MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lqet | 2025-04-15 10:07:34+00:00
Reading this, I feel slightly embarrassed about our largely unplanned 100 km family cycling tour to France 1.5 years ago. We used our standard day-to-day Peugeot bikes from the 70ies, and a relatively new children's trailer. Because our bikes were so old, I made sure to have all the tools with me to fix anything broken, despite the relatively short distance. The bikes didn't have a single mechanical failure, not even a flat tire. But halfway through our trip, the trailer had a broken spoke. I removed the spoke, hoping that the rest of wheel would hold together, but all the remaining spokes immediately started to become loose after a few kilometers. I ended up truing the wheel using the remaining spokes, and than fixating the spoke nipples to the spokes and the rim with a pack of kid's plasters. To my surprise, this actually worked. We made the remaining 50km without problems, but stopped every kilometer or so to check if any spoke had become loose.

Note that we largely cycled through the French and German countryside on dedicated bike routes on which we were the only cyclists most of the time, so this was relatively uncritical.
by anal_reactor | 2025-04-15 10:07:37+00:00
What a great day to be European.

I think that websites like Temu or AliExpress are particularly popular in poorer countries because we're used to scammy tactics, and we know how to navigate them. We know what to buy in order to get what we want, and for this purpose, AliExpress is awesome, because there are so many products you can't find locally. Meanwhile customers from rich countries expect better customer service as the default, and are willing to pay higher price for it.
by boomlinde | 2025-04-15 10:07:50+00:00
> Describe explicitly how your example will trigger illegal behavior? Happy to discuss the behavior of the compiled asm if you'd like to be that pendantic?

Through calling @fieldParentPtr with a field_ptr not pointing at a field of the given field name in the result type, when the result type has an ill-defined memory layout. I'm essentially just paraphrasing the documentation, which I've already quoted.

Generated code is irrelevant to this end. Illegal behavior can coincidentally result in code that works as intended in practice as a side effect of the implementation. Similarly you may expect a signed integer to wrap around as it overflows in C because of the implementation of the compiler and the code it generates, but it's still undefined behavior.

> No? Struts have a defined layout, they're not guaranteed between compilations, but they don't change within a compilation unit.

This is not the sense in which the Zig language reference uses the term well-defined memory layout. Bare structs, error unions, slices and optionals don't have a well-defined memory layout in the sense the Zig language reference uses it.

> And the failure mode is the compiler will decide to delete your OS?

The failure mode is irrelevant. Unchecked illegal behavior is unchecked illegal behavior regardless of the failure mode. You are moving goalposts now.

> I thought you were saying that it's guaranteed to be incorrect. In fact, I think that's what you said in your reply to me. Mostly because you used the word 'mearly'.

The example I posted is guaranteed to be incorrect, which demonstrates that the use of @fieldParentPtr can result in unchecked illegal behavior, hence not type safe nor giving you an error when you write invalid code. Regarding the use of "merely", you should adopt the habit of reading complete sentences before you draw conclusions about what they imply.

> The way that I understood what you meant was, the example you provided was guaranteed wrong.

The example is guaranteed to cause unchecked illegal behavior.

> I'm sorry if I was unclear, I was trying to discuss it in good faith. :(

If you want to argue in good faith, you can start with a good faith reading of the language reference.
by stavros | 2025-04-15 10:08:03+00:00
Yep, this is my experience here in Greece. I'd randomly get maybe 5% of packages having a 3 € "customs fee" on top, but everything else was much cheaper. Now I have to pay VAT and import duties on everything, nothing gets extra fees but everything costs 50% more.

