MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-19 16:26:07+00:00
You gotta imagine his voice is like a rich bass, two octaves below James Earl Jones

[Inhaling nitrous has a voice effect more or less opposite that of helium]

I should mention that I have taken to purchasing bottles of Heavy Whipping Cream, for recreational culinary purposes, i.e. I simply drink the stuff straight, as if it were a bottle of milk. Yum.
by cs702 | 2025-04-19 16:27:06+00:00
Indeed. Power-hungry authoritarians, demagogues, and ideologues of all stripes (ethnic, religious, etc.) have always viewed books as dangerous.

Just look at the long list of major book-burning incidents throughout history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_book-burning_incidents

Books are dangerous, because knowledge is dangerous -- dangerous to ignorance, censorship, and misinformation.
by throwaway150 | 2025-04-19 16:28:09+00:00
That makes sense in sports. But in math? It's trivially easy to generate thousands of so-called "world records" every second.

Here's one:

4*10^18 + 7*10^13 + 1.

Boom! New world record. Now add 1 and you've got another. Try it. Keep going. World records like this will be surpassed by someone else in milliseconds.

Honestly, this is the first time I've heard "world record" used for NOT finding a counterexample. The whole thing feels absurd. You can keep checking numbers forever, calling each one a record? It's silly, to be honest. Never heard anyone calling these world records, before today.

OP has a nice project. But the wording is so deceptive and so silly that it harms the credibility of the project more than it helps.
by Groxx | 2025-04-19 16:29:43+00:00
Everything is hard until it's not. Invisible electromagnetic waves are invisible (hard) and frequently deadly (hard!), but now we have WiFi, cell phones, GPS, xrays, etc.

Superconductivity is absurd magic and took impossibly low temperatures until they weren't impossible, and now it's driving MRIs, massively improving medical research, and the realm of usability is constantly expanding. Absolute zero was known reasonably accurately for over 100 years before liquid helium was achieved, and superconductivity came only three years after.

It's the kind of thing you can frequently only judge accurately in retrospect.
by kevindamm | 2025-04-19 16:30:13+00:00
Sometimes we don't know the improvements until we have done enough experiments to provide a model that aids in discovering improvements. Electricity was hard (even fatal) to experiment with before it was understood (and frontier work in electricity when running at extreme frequencies or energies is still difficult to understand, and if we're counting all EM in there it goes beyond being easy to manipulate and experiment with).

My guess? If we figure out how to detect dark matter we can get closer to figuring out how to interact with it (other than through the very very very weak gravitational force). Or maybe we figure out that it was a spinning universal frame or something that gives us a better Standard Model.

If, however, we figure out how to interact with it and can harness any potential energy from it, then by definition we won't see any interference in the electromagnetic forces. That would be incredible, that would be as good as having readily available superconductors.
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-19 16:30:49+00:00
> and very dependent on exports to avoid catastrophe

Domestic debt (in the country's own currency) behaves differently from foreign debt.

Domestic one is the kind that is actually never paid out, unless the government does something very stupid.

China has other kinds of problems, and the article has the same kind of simplistic mercantilist view of the world that journalists seem very adept to and that the current US government is applying. So, while there are stuff to be said about them, you won't get anything of value here.
by mpalmer | 2025-04-19 16:31:28+00:00
Look, I love the sentiment, and the illustrations are charming.

Unfortunately, the writing.

It's...stilted.

It's presented as a letter/email, but it reads as though the author wants you to hear someone with good comedic timing... DELIVERING IT LIKE STANDUP!

But ellipses...do not translate to funnier text. The text just has to be funny! "Pauses" only enhance what's already there!

> write a quippy, funny letter from a "concerned citizen" to their community highlighting the "danger" posed by librarians. said "danger" is their vendetta against ignorance, illiteracy. style should involve SUDDEN CAPS FOR EMPHASIS, ellipses...for...artificial comedic timing. But there's something more important to the style. Something being demonstrated in this very sentence. Yes - it's *short, narration-like rhythms". These shorter sentences should occupy their own paragraph.

