MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RajT88 | 2025-05-11 04:04:35+00:00
I have a friend who is a bit like the author here. He picks up on a lot of little things and seems to intuitively understand what those things mean.

For example, I invited him to a BBQ at my friend's parent's house. (He was my roommate at the time, and had met my other friend a few times so this was not a random thing)

He talked to my friend's mother for maybe 15 minutes at the BBQ. She is a cheerful and loopy sort of person, and that was exactly the sort of conversation they had. On the drive home he asked me, "that family has been through a lot of tragedy, haven't they?". Indeed, it would break your heart to hear about them.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 04:08:19+00:00
Theoretically, it's basically a faster Node.js. Case in point, TypeScript is moving from Node.js to Go for a 10x speed increase.

But in reality, TypeScript is probably its only legitimate use-case, and only because it already had very stringent requirements.

Most projects either stick to Node.js, or if they need more efficiency, they get rewritten in C++ or Rust, instead of ported to Go.
by anon291 | 2025-05-11 04:11:44+00:00
That is church law mumbo jumbo. The absolution given in confession is absolute.

You just have to find a priest willing to offer you absolution (which could be an orthodox priest by Catholic doctrine), and either way, if you're on your deathbed, the priest must give you last rites, which will have the same effect.

The whole not-being-able-to-receive-communion thing is just an administrative punishment. While the church can make policies regarding various things, it cannot remove the efficacious power of the sacraments.

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

> If for any reason the absolution from the censure is invalid, or is not given at all, nevertheless, provided the penitent is rightly disposed, his sins will always be forgiven in the sacrament of confession
by mrcsharp | 2025-05-11 04:11:57+00:00
Well with SSE the server and client are both holding a HTTP connection open for over a relatively long period of time. If the server is written with a language that supports async paradigms, then a http request that needs async IO will use about the same amount of resource anyways. And when the response if finished, that connection is closed and resources are freed. Whereas SSE will keep them for much longer.
by sarchertech | 2025-05-11 04:12:19+00:00
Sure you might be able to do that. Or it could turn out that the amount of harmful responses are so varied that trying to block all of them makes the therapy AI useless.

There is a very fine line between being understanding and supportive and enabling bad behavior. I’m not confident that a team of LLMs is going to be able to walk that line consistently anytime soon.

We can’t even get code generating LLMs to stop hallucinating APIs and code is a much narrower domain than therapy.
by zoky | 2025-05-11 04:13:08+00:00
I had a teacher in high school who once wrote a URL on the whiteboard like this: com/foo/bar.html

Upon informing him that he had forgotten to write the domain, I learned that the site was actually www.com, and he had just left the http://www part off because “the web browser adds that automatically”. I assured him that, while in principle he was more or less correct, but in this case it wouldn’t work. He ended up adding the www, but I could tell he was skeptical that I was just being a smart ass.
by bqmjjx0kac | 2025-05-11 04:13:55+00:00
Go has surprisingly good "UX", which I don't hear people talk about much. It compiles very quickly and gets out of your way. I've found it useful for a few reasons:

1. The standard library has a real HTTP/2 implementation (unlike Python).

2. The Go compiler creates statically-linked binaries and cross-compiling is painless.

3. Channels and goroutines make it relatively easy to write parallel code. There are certainly sharp edges, like every language.
by mofosyne | 2025-05-11 04:14:19+00:00
I'm sure there's a general rule of thumb where this approach works best as an approximation (such as a simple on/off switch)... which may give us opportunities to simplify the BOM list further with cheaper parts at cost to accuracy which wouldn't apply to PCB anyway.

Where I mostly seen this approach is with 3D printers where we just want to know if the nozzle is touching the print base.

But if we can quantify the general worse case variation between most PCBs then maybe we can create a recommended strain sensor element with a semi-quantified level of accuracy so it's not just an on/off sense.
by musicale | 2025-05-11 04:14:43+00:00
> If their iOS store is only profitable through anti consumer (I can't install my own software on my own device) and anti competitive measures (you must give apple a 30% cut off all sales and they have veto power over your app at any point) then perhaps it shouldn't exist in it's current form.

