MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-04-13 10:13:35+00:00
a medical dataset with 50 people may or may not be a low number depending on the rarity and the profile of people being affected by the disease. But as it happens low counts for studies are often a problem so maybe I shouldn't be so snippy, that said I would say yes, soft sciences often require more people in studies to be significant, but that is just my opinion on it.
by azernik | 2025-04-13 10:13:46+00:00
Even worse is the all-decimal MAC problem.

Some genius decided that, to make time input convenient, YAML would parse HH:MM:SS as SS + 60×MM + 60×60×HH. So you could enter 1:23:45 and it would give you the correct number of seconds in 1 hour, 23 minutes, and 45 seconds.

They neglected to put a maximum on the number of such sexagesimal places, so if you put, say, six numbers separated by colons like this, it would be parsed as a very large integer.

Imagine my surprise when, while working at a networking company, we had some devices which failed to configure their MAC addresses in YAML! After this YAML config file had been working for literal years! (I believe this was via netplan? It's been like a decade, I don't remember.)

Turns out, if an unquoted MAC address had even a single non-decimal hex digit, it would do what we expected (parse as a string). This is not only by FAR the more common case, but also we had an A in our vendor prefix, so we never ran into this "feature" during initial development.

Then one day we ran out of MAC addresses and got a new vendor prefix. This time it didn't have any letters in it. Hilarity ensued.

(This behavior has thankfully been removed in more recent YAML standards.)
by swores | 2025-04-13 10:13:53+00:00
> "That's a lot of fancy words to say ‘we're doing this because it makes us more money’ lol"

You say that as if they're using lots of words to obfuscate that fact, but the quote you pasted has them saying entirely directly "maximize the network Return on Investment", which is just normal business terminology (and only one word more than your "it makes us more money"!)

Obviously this has no impact on whether that's a good or bad thing, I'm just pointing out that they weren't using a lot of words to hide that fact.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-13 10:15:36+00:00
Me neither, Turbo Vision was cool, Clipper kind of ok for data entry applications, and curses, well it was the way of UNIXes before X Windows became affordable.

Apparently that is some kind of retrocomputing movement.

The strange part is that most folks pushing for TUIs weren't even born and don't get the pain we went through.

We used TUIs because that is all we could afford, not because we were given an option.
by NoOn3 | 2025-04-13 10:16:33+00:00
In today's world, it's all complicated, to tell the truth. If you think very deeply, then with the help of foreign money, if there is a lot of it, you can even destroy the country without doing anything illegal, just paying for advertising and comments with coverage of only facts that are beneficial to you and excluding the unprofitable ones.

People often think that bot farms are only from Russia and China, but on the other side, paid commenters are also used. Unfortunately, it will only get worse with modern AI.
by miki123211 | 2025-04-13 10:16:34+00:00
Okay, here's a crazy idea.

The things he built are:

ffmpeg, which basically implements a bunch of specs for codecs

Qemu, which basically implement a bunch of specs for CPUs

TinyC / QuickJS, which basically implement a bunch of specs, mainly those for C and JS.

That LTE thing, which, surprise surprise, implements a bunch of specs.

He seems to be a God of turning specs into working code, not necessarily a GOd of programming in general.
by tamad | 2025-04-13 10:17:18+00:00
> Gravity is always present. What you feel as “weightlessness” is actually freefall.

Article makes this seem true, regardless of whether or not you are in orbit. But doesn’t this matter of perspective become ridiculous if you are floating freely in space? As in, yes, you’re “falling” but only because Earth is moving away from you or toward you? Honest question here…
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-13 10:17:27+00:00
1.The majority of people are not intelligent. Source is polls on whether there was wide spread election fraud

2. Politicans want money and power. They have no issues lying or manipulating people to get it

3. In a country like Russia the government can counter any information with widespread arrests and fear.

4. In a country with free speech there is little to no recourse.

Meaning that Russia, China, etc can use misinformation against us and we can't do anything. On the other hand we can try the same but they can simply use authoritarian tactics to supress it.

5. Trump has shown that the threshold for lying was set artificially low by past politicians. His success while lying about events that are easily disproven multiple times is evidence for all future politicians to lie.
by danielktdoranie | 2025-04-13 10:17:43+00:00
this is a case of “well if it isn't the consequences of my own actions coming back to haunt me”. People like the article's author (and probably the article's author) have been petitioning the government and big tech companies for years asking for more censorship to protect them from big mean hurty words and now they wonder why the internet is a nanny state.
by bayindirh | 2025-04-13 10:18:38+00:00
When I was migrating my server, and checking logs, I have seen a slew of hits in the rolling logs. I reversed the IP and found a company specializing in "Servers with GPUs". Found their website, and they have "Datacenters in the EU", but the company is located elsewhere.