If you can replicate a blog post with a single LLM prompt, you start to wonder whether the author had the same thought.
by ellen364 | 2025-04-19 16:31:41+00:00
From what I've seen and heard from others, budget shenanigans and office politics are both common reasons for hiring contractors/freelancers.

If it's September and your budget expires in April (new tax year here in UK), hire a few contractors to make sure you spend all that money. After all, you don't know what next year's budget will look like. And not using your budget might be taken as proof you don't need as much money next year. So hire contractors and do that project now, rather than waiting and taking the risk you can't do it all.

For even more budget shenanigans and org politics, imagine you're a product/project/whatever manager in charge of an exciting new project with a big budget. You do not control any of the dev teams. For some reason the dev leads are not excited by your new project and are reluctant to assign people to the project. They tell you it will be next year and you wonder if they mean never. Luckily, you have a big budget for the project! So you hire contractors and now your project has a dev team. The company doesn't have to keep on the temporary team and the project is delivered. Success!

This scenario kicks several massive cans of worms down the road. But for a while everyone's happy while progress is made on the project. Later the dev teams will be annoyed when they have to maintain code they didn't want in the first place. And whatever organisational problem meant the dev teams didn't want to get involved will still exist. But, by hiring contractors, everyone gets to ignore those problems for a while longer.
by mingus88 | 2025-04-19 16:32:42+00:00
Even a short and engaging chapter book will require someone to focus for more than 10 minutes on the text

I have been online since the early web and have seen how much content has changed to engage people. It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now. If you post anything longer I have seen people actually get upset about it.

People may binge a series but they are still on their phones half of the time scrolling for dopamine. I am trying to train my own children to seek out difficult things to consume and balance out the engagement bait.

It’s hard these days. Everything is engineered to hijack your attention
by 9283409232 | 2025-04-19 16:34:30+00:00
I don't know if I would even call this clickbait but this is not an argument against transparency. It's an argument against poor regulations. I would argue Prop 65 is the opposite of transparency because just about everything causes cancer so people have learned to ignore the warning. It was a law that was passed in a time when we didn't have as much information as we do now and it should be updated and made more specific.

> You know what would be better than a privacy policy? A privacy law.

I agree but I wouldn't call privacy policies transparent. They are made of vague legal speak like "we may or may not share your information with advertisers and partners." There are good arguments in here but they are framed against the wrong target.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-19 16:35:38+00:00
“You feel”? Who is “you”? Are you referring to me? I have no feelings or judgement on any particular case. I have no facts about them. I don’t care because I am not involved and I am not in authority.

Please do not ascribe judgements to me that I am not making. I was simply asking questions to clarify a typical process that may be hypothetically followed. Thank you.
by rconti | 2025-04-19 16:35:46+00:00
probably related to the policy of suppressing regional languages discussed in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735946

It seems likely that regional languages impact accents in the "primary" language, and even if that's not the mechanism, the cultural attitude of discouraging "different" dialects might have the same damping effect on accents.
by mock-possum | 2025-04-19 16:36:23+00:00
Exactly - just because they used culture, or religion, to underpin that stuff - doesn’t mean we need to. Doesn’t mean we need to use the same culture, or even the same religion, for that matter. “This is what works, and this is why it works, and this is the benefit, and this is why it’s worthwhile” can be enough, with a minimum of pretense.
by tonymet | 2025-04-19 16:37:19+00:00
Treating “knowledge” in the abstract is dangerous. “Knowledge” consists of manuscripts . A book store or library is merely a curation of those manuscripts (or their copies).

Librarians actually are dangerous, in that they present “knowledge” as neutral, and “more knowledge” as an unquestionable good. Nearly all librarians and book store clerks share a skewed ideology.

Everyone expects a Christian, Muslim or Jewish book store to be filled with a tailored curation of books. Libraries and book stores are ironically treated as neutral “knowledge repositories”.