I guess the intent was to let local shops compete with AE, and they succeeded, because the prices are much more in line with the local market, I just miss all the cheap stuff :P
by jvm___ | 2025-04-15 10:08:32+00:00
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?si=LcVxE3w-ohGqZAr7

If you need some existential dread. It's a hypothetical video to portray the rest of the universe, the time speed moving forward doubles every 5 seconds - and it's 29 minutes long...
by lores | 2025-04-15 10:08:38+00:00
I've worked in academic publishing for a long while, and I can tell you from experience that:

- "quantity of publications" is a problem and directly leads to bad science, so is on aggregate a measure of anti-quality

- "quality of the journals published in" is all in the mind; prestigious journals with high impact factor have been repeatedly found not to have the best research. The rigour of the editing process is more important, but few researchers know that, and importantly they are heavily incentivised by funders to go for high impact factor, completely muddying the waters of who's a good researcher by that metric.

- number of citations would be a better measure, but unfortunately is directly linked to impact factor, in practice and in perception.

- awards won, books published - too niche and random to matter much.

- "every academic could tell you the top 5 journals in their field" haha, no, you'd be as surprised as I was when doing that research.

Academic publishers have been considering the measuring problem for decades, and no one has found a solution yet.

There is no good measure of the quality of a paper until many years after publication. It's easy to identify some true positives (high impact, no retraction), it's quasi-impossible by definition to identify false negatives (unfairly ignored papers), and most importantly this emphasis on prestige research is terribly harmful to Science. Science needs researchers who are happy to replicate studies, people who publish disappointing results, and people who study otherwise unglamorous topics, otherwise Science fails.

TLDR: measuring how 'good' a researcher is by their prestige is extremely destructive to Science. You can't do that.
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-04-15 10:08:38+00:00
From the supplementary materials:

> Importantly, the dynamic viscosity µ and surface tension γ do not change across our experiments, nor in the context of human urination.

From the paper:

> Splash generated from a jet or droplet train impinging on a flat surface is a complex phenomenon depending on many factors, including the impact speed (U), impinging angle (θ), dynamic viscosity (μ), density (ρ), diameter of the jet or droplet (D), surface tension (γ) of the liquid, ambient pressure (P), as well as the wettability, contact angle, and roughness of the surface. ... In the context of urination, most of these factors cannot be changed. However, the impinging angle can be controlled to reduce or eliminate splash.
by anticol | 2025-04-15 10:08:56+00:00
I recently launched https://freeutilitytools.com — a collection of free tools like text formatters, number converters, age calculators, etc.

The goal is to solve simple, everyday problems without ads, logins, or distractions. But I don’t want it to end up as another generic “tools everyone has” site.

What are some uncommon or underappreciated tools you wish existed? Curious to hear your thoughts — whether it’s niche calculators, developer tools, or weird-but-useful utilities.
by rs186 | 2025-04-15 10:09:23+00:00
> There's five toilets on each car, you never have to wait.

Can't agree based on personal experience.

> There's free wifi.

That wifi is barely usable. I often ended up using my phone as the hotspot.

> Riding the train is more fun than flying

Depending on whether you are a big train nerd or plane nerd. I am a little bit of both, and I never consider train to be any more fun or boring than flights. On shorter trips where plane flies at a low altitude (e.g. Boston-NYC-Washington DC), if the weather is good, I would be staring at the ground and take (crappy) aerial photos the whole flight.

And your post doesn't mention the routine delays on Amtrak trains. Trains in China and Japan are much more punctuate.

Don't get me wrong, I take trains in the US for leisure purposes more than almost anyone I know, but it is not nearly as romantic as you try to paint, which is why most people choose driving or something else.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-15 10:10:52+00:00
you can install Qbittorrent client, after loading torrent file/magnet link, right click on that torrent and click on Download in sequential order.

torrent PROTOCOL does not require to download random pieces, in random order.

ONLY bittorrent, inc. COMPANY which releases "Utorrent" and "Bittorent" NAMED APPLICATIONS/PROGRAMS does not want legal trouble from media/music companies. Because STREAMING is other legal category then downloading. There is no other reason for torrent PROTOCOL to not deliver file pieces in sequential order.

if you need instant nanosecond delayed stream, those does not exist anywhere, even radio, tv stations over the air are delayed so they all transmit synchronized. so 0 latency and synchronized can be mistaken for each other.
by tetris11 | 2025-04-15 10:12:54+00:00
So the general idea is to find with compass and pencil the exact needed separation angle that can be used to bounce around the interior circumference of a circle with perfect overlap.

