MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by laomai | 2025-04-24 01:53:15+00:00
Related story, In the US, so YMMV:

I tend to try to pay in advance when I order so I don’t have to wait 5-10 minutes to get a bill, then have them run off as I grab my payment method of choice, to wait another 5-10 minutes to actually pay.

I was a little confused how my requests to pay early seemed to slightly irritate waitstaff. So I asked some restraint owner friends of mine and they mentioned how, depending on the POS configuration, the act of requesting or paying the check (forgot which one) automatically queues up your table availability to the next guest.

So I guess, convenience workflow feature for the restaurant host impacts creates an annoyingly rigid behavioral pattern that unexpectedly passes “waiting frustration” on to diners.
by sidibe | 2025-04-24 01:55:51+00:00
> That said, I was surprised to learn much later that, by all accounts, Elon Musk was a competent and resourceful leader in SpaceX's early days. Maybe these stories are just his personality cult in action, but I found it plausible

He's good at having and raising money which was what SpaceX needed, I think he was probably the same then as he is now. Reading about his early days at Tesla and the PayPal stuff, I don't really buy the idea he was ever different and took a dark turn. He's the type of person that will never self-regulate and somehow has never faced any negative consequences for lying and self-aggrandizing so has kept pushing it further
by gus_massa | 2025-04-24 01:56:04+00:00
It would be nice to have a lobby, so before the first game I can wait and ensure all my friends are connected. And perhaps a countdown, like 3, 2, 1, ...

I'm not sure about the jumps to the next intersection to move. I expected to smash my keys to move. I'm not sure what is better. (Also, pack man style movement may be another option.)

Can you add an AI player to test the game. (I opened a windows in Chrome and another in Firefox.) The AI must be not to smart but not too stupid.
by thewileyone | 2025-04-24 01:56:29+00:00
Dude, I'm impressed cause I don't the energy to build my own OS kernel!

But here's a wacky idea. Just set it up so that the OS only runs DOOM as default. Boots directly into Qemu and runs DOOM, nothing to select or change. Maybe something you could fold other games into so that they can run off a USB boot loader. Might be appealing to people who don't want to install or compromise their base setup.
by rondini | 2025-04-24 01:56:34+00:00
You’ve been combative throughout this thread, and it's clear that you don’t see typography or design as disciplines that warrant serious thought. I don't think you're actually willing to engage with an explanation of why it matters but I'll try anyway.

System fonts are the absolute bottom of the barrel. Some are well designed but using any of them is a visual shorthand that you didn't care enough to put thought into your design. You're associating your product with the ocean of amateur work on the internet, giving the impression you copy pasted a template.

There are some high quality free fonts typically backed by massive organizations with actual typographic expertise. Most free fonts however, are amateur work that are technically and functionally lacking. Professional fonts are well designed at all weights, they're carefully spaced, they include much larger character sets to support more languages, contain features like lining and non-lining figures, variable font weights, small caps... are those all slight differences?

There’s a reason so many articles exist with titles like “Google Fonts That Don’t Suck”. Most of them do. If you are a professional whose job requires working with type, then choosing a font is foundational to your product. Arguing that all design is BS is just lazy; it's not a coherent argument.

I highly recommend practicaltypography.com, a free web book that discusses all of this and more, including why system fonts are bad and why a professional typeface is worth paying for.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-24 01:57:17+00:00
You've taken me down a bit of a rabbit hole, thanks for that.

I've always been impressed by Robert Goddard and his advanced (for the time) work on rocketry, which was little appreciated by many of his contemporaries, except, it's suspected, secretly by select people from within Nazi Germany who used it to advance their V programs.

However, of Tsiolkovsky, I didn't know anything at all, and what he imagined and then actually modeled with remarkable precision and accuracy is downright incredible, all the more for this being done in the 19th fucking century. If even Goddard wasn't appreciated in the 20s and 30s, it's no wonder that nobody had a clue about what to make of Tsiolkovsky's work until much later in his life and afterwards, and just ignored so much of it for so long.
Has anyone else found Google's AI overview to be oddly error prone?
by ckemere | 2025-04-24 01:58:15+00:00
I've been quite impressed by Google's AI overviews. This past week, though, I was interested in what I thought was a fairly simple question - to calculate compound interest.