Doesn't this argument regarding Apple's game ecosystem and platform fees apply to Nintendo's as well? And every other business model that relies on platform fees?

Is there any coherent argument that it is OK for eShop/Xbox/PSN to charge 30% platform fees but that it isn't OK for Apple's game store to do the same?

Microsoft tried to argue that the difference is that Xbox is sold below component/manufacturing cost (for some period of time) and needs platform fees to compensate, but 1) Switch was always profitable by that metric and 2) that metric ignores R&D cost amortization.
by cletus | 2025-05-11 04:16:13+00:00
Google has over the years tried to get several new languages off the ground. Go is by far the most successful.

What I find fascinating is that all of them that come to mind were conceived by people who didn't really understand the space they were operating in and/or had no clear idea of what problem the language solved.

There was Dart, which was originally intended to be shipped as a VM in Chrome until the Chrome team said no.

But Go was originally designed as a systems programming language. There's a lot of historical revisionism around this now but I guarantee you it was. And what's surprising about that is that having GC makes that an immediate non-starter. Yet it happened anyway.

The other big surprise for me was that Go launched without external dependencies as a first-class citizen of the Go ecosystem. For the longest time there were two methods of declaring them: either with URLs (usually Github) in the import statements or with badly supported manifests. Like just copy what Maven did for Java. Not the bloated XML of course.

But Go has done many things right like having a fairly simple (and thus fast to compile) syntax, shipping with gofmt from the start and favoring error return types over exceptions, even though it's kind of verbose (and Rust's matching is IMHO superior).

Channels were a nice idea but I've become convinced that cooperative async-await is a superior programming model.

Anyway, Go never became the C replacement the team set out to make. If anything, it's a better Python in many ways.

Good luck to Ian in whatever comes next. I certainly understand the issues he faced, which is essentially managing political infighting and fiefdoms.

Disclaimer: Xoogler.
by mrcsharp | 2025-05-11 04:16:47+00:00
I did address the fact that not everyone has a family or a close friend.

What you described isn't a good fit for using AI. What would an LLM do for him?

The fact his roof collapsed and he didn't think much of it indicates a deeper problem only a human can begin to tackle.

We really shouldn't be solving deep societal problems by throwing more tech at them. That experiment has already failed.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-11 04:17:03+00:00
> Just because I can invent a reason someone else can write it off...well, that doesn't shed any light either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens's_razor

> Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states:

>> What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

> The razor is credited to author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, although its provenance can be traced to the Latin Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur ("What is asserted gratuitously is denied gratuitously"). It implies that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens used this phrase specifically in the context of refuting religious belief.
by ppsreejith | 2025-05-11 04:17:38+00:00
> People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.

> Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay.

Seems to me they're different groups of people. Otherwise, if people hate ads, why don't they pay?

I don't agree it's an everyone loses situation. Enough people don't mind or prefer the ads based ecosystem for it to continue.

IMO, more sophisticated ad blockers (I.e real control over one's devices) used by more people, would make the ad tech ecosystem a lot less profitable. After all, ads only work when you can control what the other person sees.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-05-11 04:17:54+00:00
In the EU, freedom of expression has explicit limits on hate speech and holocaust denial, mainly because dignity and equality supersedes the "freedom" of speech.

The general idea behind EU's freedom of speech is that its totally acceptable for expressing controversial ideas or questioning norms, like a religious leader could do. Calling for harm or hate (like some religious leader do) is not acceptable.

> do they really forbid people from speaking their minds entirely?