My point is that every collection is curated according to the taste and the agenda of the curator or librarian.

It is the quality of the collection that makes it good, not the volume. Librarians are dangerous because they’ve convinced the public that they are gatekeepers of knowledge, when they are actually just curators.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-19 16:37:37+00:00
Hey, if you want to go back to life in Ancient Rome, with the disease and lack of medicine, the slavery, the dictatorship... I'm not going to stop you.

When you say civilization worked quite well for thousands of years, as an argument against mobile phones, I'm not sure you've quite thought your argument through... unless it's always been your dream to be a Russian serf, or an Egyptian slave?
by ben_w | 2025-04-19 16:38:44+00:00
Given the existence of terrorists, private info of almost any public figure or their family is abusable in the same way.

Worse, given the degree of sycophancy in the population, there's always a risk of any viral meme resulting in what happened with King Henry II of England saying "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"[0] (the priest, Thomas Becket, was killed).

[0] or whatever it was in the original, which might have been Latin or Anglo-Norman but even if it had been Early Middle English, that's pretty much incomprehensible to modern speakers, as it looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Owl_and_the_Nightingale
by StefanBatory | 2025-04-19 16:39:53+00:00
Because I saw others here speak about their libraries, I will too.

I'm Polish, I live in a big city. My libraries around, are, to say it mildly, awful. At best, they'll contain old school readings, some history book from communist period and old tech manuals (old as in, Win 95 guides or for tech that is no longer used).

I really envy Americans in this aspect.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-19 16:40:08+00:00
Does Toyota, GM, Ford have an FSD that’s just as good?

Bad question --- Tesla doesn't actually have FSD. What they actually have is Level 2 automation that requires constant supervision just like the others.

Do they have charging stations all over the country?

Yes, they do. They are all adapting to use Tesla chargers.

https://www.motortrend.com/features/tesla-nacs-charging-port...

FSD, charging stations, and the upcoming CyberCabs are Tesla’s moat, hence the stonk price.

FSD is fake news, charging stations are now open and Cybercabs are pure wishful thinking.

In other words, Tesla has no real moat --- and market data shows it.
by ignoramous | 2025-04-19 16:40:36+00:00
> This is a Google Play Services update

As the GrapheneOS docs note, the feature is better implemented in init and not in system server or the app/services layer like Google has done here? Though, I am sure Google engs know a thing or two about working around limitations that GrapheneOS developers may have hit (in keeping the timer going even after a soft reboot, where it is just the system server, and the rest of the userspace that depends on it, that's restarted).
by pdimitar | 2025-04-19 16:41:02+00:00
Nobody is "limiting" themselves to anything. That's not a counterargument you're making.

We all deploy to production, dude.

Strong static typing (Rust), even only dynamic strong typing + pattern matching (Elixir), are leagues better than Python. Literal 3x - 7x less code and less production errors both in Elixir and Rust, over the course of 5 years.

You're the one limiting yourself. Expand your horizons.
by florbo | 2025-04-19 16:41:04+00:00
I think emojis are easily overused, but I certainly don't mind when they're used to convey simple, universally understood meaning (such as reacting with a "me too" in a bug report).

Stuff like gitmoji, though, drive me nuts. Talk about ambiguous and easily misused. Faster for everyone if you just say what you mean.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-19 16:41:46+00:00
> We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools.

These titles are invariably widely accessible and banned from public schools because they contain graphic displays of sexuality that parents don’t want their children to be exposed to. The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter).

They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these displays.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-19 16:42:25+00:00
> because in a lot of shitty countries, even some pretending to be democratics, not disclosing or at least inputting your password might be a crime severely punished

What's your point? That because it isn't useful in every country, it's not worth making available to any countries?

It's not preventing you from providing your password.

You started by saying it's a good option to have, so I don't understand the point of your second paragraph.
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-04-19 16:42:27+00:00
> There may be a difference in what they do when the community requests content not in the catalog.

My partner is a librarian and I can tell you they frequently add books they personally dislike or outright loathe (be it for content reasons or if they just think it's a bad book).