Specifically, I was curious about how Harvard's endowment has grown from its initial £780 in 1638, so I asked Google to calculate compound interest for me. A variety of searches all yield a reasonable formula which is then calculated to be quite wrong. For example: {calculate the present value of $100 compounded annually for 386 years at 3% interest} yields $0.736. {how much would a 100 dollar investment in 1638 be worth in 2025 if invested} yields $3,903.46. {100 dollars compounded annually for 386 years at 3 percent} yields "The future value of the investment after 386 years is approximately $70,389." And my favorite: {100 dollars compounded since 1638} tells me a variety of outcomes for different interest rates: "A = 100 * (1 + 0.06)^387 A ≈ 8,090,950.14 A = 100 * (1 + 0.05)^387 A ≈ 10,822,768.28 A = 100 * (1 + 0.04)^387 A ≈ 14,422,758.11"

How can we be so reasonable and yet so bad!?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-24 02:00:03+00:00
Huh, I am not sure if you are earnestly sincere or not, but I just got done saying that I consume way too much media, and here you're suggesting that I open up access to way more of it.

Honestly, YouTube's catalog is so extensive that I don't need to go outside of it. I don't enjoy reading any books or magazines, frankly. YouTube does interfere with one book in particular, and that's the Bible. Which I have plenty of access too, but my "quality time" suffers because I'm engrossed in other things.

I am no stranger to the library. But when I visited last year and looked through the catalog, I sort of wanted to throw up a little. Because the selection at my nearby municipal library, and the main branch of the Phoenix system, they suck a lot. I mean it's horrible.

My local library curates a lot of extremist liberal material. On their shelves are the gayest authors, and the harshest critics of conservatism, and a lot of Indigeneous/Latino. In other words, coalitions of people who hate my way of life and wish to destroy it by any means necessary. I would rather not read their playbooks, whether or not they are succeeding in their mission. A dearth of material aligned with my worldview. Plenty of pagan books, self-help and pop-psychology, and lots of outdated tech or legal info, but nothing I would really be induced to check out.

Likewise for the Phoenix main library. It's huge, cavernous, should be chock-full of information, but I was able to find a couple of bio books on US Presidents that sort of held my interest for 20 minutes. Mostly this library is oriented toward retired people seeking hobbies, and people looking for jobs, and the sort of practical stuff for the urban poor and their children.

I was interested in deep topic research on Ireland, or Pennsylvania, and various related historical topics, and I found that any local library just can't afford shelf-space on regions far away like that. I could study local Arizona history for sure; in fact there's a special room for that, but I only share 26 years' worth of that history.

The catalogs of Libby and Overdrive were massive and overwhelming, but again, the caliber of content was underwhelming. The video streaming platform was, again, pushing lots of far-left stuff before my eyes; I just didn't want to watch it. YouTube has lots of mainstream blockbuster films. I'm good with pay-per-view of something that is well-made.

No, I really have no objections to YouTube or the way it's sucked me in. It's the friendliest and most bearable Google property of all. Sadly it's the same Google where I try to get daily stuff done. A library card won't help me do banking or pay my bills. My smartphone is getting in the way now. We're enslaved to these things and I don't anticipate it getting better.
by ronnieboy493 | 2025-04-24 02:00:27+00:00
I remember being young and having loading Rockbox on my iPod. Great times.

Playing DOOM, which I hid from my hyper-religious parents, was always a blast. It trashed the battery so I kept it plugged in - it would get very hot. Probably terrible for the device but I was a kid and wanted to slay some demons.

There was a Mandelbrot viewer that was pretty cool. Lots of stuff I'm probably forgetting.

