MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xenadu02 | 2025-04-29 23:48:35+00:00
That was deliberate for propaganda purposes. They rushed many of their programs (and got a number of people killed by doing so) and simply never told anyone about the failures. Besides which Sputnik 1 wasn't very useful, but it was what they could rush out the door once they knew the US launch schedule.

Not to say the US Apollo program was fundamentally different... it was just much much bigger. And unlike the Soviets the US published their failures (see the Apollo 1 fire).

Odd to think about how much progress was generated thanks to national pride and propaganda. What a strange time in the history of the world.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-29 23:49:09+00:00
> Consider what are the major issues right now that aren’t being addressed? Global poverty is at an all time low, climate change has been met with vast investments in solar/wind/batteries/EV’s etc, there’s suddenly effective drugs for obesity, poverty’s down, medicine keeps advancing and antibiotic resistance is being slowed down by better methodologies, etc

> The mainstream in the US is far more accepting than ever, remember when gay marriage was illegal? Yea interracial marriage was illegal in some areas as recently as 1967.

> Not everything is improving in lockstep, but the general trends aren’t nearly as bad as you imply.

Whether a lot of these changes are good/optimistic or bad/pessimistic depends a lot on your political stance.

Yes, society is very divided.
by avalys | 2025-04-29 23:49:18+00:00
That statement doesn't really make any sense. The expense of producing "fuel" for fusion is much lower than fission, and the improved safety profile means the actual realized engineering costs will also be lower.

Yes, in theory, if you could convince the world to accept thousands of new fission plants, you could probably get the cost pretty low, and that low cost would be pretty close to the same outcome for fission. But, good luck with that! Fusion has a much better chance of actually achieving the theoretical long-term economics of fission.
by jareds | 2025-04-29 23:49:18+00:00
As someone who's blind I've made this argument in the passed. I don't need 100% success as long as the failure mode won't injure me. Seven years ago I would have loved a car that would have driven me to and from work 95% of the time, and refused to take the other 5% if the weather forecast was bad enough that the self driving wouldn't work correctly. I'd also be fine with the car pulling over to the side of the road if it got confused and waiting for someone remote to take control and drive until it was out of the situation where autonomous driving wouldn't work. Given the fact that I now work remote and am married to someone who drives if you told me I could by a car with autonomous driving for $50000 now I don't think I'd do it. I'm interested to see just how good autonomous driving gets and if it drives down the prices of taxi services. At this point I'd rather see an autonomous taxi service offering lower rates then Uber instead of buying my own car with autonomous driving.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-29 23:49:28+00:00
Everyday people have been clamoring for some sort of change for a long time. 00s at least. It reached a boiling point in the late 2010s and you had a nearly parallel rise of Trump and Bernie. The difference is that the republicans couldn't keep a lid on Trump and his backers like the democrats did to Bernie. So Trump got in and then politicians "built in his image" started getting elected all over the place. So now the republicans have a party that more accurately reflects what people want. And they'll use that to mop the floor with the democrats until the democrats turn their own party over to reflect what voters want.
by jeswin | 2025-04-29 23:49:51+00:00
> Indian government has been taking steps like these for quite some time now.

In this instance though, this is from the High Court of the state of Karnataka and not the Indian Government. Karnataka isn't ruled by the same party at the center (imagine California and the current US Government). Again, the Government of Karnataka had nothing to do with this case either - it's the High Court.

Indian courts have done similar things forever. YouTube/FB etc quickly comply with court orders here; because judges would simply issue a blanket ban order on the website.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-04-29 23:49:56+00:00
I think part of Elon's strategy is announcing <something> being around the corner in order to scare off competitors and investment into alternatives because, well, Telsa is already so far ahead.

This is why Tesla's "actuals" are delivered so many years after the dates of the initial pronouncements (for those few things that have so far been delivered at all).
by Loughla | 2025-04-29 23:50:30+00:00
No. No. That no longer applies, and I would argue never applies to a publicly funded entity like the federal government. When you're spending public dollars there is zero difference between incompetence and malice.