This can happen at the request of the community, or even if they believe somebody in the community might want said book.

This "curation is actually censorship" balderdash is completely out of touch with what library curation looks like and how librarians work and see their responsibility to their community
by rudedogg | 2025-04-19 16:42:52+00:00
Do you have a link to some of this output? A repo on Github of something you’ve done for fun?

I get a lot of value out of LLMs but when I see people make claims like this I know they aren’t “in the trenches” of software development, or care so little about quality that I can’t relate to their experience.

Usually they’re investors in some bullshit agentic coding tool though.
by SeanLuke | 2025-04-19 16:42:56+00:00
If you think this is dense, try Italy some time. Huge numbers of highly distinct dialects, because until the mid-1800s Italians spoke huge numbers of entirely different languages, complete with their own full literature traditions. During unification the country settled on Florence's language (the language of Dante) as the "official" language: but everyone still proudly speaks their own language. To my knowledge, Italy is regarded as the densest diverse dialect region in Europe.

How different? What Americans call arugula the British call rocket. Because the British word is derived from the French roquette, which is from ruchetta, a word in italian dialects along the French border. But Americans got their word from aruculu in the southern Calabrese dialect, a result of immigration. The Italian word is rucola, from the Latin eruca.

Americans think "Capeesh" is an Italian word because they heard it in The Godfather. But it's not: it's Sicilian, as is much of the film.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-04-19 16:44:16+00:00
> so of course it makes sense that 'constraints of development' make it impossible to make a working debugger

All of these examples are Microsoft is not building X as well as it used to, which is entirely possible. However, Microsoft choosing to move languages says something entirely different to me than simply -- software somehow got worse. It says to me that devs weren't using C++ effectively. It says to me that a tradeoff was made re: raw performance for more flexibility and features. No one sets out to make slow software. Microsoft made a choice. At least think about why that might be.
by mvdwoord | 2025-04-19 16:44:52+00:00
Most definitely, like I also mentioned. Actually at my current gig there is one engineer in the networking who is basically the load bearing wall of the department. Internal, will never even think about going external (or ask for a raise even...).

One of my old managers always kept roughly 70-30 fixed/temp in his department, just for the scaling down quickly options, as well as occasionally pushing the contractors for the slightly shittier tasks every now and then.

I have had two 5-7 year streaks now as a contractor with a large institution, at which point something funny happens, the internals on large struggling projects tend to move on to greener pastures, and it comes to me and a couple of other externals to keep things moving and effectively trade some extra money for the lack of inspiration at work.

Lastly, sometimes, managers simply have a job which is a 200-300k a year job, but due to the HR policies, the position has a salary cap of e.g. 75k. Bringing in an external means they are able to spend more, and get more experience / higher quality people onboard.

In any case, the market is open, so anyone who thinks that the contractors are unfairly advantaged, either put in your resignation and go for it, or enjoy your stability but accept the deal you made. Corporate does not owe you anything, and certainly not rationality in what they do ;)
by Fade_Dance | 2025-04-19 16:45:15+00:00
Yes, I wouldn't expect the ban to be listen any time soon.

For reference I was shadowbanned for an unknown reason, probably by posting too much on new threads in a subreddit, if I had to guess. This isn't a full ban, just a shadow ban. I've been banned for 2 months and have been appealing every day and from what I can see it might take me up to a year or perhaps the ban will never be lifted. And I am 100% sure that I've done nothing against content policies.

You on the other hand have an actual ban for Content Policy violations. Maybe someone up voted too much Luigi content or posts that advocated for violence (and they have a very loose interpretation of this). Who knows. But you got a real ban and they don't want you there. Now that you have created another account which was caught you also have ban evasion on record.

