MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lwouis | 2025-04-23 10:11:39+00:00
Domestication is often thought of as a unilateral relationship. Like all relationships, it goes both ways.

We have domesticated cows and wheat. Now their population has reached tremendous size. So has our population. We both need the other species to survive. We need them, and they need us.

You could definitely take the perspective that we have been domesticated. For example, plants have domesticated us by feeding us.
by dybber | 2025-04-23 10:11:40+00:00
> Apple violated the Digital Markets Act by restricting how app developers could communicate with customers about sales and other offers, according to the European Commission, the executive branch of the 27-nation bloc.

> Meta broke the law by imposing a “consent or pay” system that forces users to either allow their personal data to be used to target advertisements, or pay a subscription fee for advertising-free versions of Facebook and Instagram.

It will be interesting what their responses will be, but I guess they will appeal it to try to postpone the inevitable. I guess they hope Trump will make some kind of deal with EU?
by homebrewer | 2025-04-23 10:11:45+00:00
It's not arbitrary. Lithium batteries charging uses voltage termination, and the usual cutoff for 100% on lithium-cobalt batteries (so not LiFePO which is not yet widely used on phones) is 4.2 volts. It's the same for all batteries I've ever used or heard about. You can charge it to higher voltages, but basically nobody sane does that as it quickly becomes dangerous, and 4.2 is pretty much the standard voltage.
by rkagerer | 2025-04-23 10:11:56+00:00
In order to provide subscribers of this service with complete anonymity over the email addresses being searched for, the only data passed to the API is the first six characters of the SHA-1 hash of the full email address.

I take it the k-anonymity thing essentially "chunks" your database. So rather than returning one (identifying) result for one email address, you instead take the first few characters of its hash, and return a few hundred results corresponding to all the emails whose hashes share the same prefix. (A bit like asking for the "L-N" section of the phone book instead of asking for a single line).

I'd be curious what sort of attack vectors or "side channels" you wargammed out when coming up with the scheme - eg. if a block wound up mostly comprised of email domains (providers) popular in one part of the world, and only a few from another geography, then you might be able to infer identity via timezones based on time of day queries come in.
by hk__2 | 2025-04-23 10:12:07+00:00
I don’t really see "smart tricks" here, just features of the language that you may not be aware of. I use most of them in my daily work without thinking about it: `@overload` and other typing features are useful to document the code, prevent mistakes, and help IDEs generate more helpful suggestions; keyword-only arguments force users to pass options as keywords, so you avoid calls like `foo(x, z, z, true, true, false, true)` and ensure the code is more explicit; for-else can sometimes clarify some complicated code; the walrus operator, short-circuiting with `or`, and chaining operators are just normal Python.
by gadilif | 2025-04-23 10:12:20+00:00
I'm not sure that's what he meant. My understanding from the post is: First, do your job (I'd add - do it well). That's table stakes, and, some people may be happy with that. But, if you want to get promoted, if you want to 'not feel trapped by your title', then, do more. Don't wait for others to tell you what you can or should do - take initiative. Then, people will notice and you'll either get more responsibility/get promoted, or at the very least, you'll gain more experience (with results to show for it), and in any case you're better off for your next position.
by dspillett | 2025-04-23 10:12:34+00:00
IIRC it largely depended on the age of the carriage. Some newer slam-door carriages had the door sensor and remotely operable lock, but most of the stock did not and was of an age already that they were due for replacement so retro-fitting wasn't cost-effective. That subset which did have the mechanisms in place may not have been counted in what was decommissioned in 2005 & prior. I'm pretty sure I used slam doors later than 2005 too.
by mkl | 2025-04-23 10:13:17+00:00
Never really convinced me; I've done lots of graphics stuff, and I find thinking about pixels as squares works fine. Under magnification, LCD pixels are usually square blocks of rectangular RGB segments (OLED and phone screens can be stranger geometry), and camera sensors are usually made of square (ish) pixel sensor blocks in a Bayer colour array pattern. They're not point sources or point samples, they emit or sense light over an area. Maybe I'm missing something.

Lots of past discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35076487 74 points, 2 years ago, 69 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26950455 81 points, 4 years ago,70 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20535984 143 points, 6 years ago, 79 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614159 118 points, 10 years ago, 64 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1472175 46 points, 15 years ago, 20 comments
by lordnacho | 2025-04-23 10:15:02+00:00
For me, the biggest benefit to python is that it feels like executable pseudocode. The language gets out of the way of your domain level instructions. This is probably why most non-programmers have the easiest time with python.

The more fancy stuff you add to it, the less attractive it becomes. Sure, most of these things have some sort of use, but I reckon most people do not get deep enough into python to understand all these little things.
by nextpaco | 2025-04-23 10:15:03+00:00
They applied in October 2024 and starting receiving funding (€ 50.000 max) in May 2025. This is beyond ridicoulness.