You then join up the bounces to their neighbours to get the desired N(prime)-sided polygon.

The easier Heptadecagon (17-sided) was illuminating here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptadecagon
by bob1029 | 2025-04-15 10:14:11+00:00
> Another important trend: power outages tend to be more severe in rural areas than in highly populated urban areas.

I've been getting a good taste of this one. If you want an excellent ~real time visualization of just how fragile these areas are, pull up the Entergy outage tracker the next time a hurricane rolls through Texas/Louisiana.

In my current neighborhood, approximately 90% of the homes have LNG standby generators. A typical outage in the area is at least 12 hours to resolve. With a catastrophic windstorm it takes upward of 2 weeks.

On the other end of the spectrum, I used to live close to the original Samsung factory in Austin. I was in an apartment that was fed with underground utility. I had a server with over 3 years of uptime and it was plugged directly into the wall. This was 2011-2014.

I think a lot of it boils down to your local infrastructure. If you pay really close attention to how the utilities are implemented at real estate transaction time, you can influence how much impact you would see during a disaster.

If you're in ERCOT and you absolutely cannot handle the idea of losing power ever again, buying something around Taylor, TX would probably be a good way to bunker up. You need to understand that the Koreans would never build another semiconductor factory in Texas if they didn't have incredible guarantees from the utility providers moving forward from that winter event.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-15 10:14:22+00:00
For a while, I was CTO of a company called Livestation [0], which as the Wikipedia article states, was "originally based on peer-to-peer technology acquired from Microsoft Research".

This P2P stack was meant to allow for mass scaling of lowish latency video streaming, even in parts of the World with limited peer bandwidth to original content source servers. The VC-1 format got into a legal quagmire, as most video streaming protocols do, and it speaks volumes that by the time I turned up in ~2012-ish, the entire stack was RTMP, RTSP, HDS and HLS with zero evidence of that P2P tech stack in production.

My main role was to get the ingest stack out of a DC and into cloud, while also dealing with a myriad of poor design decisions that led to issues (yes, that 2013 outage in the first paragraph of the wiki article was on my watch).

At no point did anybody suggest to me that what we really needed to fix our attention back to was P2P streaming, beyond the fact the company built a version of Periscope (Twitter's first live streaming product), and launched it weeks/months before they did, and were pivoting towards a social media platform, at which point I decided to go do other things.

The technical and legal problems are real, and covered elsewhere here. People want reliable delivery. Even Spotify, YouTube and others who have licensed content and could save a pile by moving to DRM-ified P2P don't go near it, and that should tell you something about the challenges.

I'd love more widespread adoption of P2P tech, but not convinced we'll ever see it in AV any time soon, unfortunately.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveStation
by Someone | 2025-04-15 10:15:25+00:00
> If got the math right, then about 1 in every 32,000 stars in the universe goes supernova each year

Can’t be right, can it? It would make the Sun (over 4 billion years old) an enormous outlier.

It also would mean stars, on average, do not get very old. Over 10% of the stars that the ancient Greeks saw in the sky would have to have gone supernova since then.
by tempfile | 2025-04-15 10:15:29+00:00
I think both those cases are easy to decide, and are legitimate play. Even if they were not legitimate, I think the remedy is simple -- not jail, but at worst return the money that was taken. In this case, even if deciding the merit of the case is hard, there was a transparently reasonable remedy (return 90% of the funds, continue with your life) which Medjedovic rejected. More than just rejecting the offer, he then went on to launder the tokens through a mixer, fled the country, and has refused to put the funds in escrow while the case is decided in court. None of this is reasonable, in my opinion, and I am 100% ok with the legal system forcing him to comply.

> This phrasing removes relevant context to the point where it no longer represents what actually happened.

I don't think it does, but you don't explain why, so there is not much to argue. It is hard to get an objective description of what happened, but as far as I can tell, the liquidity pools operated by Indexed Finance are governed by a smart contract, the smart contract contained a mistake, and by exploiting that mistake, Medjedovic was able to drain them completely.

