MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-13 10:34:30+00:00
Monty Python was hardly the only show that featured men dressed as women. Drag has actually been part of British entertainment for a long time. And, honestly, I don't really see the big deal, as long as it's not done with a hateful agenda.

Little Britain's poor taste jokes would've happened regardless of Python, because of its centuries long history of crossdressing.

Many of their takes also involved kicking back against society. Put a man in a woman's position and suddenly the things women endured daily become absurd. Have a man make a crass suggestion towards another man like an asshole would to a woman, and suddenly it becomes absurd and weird. In isolation those events could be considered homophobic, but between an animated politician eating the queen and a farmer explaining that his sheep are flying into trees to nest, I don't think such pessimism is warranted.

My take watching Python is that the actors very much knew that misogyny and homophobia are stupid as a concept. They didn't shy away from portraying society as it was (and unfortunately, still is), but they weren't necessarily trying to take anyone down.

The fact many Python sketches are offensive these days says more about how society has aged than Python, in my opinion. When Python has a man in a dress, it's just a silly character, but when in modern media it has become necessary for such things to be a statement for (or, even worse, against) basic human rights.

I think the strength and weakness in Python is that they'd make fun of anything and anyone. That include sensitive topics that haven't changed as much as they should have in the last century.
by manmal | 2025-04-13 10:35:42+00:00
I don’t know about valuing kids - maybe they are valued enough, in a very direct sense.

But, as a parent of three kids, it’s very very obvious that modern western society is not really made for bringing up children in a good way. I could list multiple reasons, but IMO the most important one is that raising children with 1-2 parents, and not as a tribe or colocated big family, is super hard and a non-stop grind. It’s not possible to retrofit this kind of support with government mediated interventions, like gratis kindergarten, financial support, etc. You are always the first and last in line, as a typical, western parent. I can totally understand anyone who doesn’t want that kind of constant stress and often unhappiness in their lives.
by raffael_de | 2025-04-13 10:35:48+00:00
Interesting. I used to have problems using such apps on LineageOS due to their dependence on this Google Push Messaging service (don't remember what it's called) and also dependence on Google Maps services.

(Grab is like Uber/Bolt but used in different regions of the world.)

Camera quality of LineageOS was really bad.

A voyage was the catalyst for switching to iPhone as this seemed back then the best option to LineageOS and I couldn't risk not being able to use such logistically relevant apps.

Especially in Asia you have to be ready to install and use whatever app is required and not being able to might be seriously handicapping.
by KronisLV | 2025-04-13 10:35:55+00:00
That’s great to hear and Anubis seems cool!

I just worry about the idea of running public/free services on the web, due to the potential for misuse and bad actors, though making things paid also seems sensible, e.g. what was linked: https://man.sr.ht/ops/builds.sr.ht-migration.md
by metalman | 2025-04-13 10:36:25+00:00
the integration of the SST's is years out, anything right now is test phase, and work at bringing awareness to the grid operators, who by the way are all conversant with the peculiaritys of working with steam, ie: a conservative bunch who you can bet, will be running code on terminals so esoteric and unpublished as to invite madness for the unwary.........that, and power companys have been embedding there own private fibre inside the core's of the HVTL, so they have unusual options. It's the grid fer fucks sake, give them some credit. Powermag looks to be extra solid,bookmarked.
by globular-toast | 2025-04-13 10:36:28+00:00
Everyone loves their car, but hates everyone else's cars. Remember, your car is transport, everyone else's cars are traffic.

Saying "people love cars" is false. Some people love cars. Those are the ones doing their own work/maintenance/restorations etc and just spending time in the garage with their cars. A few more people love driving, they don't just love cars for their own sake, but they will go and just drive for fun. But most people don't do any of that. They just use cars as part of their boring, routine lives.