This administration has shown that it absolutely isn't incompetent. It's getting stuff done. Which means it's malice. Guaranteed. We're watching a self made disaster where few will profit, but will profit ENORMOUSLY.
by 9rx | 2025-04-29 23:50:47+00:00
> The same dollar buys me a lot more food and accomodation in rural areas.

That's because food and accommodations are often less valuable in rural areas. Supply and demand, as they say. But that is outside of the scope of inflation. As before, inflation seeks to measure the value of the currency itself, which also fluctuates in value just like everything else.

> Unfortunately, collective wage agreements, UI benefits and pensions are federally the same across Germany

Theoretically the value of the dollar could differ from place to place like food and houses – value is just arbitrary human opinion, after all – but as currency moves freely, everyone tends to agree on its value across entire countries (and usually the entire world). In practice, you'd also find accommodations and food settling on the same value across entire countries if we had magical portals that could move them to and fro on a whim like we can with currency.

But it seems like what you are really thinking of is a cost of living index. Usually those are prepared on a regional basis for the reasons you have described. Inflation is decidedly not intended to be a cost of living index and there is no reason to turn it into a cost of living index. We already have that – not to mention that we also need to understand inflation.

You may be also implying that some people use the wrong tool for the job (i.e. trying to use inflation as a cost of living index), but in that case the problem isn't that the tool broken, the problem is that the people are broken. The question then is not "What will it take to modify this screwdriver so that it is better at driving nails?" The question is "Why the fuck aren't you using a hammer?"
by boplicity | 2025-04-29 23:51:34+00:00
The problem is that the U.S. has bad media focused on being "right" over actual truth. (See Fox News and the many far-right "alt news" organizationns.) This lack of care for the truth is the foundation the U.S. political system rests on top of. Without fixing that foundation, U.S. leadership will continue to either be terrible, or terribly constrained. Add in unlimited political funding from anonymous people/organizations, and the situation is only more impossible to fix. Good U.S. leadership is a pipedream, unfortunately.
by nathan_compton | 2025-04-29 23:51:39+00:00
I think Greg Egan writes very optimistic science fiction that only really does 2 sort of. Exceeding the speed of light is, from my point of view, so absurd a premise as to make me feel that any hard science fiction which tries to get around it is not serious.

Its not that I can't enjoy that kind of science fiction, its just I can't take it seriously as having anything to do with actually reckoning with our position in the universe as human beings. Universe Big.
by leeab | 2025-04-29 23:52:25+00:00
Well, it depends on how many GPU clouds you're managing. We've talked to a bunch of companies, some startups, some enterprises and the main trend we found was the sheer number of companies with GPU clusters from multiple clouds...likely due to GPU shortage.

And yes, it's nowhere near 100% but an overwhelming majority was running Kubes for GPU workloads...mainly cuz so they'd have a unifying layer that wasn't managing each cloud separately and being proficient with their respective tooling.

Are you using something else? Slurm, docker, etc?
by agent281 | 2025-04-29 23:52:40+00:00
I would not describe LA to SF as a consistent experience. I had an 8:30 PM flight delayed until 1:30 AM. Actually, the only consistency I've had with those flights is that they are consistently delayed.

I've heard that the flight delays cascade throughout the day. So if the first flight is 10 minutes delayed, all SF-LA flights are delayed for the rest of the day. Since SFO has a lot of fog, my understanding is that it's often delayed.

Maybe it's okay coming from Burbank, but I live on the Westside so I have to take LAX.

I would love to have another option. Ideally, a train would decrease the load on the airlines so that they could handle delays better.

To answer your question directly, no I don't have to do work trips every couple of days, but I do have work trips from LA to SF every couple of months.
by lucasyvas | 2025-04-29 23:52:46+00:00
I agree with the article that it’s difficult. What if Google was still allowed to distribute their apps via embedded Chromium, but were not allowed to ship the Chrome derivative as a full-fledged browser?