Can you explain to me in simple english how that is using the contract as intended? Note that "it's what the smart contract said" is not sufficient, for the same reason that "the web server allowed me to make that request" is not a defence against a charge of computer hacking. What the smart contract says is actually almost irrelevant. What is relevant is what it was intended to do.

Incidentally, why should I be rooting for this guy? It seems like literally the only argument in favour of what he did here is "everything that is possible is fair". His extraction of money is purely parasitic, and aside from merely identifying the bug, he hasn't done any useful work at all. I would grant that this applies to the lottery and card counting examples too. But why should I care that he's having his money taken away?
by nabla9 | 2025-04-15 10:15:42+00:00
>What's the point of all the encryption claims?

The point is that _you_ read them carefully. They are true to their claims.

https://proton.me/support/does-protonmail-encrypt-email-subj...

Va gur orfg UA genqvgvba lbh qba'g pyvpx gur yvax nobir, ohg nfx dhrfgvbaf yvxr "Jul fhowrpgf yvarf ner abg rapelcgrq?" naq gura fbzrbar rkcynvaf vg gb lbh.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-04-15 10:16:30+00:00
useless to know the brand. Amazon will change the seller every time you see an item, and pretend the reviews apply. then the new seller will ship you counterfeits while selling under the good brand and reviews. after a few sales, seller bestbikesbrooklin7456, is banned and you are offered bestevercyclesocal888 and the cycle restart.
by input_sh | 2025-04-15 10:18:23+00:00
That's because it was still an iOS-exclusive.

People forget that the Android app and the aquisition announcement came out like one week apart. The basic web version didn't come out until half a year later.

My point is it already had a solid rich, influencer-y userbase + was about to become available on more platforms. Aquisition definitely had an impact on the user growth, but the growth itself was already inevitable.
by sdflhasjd | 2025-04-15 10:21:54+00:00
Ebay do something similar too. You can immediately provide positive feedback, but you have to wait 7 days to add negative feedback. This is ostensibly to encourage sellers to address issues to retain reputation. Sellers can also get negative feedback removed after the fact by doing refunds, etc.

This means high volume low value sellers have little incentive to actually properly describe things or post correctly. A common issue I keep seeing is sellers using slower postage than paid for. You can immediately see from the tracking number, even if you wait 7+ days to submit feedback, you'll get a 'sorry' refund and the feedback is somehow 'addressed' without them going back in time and delivering it faster.

Online reviews are just a sham now, Goodhart's law etc as even if the reviews aren't fake, they're encouraged or incentivised from real customers. Look up any service provider on TrustPilot and it's the same: hundreds of 5-star reviews from people told to add a review just after signing up, a dozen 1-star reviews from bad customer service, and barely anything in between.
by RedNifre | 2025-04-15 10:22:51+00:00
This used to exist in 2008 and it was perfect. It was called Joost and worked like this: - P2P streaming - You get a big menu of channel logos - You click on a channel and it would start the first episode of a randomly chosen series from that channel, or it would continue from where you left off - There might have been a "zap" function? I'm not sure - The GUI was so nice and large that if you connected a Wii Remote to your PC, you had the best TV experience from your couch, ever: Just press a button to bring up the menu, aim at the channel you want to switch to, done.

Such a shame that it failed, nothing after it ever came close.
by juliogreff | 2025-04-15 10:23:18+00:00
I often do ultra races, always trying to be at the pointy end. I have all the training, and all the fancy equipment you could possibly imagine. Doing something of the magnitude of this article though still scares the hell out of me. Every year I watch the Transcontinental Race, and every year I say "yeah, would love to do it, but next time". I still haven't signed up.

The gear, the legs, they help with going faster. Whether or not you can finish (barring catastrophical mechanical or injury) is all in your head!
by anjandutta | 2025-04-15 10:23:38+00:00
This is super cool — love the zero-codegen approach. I’ve had to deal with codegen hell in monorepos where a tiny .proto change breaks half the pipeline. Curious how this handles more complex types like nested messages or oneof fields?