"Yes" could be an answer here, but we could legitimately wonder if a right mind would think "we should kill all the ones I don't like"
by zatkin | 2025-05-11 04:18:04+00:00
It's funny seeing that list of MX apex records. In response to me trying to show off how I had acquired a single letter domain, and had a single letter e-mail address (which resulted in *@*.**, replacing asterisks with letters), my boss showed how he was able to receive an e-mail address under one of those two-letter 'MX apex records'...
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-11 04:18:07+00:00
Ah the memories eh? I had a Digital Group Z80 system with a keyboard that encoded the keypress as an 8 bit value that could be read by the computer It was 6 bits of key press and one bit for shift and one bit for control. I actually know where it is though, it's in a computer museum in Germany (long story).
by Bud | 2025-05-11 04:19:21+00:00
Atari 400 couldn't really compete. I had one as a kid. Neighbor kid had a C64. That membrane keyboard was a big handicap.

The Atari sure had some nice games, though!

The full IBM PC wasn't really a competitor; it was 3x the price and very few families were willing to shell out that kind of money at that point.
by Animats | 2025-05-11 04:19:39+00:00
Most browsers treat one word not as a domain but as a search key. This was an issue when companies started getting their own TLDs. Could you just type "amazon" or "microsoft", which are TLDs, and go there without being diverted to a search engine? The answer is no. Even if you put a dot after the domain name.

DNS lookup and web browser domain lookup are not quite the same. This is the price of a unified input bar.
by smallnix | 2025-05-11 04:20:23+00:00
I think we got very different reads here. I understand the comment on the author to be judgemental to be very gentle. Dillydog is a person who affords everyone a rich and deep hidden inner life, so much so, that assuming people are so shallow to be read by a glance makes them angry on their behalf. I think they are in a good place already, emphasizing deeply with others.

Of course just my interpretation.
by 0dayz | 2025-05-11 04:20:37+00:00
Always felt that the EU on this point should be a bit like USA and have lax laws on a federal/union level while allowing its member states to have whatever hate speech laws they want.

While I support the idea the issue is that hate speech laws are usually only used in "majority against the minority", despite the minority being even more vulgar and racist than the natives.
by colechristensen | 2025-05-11 04:21:19+00:00
You can just buy strain gauges which are specially cut copper foils on a thin plastic substrate that you glue to something, like a metal strip. The resistance changes very slightly as the metal bends.

You measure the change in resistance with a wheatstone bridge tuned correctly.

You basically just need a strain gague (a few dollars), 4 resistors, an op-amp, and a microcontroller with an ADC.

Calibration is important and you'll run into things like the metal bar creeping, permanently bending as a result of weight being put on and off.

But also, milligram accurate scales are $20 on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/GRAM-PRES-Precision-Milligram-Reloadi...
by pants2 | 2025-05-11 04:21:25+00:00
Nobody's pointing out that Google's "Preview" models aren't meant to be used for production use-cases because they may change them or shut them down at any time? That's exactly what they did (and have done in the past). This is a case of app developers not realizing what "Preview" means. If they had used a non-preview model from Google it wouldn't have broken.
by leptons | 2025-05-11 04:22:08+00:00
My first experiments with machine code were using POKE statements too. Once I knew that I knew what I was doing, I got deeper into it. Fortunately around the same time I got a 300baud modem and found some assembley language tools on BBSs. The modem was key, it opened up a much wider world to me. I learned all kinds of programming tricks from others, like how to disassemble and read other's programs.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 04:22:09+00:00
> you have to go through perf calibration and justify your performance

He did sound relatively defeated when he accused himself of not accurately predicting the future needs of Go users, as if it were even possible!

Maybe management has just been unjustly critical of his performance, and he's taking it too much to heart? Hard to tell, but I just get that feeling.
by dangrossman | 2025-05-11 04:22:26+00:00
Gmail is the only product you listed that Google started itself.

Google Maps was built on the acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies, Keyhole and ZipDash.

Chrome is based on WebKit, built at Apple.

