MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 3036e4 | 2025-04-26 09:56:51+00:00
I edited mostly a single page many years ago. It wasn't a controversial subject really, just one where there is a lot of garbage popular history and some light revisionism that made it a bit of an effort to remove unreliable sources and add some better sources. Never any issues or fights over it, but I got bored eventually and just let it be.

Recently I edited a page or two, then tried to edit more, but everything is so complex now. All the special markup and stuff to consider is really off-putting. Took me forever to figure out how to properly fix the year of death of a person and some other data I just ignored because it was too much red tape. Wish it was more simple plain text. Makes quick drive-by edits too much work.
by eqvinox | 2025-04-26 09:57:07+00:00
You're saying it yourself: it's a target of influence campaigns. The Wikimedia Foundation ìs not a source of them itself.

The non-profit public benefit service they provide is the openly editable encyclopaedia wiki, not its contents or its editors. The same safe harbour provisions as with other content hosters should (and need to) apply as with YouTube hosting questionable videos.
by rollcat | 2025-04-26 09:57:28+00:00
This.

Simple projects: just use plain C. This is dwm, the window manager that spawned a thousand forks. No ./configure in sight: <https://git.suckless.org/dwm/files.html>

If you run into platform-specific stuff, just write a ./configure in simple and plain shell: <https://git.suckless.org/utmp/file/configure.html>. Even if you keep adding more stuff, it shouldn't take more than 100ms.

If you're doing something really complex (like say, writing a compiler), take the approach from Plan 9 / Go. Make a conditionally included header file that takes care of platform differences for you. Check the $GOARCH/u.h files here:

<https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/refs/heads/release-branch.g...>

(There are also some simple OS-specific checks: <https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/refs/heads/release-branch.g...>)

This is the reference Go compiler; it can target any platform, from any host (modulo CGO); later versions are also self-hosting and reproducible.
by koito17 | 2025-04-26 10:00:00+00:00
The companies suing Amazon Japan requested damages of approximately 280M JPY, or approximately 2M USD. Of course, this is not a lot of money given Amazon's scale, but the companies tried to recuperate lost profits.

With that said, the discussion on Yahoo News is mostly in agreement with the opinions shared in this thread: given Amazon's scale, a fine of 35M yen is equivalent to no penalty.
by ksajadi | 2025-04-26 10:00:30+00:00
I am not sure if I agree with the statement "the only reason we know about them is because Wikipedia fights them". I am sure there are admins and accounts on wikipedia who work hard to protect the sites integrity. However, I know a lot of the misinformation on wikipedia pages, specific to the Middle East were uncovered by organizations outside of the site and with quotes of the content that have found their way to the site, so in those cases, the internal checks and balances of wikipedia didn't work.
by TomK32 | 2025-04-26 10:01:58+00:00
What a contrast to the early days: 22 years ago I was simply appointed admin on the German language Wikipedia when there was simply a lack of hands doing deletions and stuff. No voting, just a show of hand a lots of trust put into people only know by what they write and discuss on this new website.

A few years of work (10k edits) and a few years of dwindling participation on my side someone noticed that quite a few of those early admins never faced a vote at all. The process had re-elections when 25 wikipedians asked for a vote, took them almost three weeks, I got that treatment as well in 2009. Indeed someone had enough time to dig through and find a discussion where I wasn't the nicest person (at the same time writing and discussing on Wikipedia help me a lot to develop a healthy social skill). Well, I didn't use the admin rights anymore so I rather resigned before someone dug even deeper ;)

For security reasons those admin rights should be time limited anyways.
A better and simpler chisquare test
by currando | 2025-04-26 10:02:33+00:00
The idea is so simple that surely someone must have imagine it before. Just an example suffice: consider the experiment of throwing a dice, this can be seen as five different independent experiments counting the numbers in the remaining cases and applying the normal approximation to the binomial, so that for example in a dice the probabilies are 1/6, 1/5, 1/4 .... and you sum those (oi - restpi)/(rest*pi*qi) where pi are the updated probabilies and rest are the remaining number in each case. The sum follows approximately a n-1 dof chisquare. In the examples in wikipedia the numbers are very different for the first example (good dice) but similar for the second (biased dice) Bayesian intuition or common sense implies that the n-1 experiment are independent.
by rkagerer | 2025-04-26 10:02:45+00:00
All I wanted to do was play a sample of one randomly selected track.