Also, been building something in a different space (LeetCode prep tool), but the idea of removing build steps for dev speed really resonates. Would love to see how this could plug into a lightweight frontend setup.
by fransje26 | 2025-04-15 10:25:32+00:00
> https://youtu.be/8D-S8nYCwjA?si=TZfnb2qrkiZdiYU6

TIL that Pan Am was flying Airbuses!

> It takes about two weeks to totally numbify your backside.

Beat you sit-bones into submission until your pain-reporting nerves give up.. The week-and-a-half before you get there, though.. Ouch.
by shakna | 2025-04-15 10:25:37+00:00
Seller-side here. Amazon combine my author page, with that of A.A. Milne. Some of my products show up under the deceased author, some of his under mine. Reviews for one particular product are combined.

My seller ID is separate, my last name is also Milne, but my first is James.

He wrote a book called "The Red House Mystery", I wrote an homage to it because I am related to the man, called "Red House". Different products, with different ISBNs.

Combined reviews. [0]

That's not exactly a fair process for customers - and no, I can't get them uncombined. I've been trying for years. But if the seller can't get rid of something completely misleading, that seems to have been caused by a very badly automated process, then there are processes at Amazon that cause problems.

[0] https://www.amazon.com.au/Red-House-James-Milne-ebook/dp/B0C...
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-15 10:25:47+00:00
( not a criticism of you/your post )

it is insane to me, for people to have need to watch toxic channels like LinusTechTips livestream, regurgitating weeks old toxic marketing disinformation and having need to have that 0ms latency... XD

why everyone needs low latency for one way stream? unnecessary hurdle just to have that hurdle. no benefit to anything.

but agree with you that if companies already forget existence of IPv4, internet will be simpler, faster and more usable. for less price for everyone.
by mrep | 2025-04-15 10:29:12+00:00
> The observable universe is a mere 93 billion light-years across

As a non-astronomer, that number still always boggles my mind.

> Also, with the universe expanding, the observable size will reduce over a long time period.

Also boggles my mind. Also makes me think of doctor who when the stars start disappearing. I need to rewatch that...
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-15 10:29:40+00:00
Plenty of Democratic voters are on board with taxing the rich and flattening those economic hierarchies.

The problem has been that the Democratic party is the neoliberal wing of the establishment. Its purpose has been to create the illusion that economic progress is possible while working hard to maintain the economic status quo. Cultural diversity was the distraction and consolation prize.

Now the establishment wants full, unquestioned, totalitarian control now and no longer cares about maintaining the illusion of choice.

Ultimately it wants a country run on plantation lines with voting rights restricted to wealthy white male property owners, a "Christian" moral narrative (really just racism, greed, supremacism, and sexual opportunism dressed up in bible rags) and no independent sources of intellectual dissent.

Which means the bare minimum of public education, no science, no difficult or non-commercial art, no free thought in universities or academia, and as little free travel and contact with the outside world as possible.

The most comparable country is North Korea. So the likely end will be a heavily militarised and even more heavily propagandised country, run as a pampered inherited monarchy which tolerates a certain amount of education when it's useful, but is violently hostile to all dissent.

It's quite hard to get there from here. The shock-and-awe of the last few months were supposed to establish dominance, but it's not going to happen without resistance. Harvard is one example. There will be more.

Ultimately the military will be used to force compliance, and - absent a not entirely unexpected medical event - they'll decide which way this goes.
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-04-15 10:29:49+00:00
> The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies.

Not just better value for money, I often find that AliExpress sells things I simply cannot find anywhere else.

A recent example: I was looking for something to balance the 3rd axis on my telescope, There are very few products on the market from mainstream brands and none were what I needed. On Ali I easily found several options. These are basically just machined pieces of metal so not really anything than can break.

Same goes for storage bags and cases. You can often find a bag or case specifically made for your device, while there isn’t anything for sale locally.