You might as well say US people fucking love washing machines or knives and forks.
by blablabla123 | 2025-04-13 10:36:43+00:00
Yeah it's really great, before switching to GrapheneOS I used LineageOS for years so battery life is already good in that case. But the whole access control, and checking every few months which apps are hardly used is just super practical. I don't do online banking on my phone though, I guess for people who do it's not feasible. The only thing I don't like is that it only works with Google Pixels
by mentalgear | 2025-04-13 10:37:27+00:00
Seems like a great idea, but I'd be nice if the project had a simple description. (and not use so much anime, as it gives an unprofessional impression)

This is what it actually does: Instead of only letting the provider bear the cost of content hosting (traffic, storage), the client also bears costs when accessing in form of computation. Basically it runs additional expansive computation on the client, which makes accessing 1000s of your webpages at high interval expansive for crawlers.

> Anubis uses a proof of work in order to validate that clients are genuine. The reason Anubis does this was inspired by Hashcash, a suggestion from the early 2000's about extending the email protocol to avoid spam. The idea is that genuine people sending emails will have to do a small math problem that is expensive to compute, but easy to verify such as hashing a string with a given number of leading zeroes. This will have basically no impact on individuals sending a few emails a week, but the company churning out industrial quantities of advertising will be required to do prohibitively expensive computation.
by Retric | 2025-04-13 10:38:19+00:00
That’s fairly mild, but it’s not so easy to link to 20+ year old clips. There’s some real bangers of homophobic rants in your time frame, but you may be a little young to remember any of them.

In terms of lies here’s one that was a central tenant of the part of the party line for decades. Social security isn’t an income tax because we have a tax called the income tax.
by fidotron | 2025-04-13 10:38:46+00:00
Thanks, but in truth the media stuff here isn't the difficult bit as the state of webrtc in 2025 means it's really just a question of shuffling byte buffers around in time. It's really libwebrtc and the browser integrators that deserve the credit.

I have done native mobile libwebrtc work, and that's several other levels of complexity from all this, but with that you can do things like hardware accelerated neural net integration quite easily because of how it's all structured.
by blablabla123 | 2025-04-13 10:39:10+00:00
I know, I had the problem when I got the Pixel. Already with the stock Android and then when installing Graphene. It took one or two weeks of tweaking until the battery life was on par with LineageOS. Not sure if I'd be able to reproduce it, but I think a combination of display settings and stand-by/background services. It's a thin line though, also making sure that Whatsapp notifications still work.
by hyperman1 | 2025-04-13 10:39:19+00:00
In the EUCD, a copy in RAM falls under copyright, but there is an exception defined (art 5) if the copy is transitory and the target use is legal under copyright. Neither is true for AI, so this article is probably wrong in the EU.

Apart from that, I wonder uf an AI is learning in the legal sense of the word. I'd suspect removing copyright trough learning is something only humans can do, seen trough legal glasses. An AI would be a mechanical device creating a mashup of multiple works, and be a derived work of all of them.

Main problem with this rebuttal is how you prove the AI copied your work specifically, and finding out which of the zillions of creative works in that mashup are owned by who.
by meanpp | 2025-04-13 10:40:13+00:00
After the phrase:Manipulating the logarithms, we can also get ... the formula is incorrect, since p_j have disappeared.

\[D_{KL}(P,Q)=-\sum_{j=1}^{n}\log_2 \frac{q_j}{p_j}=\sum_{j=1}^{n}\log_2 \frac{p_j}{q_j}\]

The post is just basic definitions and simple examples for cross entropy and KL divergence.

There is a section about the relation of cross entropy and maximum likelihood estimation at the end that seems not so easy to understand but implies that the limit of a estimator applied to a sample from a distribution is the KL divergence when the sample length tends to infinity.
by bathtub365 | 2025-04-13 10:40:28+00:00
All of these elements are table stakes for software that people will use and application settings is not a “hard” problem.

Normally it would just be lazy design to annoy the shit out of your users with nags instead of giving them settings but this approach seems to be pervasive at companies that make billions off this software so I can only conclude that it’s intentional.
by mckn1ght | 2025-04-13 10:41:06+00:00
> generative AI systems essentially strip away all the "non-verbal" communication channels

This is a human problem, not a technological one.