They're certainly positioning themselves for providing scraping servers for AI training. What will they do when I say that one of their customers just hit my server with 1000 requests per second? Ban the customer?

Let's be rational. They'll laugh at that mail and delete it. Bigger players use "home proxying" services which use residental blocks for egress, and make one request per host. Some people are cutting whole countries off with firewalls.

Playing by old rules won't get you anywhere, because all these gentlemen took their computers and work elsewhere. Now we all have are people who think they need no permission because what they do is awesome, anyway (which is not).
by subscribed | 2025-04-13 10:20:57+00:00
LOL, next you're going to infer the author is a childless cat lady, who started regretting not having children.

It's quite a lengthy rant about prioritizing everytime inconvenience over a setting switch that could be enabled once, after a few years time.

World doesn't revolve about your children (or mine. And yes, I have them and yes, this is one of these mildly infuriating UX decisions).
by mrweasel | 2025-04-13 10:21:39+00:00
> I am kind of surprised how many sites seem to want/need this.

The AI scrapers are not only poorly written, they also go out of their way to do cache busting. So far I've seen a few solutions, CloudFlare, require a login, Anubis, or just insane amounts of infrastructure. Some site have reported 60% of their traffic coming from bots not, smaller sites is probably much higher.
by skyfantom | 2025-04-13 10:21:40+00:00
No. But I do have in plans 1. to track results and 2. try different prompts.

Currently I’m working on adding interactive chats. Chats where users add some financial data automatically into messages. Something like:

“Please analyze {historical_data(10, days)} and also check {news}. Give me some recommendations based on these data”
by pkkm | 2025-04-13 10:22:49+00:00
> My theory: what matters isn't "best practices", it's have a coherent conceptual design and code that reflects that design.

I think so too; that said, the language could definitely be better. It suffers from a lot of primitive obsession. Instead of structs, you often find either vectors or lists with predefined element positions; instead of map, ordered map, and multimap types, it's just various kinds of lists everywhere. They're not even used consistently: for the same thing, one package may use an alist and another a plist.
by NamTaf | 2025-04-13 10:22:54+00:00
Australia's favourite spectator sport is not, in fact, cricket or AFL, but rather watching government knife their PM whenever the political winds change direction. In the last 8 years, 4 PMs have been rolled before they've reached an election, because the party loses confidence in them.

Many parliamentary systems wherein a PM is elected by the cabinet routinely demonstrate that they will use their power to remove a leader in whom they've lost confidence.
by deadbabe | 2025-04-13 10:23:00+00:00
No, if we truly valued children, we would seek to make more children, and devote substantial portions of our lives and resources to raising children.

But increasingly, society doesn’t give a shit about children. People value more their own individual autonomy, their vacations, their luxury goods, their comfort, over the responsibility and work involved in raising children. Children have lower value than ever in this world, reduced to units of potential future economic output, or accessories for your next instagram reel or photo.
by nkrisc | 2025-04-13 10:23:11+00:00
> The world doesn't revolve around children.

I mean, it kind of does. There is no (human) world without kids.

Every adult who can’t stand children was once a child and will be cared for by the annoying children of today when they’re old and infirm. Not by their own kids, of course, because they don’t have any, but by other people’s kids. So, you’re welcome, I guess. Sorry you had to see things for kids.
by throwanem | 2025-04-13 10:23:11+00:00
No, I acknowledge that there's a good few paragraphs more of the superficial, doctrinaire nonsense you have been parroting than was immediately obvious to me here. Enough to be worth pasting through GPTZero, more than enough to say anything novel or interesting, and what a shame you never got there.

One example to shut you up: about the first thing every serious critic of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress addresses is that it's intentionally and explicitly written with about two-thirds of an eye toward the American "revolution" - hence the correspondences between Professor de la Paz and Benjamin Franklin (with a generous dash of Jefferson) on the one hand, and Mannie as an obvious George Washington expy on another. These are intentional similarities! Heinlein mentions it explicitly in Expanded Universe (don't hold me to that, it may have been in Grumbles from the Grave) and it's treated at length in one or another of the crit histories I've read, or maybe it was the Patterson biography, I'm not reading back hundreds of pages of diary notes for your lazy ass. It may have been the novel's own preface! He was intentionally loose with the correspondences, both in character and in plot, for narrative and didactic reasons, and that has proven a fruitful vein for both critical analysis and outright criticism over the years, and you can't even talk about any of it. You didn't notice any of this. Because you never learned the difference between looking at books and reading them. I'm sure you looked at every page, though!

