MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thyristan | 2025-04-28 14:14:39+00:00
Germany for example mandates printing a receipt. The receipt must be stored in a certified storage inside the cash register and is signed cryptographically, including the hash of the previous receipt such that there is a hash-chain of printed receipts. Therefore each printed receipt that the customer takes home (and maybe at some point hands in to the tax office for some reason) can be used to check the integrity of the cash register storage and all prior receipts in the chain.

https://www.lexware.de/wissen/buchhaltung-finanzen/neue-rege... https://www.lexware.de/wissen/buchhaltung-finanzen/kassenbon...

Many other EU countries have similar regulations, and in some cases had them for a long time.
by afavour | 2025-04-28 14:15:00+00:00
The problem with this model is that in a lot of places (especially in the US) public transit isn't a viable alternative to owning a car. So if your ability to drive gets taken away a lot of people just end up driving illegally. It's either that or lose your job, income and possibly home etc etc.

IMO a forced maximum vehicle speed is a useful middle ground option.
by croisillon | 2025-04-28 14:15:04+00:00
Related: Obituary for a quiet life (303 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40028643

When the notable figures of our day pass away, they wind up on our screens, short clips documenting their achievements, talking heads discussing their influence. The quiet lives, though, pass on soundlessly in the background. And yet those are the lives in our skin, guiding us from breakfast to bed. They’re the lives that have made us, that keep the world turning.
by Izkata | 2025-04-28 14:15:09+00:00
I don't have much experience in jobs like those, but a family member who jumped between whole different professions for years does. He always got bored of them because, at least according to him, all of them had one failing: you learn everything you need in a couple of months or so, then it's pretty much just getting better at doing those things repeatedly.

Eventually he tried out programming and found there's no real end to the amount of things to learn. It was the only job he found that he wouldn't get bored on. He only eventually left because of bad bosses.

I think that might be the factor that makes it hard vs easy compared to others - that for a lot of people, continual learning (which they thought they'd left behind when they finished school) is why it might be harder than the other jobs ones you listed. Though I know I'd find those ones harder for other different reasons.
by katabasis | 2025-04-28 14:15:12+00:00
I'd love to see something like this that is marketed to parents or schools who want to give kids a way to access the good parts of the internet (Wikipedia, e-books, etc) without the toxic parts. Maybe throw in some kind of de-centralized social media or file sharing for collaboration with other students or like-minded families. Kiwix + Pi-hole + Activity Pub basically. The device could create its own network (that only allowed access to an allowed list of sites, defaulting to a list of educational projects).

If no one produces such a device I may need to make one myself by the time my toddler gets old enough to go online.
by havblue | 2025-04-28 14:15:12+00:00
I tried the Oblivion remake and have been just assaulted by the number of things I can try and do. There's a story behind nearly every quest with some kind of ironic twist. Thinking of how you can get over the next hump by developing your character is fun.

Now, compare this with the newer Fallout 4, Outer Worlds or Starfield. There are a ton of fetch quests. There's nothing at stake seemingly in a lot of cases, or whatever you're trying to do seems really far off. Nothing is immediate and everything is impersonal. That's boring.

So to pose a theory, it's about the quests, not necessarily the world.
by whstl | 2025-04-28 14:15:43+00:00
Floooh is amazing.

One of my favourite libraries ever is Sokol, which is used for those emulators AFAIR:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

It hits the spot for me in terms of features, small-size and ease of use/embedding.

Every other library has way too much I don't need and way too little that I do.

It was also a fantastic code reference for me, when I was porting game code between platforms. It has all the answers I need in it, and I know how to navigate it quite well after those years. If one studies it enough it has enough material for a few reference books.
by pizlonator | 2025-04-28 14:16:01+00:00
I'm working on improving Fil-C's stability and compatibility.

Fil-C is a memory-safe implementation of C.

https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge/blob/delug...