You can still have all your aforementioned broken powerpoints etc and use AI to help write code you would’ve previously written simply by hand.

If your processes are broken enough to create unmaintainable software, they will do so regardless of how code pops into existence. AI just speeds it up either way.
by palata | 2025-04-13 10:41:33+00:00
I tend to think about the average code review: who actually catches tricky bugs? Who actually takes the time to fully understand the code they review? And who likes it? My feeling is that reviews are generally a "skimming through the code and checking that it looks ok from a distance".

At least we have one person who understands it in details: the one who wrote it.

But with AI-generated code, it feels like nobody writes it anymore: everybody reviews. Not only we don't like to review, but we don't do it well. And if you want to review it thoroughly, you may as well write it. Many open source maintainers will tell you that many times, it's faster for them to write the code than to review a PR from a stranger they don't trust.
by depierre | 2025-04-13 10:41:37+00:00
It's really about striking a balance: giving vendors a fair chance to patch, while also not leaving users in the dark indefinitely. That's also why the 90-day disclosure policy has become common in the industry (e.g., Google's Project Zero). I've had cases where I tried reaching out via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, you name it, and got radio silence for months and months. Then, when you make the difficult decision to go public, the vendor finally reacts... That sudden urgency only shows up when there's a bit of spotlight.
by microtherion | 2025-04-13 10:41:47+00:00
There are also some microcontroller architectures worth considering:

* Intel 8051, dating from 1980. You can still buy e.g. the CH559, based on the same architecture with an USB interface retrofitted somehow.

* AVR 8-bit architecture. Readily available in (older) Arduinos or easy to handle chip packages.

For modern architectures, reading skills can be very valuable, as they allow you to chase bugs beyond the high level language border. Astonishes your friends & confounds your enemies. Writing is decidedly more niche.
by andy99 | 2025-04-13 10:42:04+00:00
Yeah this is just a minor example of enshittification, there's no more to it than that. Netflix and other modern software like it aren't written for customer they are written to extract maximum "value" from "users". They want to push the kids account thing because they think it will make them money. Ux is only important to the extend it's so bad it creates churn, it's not something they care about optimizing.
by weinzierl | 2025-04-13 10:44:41+00:00
"But I predict software development will be a lot less fun in the years to come, and that is a very bitter prediction in deed."

Most professional software development hasn't been fun for years, mostly because of all the required ceremony around it. But it doesn't matter, for your hobby projects you can do what you want and it's up to you how much you let AI change that.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-04-13 10:44:46+00:00
I don't agree that 20-minute charge is "very clearly a bottleneck" on road trips.

Never mind "target" shopping, for 2 people to each stetch legs and use the restroom in turn, is already 10 minutes.

Get another bottle of water at the attached convenience store, and you're close to the 20 minute mark.

And if small children were also involved, then well...

If you stop every 2 hours, you don't need the full 20 minutes to fully charge anyway.

20 mins is about where you equal the other, human time constraints. i.e. no longer the bottleneck.
by bathtub365 | 2025-04-13 10:45:16+00:00
This means that there is actually likely MORE state tracking this than if it were a simple setting. You need to store not just the setting for this particular feature, but also potentially the last time they were asked or whatever else triggers them to get asked again. It’s either poor design, or explicitly designed to repeatedly push a feature on a user even if they don’t want it.
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-13 10:47:10+00:00
It's not an issue. Claude routinely uses internal APIs and frameworks on one of my projects that aren't public. The context windows are big enough now that it can learn from a mix of summarized docs and surrounding examples and get it nearly right, nearly all the time.

There is an interesting aspect to this whereby there's maybe more incentive to open source stuff now just to get usage examples in the training set. But if context windows keep expanding it may also just not matter.