These essays of yours are, generously, on the level of a college freshman who parties too much, studies too little, and treats English as a dump course. I did more thoughtful work as a high-school senior. For this you feel the need to be secretive? What a joke. Get lost, flyweight.
by xienze | 2025-04-13 10:23:35+00:00
It’s supposed to be paid for by people who’d rather work to earn just a bit more than UBI than do nothing and get paid, obviously.

The fundamental problem with UBI, like every other feel-good economic initiative, is that its proponents make poor assumptions about how the people who stand to benefit will behave — see all the predictions that the folks currently working in fast food or Walmart will magically turn into entrepreneurs or usher in a golden age of art if they simply had $1000 per month in cash. It’s noble to think the best of others, but they just kind of hand wave away the reality that there’s a non-trivial population that aspires to do nothing more than consume drugs and/or play video games for their entire lives. It’s not everyone obviously, but it’s enough to be a problem. Doubly so when you consider they could become a sizable voting bloc that will continue to vote for whoever promises to increase UBI.

When people dismiss UBI studies that last for just a few years and target a small slice of the population, it’s precisely because these long term negative effects take time and people to play out.
by MichaelRo | 2025-04-13 10:24:16+00:00
>> A German experiment has found that people are likely to continue working full-time even if they receive no-strings-attached universal basic income payments.

That's because this is not basic income but just an additional, lucky source of income, for a limited time. It's effectively landing a contract job on top of a regular job. I'm gonna go to great lengths to keep both since I can save the additional money and they might have quite an impact on my life.

I'm guessing the target people were not the best paid workers in Germany but still, saving €1200 per month is a lot more than the average of €450 ("According to a survey conducted in 2020 in Germany, the average monthly savings among the population amounted to 451 euros."). So if they were an average family that had a job and saved €450, with the "UBI" they just managet to triple their savings over a period of three years! Of course people won't quit their jobs, they're not stupid.

Overall it shows absolutely nothing on UBI but maybe it shows something on human psychology and rational behavior.
by andyolivers | 2025-04-13 10:24:25+00:00
I think you should take a good look at your comments, cause if I lack humility you are doing exactly the same and worse. I'm being called "petulant, indignant, arrogant" and so on... I don't recall calling you anything like that. I'd prefer people to criticize the features of a website rather than saying "this text was written by LLM, you can't even bother to write your own text". The feedback you are providing is not constructive, it's simply meant to troll a piece of text and red flag it as "AI-generated". Either way, I'm apologizing for my comment.
by tmcb | 2025-04-13 10:25:22+00:00
I am not sure if I agree with his conclusion, but some economists are of the opinion that countries in Northern Europe used the euro as a political tool to protect their own internal markets by making goods produced in the poorer countries of the Eurozone less competitive. If a country’s government could previously deflate their own currency to make their exports more attractive, they cannot do it anymore since they joined the Eurozone.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-13 10:26:25+00:00
Isn't the experiment to show the effects? Why would a country matter , it's about people. It wasn't to see if the country could implement it.

Drug trials often include can go to several thousand but only in a later stage, earlier stages are a few hundred. https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3...
by mptest | 2025-04-13 10:26:38+00:00
>There is support for UBI from socialists too. The opposition comes from the "centre - people whose main concern is maintaining the status quo.

Yeah, almost like that MLK guy knew what he was talking about. Changes from the original quote will be italicized

"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the economic moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the poor's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the libertarian or socialists, but the economic moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the poor to wait for a “more convenient season.”
by Frieren | 2025-04-13 10:27:03+00:00
> If half of healthcare workers quit on the spot, that would lead to a societal crisis. But maybe it would also force the employers to fundamentally change the space, in order to not lose their employees.

In a capitalist society, wages would rise and conditions will improve as people are willing to pay as much as needed for health care.

The problem is that in the current rent-seeking economy (capital gets all the money while work is worth very little) all that money is redirected to the owners of middleman companies that add nothing to the economy. Produce no services nor products. Our current system is very inefficient and cannot last as it is today.

To increase wages and improve the situation of most workers will assure increased productivity and citizens well-being. It is a no-brainer. But it is not easy to implement as the people in power profits handsomely with the current bad situation.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-13 10:28:52+00:00
True, but do you (HN readers) look on transgression only with nostalgia? What would be usefully transgressive today? Much subversive humour is Socratic in just asking (pointing out) hard questions.

In that vein, TBH I find it hard to square a post celebrating famous British humour on a site where any humour, whether good or in poor taste, is mercilessly punished by downvoting and faux outrage. I'm not calling hypocrisy, just pointing to an odd juxtaposition of values.

