00
We're talking about two separate things. I was talking about being able to play a game for 30 minutes (or even 5 minutes), then set it aside for later. That could be later in the day, or several days later.

Quitting gaming altogether wouldn't have many benefits in my case. I only play on weekends, and usually less than an hour per day. It's not that I'm boasting about a lack of filler activities in my life. I have them. They're just elsewhere.
by ianburrell | 2025-04-19 19:41:06+00:00
The market is small, there are existing competitors, and things change slowly. I also suspect that there isn't much value that startup could bring. I bet there are fancy products for fancy yachts.

There is a lot of open source going on. There is OpenCPN chart plotter. There is also NMEA OneNet which uses Ethernet so should support things that radars, plus make wiring easier.
by MatthewPhillips | 2025-04-19 19:41:23+00:00
Hey, I'm the author of this doc. The reason for the pattern is to make it so you always can find why a mutation occured. So combining state variables and dom changes is ok as long as that's the only place that does the mutation. If not, now you've made it harder to debug. I keep the strict separation so that I can always stick a debugger and see a stack trace of what happened.
by mindcrime | 2025-04-19 19:41:35+00:00
It makes perfect sense as a header to me. But then, I'm somebody who uses that phrase quite often and have been using it for years, or decades. I really don't see that as much (if any at all) of a "tell" that the content is AI generated.

And the real kicker is, we're ignoring the point that this isn't a binary distinction. Content can be written by a human and an AI collaboratively, where you can't say that it's totally "human generated" OR totally "AI generated".