The trick is to have good docs. If you don't then step one is to work with the model to write some. It can then write its own summaries based on what it found 'surprising' and those can be loaded into the context when needed.
by KronisLV | 2025-04-13 10:47:48+00:00
I remember using my old Quest 2 with an app called Immersed that ran on the Quest too and rendered the environment there, seemingly streaming the monitors in what felt like higher resolution vs the Quest Link. It was really pleasant until the Immersed app removed support for physical monitors and I could no longer use my 4 monitor PC setup in VR: https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/1cm2niy/imm...

I actually enjoyed it, because having nothing other than a black void or space or whatever in my vision was surprisingly zen and nice. It wasn’t quite like my 1080p monitors, a bit closer to what felt like 720p, though the absolute biggest issue was the pressure on my head which meant that it became uncomfortable after a few hours, even with a custom strap - something that had gotten better in the more recent hardware.

Aside from that, I’d say that Virtual Desktop is pretty nice but also has artificial limitations on how many screens it can display: https://www.uploadvr.com/virtual-desktop-multiple-monitors-u...

I’ve never really found that sweet spot that I had between discovering Immersed and them ruining the app for me again.
by sensanaty | 2025-04-13 10:49:03+00:00
I don't have kids but I do have 4 nephews. They all take their bikes or if not possible for whatever reason, buses/trains/trams/metro to school and elsewhere. My 1 sister lives in the countryside and her kids still take the bike to school, which is ~10km away from their house, and if they go to another city they can take their bikes on the train.

Why wouldn't you want your kid to be independent like this? Why force them to have to rely on you and your car if they want to go out and see their friends? It inconveniences you and makes their life much more dull and restricted, not to mention the health benefits of taking the bike vs sitting in a car for a kid.
by plsbenice34 | 2025-04-13 10:49:33+00:00
Instead of 'pampered' i think the word should be 'neglected'. Some older people tend to use words like pampered to give the sense that the young people had it "too good" so now they deserve to suffer by not being independent, but that is rarely the case. There is nothing pleasant about a childhood spent in front of screens that leaves one anxious and lacking independence.
by Joeboy | 2025-04-13 10:49:45+00:00
As per other comments, women being played by men was and is a venerable tradition in British comedy and not actually very transgressive at all. It feels more "transgressive" now than it did then, I think because we imported US culture war stuff in the last decade or so.

I don't think HN actually hates humour, it just has a relatively high bar. Some of my most upvoted comments have been jokes. But I like to think they were reasonably good ones.

Regarding the Pythons and transgression, I think for me it's probably a case by case thing. There's obviously "good" transgression and "bad" transgression, but I suppose you have to have some support for the willingness to transgress, if you want positive social change to be a possibility.

Regarding specific things the Pythons said, the most actually transgressive-at-the-time thing I can think of is probably Graham Chapman's overt homosexuality and support for gay rights, which was no small thing in 1970s Britain.

Edit: Or you could make a case for it being the "blasphemous" Life of Brian, although I don't think the public outrage about that was really in step with mainstream opinion.

Edit2: I'm wondering whether Some Like it Hot, Milton Berle etc were considered transgressive in the US? Were these things not actually quite mainstream in the 20th century, even in the US?
by 1dom | 2025-04-13 10:53:01+00:00
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the Jewish/antisemitic angle at all, but that's my own ignorance in that area.

The "represents rich people" angle was the only interpretation I could see. Still not sure I fully understand why the conversation has gone in the Jewish/antisemite direction though, but again this is a topic I choose to remain ignorant on.
by usrusr | 2025-04-13 10:53:55+00:00
Yeah, for some things a bit of speculative imagination, thinking through possible outcomes isn't actually that bad compared to more evidence oriented alternatives. You can't really have a control group for community wide effects and without a control group you don't even know if an observed change happened because of what you did out despite of what you did even after the experiment. Sometimes hindsight isn't 20/20 at all but surprisingly blind.