It also functioned as a device for adult images that I would dual boot into. Not the best for my young brain most likely. Still, I have plenty of nostalgia around using computers to solve parental problems. Or creating more because I didn't understand partitioning, boot loaders, or really anything when installing Ubuntu on a family machine. :)
by codebje | 2025-04-24 02:01:07+00:00
I once updated a little shy of 1mloc of Perl 5.8 code to run on Perl 5.32 (ish). There were, overall, remarkably few issues that cropped up. One of these issues (that showed itself a few times) was more or less exactly this: the iteration order through a hash is not defined. It has never been defined, but in Perl 5.8 it was consistent: for the same insertion order of the same set of keys, a hash would always iterate in the same way. In a later Perl it was deliberately randomised, not just once, but on every iteration through the hash.

It turned out there a few places that had assumed a predictable - not just stable, but deterministic - hash key iteration order. Mostly this showed up as tests that failed 50% of the time, which suggested to me a rough measure of how annoying an error is to track down is inversely correlated with how often the error appears in tests.

(Other issues were mostly due to the fact that Perl 5 is all but abandoned by its former community: a few CPAN modules are just gone, some are so far out of date that they can't be coerced to still work with other modules that have been updated over time. )
by steveBK123 | 2025-04-24 02:02:46+00:00
This is why I found GOOG engineers I’ve met the most insufferable. Note I’m east coast so sample size is under 10…

But they all universally had a rather smug attitude that what THEY were working on was morally above what the rest of us were because they were just doing non-commercial r&d loss making stuff.

They didn’t sully themselves with anything to do with the core business!

Of course this steps over the darker aspects of the core business which funds their generous “non commercial” fun jobs…
by alganet | 2025-04-24 02:03:13+00:00
*_at and *_by fields in SQL are just denormalization + pruning patterns consolidated, right?

Do the long walk:

Make the schema fully auditable (one record per edit) and the tables normalized (it will feel weird). Then suffer with it, discover that normalization leads to performance decrease.

Then discover that pruned auditing records is a good middle ground. Just the last edit and by whom is often enough (ominous foreshadowing).

Fail miserably by discovering that a single missing auditing record can cost a lot.

Blame database engines for making you choose. Adopt an experimental database with full auditing history. Maybe do incremental backups. Maybe both, since you have grown paranoid by now.

Discover that it is not enough again. Find that no silver bullet exists for auditing.

Now you can make a conscious choice about it. Then you won't need acronyms to remember stuff!
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-24 02:03:17+00:00
T-Mobile does not have a trademark on the color magenta, nor does Pantone on any colors.

The trademark is for using that color to market your product such that a buyer might assume they are buying T-mobile, but in reality they are not.

Or for Pantone, that a buyer is buying a color quality controlled by Pantone.
by ramraj07 | 2025-04-24 02:04:51+00:00
I admire your stance but consider this hypothesis: nothing is better than nonsense. Most research leads to nothing. Knowledge is better than ignorance but research funding isn't unlimited. I estimated the average biology paper to cost several hundred thousand dollars if it didn't involve animals and a million if it did. Does the parameter you find or establish even justify such a cost? Most of my and my colleagues work really didn't change anything in my opinion. Even if some of us didn't want to be useless like this, we had no choice. The system just forces you to do these projects. The only way to beat this system is to get out of it. That's what I did. I hope to start a garage lab sometime and do whatever I want as you say. At least I won't be taking public funding and I hope I might find something better without those limits after all.
by 000ooo000 | 2025-04-24 02:05:12+00:00
How about: IIPTWNIRTIoSoDIQMBSNRTL

(It Is Probable That While Not Immediately Required The Implementation of Storage of Data In Question May Be Simpler Now Rather Than Later)

I've gone ahead and included additional detail in the acronym in the event that the clarity is required later, as this would be difficult to retrofit into a shorter, more-established acronym.
by tptacek | 2025-04-24 02:06:26+00:00
This claim that system fonts are the "bottom of the barrel" is just so clearly false that I don't understand how you can be an advocate of typography and say it. Both Microsoft and Apple put huge amounts of effort into typography, contract or employ well-regarded designers, and their outputs are themselves well-regarded.

