MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dhx | 2025-04-26 09:12:13+00:00
Maybe covered by the following exemptions of section 3 of Nuclear Non‑Proliferation (Safeguards) Regulations 1987?[1]

(1) For the purposes of paragraph 9(c) of the Act, each of the following kinds of nuclear material is nuclear material of a kind to which Part II of the Act does not apply: (c) source material that is incorporated in: (i) the glazing of a finished ceramic product; or (ii) an alloy in the form of a finished constructional product, being an alloy the source material component of which is not more than 4% by weight of uranium or thorium; (d) source material that is contained in: (i) a chemical mixture, compound or solution, or an alloy, in which the uranium or thorium content by weight is less than 0.05% of the weight of the mixture, compound, solution or alloy;

There's probably dozens of other acts and regulations which would also apply to which the exemptions above may not apply--for example, legislation related to import declarations and use of mail services.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.au/F1996B02071/2023-10-27/2023-1...
by mrweasel | 2025-04-26 09:13:19+00:00
Well, I'd probably shop at Amazon before Temu, but yeah, Amazon is the option of last resort. I do wonder how common that sentiment is, probably not very, even if it seems like at least the people around me never really use Amazon anymore.

It varieres from region to region obviously, but here there's no point in ordering from Amazon. Everyone else is cheaper, have faster shipping and don't have a ridicules number of scamming sellers with fake, defective and dangerous products. It seems like Amazon should be failing, but I don't think they are.

The Amazon store really have become an absolute shitshow.
by creata | 2025-04-26 09:13:21+00:00
The Ruby syntax doesn't seem that different to many other languages. For example:

xs.filter(x => x & 1).sort().join(", ") // JavaScript xs & filter odd & sort & map show & intercalate ", " -- Haskell

Python seems to be the odd one out. Imo, its list comprehensions are confusing as hell to "newcomers". For example, when a list comprehension has multiple `for`s, what order are they nested in?
by lesserknowndan | 2025-04-26 09:13:58+00:00
The article doesn't actually say it, but the 'A' in the name A14 almost certainly refers to the Angstrom unit of length.

Intel have similarly named their upcoming fabrication process 18A - so if TSMC had used 14A that would have been even more confusing than naming it the same as an old Apple chip.

Luckily, in TSMC's case, the number will be going down, not up, for any future fabrication processes.
by feraloink | 2025-04-26 09:16:51+00:00
The article only said that his solicitor (lawyer?) described the quantities as being so small they were safe enough to eat.

I read some more about it (Guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/11/scien... and entirely agree with you that the border force over-reacted, and could have spent the money and resources more effectively than by pursuing this.

Also, via Guardian, this attitude is demeaning and depressing:

>"At a sentence hearing in March, the lawyer described Lidden as a “science nerd” who committed the offences out of pure naivety. “It was a manifestation of self-soothing retreating into collection; it could have been anything but in this case he latched on to the collection of the periodic table,”
by ajuc | 2025-04-26 09:17:50+00:00
The main reason is that they have marketing of a corporate entity behind them and someone to sign a contract with.

I've seen many times - company switching from free, open-source, distributed solution to a worse, closed-source, coporate-backed solution just so they have someone to sign a contract with.

First time it was moving from self-hosted Jabber to MSN Messanger (is sucked, worked less reliably than self-hosted jabber, didn't worked on Linux, and was probably way more expansive in the long run). Then it was moving from self-hosted wikis to some B2B solution. Then it was self-hosted git to corporate github or sth similar.

I understand the theory behind outsourcing these things, especially if you're just starting. But if you already have the OS solution deployed and working - why switch?
by arrowsmith | 2025-04-26 09:18:05+00:00
We've also seen a huge compression in net income as the tax thresholds haven't kept up with inflation. So someone who paid a 20% marginal rate twenty years ago is now paying 40% on the same real-terms income. And the 0% personal allowance has been eroded too.

Not to mention the 60% effective marginal rate between £100k and £125k - 69% if you have student debt, oh and that's not even counting employee's NICs.