You can try it easily on Linux/X86_64:

https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge/releases
by flohofwoe | 2025-04-28 14:16:41+00:00
Late to the party, but the 'proper' link is:

https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/

(the post's link is https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit-preview/ which I had put up at some point in the past to test some new features, but it's very outdated by now).
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-28 14:17:04+00:00
most datacenters do not use diesel, but gas/methane/natural gas - utility connection, that way you do not need to truck/store anything.

and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there.

same applies for luxury high rises in europe, almost all if not all of 20+ story buildings built last 30 years have them on roofs.
by krupan | 2025-04-28 14:17:54+00:00
"Basically, there is zero double checking in your computer for almost everything except stuff that goes across the network."

This is so not true.

All the high speed busses (QPI, UPI, DMI, PCIe, etc.) have "bit flip" protection in multiple layers: differential pair signaling, 8b/10b (or higher) encoding, and packet CRCs.

Hard drives (the old spinning rust kind) store data along with a CRC.

SSD/NVMe drives use strong ECC because raw flash memory flips so many bits that it is unusable without it.

If most filesystems don't do integrity checks it's probably because there's not much need to.
by Finnucane | 2025-04-28 14:17:58+00:00
I was living in Brooklyn, NY during the 2003 blackout that knocked out much of the northeastern US for a couple of days. In those days we weren't quite so dependent on cell phones and such things. People walked home, since the trains were stopped. Guys grabbed flashlights and directed traffic. We listened to the news on the car radio. After that I went to J&R and bought a wind-up emergency multi-band radio. In the intervening 22 years, I've never used it. Though at the rate things are going, maybe that will change.
by rollcat | 2025-04-28 14:18:10+00:00
> running a rdbms

I agree with you on every step and every point except the LM. Your entire argument hinges on FTS requiring a fat RDBMS. This is not the case.

Postgres is what I have experience with, but I just looked up SQLite and indeed it has FTS5[1]. This is not an LM-grade problem, this is a solved problem.

[1]: https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 14:18:16+00:00
Good question!

PyXL today is aimed more at embedded and real-time systems.

For server-class use, I'd need to mature heap management, add basic concurrency, a simple network stack, and gather real-world benchmarks (like requests/sec).

That said, I wouldn’t try to fully replicate CPython for servers — that's a very competitive space with a huge surface area.

I'd rather focus on specific use cases where deterministic, low-latency Python execution could offer a real advantage — like real-time data preprocessing or lightweight event-driven backends.

When I originally started this project, I was actually thinking about machine learning feature generation workloads — pure Python code (branches, loops, dynamic types) without heavy SIMD needs. PyXL is very well suited for that kind of structured, control-flow-heavy workload.

If I wanted to pitch PyXL to VCs, I wouldn’t aim for general-purpose servers right away. I'd first find a specific, focused use case where PyXL's strengths matter, and iterate on that to prove value before expanding more broadly.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-28 14:18:18+00:00
Even more severe than high speed is driving while sleepy, but nobody is proposing a law to regulate sleep. Also more severe than speed is the mass of vehicle. Severity is also far more impacted by vehicle mass, but I don't see any movement towards regulating vehicles be as heavy as possible.

I can come up with many more examples to illustrate the stupidity of focusing on severity and speed versus frequency and probability.
by RegnisGnaw | 2025-04-28 14:20:04+00:00
But they want to give the special treatment to other car makers: "Under her plan, the licenses could be redistributed to rival electric-vehicle manufacturers like Rivian, Lucid and the Volkswagen affiliate Scout Motors, which also employ a direct-to-consumer sales approach."

So its basically what Trump is doing, but the other way. I'm okay if they strip Tesla's special treatment or give the same to the other EV makes, but not both.
by cesarb | 2025-04-28 14:20:28+00:00
> probably with the usual suspects popping up to blame renewables

Renewables were a factor in the blackout here in Brazil a couple of years ago: the models used by the system operator did not correspond to reality, many solar and wind power plants disconnected on grid disturbances quicker than specified. That mismatch led the system operator to allow a grid configuration where a single fault could lead to a cascade (more power was allowed through a power line than could be redistributed safely if that power line shut off for any reason), and that single fault happened when a protection mechanism misbehaved and disconnected that power line. The main fix was to model these solar and wind power plants more conservatively (pending a more detailed review of their real-life behavior and the corresponding update of the models), which allowed them to correctly limit the power going through these power lines.