This is beyond ridiculousness.

An AI agent could make a far better job than many well-paid but extremely lazy european bureaurats.

Let alone the corruption, if they choose their friend projects.

I'm pro an unite Europe but current European Union is beyond shame.
by soraminazuki | 2025-04-23 10:16:00+00:00
A Dockerfile is essentially a shell script with access to the outside world. It has unconstrained network access. It can access local hardware and filesystem if instructed to. However, it doesn't verify that whatever stuff it took from the outside remains the same across builds. Docker doesn't care if the same Dockerfile builds Apache httpd in one build and Nginx in another. It literally can't get more irreproducible than that.

But mysteriously, people say that Docker is reproducible because, uh, you can download gigabyte-sized binary blobs from the Docker registry. I wonder, what's not reproducible by that metric?

Docker images may be portable compared to binaries targeting traditional FHS distros. But it's not reproducible whatsoever.
by skrebbel | 2025-04-23 10:16:28+00:00
This resonates with me. I live in the Netherlands and back when I was a teenager, the English language started to become trendy so high schools began programmes where certain subjects were taught in English. I enrolled in one of these, generally liked it, but it made me hate biology.

Thing is, in my native Dutch, most things from nature have normal, natural sounding names. Words like "scheenbeen" (shin bone), "longontsteking" (lung inflammation), "boterbloem" (butter flower). In English, every single term in biology seems to be a 7-syllable latin word, directly anglicised (respectively "tibia", "pneumonia" and "ranunculus" in my examples - admittedly not 7 syllables but no less ridiculous) (how do you people even pronounce "ranunculus"??).

I simply don't understand why the language famous for having the largest vocabulary in the world couldn't give any bone other than "rib" a regular English sounding name (This also makes House MD needlessly hard to watch).

This made biology seem like mostly learning Latin word lists by heart. I simply didn't see the point! There'd be pages with pictures of the human body and just forty lines with Latin words pointed to them, and that was this week's teaching. If this stuff wouldn't be so cryptic, maybe there had been more space for wonderment. I once saw a Dutch language biology book from a parallel class and it was so much better.
by Guthur | 2025-04-23 10:16:52+00:00
Microsoft has a terrible history of integration even among it's own products and has forced obsoletion throughout. If it's literally you only have a single vendor to pay then you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy.

You can't on the one hand maintain the myth that there will somehow be private competition but then on the other set the barriers so high that only the largest most entrenched monopolies can succeed.
by hk__2 | 2025-04-23 10:16:53+00:00
Yes, but not in arguments:

def f(i=0) -> None: j = i + 1 k = 1 reveal_type(i) reveal_type(j) reveal_type(k)

Output:

Revealed type is "Any" Revealed type is "Any" Revealed type is "builtins.int"
by jvanderbot | 2025-04-23 10:16:59+00:00
I this strikes me as less than half the reason, though still a very big factor.

If I had to guess it would be that every business needs (or thinks they need) a custom website, and often some custom software processes, and definitely their own custom network and IT, and likely some slightly customized ERP. But rarely, very very rarely, do any businesses want custom chips or computers such that a CE is required. The demand for software is so high.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-04-23 10:17:37+00:00
Oh well, that was a misunderstanding. If people are forced to use a new OS whether they want it or not, then of course any Linux distro will do and there is hardly any need for a new OS, let alone one that the EU has developed.

I was assuming, in the context of the original post, that the EU lacks in innovation with regards to operating systems and tried to explain why it is hard to innovate in this area because of the application barrier and due to the fact that viable alternatives like Linux aren't competitive enough.
by mrighele | 2025-04-23 10:17:51+00:00
I go to m.facebook.com and I get redirected to facebook.com, since I am not on mobile. I force the browser to go as it was mobile and I get:

* Stories

* A post from one group I am subscribed to

* People you may know

* A meme from a group I am not subscribed to

* A comic from another group I am not subscribed to

* Reel from people I don't know

* Another meme

* A post from a person I don't know

* Another meme

* A post from a friend

* A post from a game publisher (not subscribed to)

* A post from a friend

* A post from another "somebody"

* Another reel

* Another unwanted comic

3 posts out of 15. 20% is better that OPs 10%, still not good
by zahlman | 2025-04-23 10:18:37+00:00
>In other words, if it is supposed to be accessed directly by arbitrary external code

There is no such thing as "supposed to be" in this context. It can be accessed, because Python fundamentally doesn't protect against such accesses anywhere. There is no wrapper because there is no ordinary purpose for the access.

>If any property can have that syntax, then the syntax loses its meaning?