That may still leave them some incentive to participate in its development since many of their web apps are optimized against Chromium, but they are not allowed the business advantage of the technology as it exists today.

The would-be acquirer, I guess, would be forbidden from duplicating the business model. The logical question is, well how would that acquirer make any money?

My hunch is that Chrome would just become a dead brand and the browser engine could live on as an embeddable technology. That still might provide value to a would-be owner, but they would make their money off of products making good use of the browser engine and not the engine itself for web browsing.

Having a world class browser engine is valuable to application development still. It has core value, just not as a vehicle for making money in a standalone way.

Maybe it’s hard to make sense of because monetizing a browser directly is, and arguably always has been, kind of… stupid.

The answer might be found looking at something like Deno Deploy. They realistically can’t monetize the language/runtime because it doesn’t make any sense. They capture commercial value by offering to run your code in a seamless way.

I don’t know. Maybe an AI company is a decent fit - they can run it as an agent/scraping service and make money that way. An automotive company could buy it and sell an optimized version for Infotainment systems for other car manufacturers as well. There’s money to be made off of selling it as a platform, but probably not as an Internet browser.

I’m sure Google itself could have thought of a billion other ways to make money off it but they were just too lazy to dream it up because it wasn’t aligned to their core business.
by jwrallie | 2025-04-29 23:53:03+00:00
The problem is once people pay for a service or invest time on learning a free platform, they will irrationally defend their decision to the point it’s almost impossible to get good recommendations on language learning tools online. Few people really tried multiple platforms fully (it takes years) to the point they are able to make criticism fairly about long term effect (which is the important point).

The SRS approach with cards content made by yourself is more time consuming but works better long term due to the context from which you created the cards, but it takes some time to understand the process correctly (not only the software interface, but how it interfaces with your own memory).

There are also other SRS platforms other than Anki, but Anki gets all the floor space because of its sheer number of users (popularity). Some may be better.
by zetazzed | 2025-04-29 23:53:41+00:00
Ok, I appreciate that timelines in this space are long. But the opening phrase:

"Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development..."

reads a bit like a parody of corporate speak about a project nowhere close to happening. Did they agree to deploy? Or reach an agreement to collaborate? No, that's too strong. They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development.
by princevegeta89 | 2025-04-29 23:53:59+00:00
Actually, we should also realize that they've been super wildly successful at getting people to move towards clean energy vehicles.

Prius is the world's highest selling Hybrid car, and it's been that for more than a decade now. This means Toyota has helped cut down emissions from consumer automobiles by a significant degree.

It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicles out of that same 100k pool, which literally produce double the MPG compared to ICE cars. It becomes obvious when we look at the total emissions generated by that pool of 100k cars.

If there's anyone to blame, I'd look at the luxury division - Mercedes, Audi and BMW (and also Genesis/Acura) - all late to the party, and still haven't been successful at meaningfully replacing the vehicles they would sell to their customers yet.
by malicka | 2025-04-29 23:54:39+00:00
The 24€ one is the official one:

> AnkiMobile is the official iOS app and all purchases help fund Anki's development.[1]

You could always use the web UI in your phone browser, Ankiweb[2], which is very kindly hosted for free by the developers.

You could also write your cards as CSV, HTML, or really any format you want and import them, if the interface isn’t to your liking. Shoot, you can even use an Emacs package[3] if you want to.

[1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [2] https://ankiweb.net/ [3] https://github.com/eyeinsky/org-anki
by Loughla | 2025-04-29 23:55:04+00:00
>Lockdowns saved lives, even though they caused huge disruptions.

The problem with this argument and op's is that they're starting from different baselines. This next sentence is not meant to be as judgy as it sounds I'm afraid.

But your context is that lives are worth more than economic problems. The counterpoint that exists is that other people's lives aren't a valuable as my livelihood and income.