And don't get me started on the stealth tax that is employer's NICs. (Those were just increased even further, and the morons are all defending it by pretending it doesn't come from wages... where exactly do they think the employer gets the money from?)

Plus all the insane traps where earning extra money can actually reduce your net income. E.g. there are situations in which increasing your salary by £1 can leave you thousands of pounds poorer because certain benefits are withdrawn with a cliff.

What's the point in working harder? You'd think that with such eye-wateringly high levels of taxation, we'd at least have something to show for it in the public sector, but... okay, I need to stop writing now for the sake of my blood pressure.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-26 09:18:52+00:00
I don’t buy anything over $50, on Amazon. Been burned by fakes and gray-market stuff (sold as legit brand).

Amazon definitely explicitly supports this.

What I do, is go directly to the product Web site (not the Amazon page for the manufacturer), and order from there. Sometimes, the fulfillment is via Amazon, but I know I’m getting the real thing. The difference in price is often smaller than you might think. Amazon prices aren’t that good, anymore.
by danpalmer | 2025-04-26 09:19:08+00:00
Yeah lots of the commenting online seems in somewhat bad faith about this.

I’ve listened to interviews with the Bluesky CEO and the Mastodon founder (CEO?), and it was quite eye opening. They have very different views on their roles. The Bluesky CEO is thinking at the level of community building, incentives, longevity, and decentralisation at a fundamental level, whereas the Mastodon founder seems primarily motivated by building an open source project and supporting contributions from the community.

Neither approach is wrong, but they’re different and are clearly achieving different things.

Mastodon might be easier to self host on the surface, being just another Rails site, but the result isn’t a “world without caesars”, it’s a world with a lot more caesars, where anyone can be one. Migrating instances is roughly impossible if you have any presences you want to preserve, and ActivityPub compliance is essentially defined by Mastodon’s current behaviour.

Bluesky on the other hand seems to so far be far more successful at the community building and laying out the protocol foundations, at the cost of being harder to self host. But honestly, having self hosted Mastodon and switched (and forced to start again in the process), so what? Hosting a PDS is trivial and that’s the bit that really matters anyway.

Mastodon should be recognised for how much it shifted the conversation around social networking, especially in the first year after Twitter’s acquisition, but it seems clear that Bluesky has some fundamental advancements that Mastodon fans seem unable to recognise simply because it looks so different.
by Etheryte | 2025-04-26 09:20:17+00:00
> Wang ordered attorneys Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster to show cause as to why the court should not sanction the defendants, law firm, and individual attorneys. Kachouroff and DeMaster also have to explain why they should not be referred to disciplinary proceedings for violations of the rules of professional conduct.

Glad to see that this is the outcome. Similar to bribes and other similar issues, the hammer has to be big and heavy so that people stop considering this as an option.
by goku12 | 2025-04-26 09:21:42+00:00
My definition of a phone platform is that a reasonable app ecosystem must exist. Or at least the ability to easily develop the ones I need - I don't mind developing for my needs. If a more secure phone without a substantial app ecosystem is enough, then a feature phone would be fine. Librem phone unfortunately doesn't meet that requirement.

The difficulty is that even many essential service APIs are not open to alternative implementations.
by atombender | 2025-04-26 09:22:09+00:00
The sustainability of open source doesn't seem to come down to whether the product is open source or not.

As an example, Elastic was a $10B company in 2021 — the year they went dual license — with revenue of around $500-600m. They showed that you can build a huge business on something that's given away for free. I don't know anything about Synadia's financials. It's possible they're successful, but simply want more. It's possible they've not been able to build a sustainable business on NATS. Their commercial offering is basically support plus a closed-source control plane, which isn't exactly a big carrot when the alternative is $0.

I also wonder if there's any VC pressure happening here that could explain the sudden shift. Synadia raised $25m in 2024, and it may be that, one year later, the investors just aren't seeing the progress they were expecting.
by hamilyon2 | 2025-04-26 09:22:34+00:00
Not clear what is meant here. Does ethanol from corn count? Methane from waste dumps? Gray hydrogen? Wood pellets? Ammonia?

Electricity from unclear source?

