MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-21 22:08:52+00:00
> Who started the first democracies on Earth, aliens?

The people - but at least back then, the rulers only had knives, swords, horses and maybe early versions of guns at their disposal.

Today's rulers? They enjoy grenades, insane explosives, machine guns, sniper rifles, tear gas, tanks and the most capable surveillance gear that money can buy. It has gone exponentially harder to depose dictators, and outright impossible without serious amounts of external help.

IMHO, it should be the responsibility of all rich, Western democracies to aid any and all democratic movements and to safeguard them against reactionary movements.
by yellowapple | 2025-04-21 22:08:54+00:00
> The approach they've taken ("trusted verifiers") is an approach aligned with their values, as it is an extension of the labelling concept that is already well established in the ecosystem.

That just leaves me wondering why they bothered with a new separate system instead of just using the existing label system. A "verified by bsky.social" or "verified by nyt.com" or whatever label would do the job perfectly well, no?
by Wilfred | 2025-04-21 22:09:14+00:00
In `use foo::bar; use bar::foo;`, am I importing an external crate called foo that has a submodule bar::foo, or vice versa?

This bit me when trying to write a static analysis tool for Rust that finds missing imports: you essentially need to loop over imports repeatedly until you reach a fixpoint. Maybe it bites users rarely in practice.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-21 22:09:19+00:00
China has specific needs that almost nobody else does. Most notably, all of China's power generation is in the west of the country (eg Three Gorges, the new Tibet dam) but all the people are in the east. You lose power with long-range transmission and on China's scale that's a real problem.

So China has largely invested in, deployed and perfected Ultra-High Voltage Direct Current ("UHVDC") transmission infrastructure. China has really shown they think 10, 20 and 50 years into the future with their planning.

As for grids, there are a lot of places that could be self-sufficient with solar plus batteries. A lot of remote towns and houses work this way already.
by icedchai | 2025-04-21 22:09:58+00:00
If you think they're not lies, that's fine. However, what you describe are exactly the sort of "white lies" I'm talking about. At a previous company, half of my coworkers literally did negative work, creating a mountain of technical debt that a couple other people had to clean up. My complaints about this were ignored, repeatedly. I was told my complaints were invalid by someone who had roughly half my level of experience, but a fancier fake title for less pay. They were, indeed, very accommodating of people of all skills and abilities. ;)
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-21 22:10:05+00:00
"The dark gothic manoeuvers of US President Donald Trump in shutting down criticism seemingly by a combination of punishment by diktat and perverting the invocation of freedom of speech is an exemplar for the ages. "

I simply don't see it. Trump here and in other cases is going after specific figures that used to work for him or can be somehow stripped of access to government resources. It's shitty but not the same as a wider attack on free speech in the media and among the public.

All the opposite is widely the case, media of all kinds in the United States is voracious in throwing shit at Trump and his government. So far, (typical of this administration) several openly published, completely uncensored scandals have badly rocked the Trumpist boat and I don't see his government doing the least thing to censor or intimidate the publishers of very, very widespread news and opinion about said scandals.

The reporter at The Atlantic who was accidentally added to a secret cabinet-level group chat on Signal literally published the entire chat thread as part of his criticism of the new administration, mainly to showcase their mendacity in denying his claims. The bloback? It has been entirely aimed at the government's people. That reporter remains free, and publishing.

People who compare this government to seriously authoritarian regimes would do well to look at what quickly happens to reporters and others who rock the boat under genuine authoritarian repression.
by Balgair | 2025-04-21 22:10:25+00:00
Caveat: I'm not very smart

So, if 0.3 is 12 weeks of therapy, then 0.06 is ~2.5 weeks of therapy (0.3/0.06 = 2.4), assuming you pick any 2.5 random weeks of the 12 week course.

Yes, I'm sure the first session is the most important and then a logarithmic curve of blah blah blah.

Essentially, deleting FB is not much, but it's not nothing either.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-21 22:11:07+00:00
A connection fee helps but not as much as you think. You could turn that off but there are still pipes built into your house or apartment down to the street. There's still a pipe that runs down the street. There is distribution infrastructure. You might be paying for your connection separately on your bill but you're still amortizing all that downstream infrastructure. If overall usage drops, that connection fee still has to go up.
by benoau | 2025-04-21 22:11:10+00:00
Writing good software takes a good amount of time - you can catch bugs like this in so many ways but ultimately they should be being caught, tests should be failing in their deploys or their commits or whatever, but they will only be caught while companies invest in good software practices. We're in a midway point between humans being undesirable to do this work, and AI not quite being good enough by itself (yet), so I think buggy software will have a golden age the rest of this decade lol!
by wesselbindt | 2025-04-21 22:11:24+00:00
Any convention comes with the inconvenience of definition and explanation. So to call the convention that the empty product equals 1 based on that alone seems a bit unfair. The reason the mathematical community has adopted this convention is because it makes a lot of proofs and theorems a bit easier to state. So yes, you lose a bit of convenience in one spot, and gain a bit in a whole bunch of spots.