What I think could be a very interesting on-ramp to something more UBIesque, in an environment with lots of need-based social support payments like Germany, would be an opt-in flat taxation mode for earning on the side of receiving aid: taxed high starting with the first cent earned, and in exchange those earnings are explicitly excluded from and need-based considerations or thresholds. That could greatly reduce all "not worth the hassle" considerations and uncertainties. It could be implemented as a special bank account where every incoming transaction is automatically taxed, and every payment or withdrawal certified "I'm allowed to have this without putting anything need-based in question.

What tax rate? The logical first candidate would be wherever the income tax curve tops out for high earners. If that's the highest those can be bothered with before they "stop performing", you should not be surprised if low earners would not want to perform at a higher effective tax rate either. But that tax rate should not be so low that a shift to regular taxation makes no sense in cases sufficiently permanent and wellhpaying that the administrative change isn't just overhead.
by atoav | 2025-04-13 10:54:00+00:00
What you're actually saying is that there is no single and symbolic issue it is tackling, you know landing on the moon type stuff.

That however is not how modern particle physics operates. A particle accelerator of the scale of CERN runs many experiments at once as with higher energies more becomes measurable. The idea here isn't that we have a hypothesis of a small thing existing and therefore we build a giant microscope, the idea is that we know we do not have a complete understanding of what happens in thst domain, so we build a giant mkcroscope to look at it. I am pretty damn sure there is a line of theoretical physicists who already know what to try once a bigger accelerator is around. And we have other benefitial developments coming out of that.

The fact that you write this on the internet, a thing which was in no small part created by CERN should probably also tell us something.
by palata | 2025-04-13 10:54:57+00:00
The calculator made it less important to be relatively good with arithmetic. Many people just cannot add or subtract two numbers without one. And it feels like they lose intuition, somehow: if numbers don't "speak" to you at all, can you ever realize that 17 is roughly a third of 50? The only way you realise it with a calculator is if you actually look for it. Whereas if you can count, it just appears to you.

Similar with GPS and navigation. When you read a map, you learn how to localise yourself based on landmarks you see. You tend to get an understanding of where you are, where you want to go and how to go there. But if you follow the navigation system that tells you "turn right", "continue straight", "turn right", then again you lose intuition. I have seen people following their navigation system around two blocks to finally end up right next to where they started. The navigation system was inefficient, and with some intuition they could have said "oh actually it's right behind us, this navigation is bad".

Back to coding: if you have a deep understanding of your codebases and dependencies, you may end up finding that you could actually extract some part of one codebase into a library and reuse it in another codebase. Or that instead of writing a complex task in your codebase, you could contribute a patch to a dependency and it would make it much simpler (e.g. because the dependency already has this logic internally and you could just expose it instead of rewriting it). But it requires an understanding of those dependencies: do you have access to their code in the first place (either because they are open source or belong to your company)?

Those AIs obviously help writing code. But do they help getting an understanding of the codebase to the point where you build intuition that can be leveraged to improve the project? Not sure.

Is it necessary, though? I don't think so: the tendency is that software becomes more and more profitable by becoming worse and worse. AI may just help writing more profitable worse code, but faster. If we can screw the consumers faster and get more money from them, that's a win, I guess.
by jen729w | 2025-04-13 10:56:49+00:00
Except it’s quicker to navigate an interface using keystrokes than it is using a mouse regardless of how much RAM you’ve got.

Compare a proficient travel agent who speaks Sabre to you booking a flight on Skyscanner. They’d whup your ass.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=G8n0_3t-EhI&pp=ygUPc2FicmUgY2xpI...
by alkonaut | 2025-04-13 10:58:14+00:00
Any proper experiment for UBI requires 1) to do it for a whole economy. You can't have 10 or 100 people on UBI where the job market, prices etc aren't affected by UBI. And 2) For life. The small effects on behavior if I'm given UBI for 1, 3 or 5 years are going to be so small as to be uninteresting. The surprising results will just be artifacts of the experiment.