Clicking the play button doesn't do that, it brings up a somewhat eccentric 2-line license agreement.

Clicking the checkmark to agree then prompts for your email address and to create an account.

These are dark UI patterns, and it's a shame a website purporting to be about generously sharing free content uses them. A button should do what it advertises.

Here's a snippet from the full license text if anyone's curious:

Moby does not permit his Tracks to be used to advertise right-wing politics or causes, or to be used to promote meat, dairy, or other animal products. People may disagree about when these lines have been crossed—which is why Moby retains the right to terminate the license to any Track completely at his sole and absolute discretion, at any time.

Also note you're contracting with a corporation, and the agreement includes a clause about you indemnifying them.
by 20after4 | 2025-04-26 10:03:13+00:00
There are a whole bunch of little utilities like browser extensions and bookmarklets and even an entire in-house cloud infrastructure that is used for hosting various kinds of bots and web-based tools for automating workflows. It's all very ad-hoc, crude and not very well organized or publicized. There have been a few efforts over the years to create a repository for all of the little tools to help with exposure and some level of vetting for security risks. I'm not sure any of those projects were ever successful (or even made it past the planning stage) but there has been some appetite for improving that ecosystem.
by jll29 | 2025-04-26 10:03:25+00:00
Quality of life encompasses many factors, e.g.

Switzerland has 98 days of maternity leave, Afghanistan has 90(+15) days of maternity leave (Wikipedia even puts it at #1 worldwide with two years, but that may be incorrect?). In Switzerland, women have been able to vote since 1971. In Afghanistan, women have been able to vote since 1919 (but interrupted during the *previous* Taliban regime).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-26 10:03:31+00:00
I’ve learned that there isn’t a “magic bullet” policy that we can enact, that always ensures that we do things correctly. Human nature is messy and varied. A word of praise can be weaponized.

I often encounter people that use praise as a domination tool. They praise you in a manner that suggests that, if they did not recognize and note something, you would not have it. They use praise to “declare ownership” of your good traits.

I encounter this, because I have highly valuable skills, that can make others a great deal of money, and have an aspect that predatory people think is “weakness.” They believe I have low self-esteem, because I am not always tubthumping.

Also, we have to be careful of saying things like “Don’t complain, if you don’t have a solution.”[0]

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/problems-and-solutions/
by sudb | 2025-04-26 10:03:41+00:00
I had a problem recently trying to send LLM-generated text between two web servers under my control, from AWS to Render - I was getting 403s for command injection from Render's Cloudflare protection which is opaque and unconfigurable to users.

The hacky workaround which has been stably working for a while now was to encode the offending request body and decode it on the destination server.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-26 10:05:05+00:00
You jest, but skin in the game is argument is not irrelevant. It is called a franchise for a reason after all. You want a slice of the pie, you should be able to prove that you know what you are doing. Owning land was a good enough proxy then. We can argue what would be a good proxy now.
by V__ | 2025-04-26 10:08:15+00:00
Living in a world where access to information is basically universally available at the tip of one's fingers, it is an eerie feeling to watch how the institutions and norms of the (self-proclaimed) "foremost western democracy" are falling apart day by day.