Waymo's hardware came from the acquisition of 510 Systems, and the software came from the acquihiring of the team that developed Stanford's self-driving cars for the 2005 and 2007 DARPA challenges, who brought their code with them.
by eyko | 2025-05-11 04:23:38+00:00
John Stuart Mill's essay "On Liberty"[1] offered one of the most comprehensive defences of free speech (that is as relevant today as it was then).

You do raise a good point re: tradeoffs in a healthy society. Mill anticipated this objection and addressed it directly. He didn't advocate for free speech without consequences but developed a harm principle specifically to establish what limits are acceptable. Acceptable limits on thought and speech should be based on demonstrable harm, rather than alleged offence, discomfort, or the current popular opinion or cultural disapproval.

He recognises the need to set some limits, yet also the dangers of who gets to set them. Historically, those with power to restrict speech have restricted truth as falsehood. The bar for restrictions should be very high, not because free speech should be absolute, but because the dangers of overzealous restrictions far outweigh the cost of permitting speech we might personally find objectionable. Even completely false opinions might have their value as they force defenders of truth to better articulate their position or reasoning, and prevents beliefs from becoming prejudiced, or platitudes.

I thought I'd share since it's relevant and there may be some younger readers here that might not have come across his work. I really recommend reading it, even if it's an LLM summary as an introduction (as seems to be the trend nowadays)

Edited to fix a few typos (typing from mobile)

1. https://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlLbty.html#book-reader
by cgio | 2025-05-11 04:24:18+00:00
This is because dignity is somehow naturally aligned with property, indirectly power? I give an example where it does apply moral teachings to economic scenarios myself, e.g. monastic life. If you mean that the natural property argument is to be considered a moral teaching then I don’t see how morals and not mere power dynamics are required for this model. Can you give an example so that I can assess if my implied ignorance refers to other scenarios?

I would argue that any economic system concerns itself with human as an economic agent, capitalism and socialism alike. Is church against capitalism too? If yes, that’s not what this circular reads like.
by card_zero | 2025-05-11 04:24:48+00:00
I tend to agree that I liked the idea of the gameplay more than the way it actually worked out. I remember things such as: a pet dog you could add to your party who would steal all the experience points for himself; a skills system where in theory you could mix magic and technology, but in practice they interfered and more than negated any benefit of being creative with it; and a graveyard where zombies would spawn endlessly so that you could grind them for XP for as long as you could bear it.

I guess the atmosphere sells me on games. That's a whole other thing. I note "/setting".
by bruce511 | 2025-05-11 04:24:49+00:00
I think this perhaps sums up my feeling about this whole topic; which is that YMMV.

My world is divided into 2 spheres, personal and work. My personal world runs on WhatsApp. But then in my country everyone has WhatsApp. Nobody uses SMS (other than for spam and OTP), nobody cares about this week's offering from Google or Apple.

Voice calls, group chats, polls (invaluable for group decisions) DMs, etc.

I don't negate uour experience of it. Clearly it failed for you. But the nature of a thread like this is that it's all just personal experience, which is, not surprisingly all over the map.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-11 04:25:30+00:00
Need to give credit to the Apple's cassette port interface, too, which not only ran as fast as the 1541 disk drive, but could be pressed into service as a rudimentary half-duplex 1200bps modem with the addition of a few inexpensive off-the-shelf parts to interface with the phone line.

I've always been surprised that nobody else seems to have experimented with that. 1200 bps modems were nothing to be sneezed at in 1980.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-11 04:25:51+00:00
> I strongly disagree. If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened. They are all FREE too, mind you. Everyone would still be paying for email.

People weren't paying for email before gmail. It was predated by hotmail, Yahoo mail, and innumerable free online email offerings by small players. Being free wasn't even a selling point for gmail; the selling point was that they gave you a lot of storage.

Speaking of things that happened before Google, Yahoo Maps and Firefox are older than Google Maps and Chrome. And... Google Flights is a Google acquisition, not a product that they developed.

And then...

> Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?