This is why rational debate breaks down so very quickly. We don't even have the same starting point anymore, let alone view of the facts at hand.
by n_ary | 2025-04-29 23:55:14+00:00
You are indeed correct according to my opinion. Salesforce went too deep into BlockChain and BigData and probably never recovered from the sunk costs. But to stay relevant they again need to risk another bet but also need to conserve(death by a thousand cuts and all) so they layoff while jumping on AI bandwagon. And how fortunate it is that LLM sellers tout productivity gain(zero backing data but hey) as a benefit, so it also falsely support their failure as a success.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-29 23:56:18+00:00
Not mature enough to Toyota's taste, probably.

Hydrogen fuel cell is more about diversification, and it is fully backed by the Japan gov so ROI would be through the roof even if it doesn't "win".

Also many countries aren't producing enough electricity (cough Japan and Germanycough) so EVs getting popular _at scale_ isn't going to happen tomorrow either.
by wfn | 2025-04-29 23:56:28+00:00
Well, re: GDPR, for one Vlad is abjectly clearly wrong on email addresses not being PII. They are.

The mere fact of him relying on his rationalisation (of burner email addresses) over established GDPR definitions of PII is troubling. To me it rings immature and unprofessional. As a software engineer I shall treat PII with care and account for it. If a CEO is this defensive about their clearly wrong opinion, it's a red flag to me.
by tehjoker | 2025-04-29 23:56:28+00:00
This is a highly propagandized view of China. Their industrial strategy was to get western capitalists to support industrializing the country by offering cheaper labor, but without surrendering control of the country to them, but now wages have risen quite substantially and their country is industrialized.

The western capitalists are now pissed that china didn't "liberalize" and let them take control of the country and are attempting to retaliate. This is why you have imbibed this propaganda that they created.
by d--b | 2025-04-29 23:58:21+00:00
The fact that sci fi has gotten more pessimistic is debatable. But if we had to pinpoint a reason, I’d say that Silicon Valley selling the world technological utopia and delivering attention farming algorithms is a good culprit.

Now every time there is some kind of tech progress, we can’t avoid imagining how its monetization is going to affect people in a bad way.

The second obvious reason is that we’re fucking the planet up and this has been enabled by technological advances.

And well authoritarian regimes. Ahem.

That said, to me there’s plenty of recent sci fi that isn’t too pessimistic. The Martian, Interstellar, Arrival, Her, to name a few.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-29 23:58:44+00:00
Sibling comment rightfully points out that a legitimate company will follow the laws. Proton is a legitimate company, so they follow the laws. This is detailed in their published threat model:

"“The Internet is generally not anonymous, and if you are breaking Swiss law, a law-abiding company such as Proton Mail can be legally compelled to log your IP address.” This cannot be changed due to how the internet works. However, we understand this is concerning for individuals with certain threat models, which is why since 2017, we also provide an onion site for anonymous access (we are one of the only email providers that supports this)."

And, in the case you are presumably talking about, Proton took it through the courts and ended up getting a ruling that "email services are not telecommunications providers. Consequently, email services are not subject to the data retention requirements imposed on telecommunications providers and are exempted from handing over certain user data in response to Swiss legal orders"

Which paints an incredibly different story than the one you are trying to paint.

Third, emails weren't handed over (nor were files, calendars, etc.). Which is another important distinction your comment does not mention.

Why parrot half of a story disparaging one of the only large email providers that fights in court to protect the privacy of its users?
by T-R | 2025-04-29 23:59:49+00:00
Optics let you concisely describe the location, but defer the dereferencing, so you could definitely approximate optics, not by passing around pointers you compute with `offsetof`, but passing around functions that use `offsetof` to return memory locations to reference (read/write to). You could certainly write a composition operator for `*(*T) => List<*R>`... Some people have done something like it[1][2]:

Account acc = getAccount(); QVERIFY(acc.person.address.house == 20); auto houseLens = personL() to addressL() to houseL(); std::function<int(int)> modifier = [](int old) { return old + 6; }; Account newAcc2 = over(houseLens, newAcc1, modifier);

These also use templating to get something that still feels maybe a little less ergonomic than it could be, though.