And note that this convention is not at all required for the point I'm making regarding prime numbers. As you say yourself, restrict the theorem to integers greater than 1, and you can forget about empty products (and it is still easier to state if 1 is not prime (which it isn't)).
by jongjong | 2025-04-21 22:11:31+00:00
Pipelining is great. Currying is horrible. Though currying superficially looks similar to pipelining.

One difference is that currying returns an incomplete result (another function) which must be called again at a later time. On the other hand, pipelining usually returns raw values. Currying returns functions until the last step. The main philosophical failure of currying is that it treats logic/functions as if they were state which should be passed around. This is bad. Components should be responsible for their own state and should just talk to each other to pass plain information. State moves, logic doesn't move. A module shouldn't have awareness of what tools/logic other modules need to do their jobs. This completely breaks the separation of concerns principle.

When you call a plumber to fix your drain, do you need to provide them with a toolbox? Do you even need to know what's inside their toolbox? The plumber knows what tools they need. You just show them what the problem is. Passing functions to another module is like giving a plumber a toolbox which you put together by guessing what tools they might need. You're not a plumber, why should you decide what tools the plumber needs?

Currying encourages spaghetti code which is difficult to follow when functions are passed between different modules to complete the currying. In practice, if one can design code which gathers all the info it needs before calling the function once; this leads to much cleaner and much more readable code.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-21 22:12:16+00:00
This is why Chinese social media is communicating to consumers to buy direct and cutout the developed world middle man.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chines... | https://archive.today/rVvix

https://x.com/abby4thepeople/status/1911238808018014587 | https://archive.today/dwyw7
by gerdesj | 2025-04-21 22:12:26+00:00
It seems you know what you are on about! Thank you for a cracking comment.

I've always had this feeling that the foundations (integers etc) are a bit dodgy in formal Maths but just as with say Civil Engineering, your world hasn't fallen apart for at least some days and it works. Famously, in Physics involving quantum: "Shut up and calculate".

Thankfully, in the real world I just have to make web pages, file shares and glittery unicorns available to the computers belonging to paying customers. Securely ...

The foundational aspect equivalent of integers in IT might be DNS. Fuck around with either and you come unstuck rather quickly without realising exactly why until you get suitably rigorous ...

I'm also a networking bod (with some jolly expensive test gear) but that might be compared to pencils and paper for Maths 8)
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-21 22:12:34+00:00
I would have liked to have seen a justification for this as well. One thing about labels is that they can apply on a per-post granularity as well as a per-account granularity, but verification is purely account-level. Another is that they have slightly different semantics, you can lose your blue check if you change your handle or display name, but labels stay the same no matter what. That's probably the real justification for making it its own feature.
by zahlman | 2025-04-21 22:12:35+00:00
In my own language design (nothing public yet - need to prioritize more practical things at the moment) this is definitely on the menu. Aside from a minimal set, keywords are implemented as compile-time macros; and it's intended that they can be extended, both "natively" and in the implementation language, by writing AST-manipulation code. But the handling of arithmetic expressions, as well as the broader line/block structure, is hard-coded. (I draw inspiration from both Python and the Lisp family.)
by addisonj | 2025-04-21 22:13:50+00:00
I had the awesome, yet terrible experience to work on an obscure Nintendo feature.

By networking, I am assuming you mean console stack... which I had experience with myself, and yeah... not great. But even more, their web services (more than 10 years ago at this point, hopefully better now) were so, so bad.

The thing that struck me then, and continues to seem true, is how much they just don't really seem to care and that they singularly focus at being good at innovating where it matters: games and differentiated hardware.

Young me thought they were silly for being so "behind the times". Older me respects it more.
by fuomag9 | 2025-04-21 22:14:05+00:00
Here in Italy I don't know if I hate more uber or the taxi drivers themselves. Most cities do not have uber because of them striking and paralyzing cities. Most taxi drivers will try to scam you if you are a tourist, will not take credit cards and will under-declare profits to avoid paying taxes. Taxi licenses are limited in number and re-sold between taxi drivers and new potential buyers. No new licenses are emitted because the government is scared of them.