If you want you can do daily appeals like I am but in your case I wouldn't expect the ban to ever be lifted, and would look at either moving on from Reddit or creating a new account with a new IP and keeping it entirely firewalled, permanently. (And this is probably no easy task since you are likely going to need to use a VPN, but keep in mind Reddit often shadowbans for using VPNs).
by toast0 | 2025-04-19 16:45:29+00:00
Most libraries track circulation of their catalog. If nobody is using the classics, they're going to get weeded. Most libraries have limited shelf space, and it's best used for things that people are using.

Archival can be part of a library too, but I think a reasonable tradeoff is interlibrary loans, public catalogs, and considering copies in other libraries while weeding. Some library systems can also move items to non-public stacks which may be less space constrained, and only access them on request.
by isaksamsten | 2025-04-19 16:45:41+00:00
I use a small plugin I’ve written my self to interact with Claude, Gemini 2.5 pro or GPT. I’ve not really seen the need for semantic searching yet. Instead I’ve given the LLM access to LSP symbol search, grep and the ability to add files to the conversation. It’s been working well for my use cases but I’ve never tried Cursor so I can’t comment on how it compares. I’m sure it’s not as smooth though. I’ve tried some of the more common Neovim plugins and for me it works better, but the preference here is very personal. If you want to try it out it’s here: https://github.com/isaksamsten/sia.nvim
by BlueTemplar | 2025-04-19 16:46:03+00:00
I know nothing about the subject, but it only took me a few minutes to follow references to find what looks like it might be the answer that you are looking for ?

https://www.proquest.com/ openview/768dad5fa2923211ed1128cfa33d5a29/1?cbl=18750&diss=y&pq-origsite=gscholar

(It does sound like a great idea for a layman-focused documentary, and I would be surprised if none exist yet.)
by jimbob45 | 2025-04-19 16:46:12+00:00
I’ve come to the same conclusion after years of feeling like the idiot for not being able to sit through books. If people aren’t making it through your book, they might have a short attention span but your book also might just be bloated, unclear, or uninteresting. It may even not have set expectations well enough. As Brandon Sanderson says, it’s very easy to skip out on the last half of Into The Woods if you don’t know who Stephen Sondheim is as a writer.
by lordgreg | 2025-04-19 16:46:38+00:00
Hi all,

I'm excited to introduce TaskCrafter, a brand-new open-source task scheduler designed for anyone who craves flexibility and control. TaskCrafter combines simplicity with power: think plugin support, Dockerized job execution, and intuitive job chaining – all built with Python and love for clean developer experience. With the just-released v0.0.3, things are getting serious – I've implemented all the modules I wanted to and am now preparing to make a list of things I've still want to finalize before it hits v1.0.0.

You can check it out here: https://github.com/lordgreg/taskcrafter

It would mean a world to me if you could provide any feedback, issue or a feature you would love to see.
by slater | 2025-04-19 16:47:59+00:00
https://neurite.network/ doesn't appear to work in Firefox.

Uncaught TypeError: tag is not a string

forNodeTitle https://neurite.network/js/zettelkasten/zetcodemirror.js:19 <anonymous> https://neurite.network/js/zettelkasten/zetcodemirror.js:23 <anonymous> https://neurite.network/js/zettelkasten/zetcodemirror.js:276

Also in part because it's trying some localhost stuff? o.0

ERR: Not connected to Localhost Servers TypeError: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource. main.js:126:34 http://127.0.0.1:11434/api/tags Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://127.0.0.1:11434/api/tags. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed). Status code: (null).
by gruez | 2025-04-19 16:48:21+00:00
>"Tesla odometer mileage vs actual miles discrepancy" - https://www.reddit.com/r/ModelY/comments/106m2dz/tesla_odome...

This is just more of the same - vague anecdotes. Why dig up 2 year old reddit posts to try to prove your case, when you can definitively prove it with a day's worth of test drives?

>"...Besides the disappointing result in the range test, the Tesla Model 3 had quite an unusual issue–its onboard trip meter was way off and essentially lied about the distance covered...." - https://insideevs.com/news/747548/ev-winter-range-test-norwa...

Is "trip meter" referring to the odometer, or the "estimated range" meter that's also displayed?