> Google Fi

> Google Fiber

> Google Pay

Yes, no one will notice.

> Google Groups

It already has gone away. Also, Usenet is something else older than Google.

> Google OAuth

Eliminating "sign in with [popular site]" would be a hugely positive change.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-11 04:28:10+00:00
Jeez, really? I would pay a blackmailer handsomely to keep a POS design like that off of my public resume.

"What did you do back in the 1980s, Grandpa?" "I designed a floppy disk drive that could barely keep up with the Apple ]['s cassette port." "... Oh."
by akomtu | 2025-05-11 04:28:28+00:00
If the church reduces the essence of humanity to intellect, it's the church's mistake.

As for the question of soul, I find the ideas of early christian gnostics the most convincing. It's worth noting those gnostics got banished from the church for ignoring the simplistic doctrine. So, their model of the human looked like this: spirit + soul + persona. Our body, emotions and intellect combined make our persona. Its key quality is egocentrism. Persona reflects the soul, which is also trifold. Persona's intellect is a dim shadow of the soul's abstract mind, that can see and create beauty. Persona's emotions are a dim shadow of the soul's aspect that enables it to feel the unity of life, for it's the life itself. Persona's body is a dim shadow of the soul's principle that can be described as inspiration. Soul is not egocentric, so it's often in the conflict with its own persona. In the center of the soul is the spirit, which is triune and its three aspects are reflected in the soul.

In this model, AI will be the intelligence layer of the super-persona. That super-persona will be soulless because it will lack the three principles of the soul: the ability to recognize beauty, the ability to feel the unity of life and the ability to be inspired.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-05-11 04:28:38+00:00
Somehow I knew that a comment along these lines was coming. HN never disappoints when it comes time to be nauseatingly analytic. No amount of whimsy or attempt at writing anything approaching literature or something long-form go unanswered and uncriticized.

I wish I (and lots of others) had just half of the ability to see people the way that the author does, it would make the world so much more rich and maybe more kind.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-05-11 04:29:25+00:00
This has fascinated me for years. I'll just re-link this comment of mine from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37544019#37548278.

This was about Amazon products rather than government documentation, but the point is the same. I'll just quote the relevant part:

> The people who make these products have to spend millions and millions of dollars setting up factories, hiring people, putting things into production, etc. But somehow they don't have a budget for a bilingual college student intern to translate a bunch of copy to English better than "using this product will bring a great joy." Why?

> I will make a super strong claim: ChatGPT can now do nearly perfect mass translations of this stuff for free, in theory simultaneously increasing translation quality and reducing costs. Despite this, for whatever reason, I predict that the average translation quality on Amazon won't improve within the next few years.

My super strong claim has so far been correct. Just go on Amazon.com and click just about anything. For instance, here's a random blanket: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MR4FSPT

"OPTIMUM GIFT: All people can use this flannel fleece blanket in Coach、Office、Bed、Study, etc. Reversible softness offers all seasons warmth. INTIMATE SERVICE: If you have any questions, please contact us. it is our pleasure to serve you."

How does a human being in this situation somehow invent the phrase "OPTIMUM GIFT?" "Optimum" is a fairly advanced English word. Maybe you'd expect, I dunno, "GREAT GIFT" or "BEST GIFT"? And "INTIMATE SERVICE?"

And once again, we now have magic English-speaking computers that can do this all for us - for free - and China has unanimously decided "nah, screw that. We'd rather go with INTIMATE SERVICE."
by Lerc | 2025-05-11 04:31:53+00:00
I managed to come up with a suffix that displays outputs of my own weird thing in a tixy style.

https://c50.fingswotidun.com/show/?code=28*ddx*%24%3Ay*%243o...*

Quite a fun challenge.

The Suffix is 2<02->P8dus:vs

which is

2<02-> clip to -2 to +2 P8*d 2 copies of 8*PI u*s 8 horizontal sine :v*s 8 vertical sine * mix horz and vert to make the tixy circles.