The situation is a complete mess here :/
by silexia | 2025-04-21 22:14:23+00:00
I also started my company to get rich. I just wanted lots of profits.

I started in 2009, and am still at it in 2025. I have had many offers to sell it for more money than I will ever need, and have had more money than I will ever need for the last decade. Why haven't I sold?

Somewhere along the way, I became personally invested in my employees, clients, and the business itself. Almost anyone I sell to would break the promises I made to the first two groups, and would damage the core of the business.

The business was bootstrapped and I had no cofounders or investors, so I never had to do what someone else forced me to do. It has been profitable the entire way, which gives me this freedom to stay the course.
by rubiquity | 2025-04-21 22:15:55+00:00
Uber is worth a case study in absolutely horrendous customer service and borderline theft. I haven't used them since they stole $150 from me for an UberEats order I was 10 minutes late to pickup in a one hour window, stating that the pickup windows are firm even for non-perishable goods and failure to show up during the window is a forfeit without refund. They even fought my credit card dispute on the matter. Vile company.
by j_timberlake | 2025-04-21 22:15:57+00:00
People downvote this guy because obviously nobody actually thinks with their blood-pumping organ.

But as for the quote, it's incredibly clear how little empathy most people have towards others, to the point where AI will easily out-empathy them, both as a conversationalist and as a robotic assistant (such as a 24/7 robot nurse with no other patients).
by warmedcookie | 2025-04-21 22:16:07+00:00
Yeah, they certainly aren't ahead in the IDE space. I tried Gemini Code Assist Enterprise today and they didn't bother taking the extra step to inject the code for you --like Cursor does. I'd rather not do these manual steps. All these features such as Repo context seem promising, but nothing is glued together to make things cohesive. But it's launched, so onto the next thing!
by projectazorian | 2025-04-21 22:16:48+00:00
I was always polite and respectful on Twitter and still wound up on a blocklist. So did many others. There was no notification or explanation provided and no recourse, I just suddenly found myself blocked from various accounts to the extent it degraded the utility of the platform.

Lots of people on the left love to be little commissars, and this sort of thing provides a perfect opportunity.

The implication of your statement is "you probably did something to deserve it, comrade" which is very much in keeping with that mentality.
by JasserInicide | 2025-04-21 22:17:03+00:00
their purpose is not to start artistic movements or liberally think for themselves and no one is claiming it is.

your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.

There are plenty of people/communities online that want it to be exactly that and want to remove the pesky human element from the equation. Dismissing them because it doesn't fit your argument doesn't mean they don't exist.
by ben_w | 2025-04-21 22:17:14+00:00
Reread it, I edit stuff while composing, and hadn't finished until at least 13 minutes after your comment.

Employability is core issue, as you brought up white collar worker comparison:

"""No they wouldn't, since those still can't replace human white collar workers even at many very basic tasks.

Once AGI is here most white collar jobs are gone, you'd only need to hire geniuses at most.""" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43746116

Key thing you likely didn't have in comment you replied to: G and I are not bool.
by vikingerik | 2025-04-21 22:17:19+00:00
2 being the only even prime isn't really anything fundamentally weird. Every prime is the only divisible-by-that-number prime. 2 has nothing unique about that.

We only notice the case for 2 because our human languages happen to define divisible-by-2 as a word and concept. If our languages called divisible-by-3 "treven" or something like that, we'd think it weird that 3 was the only treven prime.
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by Maxim_hnkl | 2025-04-21 22:19:09+00:00
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by 01100011 | 2025-04-21 22:19:37+00:00
So my experience with a leased solar system installed in SoCal in 2011 and owned until 2018(SunRun). The system ended up costing me a fair amount of money although it let me run my AC all day without thinking about it. Sure I could have turned off the AC but the amount I'd have made from selling electricity wouldn't have been much. I hear the situation is even worse now because of the new plans(and now people in the old plans will be forcibly removed). The system also slightly complicated the sale of the home.

I'll say that one goal of the current administration, assuming they're competent enough to accomplish anything, is to dramatically increase US electricity production and I believe them. So with electric costs predicted to drop I suspect it is a bad time to invest in a solar system. China tariffs probably make this even worse as panels should rise in cost.

I would also defer a solar install until I got a new roof since replacing your roof means paying to remove and replace the solar system.