Do y'all delight in things the Python team said precicely because you wouldn't tolerate it or have the personal sense of security to say it today?
by andybak | 2025-04-13 10:29:10+00:00
I'm over 50 and need reading glasses as well as distance glasses. I actually find working in the Quest 3 better than a laptop in many ways. The balance betweeen (virtual) screen size and focussing distance seems to be easier to balance. With a laptop the distance sweet spot for vision isn't always the same as the comfort sweet spot for posture. I could probably optimize my desk setup to improve this - but the point of a laptop is freedom from being chained to a desk.

If I could get a remote keyboard/trackpad with a better range then I wouldn't need a laptop at all but currently I also use a laptop and Chrome Remote Desktop when I need text entry or a regular mouse.
by andybak | 2025-04-13 10:30:48+00:00
Not GP but I use Virtual Desktop with decent home Wifi so I can max out the quality settings.

(I can even work remotely if both sides have very fast broadband)

One caveat - this is an alternative to using a laptop and my eyesight is somewhat flawed due to middle age. If you're a 20-something with perfect vision and an addiction to 4k screens then this is probably a step down. For me it's on par with my non-VR experience.
by userbinator | 2025-04-13 10:30:56+00:00
That's... not very confidence-inspiring.

Something like the SiA471DJ comes in the same pinout and package, has almost 1/10th the on-resistance, and over 10x the current rating. Moreover, its datasheet does not have such a lengthy disclaimer about its abilities:

https://www.vishay.com/doc/?76741=

If I were in the same situation I'd choose that part for a replacement --- sources online show it's basically the same price, and why replace it with the same failure-prone part just to risk it doing the same thing again? This isn't even a high-frequency application, it's just a power switch.
by basisword | 2025-04-13 10:31:41+00:00
>> Investing in the stock market is far more common in the US compared to the EU for the average person (something like 60% versus 15% of people in the EU).

Is this accurate? For example, 80% of the UK has a pension and those are invested (partially) in stocks. Unsure how this works across the rest of Europe but 15% seems really low.

>> The EU is bigger than the US in population terms, but when it comes to raising funding for a new startup it’s hard to look far beyond the borders of your own small country

Completely agree with this. As much as the EU is a single market, in a lot of ways it falls short. Even if you're in some of the larger capitals you still end up looking for funding within your country. What do you think the solution is? Is the problem language? The completely different tax systems in each country? The spread of things (e.g. less concentration in one or two cities the way tech is in the US)?
by xvokcarts | 2025-04-13 10:31:44+00:00
Well, yeah, or else they'll release software with memory leaks, which could become a dependency of some big project and bring down some important things and have real effects on some other people.

Or, yeah, because if my child can access streaming without a child lock, they may not recover from what they see.

Looks like we should protect each other as much as we can, using UI!
by morsch | 2025-04-13 10:32:01+00:00
I think that would be pretty bad UI for people who actually use more than one profile, as a) it'd be very easy to use accidentally use the wrong profile and b) it's not super easy to switch the profile when your within one (and making it easy probably lands you at the current design).

At the same time, the existing one is fine for people (like me) who only use one -- as GP says, on a TV it's just a double confirm, if designed well. That said, for accounts that only have a single profile, I'm not sure why you'd show the select in the first place. Hide it by default, show it when the user creates a sub profile. DOS didn't have a login prompt.
by Propelloni | 2025-04-13 10:33:53+00:00
> Well, that’s the thing. It kind of does. And these days there’s an argument to be made that the world doesn’t value children enough. As long as fertility is below 2.1 that’s objectively true. It means we’re dying out.

We, as in humanity, are not dying out. While statisticians observe sinking fertility rates globally [1], reproduction is still going strong. In fact, humanity is still growing.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
by ricardobeat | 2025-04-13 10:33:59+00:00
Layoffs are for companies to reduce the size of their workforce and lower operating costs, skill distribution remains the same – there are various exceptions to ensure this.

If some employees are underperforming they should already be on their way out. That also is a process protected by law (no at-will employment here), otherwise layoffs would just be an excuse to expedite firings without going through the necessary steps. In short, being employed assumes you can perform at a satisfactory level, which makes sense to me. The flipside is that hiring is a much bigger commitment as people are not disposable.

Voluntary severance packages are usually offered ahead of layoffs, and include compensation based on years worked, so things can balance out a little.

The whole regulations are more about the social impact. Younger employees have an easier time re-arranging their lives and finding new jobs, are less likely to apply for welfare, and still have time left to switch careers, so this benefits everyone.