If you want an excruciating level of detail, the final 614-page report is at https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/R... (in Portuguese; the main page for that incident is at https://www.ons.org.br/Paginas/Noticias/Ocorr%c3%aancia-no-S...).
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-28 14:20:32+00:00
People with that medical condition should make alternative plans. If you are an alcoholic, so much so that you have driven drunk so many times that you were caught and convicted multiple times and required to have an interlock device installed, then you need account for that. There are plenty of people who don’t own a car at all, so lets not pretend that we are talking about taking away someone’s pacemaker.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-28 14:20:42+00:00
As I told my kids, "Tales of the land of the happy nice people" would be boring (or, as Clarke said, "The newspapers in utopia would be dull").

That said, Ursula K. LeGuin did author such a book, _Always Coming Home_, which is far more interesting and engaging than it has any right to be.

That said, my go-to reading for when I'm really depressed is her _The Lathe of Heaven_....
by mehulashah | 2025-04-28 14:20:47+00:00
There’s a larger problem here beyond careerization that is going unsaid. People are using these metrics as an assessment of their self worth. I’ve had top researchers point out that such and such publication was accepted in the industrial track vs research track, and how important it was to keep that flag in the bibliographical data, even well after publication in a top conference. Most papers research or industrial stay in obscurity. The truly novel ones will catch like wildfire. The metricization of research and academic standing is the underlying culprit.
by jp57 | 2025-04-28 14:21:13+00:00
When I started my PhD in CS/AI in the late 90s, my department's AI faculty was already telling us, "at the major conferences, all the action is in the workshops." And this was my experience, the workshops were indeed where you found the most engaging experiences and interesting new things.

Meanwhile the work at the main at the main conference of AAAI or ICML was much farther along, and the value of having it presented at a conference, rather than a journal, was minimal. The conventional wisdom was, "the talk is just an advertisement for the paper."
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-28 14:21:37+00:00
> People also ran out of food a lot.

This statement is subject to inverse survivor bias, gatherers and pastoral societies tended to not run out, they tended to move instead. Agriculture based early societies tended to run out or get decimated by plagues, thus leaving concentrated evidence of their passing.

However due to the one way early ones are tracked by looking at stable settlements, the evidence is stacked against the nomadic ones. While what they often had is meeting places rather than residences. What we find is megaliths, but not the settled cities to support their building.

If you move and properly do not leave much behind, there will be no evidence left.m, especially after centuries, sometimes even years.
by stevage | 2025-04-28 14:21:50+00:00
Just some feedback, I think this would be much more compelling with better choices of messages. It feels like the first two words are setting something up and the third should have some kind of payoff, but a lot of the messages don't work like that. The third word is usually predictable and obvious and something of a letdown "Never give....up".

There's really nothing in that list that is interesting enough to send to anyone in my life. I'd be wanting to send something very specific like "Remember cycling Iceland?" or "Soy chicken success" or something.

I get your concerns about "writing something inappropriate" but you could probably let people choose 3 words from a list of a few hundred pre-vetted words?
by ferguess_k | 2025-04-28 14:21:57+00:00
Kudos to the original author who took the time to dive into it. I highly admire people who can dive into some technical topics and have the patience to figure everything else. They are the kind of people I look up to.

BTW whoever fascinated by the copy protection techniques of legacy systems should also check out this book: "Tome of Copy Protection", from ID (yeah the original Idea from the Deep).
by dougdonohoe | 2025-04-28 14:22:02+00:00
I'm writing more software-related articles. Just finished my 2nd in the past month, this one on why you should "always be refactoring."

https://medium.com/@DougDonohoe/ce45d56c8773

Writing well is hard and takes time. Was it Mark Twain that said "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."? I can totally relate to that this month. Getting your point across without being long winded is challenging.
by tpm | 2025-04-28 14:22:21+00:00
In democracy the power is to some extent in the hands of the people. That even enables partial socialism, when e.g. some industries or transport companies belong to the state, but rest of the economy is private. But if there is no democracy, there is also no socialism.