There is no special syntax here, so there is nothing that can lose meaning. Leading underscores are a convention. The parser doesn't care, and the compiler only makes minor adjustments (name mangling) in very limited circumstances (to avoid mistakes with subclasses).
by codeflo | 2025-04-23 10:19:12+00:00
This classic article is wrong, BTW, there's no nicer way to put it. It applies the wrong theory. It was already wrong in 1995 when monitors where CRTs, and it's way wrong in 2025 in the LCD/OLED era where pixels are truly discrete.

Audio samples are point samples (usually). This is nice, because there's a whole theory on how to upsample point samples without loss of information. But more importantly, this theory works because it matches how your playback hardware functions (for both analog and digital reasons that I won't go into).

Pixels, however, are actually displayed by the hardware as little physical rectangles. Take a magnifying glass and check. Treating them as points is a bad approximation that can only result in unnecessarily blurry images.

I have no idea why this article is quoted so often. Maybe "everybody is doing it wrong" is just a popular article genre. Maybe not everyone is familiar enough with sampling theory to know exactly why it works in audio (to see why those reasons don't apply to graphics).
by captainmuon | 2025-04-23 10:19:26+00:00
Except pixels are little squares. Sure, if you look under a microscope, they have funny shapes, but they are always laid out in a rectangular grid. I've never seen any system where the logical pixels are staggered like a hex grid, for example. No matter how the actual light emitters are arranged, the abstraction offered to the programmer is a rectangular grid.

If you light up pixels in a row, you get a line - a long thin rectangle - and not a chain of blobs. If you light them up diagnoally, you get a jagged line. For me that is proof that they squares - at least close enough to squares. Heck even on old displays that don't have a square pixel ratio they are squished squares ;-). And you have to treat them like little squares if you want to understand antialiasing, or why you sometimes have to add (0.5, 0.5) to get sharp lines.

(And a counterpoint: The signal-theoretical view that they are point samples is useful if you want to understand the role of gamma in anti-aliasing, or if you want to do things like superresolution with RGB-sub-pixels.)
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-23 10:19:42+00:00
So, the author answers the question:

> That means the pixel is a dimensionless unit that is just another name for 1, kind of like how the radian is length divided by length so it also equals one, and the steradian is area divided by area which also equals one.

But then for some reason decides to ignore it. I don’t understand this article. Yes, pixels are dimensionless units used for counting, not measuring. Their shape and internal structure is irrelevant (even subpixel rendering doesn’t actually deal with fractions - it alters neighbors to produce the effect).
by edhelas | 2025-04-23 10:20:09+00:00
What is your issue there ?

I'm currently working on integrating multi-participants video-conferencing in the Movim platform using the NLNet funding system https://nlnet.nl/project/Movim-E2EE-video/

Its super easy to apply and the people are super nice to work with. Also try to find a company that would be interested to implement those kind of features for 5-50K€, they'll laugh at you.

For a tiny bit of "public funding" you get many exciting features on many different open-source projects and initiatives that millions of users are using daily.$

Also NLNet is an independant non-profit organization. No "lazy-european-bureaucrats" there.

> Wikipedia: The NLnet Foundation supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. It was influential in spreading the Internet throughout Europe in the 1980s. In 1997, the foundation sold off its commercial networking operations to UUNET (now part of Verizon), resulting in an endowment with which it makes grants.
by at_a_remove | 2025-04-23 10:20:18+00:00
I strongly agree. The walrus operator ... argh.

When I code, I try to make everything I write not clever. I am not saving a byte here and there because I am not typing in a program from a magazine in the 1980s (I was there, I am not going back). No code golf. I did my time on the Timex-Sinclair with its miserable two kilobytes of memory and reserved keywords as special-function strokes at a character each.

Each line should do one thing, in general, and it ought to be obvious. Cleverness is held in reserve for when it is truly needed, namely data structures and algorithms.

One of my accomplishments which seems to have mattered only to me is when my apartment-finding/renting system, written entirely in Perl, was transferred into the hands of students, new programming students. Perl is famously "write-once, read-never" and seems to have a culture favoring code golf and executable line noise. Still, the students got back to me and told me how easily-ported everything was, because I had done just one thing per line, avoided $_ and other such shortcuts, and other practices. They were very happy to take it over because I had avoided being cryptic and terse.
by cafard | 2025-04-23 10:20:43+00:00
For the wait staff, cash has the great advantage that it is up to the staff to report tips to the IRS. For everyone else?

I do carry cash, and probably use cash more than someone younger would, but for restaurant bills beyond the burger and brew range I tend to use a credit card. Once one gets into the white-tablecloth world, bills are beyond the amount of cash I usually carry.
by srean | 2025-04-23 10:20:48+00:00
One of the most frustrating bugs I had encountered was when I was using memory mapped CSC format sparse arrays.

I needed the array indices to be int64 and specified them as such during initialization.

Downstreams, however, it would look at the actual index values and dynamically cast them to int32 if it judged there would be no loss in precision. This would completely screw up the roundtrip through a module implemented in C.