There was a time in history class where I just couldn't grasp how Germany could fall apart and transform for the worse so fast. Even though the population had nowhere near the amount of access to information or even tools to organize as societies do now. Looking around the world and especially the US, I now wonder how it didn't happen more often.
by Narew | 2025-04-26 10:08:18+00:00
For the moment it's a bit free wheel. And I agree the code is better but they could probably not reproduce it themself. I honestly don't know how to "force" them to understand the code the llm write if the code is clean. But this happen when the code produce by llm is over complicated or bad and we catch that by doing code review. I have the impression it will create even more disparity between student, students that just use llm code and the ones that try to understand it.
by abenga | 2025-04-26 10:08:56+00:00
Those both seem a little bit more consistent than the Ruby example, however. To understand the JS example for example, you only need know that to call a method on an object, you do `object.method(arguments)`, and this is chained in a straightforward manner, with methods called on the returned values left to right. Ditto for the Haskell example. Maybe the Ruby one does the same thing, but even in this extremely simple example, we still have two different ways of doing the same thing.

For Python, you don't really have to use list comprehensions in the place of multiple for loops, you can sacrifice the brevity afforded to write the same thing in a more easily understandable fashion.
by jampekka | 2025-04-26 10:09:45+00:00
In Finland sentence can be reduced if the case has been publicized widely, i.e. the "shame" is seen as a punishment itself.

Being labeled as "a criminal" for sure hinders rehabilitation. It reduces opportunities and probably affects identity.

Based on how crime and offenders are publicly discussed in the US, it seems there's very little interest in rehabilitation, except if the person is of high status. Per my common sense the US culture is often just plain cruel with people revelling in others' suffering if they are labeled as "outsiders".
by nly | 2025-04-26 10:11:02+00:00
We can't really criticise modern application developers for looking at this complexity, shrugging, and just using the only API available - inet_pton

In a sensible world inet_pton would be deprecated with a compiler warning and replaced with inet_pton2 that just accepted the sensible subset.

The HTTP RFCs actually do restrict the format within URIs, but modern browsers are still more liberal

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.2.2

One thing I've previously lamented is how IPv6 requires parens for IP:port pair string - particularly problematic if you want to be able to have a default port when the suffix is missing.
by jll29 | 2025-04-26 10:12:03+00:00
That's one of the few times I've read about a proposed innovation "in the spirit of UNIX" that was not already present in the original UNIX or one of its descendants.

UNIX: Everything is a file. => A directory is a file. Parent post: Everything is a directory. A file is a directory.

I.e., a switch from "There are files and special files called directories that are handled differently." to the recursive definition "There are files, which are made up of 0..n files (blobs) and 0..n subdirectories" - so file versus directory is just a VIEW.

Makes sense & would make writing traversal code for files wiht internal structure much easier to read and write.
by abenga | 2025-04-26 10:12:43+00:00
> Why are we optimizing a programming language for people who don't know it, instead of optimizing it for people who actually program in it?

Everyone who actually programs in a language was once a person who didn't know it. Languages which optimize for succinct terseness might be powerful once you master them, but they will never enter mainstream use, which I guess is not necessarily the aim.
by PinkSheep | 2025-04-26 10:14:08+00:00
If we can write code to dispatch different code paths (like has been used for decades for SSE, later AVX support within one binary), then we can write code to parallelize large array execution based on heuristics. Not much different from busy spins falling back to sleep/other mechanisms when the fast path fails after ca. 100-1000 attempts to secure a lock.

For the trivial example of 2+2 like above, of course, this is a moot discussion. The commenter should've lead with a better example.
by Xymist | 2025-04-26 10:14:20+00:00
There is a lesson in these repeated incidents that really needs to be learned by both industry and individual developers - if you intend, when putting the first publicly visible version of a project out to the world, that it might _ever_ be financially self sustaining or profitable, don't start with an OSS licence. Start with BSL, or whatever suits your taste, but don't start with OSS and change your mind after a few years when you realise it's a money pit. They are all money pits, it's inevitable.
by electrosphere | 2025-04-26 10:17:25+00:00
I worked remotely from Tenerife last year. I was there two months, at first it was great, everything new and novel. But it wears off and towards the end of my stay I longed for home, community and my usual routine.

The best balance is occaisonal "pattern interrupts" like travel abroad (or within your own country). You do not necessarily need big sweeping vacations or "experiences". A bike ride in a forest for a few days with a friend you have not seen for months can give you that mental refreshment.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-04-26 10:17:45+00:00
BYD is also heavily subsidized by the Chinese government.