> private ownership of means of production is prohibited by law - socialism definitely existed

It did not exist, it was merely declared to exist by law. And there are several issues with that, one is that means of production are also your hands and your head and you can always refuse to use them, explicitly or implicitly, however painful that may be. And the second one is the existence of huge informal economy that has supplanted the shortcomings of the formal one and that one has always been dependent on private production and this has been the case in all 'communist' economies AFAIK. It was certainly the case in communist Czechoslovakia where I lived.
by flowrange | 2025-04-28 14:22:21+00:00
This article actually solves one of the great mysteries of my life: how to beat that game.

I still remember, back in the mid 90s, playing it with my brother and some friends. We spent so much time trying to beat the default bobsleigh time, land a 100+ meter jump in the ski jumping event, or survive that dreaded third lap in skating. But no matter what, we just couldn't pull it off.

Years later, I even gave it another shot under Dosbox, thinking, "Alright, I was just a clueless kid back then. Now it's my time to shine." Nope. Still couldn't do it.

Turns out we obviously had a cracked copy. But honestly, trying to actually buy a game when you’re a 12yo in mid-90s France (obviously without any Internet connection) wasn’t exactly easy.
by Saline9515 | 2025-04-28 14:22:59+00:00
> Given that you seem to like etymology, I'm sure you'll enjoy to know that the modern acception of "intellectuals" was coined by Maurice Barrès. Here is a translation:

"Nothing is worse than these gangs of half-intellectuals. A half-culture destroys instinct without replacing it with consciousness. All these aristocrats of thought are keen to show that they do not think like the vile crowd. We see it all too well. They no longer feel spontaneously in agreement with their natural group and they do not rise to the level of clarity that would restore them to a considered agreement with the mass."

Which is quite in line with your thought that the masses are not to be trusted they must shut up!) and should be shepherded very closely by gifted individuals (like you) to avoid any wrongthink.

> Regarding democracy "empowering" certain people creates as well power imbalances. Thus, you need institutions and boundaries such as a constitution. And freedom of speech allows to express yourself when those imbalances become too strong. Poor white people speaking out in the UK is often bellitled by elites as racism. In reality, it's the result of decades of discrimination against them, starting at school. https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com...

> Regarding the grooming gangs, if you had read the wikipedia link, you would have known that Tommy Robinson has nothing to do here and that the case was brought by a feminist activist. Maybe feminists should shut up, too?

> I get that you want to jail many people for thinking and saying things you don't like. Sounds like a totalitarian regime to me. Don't whine because Trump jails pro-palestinian protesters, then?

> I don't care who passed those ridiculous gagging laws in Britain. It doesn't matter. As with Weimar, the same laws were passed by well-meaning centrists, and then used by nazis. History rimes.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-28 14:23:10+00:00
I love Presenter. When I used it recently, it was the first time someone described one of my talks as “beautiful”.

Its docs also work hard to sway you away from walls of text. It’s probably a good idea to download Presenter even if you don't want to use it, just so you can read its presentation advice.

It also lets you export your presentation plus speaker notes to a PDF later to distribute to your audience.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 14:23:27+00:00
Just running on FPGA at the moment.

This is still an early-stage project — it's not completed yet, and fabricating a custom chip would involve huge costs.

I'm a solo developer worked on this in my spare time, so FPGA was the most practical way to prove the core concepts and validate the architecture.

Longer term, I definitely see ASIC fabrication as the way to unlock PyXL’s full potential — but only once the use case is clear and the design is a little more mature.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-28 14:23:28+00:00
The reason I mentioned the rich and powerful is not in a sense that you have to get rich to drive fast. In fact, with a good motorbike, you can leave supercars in the dust for the price of the cheapest cars.