If you wanted to say "most of what's on Google Fonts is bottom of the barrel", you'd have a colorable argument. But that isn't what you said.
by zzrrt | 2025-04-24 02:06:45+00:00
> DOGE staffers would have been instructed not to trust any custom role, so… Tenant Admin it is.

Ok, arguing with DOGE on their own terms… I confess I’m not knowledgeable with these systems, but how do you even trust it when it tells you you’re the “Tenant Admin”? Why would the deep state be unable to fabricate such a role that looks like the real one but is still lying to you? I did enough research to assume this is a Microsoft thing, so you might be viewing a Microsoft domain signed by a Microsoft SSL cert, and trust that Microsoft is telling you you’re really the highest admin. But… we’re talking a vast conspiracy with billions on the line… why would a true-believer DOGE crusader not believe there are also deep state agents in Microsoft, the certificate authorities, and ISPs?

Asking for Tenant Admin or whatever magic term seems like a start to get “the truth”, but completely inadequate to actually take down “the deep state.”

Of course, that’s the beauty of it. A super-powerful, secret enemy can never be vanquished, so they’re always a great excuse to take the next step to demolish the real government and trample the rights of the people.
by unoti | 2025-04-24 02:07:09+00:00
> Why can’t the LLM just learn your writing style from your previous emails to that person?

It totally could. For one thing you could fine tune the model, but I don't think I'd recommend that. For this specific use case, imagine an addition to the prompt that says """To help you with additional context and writing style, here snippets of recent emails Pete wrote to {recipient}: --- {recent_email_snippets} """
by Sparyjerry | 2025-04-24 02:08:10+00:00
To everyone saying 'where are the arrests?' This is all conjecture at this point and time will tell what was click bait and truth. Below is the statement from NLRB's acting press secretary.

"Tim Bearese, the NLRB's acting press secretary, denied that the agency granted DOGE access to its systems and said DOGE had not requested access to the agency's systems. Bearese said the agency conducted an investigation after Berulis raised his concerns but "determined that no breach of agency systems occurred."

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355895/doge-musk-nlrb-...
by quesera | 2025-04-24 02:09:10+00:00
Well, the speculation is that an AI could iterate through a zillion novel and mostly-garbage designs to discover something unexpected with a higher gain than known designs.

There's a percent efficiency/gain improvement that exceeds the cost-performance ratio of simply increasing power -- boiling down to the usual capex vs opex argument.

I can't make an intelligent guess on the likelihood of that discovery.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-24 02:09:19+00:00
bool( thing ) is overly verbose. It would be nice to have a unary operator.

I don't think the problem is that empty strings are falsy per say (although that might not be to your personal preference). Rather I think the problem is the implicit coercion to bool, hence my desire for a unary operator.

I think this is yet another entry in the (extremely) long list of examples of why implicit type conversions are a bad thing.
by cfata | 2025-04-24 02:09:38+00:00
Staying informed today feels like a full-time job: endless tabs, scattered sources, and click-chasing headlines.

On top of that, the average American spends 70 minutes a day keeping up on the news.

While Morning Brew attempted to address this issue, I never felt satisfied with the depth and coverage.

So I decided to try to fix this problem myself.

I built Skimz to cut through the noise with one smart, structured read in under 10 minutes.

No fluff, just facts.

Just the news that matters — all before your second coffee.

I'd appreciate your feedback on the format, content selection, and any areas for improvement. Hopefully some of you will find this useful and will be able to allocate more time to build going forward.
by UnmappedStack | 2025-04-24 02:12:02+00:00
Not disappointed at all to answer! Running it on my laptop was literally just formatting a USB with the ISO and booting from the USB.

I would recommend checking out https://osdev.wiki to start out if you want to write a kernel, as well as reading relevant specifications (such as Intel Developer Manual and the specs for any drivers you write). I don't really know much about non-x86 kernel dev but most of the concepts are the same as far as I know, just different technical implementations. There's a link to a discord server on the project's readme, there are some very smart people in there who I'm sure would be more than happy to help you out.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-24 02:12:18+00:00
The EU's regulatory stance on antitrust does not require a monopoly, it requires a dominant position in a market meeting use of certain criteria marked as abuse. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... From there when they tell a company they are breaching criteria for abuse and the company doesn't change the EU issues according fines.

As for "why" this is against the law, I assume that more to mean "why did the EU make this against the law" (since the other answer is simply "because the EU law was written as so". The arguments are largely the same as for why monopolies should not be allowed to operate: to ensure free market competition by preventing a few dominating companies from unduly pressuring the market. There are, of course, some who feel the freest market is one with no governmental regulations at all but they are not the majority (at least in the EU).
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-24 02:13:03+00:00
Here's how I feel that Democrats and Republicans are viewing the Church: [where "Church" is our abstract, "all baptized believers" sort of umbrella.]

The Democrats seek to incorporate the best aspects of Church into the State. That is, entitlements and welfare programs should be secular, essentially supplanting the charity outreach and evangelization that was formerly done by Church. That patriotism and nationalism should be approached with a religious fervor and indeed, the highest religion would be the State's. I believe that liberals recognize the power of Church, and simply want the State to supplant and subsume that power for the good of the State. This garners plenty of support from non-Christians, who can see the Church eventually withering away as it is rendered irrelevant and redundant.

Conservatives see Church as an ally and partner to the State. Evangelicals in particular, independents and non-denominationals can perceive deep rifts and struggles among denominations, and they feel persecuted not only by anti-Christian sentiment, but threatened by institutionalized Church [and also Jews, Muslims, Hindus] joining and melding with State power. So there is this feeling of separatism on the Right, that Church must remain independent of State and that eventually, it will come down to a Church vs. State struggle that Church must triumph and reign supreme again.

Personally, I'm unable to agree or fully get onboard with either side in this struggle. The conservatives almost convinced me of that separatism thing, but it is absurd to think that that narrative will win out somehow. The Right is weaponizing Christian fervor against the Left, and the Left is recruiting every non-Christian, and every anti-Christian, to merely weaponize them against the Right.

And sadly, there are many innocent people caught in the middle of this. We just wanted to live our lives and not get swept up in an end-times battle. The din of the Left screaming in my ear about Trumpism is deafening and appalling. The conservatives seem to have a grip on reality, pragmatism, and calm response, but the unrest just grows, and our nation's issues are deeper than left-right partisan issues.
by UnmappedStack | 2025-04-24 02:13:08+00:00
Well, the LibC is still quite small, and the syscalls aren't really compatible with Linux. A lot of things to port, for example Vim, require system libraries such as ncurses which need syscalls that aren't in the LibC. I don't really need many #ifdefs, at least not for most things, as it's a more or less posix-based libc.
by cmurf | 2025-04-24 02:13:59+00:00
Voters elected an abuser and now we're being abused.

This is what happens with the authoritarian faction, present in all societies, wins an election. The people who stand for the Constitutional order didn't do enough. Whether they weren't sufficiently positive persuasive or negatively persuasive, here we are with President Psycho in office.

The law didn't fail. Order didn't fail. The self-governed, the people, failed to support and defend the Constitution.
by deepfriedrice | 2025-04-24 02:15:09+00:00
The "critique" is nuts. Surely AI generated. If I didn't trust the domain, I'd assume the author to be incredible for seriously referencing something like this.

Look at the critique [0] and then look at the code [1].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250423135719/https://github.co...

[1] https://github.com/ricci/async-ip-rotator/blob/master/src/as...
by quesera | 2025-04-24 02:15:59+00:00
You are not educating me in any way. And obviously I don't browse with JavaScript enabled.

We could go back and forth all day about the likelihood of a v8 sandbox escape vs RCE in a big C program. But another risk to consider is a non-obvious misconfiguration. A default server block with a wildcard server name. A stray symlink inside the docroot. An unexpected mount point. A temporary config change that you forget to revert. So many ways to fail...

Regardless, trusting your entire personal data security to a single layer of protection is madness.

Perhaps only exceeded by the logic of "it hasn't happened for a long time, therefore it will never happen again".

Good luck.