[1] https://github.com/graninas/cpp_lenses [2] https://github.com/jonsterling/Lens.hpp
by shreezus | 2025-04-30 00:00:06+00:00
I have noticed the same - Tesla FSD has improved remarkably in the last couple of versions, to the point where it almost never requires interventions.

That said, I still don't "trust" FSD to the point where I could comfortably be in the backseat taking a nap just yet. 99% is not "good enough" for something as critical as driving.
by nntwozz | 2025-04-30 00:01:08+00:00
Yeah TNG is my go-to for optimistic sci-fi. Voyager a close second; Deep Space 9 is a bit more muddled.

Modern Trek is a let-down, although Lower Decks has been awesome with lots of member berries sprinkled throughout for the TNG-era enjoyers.

I should add that Star Trek: Prodigy (albeit a kids show) has been very optimistic and enjoyable too, feels very much like TNG-era. Janeway and Chakotay are in as well.

P.S.

On a tangent The Orville (a Star Trek TNG clone by Seth MacFarlane) is pretty good; some Star Trek actors even show up in it.

Season 4 is apparently in production.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-04-30 00:03:30+00:00
Applied cynicism is deconstruction in the sense that all that is being offered is criticism and disbelief in a thing. There is no message of doing something else because it is better, only a message to do something else because it isn't the thing the cynicism is targeting. Sometimes not even an alternative is offered. The thing just sucks and it shouldn't be done, according to the critic.

You will notice how in current political conversations that no matter what the problem being discussed is, the solution is almost always the destruction of something or someone. There's this stubborn perspective that X would be resolved if we could just somehow eliminate Y.

To be crude, the pattern I described isn't aspirational, it's bitchy. You'll also notice how very little gets accomplished in the current cynical environment for the same reason that nagging people doesn't motivate them as much as inspiring them does.
by alpaca128 | 2025-04-30 00:03:35+00:00
People complaining about 5 minute update checks hopefully don't use Windows 10/11.

A while ago I did some rough calculations with numbers Microsoft used to brag about their telemetry, and it came out to around 10+ datapoints collected per minute. But probably sent in a lower frequency.

I also remember them bragging about how many million seconds Windows 10 users used Edge and how many pictures they viewed in the Photo app. I regret not having saved that article back then as it seems they realized how bad that looks and deleted it.
by andyferris | 2025-04-30 00:05:04+00:00
My thoughts on this are to add a third keyword alongside `break` and `continue` to loops that allow you to push another (loop) stack frame and descend into a tree-like data structure.

For exposition, lets seperate loop initialization from the rest, make `continue` mandatory to repeat the loop with another specified value (i.e. the loop implicitly ends without a continue) and lets say `descend` to recurse into the tree.

sum = 0; loop (node = tree.root) { sum += node.value; if (node.left) descend node.left; if (node.right) descend node.right; }

Compare with a linear loop:

sum = 0; loop (i = 0) { if (i >= array.length) break; sum += array[i]; continue i + 1; }

The `descend` keyword differs from `continue` in that its more of a continuation - control flow will continue from that point once it is done.

You could make this more functional and less imperative (and I'd be surprised if such things don't exist as libraries in some functional languages). Yes ultimately we can transform this to recursive functions and compile it that way... but for imperative languages (especially those without closures) something like the above might be useful.

Arguably the above loops are _more_ imperative and less declaritive than the standard ones from the C family. You could add a functional twist by breaking with a value (which is the result of the overall `loop` expression).
by nativeit | 2025-04-30 00:05:42+00:00
Is it normal to include the Electron framework like that? Is it not also compiled with the binary? Might be a stupid question, I'm not a developer. Seems like a very, very heavy program to be doing such a straightforward function. On MacOS, I'm sure it also requires a lot of iffy permissions. I think I'd stick with the built-in screen recorder myself.