Human ingenuity is infinite. It is not enough to enact simple rules, people will just produce electricity with hydrogen and claim it green if it will make them profit. If it will help them evade carbon tax. Nevermind that hydrogen came from some extremely polluting process involving damaging our planet atmosphere and everyone's health.
by mptest | 2025-04-26 09:22:45+00:00
I think your only problem is too-high expectations.

>examples where quality far exceeds our existing best in class work

I'm no expert, but what percentage of the economy needs/is best in class work?

I agree running up against the limits of these models after reading the marketing material can give the impression they're "a kludge for the mediocre" and they certainly are in part that, but they're also so much more.[0]

[0] https://crawshaw.io/blog/programming-with-llms
by gnfargbl | 2025-04-26 09:23:42+00:00
What has actually changed is that thirty years ago, the ratio between house prices and average earnings was about 4. By twenty years ago it had doubled and, most importantly, it has been at that level ever since with no real sign of dropping [1].

This is a structural change. We now have at least one, and perhaps two, generations of people who can't really alter their economic situation through hard work. That's the classic recipe for populism to thrive.

[1] https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...
by setopt | 2025-04-26 09:23:53+00:00
It depends what you use it for. I’m a researcher and use it to follow scientific literature (relevant arXiv sections and scientific journals, as well as funding agency announcements), and keeping an eye on what’s up is then arguably part of the job.

If you use it for general news and blogs, that’s of course different. I completely agree with letting the FOMO go.
by paweljanda | 2025-04-26 09:23:54+00:00
Over the past two weeks, I’ve written a 3-part tutorial series showing how to build a local ChatGPT-style app using Blazor and MaIN.NET.

It covers:

- Part 1: Setting up a local LLM (no APIs needed) https://dev.to/paweljanda/build-a-local-chatgpt-like-app-wit...

- Part 2: Adding chat history for better conversation context https://dev.to/paweljanda/build-a-local-chatgpt-like-app-wit...

- Part 3: Uploading PDFs and chatting about their content https://dev.to/paweljanda/build-a-local-chatgpt-like-app-wit...

The MAIN.NET package handles local LLMs, embeddings, and file-based conversation, and these tutorials demonstrate some of its capabilities. Everything runs locally, without sending data to external services.

MAIN.NET itself is fully open-source: https://github.com/wisedev-code/MaIN.NET

Might be useful for anyone exploring local AI applications.
by feraloink | 2025-04-26 09:24:06+00:00
Not sure who is responsible for confirming whether he had a permit: oversees seller or shipping company, or customs/import upon receipt in Australia.

Guardian article says, "he ordered the items from a US-based science website and they were delivered to his parents’ home.... Nuclear materials can be imported legally by contacting the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office for a permit first."

So maybe all of this fuss was due to not having applied and received a permit?
by lelanthran | 2025-04-26 09:24:11+00:00
> A secondary trait I would often notice is a complete exclusion of [easily intuited] counter-facts because they cut into the paper’s claim.

It's lack of industry experience. I complained about this is a recent comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43769856

Basically, in SE anyway, the largest number of publications are authored by new graduates.

Think about how clueless the new MSc or PhD graduate is when they join your team: thesebare the majority of authors.

The system is set up to incentivise the wrong thing.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-26 09:24:22+00:00
Most likely C++ would not happened, while at the same time C and UNIX adoption would never gotten big enough to be relevant outside Bell Labs.

Which then again, isn't that much of a deal, industry would have steered into other programming languages and operating systems.

Overall that would be a much preferable alternative timeline, assuming security would be taken more seriously, as it has taken 45 years since C.A.R Hoare Turing award speech and Morris worm, and only after companies and government started to feel the monetary pain of their decisions.
by mitechworld | 2025-04-26 09:25:30+00:00
I've recently launched https://flowyBoard.com, a tool to make the creation of animated and 3D flowcharts and diagrams really easy and fast. I created flowyBoard entirely on my own in my free time when I wasn't working as a web developer. It's unbelievably hard to be an immigrant, married, and a full-time developer, and yet find some time and passion to build the tool you've always been looking for. At this stage, I only need your suggestions and feedback. You can find the contact information on the website. Please reach out to me for feedback or business inquiries.
by ginko | 2025-04-26 09:25:43+00:00
I can only talk about my own experience trying to learn FreeCAD for a project[1] I eventually used Build123d for.