Being an intermittent bug it was quite a hell.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-23 10:20:54+00:00
These truths mostly also apply when answering the eternal* question:

Why is everybody outside music, movies, crypto & pizza struggling to attract talent?

* Snow Crash (1992) might turn out not to be so precisely prescient due to upcoming dedollarization, AI democratization/bubble burst (the exact option depends on your personality type), & the solid state battery boom:

>When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery
by phrotoma | 2025-04-23 10:21:25+00:00
So glad to learn the term for this! For ages I've been lamenting the elimination of sections in clothing stores. At some point if you needed new pants you could pop into the shop and head over to the pants section. Now they're strewn all over the place and you have to wander aimlessly hoping to stumble across a couple pairs hidden among the shirts and socks.

Hear hear: Death to the Gruen Transfer!!
by 0xEF | 2025-04-23 10:22:01+00:00
Hmm. That's not been my experience, both as a factory worker and former materials salesman (most of which were foams used as insulation). In the factories, the walls are typically concrete block with hollows (sometimes called cinder block) and I can tell you first-hand that in our Winters, when the temp hits below 32F consistently, those walls are very, very cold, as is the inside of the shop despite the efforts of our +250kBtuH heaters and keeping the bay doors closed as is common practice in the Winter months.

In my travels to other factories in the Southern parts of the US, we encounter the opposite problem. Brick shops are almost always too hot despite reasonable ventilation and climate control measures. There is definitely something to be said about where the structure in is the world when it comes to choosing appropriate building materials.
by justin_ | 2025-04-23 10:22:57+00:00
> A camera does not take point sample snapshots, it integrates lightfall over little rectangular areas.

Integrates this information into what? :)

> A modern display does not reconstruct an image the way a DAC reconstructs sounds

Sure, but some software may apply resampling over the original signal for the purposes of upscaling, for example. "Pixels as samples" makes more sense in that context.

> It is pretty reasonable in the modern day to say that an idealized pixel is a little square.

I do agree with this actually. A "pixel" in popular terminology is a rectangular subdivision of an image, leading us right back to TFA. The term "pixel art" makes sense with this definition.

Perhaps we need better names for these things. Is the "pixel" the name for the sample, or is it the name of the square-ish thing that you reconstruct from image data when you're ready to send to a display?
by pjc50 | 2025-04-23 10:25:19+00:00
Ah, they said the T-word, presumably to invoke some political fire support from across the Atlantic. I wonder how that will go. Of course, this is not a tariff, for two reasons: firstly, it does not involve money (the UK's digital services tax does, but that's not this), and secondly, the same rules would apply to EU native competitors .. if there were any. It's what's knows as a "non tariff trade barrier". Of course those are all over the place, and many of them are there to protect consumer and public interests.

> The EU regulator also dropped Meta's Marketplace's designation as a DMA gatekeeper because the number of users fell below the threshold.

Now that's interesting. I think the threshold is 45 million? Falling EU userbase?
by metalman | 2025-04-23 10:25:46+00:00
funny, there are films, of elaborite demonsrations of foils in a flowing fluid, where they can inject die in nice neat parallel bands accross the flow, and they detach at the foil accelerat and deform on the top, and reatch at the trailing edge saw them over on homebuiltairplanes.com, where there is a bunch of top shelf engineers, who hold court, and the perenial topic of lift is disccused and joked about, ie: lift is caused by money... films are old black and white...mit or bell labs, maybe naca....old....well done
by huntertwo | 2025-04-23 10:25:47+00:00
I’m unable to figure it out - is this just a screen that tells you what the status of the next signal is? Or does it control the train?

Also couldn’t they just retrofit a battery somewhere instead of a new steam generator? It also seems like they reinvented the wheel making it rugged. Seems like they’re spending too much money on this project, but it seems to be private money so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: presumably the rest of the train also has power? Is the power draw from this system so intense it needs a new generator? Or does it need the resilience maybe?
by preisschild | 2025-04-23 10:26:34+00:00
> While I think that the overarching goal is good and I would like to see them succeed, I also think that they fail to address the single most important issue. Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft.

I think that's good. It prevents forming monopolies and makes use of open standards more often.
by dspillett | 2025-04-23 10:29:13+00:00
> Most cats catch for fun rather than food I think

The hunting trigger is only loosely connected to hunger — they don't get hungry then go out to hunt, they'll often see a hunting opportunity and go for it, eating the result partially/totally/not as needed. In a situation with abundant prey this will look like they are mostly hunting for “sport”.

I assume this comes from hunt availability/success being intermittent: it is better to slightly over-hunt (and slightly overeat) to keep reserves up for a lax period that might be coming.

They say that a fed cat is a better mouser, and this might be why. A truly hungry cat will prowl less to conserve energy so have less opportunistic encounters with prey.