If the us were not to fight back, the non subsidized industries would die, Chinese would stop subsidizing, rack up the price and competition would be too difficult to start again because of the monopoly on lithium and advance on technology.

It's been done thousands of times with other industries and countries.

Most recently Google, who had been giving Android for free when windows phone were licensed and Samsung tyzen cost money to develop, then forced manufacturer to accept outrageous terms to ship Google play service in their phone when all competition was already dead, is now under scrutiny for antitrust.
by krisoft | 2025-04-26 10:18:05+00:00
> But in a real court, I can see the verdict and the laws that were broken. All in complicated, but readable english.

Thats not really true either. There is a lot to unpack to understand court cases. Just the hearsay rule and its exception would fill a book. Jurisdiction, double jeopardy, means rea, “reasonable man”, Brady disclosure, fruit of poisonous tree, presumption of regularity, habeas corpus, SLAP, reasonable doubt, writ of mandamus, motion to dismiss, motion to supress, motion for change of venue, motion in limine, amicus curiae, consideration. Just to unpack the latin terms makes your head spin, and then you will be caught out by some term with some seamingly easy to understand common meaning used in surprising ways.

One can almost say it is a whole profession to understand what is going on in court. We could call them lawyers or something if we want to be fancy about it. And then turns out even those specialist further specialise in narrower areas.
by perihelions | 2025-04-26 10:19:13+00:00
- "Just five years of mining waste from a single iron ore site in Inner Mongolia contains enough thorium to meet US household energy demands for more than 1,000 years, according to the report published in Chinese journal Geological Review in January."

Remarkable that Chinese writers reference *American* household energy use as their benchmark. This must be the zeitgeist of the time: "rising middle class approaching American living standards". Americans are ashamed of what they perceive as their own energy decadence. But Chinese validate material wealth.

I read an unrelated article the other day which dovetails in to this: a Chinese paper heralding a figure of double-digit growth in... energy consumption. They wrote about it as a barometer of economic health. The difference between East/West mindsets is just so stark!
by yummypaint | 2025-04-26 10:19:35+00:00
This should be the top comment on HN where most users claim to have some grasp of statistics. N=5 implies a statistical uncertainty of about 45%, so they measured what one would expect, which is essentially nothing. Also this is specifically about Brazilian biomedical studies, and contains no evidence to support people's various personal vendettas against other fields in other countries. At least read the article people.
by rikroots | 2025-04-26 10:21:35+00:00
I worked at Portex back in the 80s. After a shift at that factory it was a pleasure to get home, slip on the shell suit and spend the evening drinking and discussing minor, mindless vandalism opportunities. I moved away in the end (to a squat in London) because I knew, deep down, there had to be something better for me out there.
by soapdog | 2025-04-26 10:21:43+00:00
There are a couple readers that avoid that by providing a calmer experience without a firehose and without background fetching.

https://blogcat.org (I made this one)

https://fraidyc.at (this is the inspiration for many calm readers)

https://cblgh.itch.io/rad-reader (multiplatform and super calm)
by bjackman | 2025-04-26 10:22:31+00:00
I think this is a great idea. It seems like we are entering the phase where the core hardware problems are solved and we now need to:

A) bring down cost and expand the design space for the hardware and

B) minimise the barriers to working on the "software" problems where there still seem to be huge areas of mostly unaddressed challenges.

An open source platform seems like a good thing for both.
by florbnit | 2025-04-26 10:23:30+00:00
I get that. But that “ecosystem might adapt” has absolutely nothing to do with t-strings is what I’m saying. Anyone who wants to validate sql will have to just look through strings guess that it’s sql and validate and highlight it. This could be done before and after just the same. The template strings by nature of just being “strings that will turn into something else at some later point” do nothing to further this in any way.
by grues-dinner | 2025-04-26 10:23:55+00:00
Watching nearly the entire software-financial complex burn to the ground when the vaunted "moats" dry up is going to be a hell of a sight. All this AI hype is just going to end up commodifying the very thing that the entire industry is built on: management of processes.

Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.
by technothrasher | 2025-04-26 10:26:30+00:00
The only few times I tried to make small edits, typo corrections, or similar, they just got immediately reverted as vandalism. So when I found a page that is largely wrong about a relatively obscure historical figure that I actually know a lot about and have plenty of source material for, I didn't really feel motivated to put the work in to clean it up.
by PinkSheep | 2025-04-26 10:26:50+00:00
Exactly. Multiply this with the time it takes for one run on a slow machine. Back in the day, I ran a compilation on my phone as it was the target device. Besides the compilation taking 40 minutes (and configure had missed a thing or two), the configure step itself took a minute or so. Because I don't know all the moving parts, I prefer start from scratch than running into obscure problems later on.

Arguing against parallelization of configure is like arguing against faster OS updates. "It's only once a week/whatever, come on!" Except it's spread over a billion of people time and time again.
by florbnit | 2025-04-26 10:26:57+00:00
> And highlighters and static analyzers will key off of this.

Then the t is redundant and we don’t need t strings involved in any way. This would work just as well. In fact better by using html("<h1>Hello</h1>") and have it return a html object instead of returning a just a string which is what t-strings will do. So literally the only contribution from t-strings in that context is to make things worse.

If they had just standardized some way of putting semantics into the template everything would be better. Let us define a “sql = temlate(….)” and use sql”…”
by mbanerjeepalmer | 2025-04-26 10:27:14+00:00
People here seem to fall into two camps:

(A) Studiously prune your feeds like a bonsai. As the author suggest, follow the chain of trust to a small number of voices (for me, something like Stratechery, Simon Willison, Inner Ring).

(B) Realise that RSS is another form of 'tyranny', this time at the hands of the publisher instead of the platform, where the composition of your feeds, and therefore what uses your attention, doesn't correlate highly with what matters to you.

I can feel the pickaxes being unsheathed as I type this but...I have reason to believe my (and others') LLM/embeddings-driven products are a good solution.

Position (A) isn't tenable if FOMO matters. Paraphrasing another comment here: 'Following arXiv is part of the job'.

So let's say you adopt position (B). You recognise that everything that matters to you is distributed across some set of feeds. But only a small proportion of the total material in those feeds matters to you. If you can articulate what matters then you can let an LLM or embeddings model use their attention, instead of yours, on the low-relevance items by filtering them out.

Some options:

- https;//scour.ing

- https://feeds.fun

- https://zacusca.net (disclosure: mine, and still pretty janky)
by lexoj | 2025-04-26 10:28:29+00:00
The way I have addressed this is using my own tool [1] which creates daily digests instead (MD files with date). This removes the stress to check everything or having hundreds of unread, I care only about the current day. If I get some time, say on the weekend, I could go in previous days and check if I skipped. I think its a better trade off than having so many unread stories that grow over time.

[1] https://github.com/piqoni/matcha
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-04-26 10:29:19+00:00
hmm, maybe. In the U.S you have often the person who moved from a 'crap' town to some place they consider great, who gets really emotional about the crappiness they escaped to be able to think freely and the like. And often these people are the ones I would think of as customers for a book like this, and if their new town isn't in the book they certainly won't be offended.
by smitty1e | 2025-04-26 10:29:36+00:00
> It’s odd for there to be such an easily-removable design flaw in the human body; evolution tends to remove them.

I wouldn't say so at all. Poor eyesight carries on smartly. Baldness. I enjoy both.

But an old story about the controller code for a surface-to-air missile comes to mind.

Someone looking at the memory allocator spots an obvious resource leak: "This code is going to crash."

The reply was that, while the point was theoretically valid, it was irrelevant, since the system itself would detonate long before resource exhaustion became an issue.

So too prostate cancer back in the day: war, famine and plague were keeping the lifespan well below the threshold of every man's time bomb.