For me FreeCAD was highly unintuitive. Everything is a chain of operations/modifications on solids(good!) but for some reason it won't let you modify anything but the last element in the chain?

I was working on a trackball device so part of the parameters are the size of the trackball you'd use.. This affects pretty much all the parts in the chain but you have to decide all the way in the beginning on what size you need. In code-based systems this is simply a variable you define in the beginning and can modify at any point. Let's say I want to use M2 screws instead of M3 ones or use a larger bearing: I can just change a variable at the start of the script.

Being an absolute beginner I also had to reorganize stuff a couple of times. With python/build123d that's a matter of shuffling around code in your editor. I don't even know how you would do that in FreeCAD without deleting and redoing large swathes of your design.

Then there's my general unease dealing with this opaque representation of your model where any previous step you may have took puts your project into some state that can't really be undone or at least not intuitively found. When working with code and something breaks you can usually recover from a broken state by stripping out whatever you were working on. At worst you can just go back to your last revision in Git. With GUI-based tools you have to pray that Undo/Redo gets you to a state you wanted without losing too much.

Maybe the proprietary tools work better here but they don't run on Linux and I also don't use them for ethical reasons.

Admittedly the whole experience with build123d is anything but perfect. I _would_ like to just pick stuff with the mouse where possible and have a nice real-time display of changes I make. Ideally I'd like to see some sort of editing graph where you can see intermediate steps and pick visually parts to operate on for the next step - all underpinned by a concise textual representation that can be versioned.

Maybe this is me showing SE hubris but it's how I was able to get a reasonably complex personal project done. Maybe programming somehow broke my brain, IDK.

[1] https://github.com/ginkgo/trackball/
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-04-26 09:25:52+00:00
Sounds like that might have been a copyright issue? In the UK a transcript of a show would need permission of the writers/owners to be reproduced. I can see Wikipedia would be sensible to disallow infringing works as being bad sources.

Ironically an excerpt of the script/transcript would be allowed by UK copyright - but a site with only excerpts would probably but be a good source for Wikipedia's purposes.
by Meekro | 2025-04-26 09:25:58+00:00
Definitely agree that centralized services have a lot of advantages. Bluesky deserves some criticism for trying to have their cake and eat it too, though. They told a good story about being decentralized, and lots of people repeated it while ignoring technical experts pointing out it's not true. Even on HN, the claim that they're decentralized was repeated a lot.
by ferbivore | 2025-04-26 09:26:35+00:00
It looks to me like Equality Trust put a fair amount of thought and research into their website, did their best to paint a picture of what's going on in the UK by using multiple reputable sources, and tried to explain why that picture is dire, not just for those with a net worth that rounds to £0 but for the nation at large, with several dozen citations to back that up.

Thank God we have this one number from some Credit Suisse marketing material to invalidate all of that.
by xethos | 2025-04-26 09:26:54+00:00
I at least am contrasting

> [running a relay being cheap and easy] wasn't asserted anywhere

With

> I recall posts of people running their own relays on RPi4s with NVMe drives

I would absolutely consider software I can host at home, on a RPi, cheap and easy to self-host. That's the assertion that's being called out here. Bluesky's relays do not scale down easily, and are difficult and expensive to host
by teamonkey | 2025-04-26 09:27:08+00:00
Gini is a very rough tool. It’s trying to describe the shape of a curve with a single number. It describes the average inequality between any two people.