I'll admit that I am biased, generally, against residential rooftop solar for non-off-grid installs since my personal belief is those panels serve society better when they're filling commercial rooftops where economies of scale can make maintenance overhead per watt lower but I'm sure someone will contradict that belief with statistics. Just throwing it out there.
by duskwuff | 2025-04-21 22:19:50+00:00
> Surely it's easy enough to define some kind of verification process based on various pieces -- phone number, credit card, purchase receipt, etc. -- and requiring a police report to be filed or something.

Apple has such a process in place: https://support.apple.com/en-us/118574 (The details aren't all laid out on that web page, but Apple support may ask for information like purchase records to confirm ownership.)

What I think is at issue here is that it will only restore access to an account which is not currently being accessed. If an account is being accessed from a logged-in device, Apple is unwilling to cut off the current user's access to that account and hand it over to another party.

And, quite honestly, I can see where Apple is coming from with this policy. Arbitrating access to a contested account can get really messy (e.g. consider a scenario where an abusive partner is trying to access the victim's online accounts).
by avar | 2025-04-21 22:20:08+00:00
This should be easier to understand if you suppose that none of your 50 states shares any of its political parties in the House of Representatives.

The Minnesota FLP[1] got members into the house of representatives in numerous elections.

If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida?

Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland, as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district.

But it's important to understand that the cart came before the horse. That purely local parties are unelectable is partly because the incumbents have shaped the system like this, to their own benefit.

In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas:

- That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you.

- That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor...
by joshuaturner | 2025-04-21 22:20:18+00:00
I can empathize with their position; I know this is something the community, especially the newer users coming from the continued rapid degradation of Twitter, are asking for.

The concept of verification and Bluesky's original mission of decentralization are two very at-odds concepts, and I think they've bridged that pretty well and left a lot of options for themselves to expand it in the future. I'm just worried about the very visible parallels to the Twitter ecosystem emerging.

My opinions on this will change if I join the verified elite, in case any bsky employees are in the thread.
by Maxim_hnkl | 2025-04-21 22:20:21+00:00
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by monoid73 | 2025-04-21 22:21:01+00:00
yeah, that'd b nice, some kind of self-bootstrapping system where you start with a strong cloud model, then fine-tune a smaller local one over time until it’s good enough to take over. tricky part is managing quality drift and deciding when it's 'good enough' without tanking UX. edge hardware's catching up though, so feels more feasible by the day.
by billybuckwheat | 2025-04-21 22:21:05+00:00
Governments didn't care about that in those days (just as they don't care now). Anyway, the cost for doing that would have bumped up the price of the magazines. Would readers have paid that? Some, maybe.

As for including a disk with the magazines, not every computer in those days had a disk drive and not everyone owned an external drive. The people I knew with computers used a cassette tape deck to load and store programs or they'd buy plug-in cartridges.
by milesrout | 2025-04-21 22:22:17+00:00
>Turns out, in this case, the “new machine” is Tony. And Tony’s kind of a racist. He’s tanking morale, making people feel unsafe. But management keeps him around because “he works hard.”

You're talking about management. Not the law. This discussion is about legal obligations. There is no law that says people should not have to work around things they don't like. There is no law of morale.

It also has nothing to do with anyone being "kind of a racist" or causing "disruption" or "tanking morale" or "making people feel unsafe". You have added all of those yourself.

The article is about a single woman complaining about a couple of specific comments. She is heavily incentivised by the American system to overstate the effect these comments have on her. If she just says she doesn't like it (reality) she gets nothing. If she claims it has caused her emotional harm, she gets something.

>So what do you think Tesla should be responsible for - just the machines, or also when someone like ‘Tony’ starts throwing the whole system off?

It should quite obviously not be legally responsible for what its staff members say, outside of their authority. What's more there should be nothing to be legally responsible for anyway, because saying "welcome to the plantation" isn't and shouldn't be a legal wrong.

Your analogy doesn't change anything.

>If you keep someone like Tony around, knowing the damage he’s causing, you’re not neutral - you’re endorsing his behavior.

And nobody said that Tesla shouldn't be able to fire someone if it disagrees with what its employee said or did. But obviously that doesn't mean that what was said was legally actionable.
by mathgeek | 2025-04-21 22:22:18+00:00
> My number theory textbook defined natural numbers as positive integers, but I'm not entirely sure why.

Since both the inclusion and exclusion of zero are accepted definitions depending on who’s asking, books usually just pick one or define two sets (commonly denoted as N_0 and N_1). Different topics benefit from using one set over the other, as well as having to deal with division by zero, etc. Number theory tends to exclude zero.