MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by interroboink | 2025-04-10 07:17:06+00:00
Somewhat tangential: this reminded me of Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" [1] which speaks highly of BeOS.

I liked the bug report "R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus developer rage" (:

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
by xg15 | 2025-04-10 07:18:28+00:00
> South Africa is unstable

Is it? They have some intra-government spats, but I hadn't heard that this threatened the stability of the whole country yet.

> which yes, brazil and India alone may hold up a stable reserve currency.

Also several other countries which joined the last year or are in the process of joining. I believe at some point, the official name was also changed to BRICS+
by baq | 2025-04-10 07:19:42+00:00
US is the alpha consumer. If you can sell in the US, you won. You want to sell in the US. You get dollars for what you sell in the US and since everyone else also wants to sell in the US, you trade with everybody using dollars. Also, your government goes batshit crazy statistically more often than the US, so your currency risk is smaller if you're settling trade in dollars.
by emacsen | 2025-04-10 07:20:45+00:00
I'm a paying customer and I signed onto Aqua Voice shortly after your demo on HN.

My experience with it has been overall positive but mixed. I enjoy using it for dictation, but I found that issuing editing commands and having them recognized/executed often took a lot longer than making an edit myself (which I can't do while in dictation mode).

But as a paying customer, seeing you go in this direction is somewhat sad/frustrating. You're abandoning the product I use, and you're saying that if I want to see my platform supported, I or someone from the community has to provide it- for a fully proprietary paid application.

I understand that I'm a minority user, but it's a bit disappointing to read this.
by mantas | 2025-04-10 07:21:50+00:00
I agree. It was OP up the thread who brought up USSR artists funding as an example.

USSR and UBI is an interesting combination though. Being unemployed was illegal. And for common man it was very hard to get laid off. Just show up, even if intoxicated (and continue drinking at work), sleep at work (e.g. drive your tractor to the field and just park there) and you'll still get paid crappy salary as anybody else and roof over your head. I guess it was closest it was to real UBI. Yes, it was not exactly UBI, but it was still universal income where you get food & shelter regardless of your work performance.

Regarding UBI turning countries into USSR, I don't think UBI would turn countries into totalitarian regimes. But it may turn countries into similar inefficient slacking-off culture where vast majority of people do as little as possible in least involving way.

Sure, some of them may claim they're super productive and creative in their hobby adventures. But if thousands of programmers create awesome ToDo apps in their free time... Is that really productive from society perspective? Society needs a lot of bring stuff, not thousands of great ToDo apps...
by dave4420 | 2025-04-10 07:23:36+00:00
In theory Congress can impeach him for it, but in practice there won’t be the votes to convict him. If there are ever, somehow, the votes to convict him, it’ll be for something worse.

After his term ends… I don’t know whether the law says that the insider trading exemption Congress has also applies to the Executive branch… but I’d fully expect the Supreme Court to say it does, if it got that far.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-04-10 07:25:41+00:00
> I live in Europe and I also ask "why can't we have that".

Which country are you in? Because the answer for "we" greatly depends on local environments and politics.

For Austria the answer for instance is "the alps" and urban sprawl. Trains stop everywhere and people want to keep this, there is just not enough distance to have high speed rails be effective and there is not enough space for dedicated lines. The answer is a very different one than for instance why Germany has so little.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-10 07:25:45+00:00
An aside:

The visual design of this website is lovely. It contains no distractions, no sexy, elaborate web design. It's just the article and relevant images.

It's also a superb piece, so I decided to get a subscription to Humanities, in which it appears. This brought me to https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/, which is one of the fastest, snappiest mobile websites I've used in quite a while. Navigating it is a stark reminder of just how bad most websites are and how terrible their performance.

When I click on the three horizontal bars in the upper left, the menu appears immediately. There is no delay or animation. Likewise when I click through its three items. I wish this were standard web design, rather than animation-laden, visually diffuse "mobile friendly" patterns that are essentially allergic to informational density when it isn't offset by a generous helping of stock photography and god-awful allegria art.

Weather.gov, along these same lines, is one of my favorite websites.
by samsin | 2025-04-10 07:25:48+00:00
Yes, considering it was ~2 years from freezing withdrawals to the approved bankruptcy plan to repay customers.

FTX was only able to repay customers because the value of BTC increased during that time. But customers were only repaid the value of their portfolio at the time of the collapse.

If I steal your money, invest it, then return the principal amount after 2 years, would you consider it financial harm?
by ben_w | 2025-04-10 07:26:27+00:00
For such reasons, I count non-disparagement agreements as a curtailing of free speech.

Everything that makes freedom of speech worth defending when the government wants your silence, also applies to businesses.

The US puts freedom of speech on a pedestal. But stuff like this makes me aware that's a lot more limited than people would like to believe.

(I've signed at least two non-disparagement agreements, but also I'm not in the US).
by vladvasiliu | 2025-04-10 07:26:59+00:00
Even so, at least in France, only major cities have an OK-ish public transit network (when it actually runs). But if you live on the outskirts 'cause you can't afford an apartment in the center? You're SoL. You maybe get a couple buses around rush hour.

Hell, even in the Paris region, outside the closest suburbs, there are only a few train lines going into Paris. At best you'll need to ride a bus or two to grab one, but most often you'll take your car.
by djmips | 2025-04-10 07:27:13+00:00
I have no anecdata to counter your thesis. I do agree that immersion in the doing of a thing is the best way to learn. I am not fully convinced that doing a lot of arithmetic hand calculation precludes learning the science of patterns that is mathematics. They should still be doing something mathematical but why not go right into using a calculator. I have no experience as an educator and I bet it's hard to get good data on this topic of debate. I could be very wrong.
by tgv | 2025-04-10 07:27:46+00:00
That's such an irresponsible take. If you don't know how to program, you can't even begin to judge the output of whatever model. You'll be the idiotic manager that tells the IT department to solve some problem, and it has to be done in two weeks. No idea if that's reasonable or feasible. And when you can't do that, you certainly can't design a larger system.

What's your next rant: know nead too learn two reed and right ennui moor? Because AI can do that for you? No need to think? "So, you turned 6 today? That over there is your place at the assembly line. Get to know it well, because you'll be there the rest of your life."

> For every class, teachers need to be asking themselves "is this class relevant" and "what are the learning goals in this class?

That's already how schools organize their curriculum.
by n4r9 | 2025-04-10 07:28:24+00:00
Where is `getOrCreate` defined? Is it a custom extension method? There's also a chance we're thinking in different languages. I was writing C#, yours looks a bit more like C++ maybe?

Readability incorporates familiarity but also conciseness. I suppose it depends what else is going on in the codebase. I have a database access class in one of my solutions where `ToLookup` is used 15 times; yes you have to learn the concept, but it's an inbuilt method and it's a massive benefit once you grok it.
by lukan | 2025-04-10 07:28:27+00:00
I would like to replay with another quote by another immortal(or long lived) character, Professor „Reg“ Chronotis from Douglas Adams:

"That I lived so much longer, just means, that I forgot much more, not that I know much more."

Memory might have a limited capacity, but of course, I doubt most humans use that capacity, or well, for useful things. I know I have plenty of useless knowledge ..
by rapjr9 | 2025-04-10 07:29:03+00:00
I worked as a programmer for the D'Agents group at Dartmouth. The Tcl agent system was ported to Java and we did a variety of experiments with it, mostly centered around information retrieval. I built a Beowulf cluster which we populated with a distributed database of Usenet news. Agents could jump onto the cluster, do multistep queries, and then jump back with the condensed results. We did some work with the US Navy who had a problem with ship-to-shore networks; their network links to shore were T1 equivalents, which made it difficult to work interactively with large data sets for those on shore. We used agents to jump to the ships computer, do multistep queries and computations, and jump back to the shore with the results. This saved a lot of bandwidth. There were a few problems with agent systems. Letting untrusted code run on your server was a difficult security problem, though Java sandboxing helped. Also sending a trusted agent to run on a potentially compromised server was a difficult security problem, the agents might be carrying secrets. Another issue was that agents could use enormous resources, for example doing a database query for the word "the" would engage the entire cluster database. A single laptop sending an agent per second could overwhelm a computing cluster in minutes. We spent a fair amount of time implementing resource management, such as agent lifetime limits, but this was still an issue. What mostly ended the field of study at the time was probably that agents were a lot like computer worms, with difficult security issues, both for the agent and for the server. Also agents were somewhat uncontrollable, until you tried one you didn't know for sure what it might do, which made testing risky; agents could not only jump to and from the cluster, they could jump between machines on the cluster and fork themselves, so like a computer worm they could self-spread everywhere. Some later work seemed to find some solutions to those problems, but I don't know them in detail. Remote procedure calls were a possible alternative to agents, but didn't have as much versatility as sending your own custom code in an agent.
by reify | 2025-04-10 07:32:29+00:00
Building a community for driving obsessive compulsive behaviours for people who cannot stick to a decison to; lose weight, do some more push-ups, do an extra 1000 steps per day.

Then share your failures, or even celebrations, to get support from other obsessive compulsive's, ultimately creating a community of people who become experts at shaming one and other.

Its new years resolutions on a daily basis that those non obsessive compulsive's are unable to maintain after January 2nd.

linked to your lovely health checker app to shame you some more and collect tons and tons of personal data

If you need an app to realise your goals then you are simply not ready, or more honestly cant be bothered, to apply yourself to that particular goal at that particular time.

Addictive obsessive compulsive apps, whatever next?

Go hangout with your friends, have some fun.
by xarope | 2025-04-10 07:32:39+00:00
But I bet you'd know if some calculated number was way too far-off.

I'm no Turing or Ramanujan, but my opinion is that knowing how the operations work, and as example understanding how the area under a curve is calculated, allows you to guesstimate whether numbers are close enough in terms of magnitude to what you are calculating, without needing to be exact in figures.

It is shocking how often I have looked at a spreadsheet, eyeballed the number of rows and the approximate average of numbers in there and figured out there's a problem with a =choose-your-forumula(...) getting the range wrong.
by joegibbs | 2025-04-10 07:33:20+00:00
He might not have done it deliberately, but it’s a good method to get the tariffs through without opposition. You have a lower level set first, everyone says about how terrible they are. Then you come out with insane higher tariffs that will ruin the economy. Then you go back to a lower level and capitulate, and people are just relieved that they’re not the ridiculously high levels instead of being up in arms about the original level.
by gadders | 2025-04-10 07:33:33+00:00
I don't think we will be making much of anything in the UK until energy prices come down, which is unlikely to happen with little new nuclear coming on stream and fracking new North Sea oil being banned.

The good news is though that if EG steel manufacturing moves to China and starts using cheap coal fired energy and selling back to the UK, it helps the UK meet its Net Zero targets.
by interroboink | 2025-04-10 07:34:23+00:00
Nice to see Mercurial on HN — my favorite version control software (:

I remember years ago learning that in some way Mercurial repo functionality was a "superset" of Git, the main issue being Mercurial's "named branches" — you could not round-trip those through Git. But you can round-trip all Git stuff through Mercurial.

I wonder how this project deals with that? Or maybe something has advanced on one side or the other so now they can round-trip each other.
by mrweasel | 2025-04-10 07:35:25+00:00
Exactly, high speed rail is a nice option, but it's not really widely available. I needed to go to Warsaw, 1200km away, I wanted to go by train, but I don't have that kinda time. It's either 17 hours, half of which is going to be in a bus anyway. An alternative route had me take a ferry, extending the travel time to almost two days.

Taking a plane was cheaper and took three hours and given that airport security, at least in one direction is basically non-existing you just show up 20 minutes before your plane leaves.
by sunnyam | 2025-04-10 07:35:55+00:00
This mentality is why rail is always destined to fail in the US. That mentality didn't stop China, which has a comparable land area to the continental United States and allows it to benefit from highly efficient cargo operations all over the country.

But if you want to keep the France comparison, let's compare a journey from Paris to Marseille with a journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles:

Paris to Marseille: - by car: 7h30m (773km/480mi) - by train: 3h11m direct for 94 EUR/103 USD with luggage and WiFi, amongst others

San Francisco to Los Angeles: - by car: 6h (613km/381mi) - note that I'm checking the route times at 8:24 BST and so it's night time in the US - hence less traffic. - by train (and bus): 8h30m with a change for 61 EUR/67 USD

The SF to LA route covers less distance and requires a change, so the passenger would travel 6h by train and then a further 2h on a bus - and when you compare that to driving it doesn't make any sense to ever pick public transport.

I do think there's more to it than just Americans not liking rail travel or preferring their cars. To build significant passenger rail infrastructure requires coordination at state government levels with all the stakeholders; funding; purcahsing land; technology to build modern and efficient railways etc. I don't believe the US has the capability to just build rail anymore - it would require significant investment in skills and manufacturing to increase capability to the point where it will be able to build the type of modern railway they would need to actually be a viable alternative.
by ineedaj0b | 2025-04-10 07:36:19+00:00
The best rail being built in the US is in Florida, the brightline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline

it's a tad expensive for a lot of people, and doesn't go as fast as it could because it uses existing lines but.. it's pretty good. it came about during the 08' recession, florida (gov Rick Scott) cancelled what was going to be a statewide rail line to save money. i remember nearly all the people i mentioned it too wished it had been kept. whoever the man/team/group that eventually founded brightline they fought an uphill battle but it helped most seniors in the state at the time could remember the US with trains and it had broad public interest, along with the backing of Disney.

it's still really hard to use only the train in FL. florida is very spaced out and a misery of heat during the summer. you can avoid the heat if you go from inside>car>inside, but trains lend themselves to walking.

having optionality is nice and i take it at least once month for the novelty and invite friends on to hopefully build awareness.

the us can build great things. we just need more builders to take their eyes off software and go back to public projects.

https://www.gobrightline.com/
by relistan | 2025-04-10 07:36:40+00:00
There are so many examples in the US where this isn’t true. Examples of where lines make economic sense but have not been built: Ohio (Cleveland/Columbus/Cincinnati possible extension to Detroit ), Texas (Dallas/Houston), Cross-state lines like Detroit/Chicago and Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago. There are others. The problem is a lack of will to do it, a century of demonization by the auto industry, and seventy years of deep pocketed sponsorship of the interstate freeways by the federal government to the exclusion of railways.
by eqvinox | 2025-04-10 07:36:51+00:00
Country size is irrelevant for two reasons:

- most travel is within the local polity, e.g. suburbs to work & back, social activities, etc. The radius for these is not hugely different between the US and the EU.

- it's the European train network at this point, not one country's, and it needs to be one US system too, not one state's.

Yes, trains are hard in the US Midwest. But not on the west coast, and not in the larger east coast area either.
by d--b | 2025-04-10 07:37:00+00:00
France truly has awesome trains though. Main criticism is that it lacks routes that don't go through Paris (like Lyon-Bordeaux, or Marseille-Bordeaux). But I live close to Marseille and it takes me 7 hours to go see my father who lives in Cherbourg (with a 1-hour connection in Paris, and one of the train being local). Coompared to 1200km of driving and zero planes.

And boy, don't get me started on the Eurostar. It's expensive sure, but 2 hours-ish to go from London to Paris is ludicrous.
by n4r9 | 2025-04-10 07:37:14+00:00
> the average EU country is quite a bit smaller than the average US state

I ran some rough calculations and this is true but the distinction is perhaps not as great as you imagine.

USA has land mass 9.1 million km2 50 states => 182000 km2 per state

EU has land mass 4.2 million km2 and 27 countries => 156000 km2 per country

The average EU country is 87% the size of the average US state.
by mrkeen | 2025-04-10 07:38:05+00:00
> Parser combinators are both less efficient and less featureful than bespoke solutions, which is a problem when you're writing a parser for your custom language, and you want to add extra features, like resilience, or rich error reporting.

This is untrue. PCs are the bespoke solutions. The article shows how to introduce a feature like state. Parser generators are the technique which just dump fixed-functionality source code on you.
by socalgal | 2025-04-10 07:38:08+00:00
as someone that just started using Waymo I can take a car without having to give it any attention. I love trains and public transportation in cities with good systems in place and lived without a car for 15 years. but, in areas without that already in place, my prediction would be that self driving cars are going to win. they are already functioning today and the experience is amazing. A good public transit system will take 50 to 70 years here with all the red tape but self driving cars are already here and will expand much faster

I’m not judging them as better. I’m just predicting they’ll come first and make it even more challenging to get public transportation funded and approved
by rednafi | 2025-04-10 07:38:22+00:00
But the US is huge. So is China, and they have fantastic trains.

The freedom to choose between public transportation and your own vehicle is immense. I don’t like driving, maintaining a car, or constantly paying for gas and insurance, and I’m fine with the inconvenience. At least in Europe, I have the option to give up a car and opt for public transportation.
by nicbou | 2025-04-10 07:39:04+00:00
My last calculator had a "solve" button and we could bring it in an exam.

You still needed to know what to ask it, and how to interpret the output. This is hard to do without an understanding of how the underlying math works.

The same is true with LLMs. Without the fundamentals, you are outsourcing work that you can't understand and getting an output that you can't verify.
by namaria | 2025-04-10 07:42:13+00:00
I feel conflicted about this. On the one hand, it seems like an enormous waste and a threat to the effort to contain climate change.

On the other hand, this would seem in line with the idea that life has evolved to more efficiently dissipate energy. So this might be the natural path forward?

Statistical physics of self-replication: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jcp/article/139/12/121923/74793/Sta...
by mrweasel | 2025-04-10 07:42:22+00:00
That's a good point. The two endpoint of the main Danish railway line are both airports. Flight time between the two is around 30 minutes, maybe a little less, price, as little as €25. Take the train between the two, travel time is 6 hours, and it costs €70, if you're lucky you can buy something overpriced to eat, but don't count on it, so pack a lunch and drinks. So why would you ever take the train?

The problem is that Denmark is shaped like a big L and there's no way to connect the ends without building an insanely long bridge.
by andy99 | 2025-04-10 07:42:34+00:00
We did a similar (less rigorous) evaluation internally last year, and one of the big things we identified was "purple prose":

In literary criticism, purple prose is overly ornate prose text that may disrupt a narrative flow by drawing undesirable attention to its own extravagant style of writing, thereby diminishing the appreciation of the prose overall.[1] Purple prose is characterized by the excessive use of adjectives, adverbs, and metaphors. When it is limited to certain passages, they may be termed purple patches or purple passages, standing out from the rest of the work. (Wikipedia)

The Slop Score they have gets at this which is good, but I wonder how completely it captures it.

Also curious about how realistic this benchmark is against real "creative writing" tools. The more the writing is left up to the LLM the better the benchmark likely reflects real performance. For tools that have a human in the loop or a more structured approach it's hard to know how well the benchmarks match real output, beyond just knowing that better models will do better, e.g Claude 3.7 would beat Llama 2.
by reassess_blind | 2025-04-10 07:42:56+00:00
In a similar vein for laptops, Veracrypt offers (offered?) a "Hidden OS" feature that allows an OS to be stored within an encrypted container inside of another encrypted container, with two separate passwords. This allows the outside volumes password to be divulged, which would show a dummy OS and allow for plausible deniability, while the real OS is only accessible with the second password.

However, this feature doesn't seem to work for Windows 11, or on some modern laptop hardware anymore?

Is there other software that offers similar functionality?