The curve can be skewed without the Gini number changing significantly if, say, the bottom 99% became increasingly more equal in income/wealth by becoming poorer overall, transferring income/wealth to the upper 1%.
by yellowapple | 2025-04-26 09:28:04+00:00
I'm pretty sure the ATproto answer to that is "don't bother users with that decision", i.e. just point new users to somewhere (be it bsky.social or some other PDS provider) and call it a day. This "works" from a decentralized/federated point of view because ATproto supports migrating accounts/identities between PDSes even if the old PDS is offline or adversarial, and because account/identity hosting (i.e. the PDS) is decoupled from the app itself (i.e. the appview) - so even if you signed up as @foo.example.app instead of @foo.bsky.social, you can still log into Bluesky as @foo.example.app (and likewise, @bar.bsky.social can still log into Example App), and if Example App (or Bluesky, for that matter) ever kicks the bucket you can migrate your account (and its followers, and very likely its public content, and possibly its private content if that was backed up somewhere) to someplace else.
by graemep | 2025-04-26 09:28:13+00:00
There is more to puritanical attitudes than sex. It generally means anti-pleasure.

One thing the real puritans are against that people have turned against very strongly is alcohol. It never stopped being a problem in the US, of course, but there are far more preachy teetotalers in the UK than there used to be, and government policy is very anti too.

Then there is the push for achievement and the acquisition of wealth. You are supposed to dedicate your life to the cause of high achievement, rather than stop to enjoy it.

Sex acts online actually fit in with all this as they are safe and controlled alternative to enjoying sex in real life.
by montebicyclelo | 2025-04-26 09:28:22+00:00
Awesome work / demo / blog

Link to the demo in case people miss it [1]

> using a customized camera app which also recorded my phone’s motion

Using phone's gyro as a proxy for "controls" is very clever

[1] https://madebyoll.in/posts/world_emulation_via_dnn/demo/
by raphman | 2025-04-26 09:28:40+00:00
Yes, this sounds like a simpler solution - the major drawback/advantage would be that you'd need to insert the knob in just the right orientation so that the shaft end fits into the potentiometer's slot. Might be a bit fiddly. On the other hand, the poti would keep its state even when the knob is removed, and you wouldn't accidentally change the value when inserting the knob.

Just to nitpick the nitpicker: the knob's shaft needs to be longer than 15 mm, right? "3.5 mm" is the diameter, not the length of a small T(R)S jack.
by card_zero | 2025-04-26 09:28:49+00:00
That's an error, because episodes can be cited directly, and the template "cite episode" exists for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_episode

It can be seen in use for instance on the Beavis and Butt-head article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beavis_and_Butt-Head where the citation looks like this:

"Werewolves of Highland". Beavis and Butt-Head. Season 8. Episode 1. October 27, 2011. MTV.
by taraharris | 2025-04-26 09:29:00+00:00
I didn't know it was gonna be the pandemic that did it. I was getting ready to get in because I saw the tiny yield curve inversion in like August or September of 2019 and was preparing to make up for lost decades of not investing at all. I learned all I needed to know in three weeks on youtube and I dunno, it worked for me.

I'm no expert myself in anything, but I pick my experts carefully

You can be incredibly fucking lazy for most of your life except for a few key hinges
by mattrad | 2025-04-26 09:30:30+00:00
Crap Towns called Hythe "...quite possibly the most spirit-crushingly tedious town in Kent." and "...the place that makes nearby Folkestone look like Las Vegas."

As someone who grew up in Hythe in the 80s and 90s I'd point out that the Rotunda was a far cry from Vegas.

https://www.warrenpress.net/FolkestoneThenNow/The_Demolition...
by decimalenough | 2025-04-26 09:30:48+00:00
The Human Development Index, on the other hand, does. Switzerland is #1 at 0.967, improving at 0.25% per year. Afghanistan is #182 at 0.462 and dropping, the UK is a respectable #15 at 0.940 (between Finland and New Zealand) and also improving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
by ajb | 2025-04-26 09:31:17+00:00
The first startup I worked for had 1 IT guy among 12 people, and everything was in-house, including servers. The second grew to 50 people and did not ever employ an IT guy for internal work - most stuff was run on SaaS and the total cost was less than an IT guy salary. Any admin was done by taking engineering time, and no-one wanted to divert that away from product to do in-house stuff. Because when you're taking time away from product, it's not just the salary but the opportunity cost, because any investment in product is supposed to return a multiple.