The reasons I mentioned this goes the other way: the rich and powerful have more influence than the average guy, by definition. And they tend to like fast cars, it is a status symbol and they can afford it, and there is no denying that driving fast can be enjoyable. It means that they are going to do what they can (which is a lot) to keep the privilege.
by ryao | 2025-04-28 14:23:32+00:00
Here is the NYS vehicle inspection program requirements:

https://dmv.ny.gov/new-york-state-vehicle-safetyemissions-in...

If there is anything missing that is needed for road safety, I am sure that the NYS legislature would be happy to add it. You can write to them with your findings.

In any case, there is an inspection program that keeps vehicles to a minimum standard in NYS. Other states could easily adopt it. If a significant percentage of vehicles are deemed unsafe to drive because of this, then removing them from the road would be a good thing.

> Finally, re: speed limits, it’s unclear to me how you think Newton’s 2nd Law doesn’t apply.

It is unclear to me how you think I think that. This sounds like a strawman to me.
by nathan_douglas | 2025-04-28 14:23:34+00:00
https://github.com/ndouglas/whispers

Whispers is a self-organizing, belief-driven mesh where nodes propose, verify, and evolve solutions through dynamic, decentralized consensus.

Basically a shared knowledge graph of proposed partial inferences in CRDTs using verification as a merge function. There're some issues I know I'll run into with e.g. admissibility but I have some solutions in mind.

I'm in the very early stages but I think it's a simple idea so I have high hopes for a cool demo soon.
by apercu | 2025-04-28 14:23:48+00:00
The time sink is real, but (at least for me personally), there is a sense of accomplishment when I get a a credential that is rarely felt when completing a "project".

(I control how I learn and absent a professor being a dick and purposely setting up an exam that 3/4 of the class bombs, learning is a joy compared to the politics, power games and sometimes even incompetence encountered at "work").
by floating_nodes | 2025-04-28 14:24:02+00:00
I recently set up a bare-metal Ethereum RPC node and benchmarked it against QuickNode. Using debug_traceBlockByNumber across 50 random blocks, the bare-metal setup showed an average latency of 123 ms vs. QuickNode’s 183 ms—around 33 % faster.

I shared the full methodology, results, and benchmark script here: https://floatingnodes.substack.com/p/bare-metal-vs-public-rp....

Feedback appreciated!
by IAmBroom | 2025-04-28 14:24:02+00:00
"Cruel and barbaric" is not necessarily a drawback to everyone. History shows it's not much of a deterrent at all. Unfortunately.

EDIT: I think the real cause behind slavery is not and has never been "controlling war prisoners". It's personal profit. War raids between small tribes to capture "wives" from outside their local gene pool is one such, well-document example.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-28 14:24:36+00:00
It's all but illegal in the US too but the feedback loop of increased cost, increased regulation, increased mandates for insurance has driven up the cost enough that the baseline cost of compliance is so high that unless you're solidly in the middle class driving expired/unregistered beaters with no insurance and abandoning them to impound every now and then and/or pleading financial hardship with the courts is preferable.

And when most people running expired or no reg are just everyday working stiffs and most of them can't afford huge fines it's neither useful as a pretext for fishing nor revenue so the harassment by cops stops happening. And the rhetoric of the voting public has pretty firmly against the cops harassing the crap out of people recently too.

No amount of screeching about how these people should be stomped by the jackboot for noncompliance will make the economics of that pencil out for the state. You force these people to pay up either to the state or the insurers and they won't be able to live at their current economic level and they'll just turn right back around and be on the section 8 and welfare rolls which is probably worse for the public good. It's just a shitty situation no matter how you cut it.
by baranul | 2025-04-28 14:24:45+00:00
It's a language in beta and larger project (so more users). Take Zig for instance (also in beta), it has over 3,000 issues[0], and that's 3X more than Vlang. People run into problems using Zig all of the time. Any language can be claimed to be buggy or minor issues taken out of context.

[0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues