MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graycat | 2025-05-01 04:49:27+00:00
Uh, a guess is that 1+ billion people are already good at using "drop down menus" along with check boxes, radio buttons, single line text boxes, multiline text boxes, push buttons, links. So, when those user interface controls are sufficient for the purpose, using something else might reduce the collection of happy users. The Web site of my bank stays close to such now classic controls.
by carabiner | 2025-05-01 04:54:04+00:00
In 2021, approx 500 years ago, Ryan tweeted out a series of measures intended to resolve a Long Beach port shipping jam. His measures did almost nothing and amounted to bluster and broscience. https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2021-10-28...

He also doesn't understand the concept of commercial airliners avoiding military airspace: https://www.reddit.com/r/ATC/s/1bTyTpBsqb
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-01 04:54:27+00:00
For your (and any other readers') benefit:

Dred's HN CSS Madhackery: https://pastebin.com/gLXiqKyd

Dred's HN CSS Madhackery -- Dark Mode: https://pastebin.com/6PF3dCXH

(Both in my HN profile page.)

I'm reading via the first now.

I've recently re-skinned Algolia's search to match this. What the heck, posted:

<https://pastebin.com/HMp8Er30>
by glaucon | 2025-05-01 04:54:57+00:00
> What is the probability that China is reading these messages in real-time

Real-time might be nice but there's value in reading material at this level with almost any delay.

In 1949 a US counter-intelligence program(me), the Venona project[1] decrypted Soviet cables from 1945 which made it almost certain the First Secretary to the British Embassy in Washington DC [2] was a Soviet asset. That wouldn't have happened if the Soviets hadn't misused their channels of communication.

[1] https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby
by clhodapp | 2025-05-01 04:55:18+00:00
A fine is still necessary because (as per the original ruling), they should have never foisted their store on people seventeen years ago when they first launched it and certainly should not have done so when the court ordered them to stop four years ago.

If there isn't a fine, the message will be that it's fine to profit off of ignoring court orders until you face thread of contempt charges.
by idle_zealot | 2025-05-01 04:55:31+00:00
This expectation exists because Apple/Google/monopolists sell it. But it's not realistic, the app stores are cesspools. We need a culture shift to being more selective about installing software. Clearer permissions, better architecture, and trusted repositories with reputations to maintain. Installing software without any validation of safety should be possible but scary (show a terminal log reporting useful technical information or something).
by manmal | 2025-05-01 04:56:21+00:00
> Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

That’s a poor comparison IMO, because the scale of this was multiple orders of magnitude less. App stores were a niche occurrence that almost no nontechnical person had heard about. Seldom anyone „needed“ an app for their company to be successful. Now they control billions of eyes.
by winrid | 2025-05-01 04:56:26+00:00
Right. Sorry I meant development boards. This is low volume, probably will only make a few a year. The nice thing about the esp32 is I can get the board with lora/display built in, with a battery, for $25 each. The stm32 board and module is only a tiny bit less, for example. If I wanted to I could do this with a cheap 8bit microcontroller, I would just have to design a custom board with an oscillator to modulate the IR LEDs etc. I was gonna do that with PWM from the microcontroller to "simplify" things.

Edit: oh the MSP430 is neat! If I cared about battery life (driving 200ma of LEDs anyway...) I'd totally use that.
by shubhamjain | 2025-05-01 04:59:50+00:00
I don't get it. Are JSON and XML files more friendly to import vs CSV files? I always assumed CSVs were the standard. Any reasons to prefer structured formats?

Shameless plug: I am working on a similar problem of Excel not being a great tool for large datasets. My desktop app[1] lets you import raw data files and query them using SQL. (The website needs to be updated, the app looks much better than the current screenshots).

[1]: https://textquery.app
by commandersaki | 2025-05-01 05:00:16+00:00
Yes, I was at Amazon for a total of 8 months. I found the environment, tooling, and systems way too bloody complicated. Brought down some systems when doing a task because I put insufficient data in a config file. But I think what bothered me the most was that I wasn’t really assigned any tasks for the first 6 months and didn’t really understand what the team was working on. Definitely one of the lowest points in my life. I don’t think it was imposter syndrome though, I just think I wasn’t a good fit - hence why I left.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-01 05:00:23+00:00
What I'm using currently for news: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/114356066459105122>

(Own tool, local-only, inquire if you're interested, email in profile.)

Source currently is CNN, which really isn't a particularly good news source or article selection. I'm working on a version based on The Guardian's RSS feeds.

I find the result far more readable and calming than any current online news presentation.

Starting point was CNN's "lite" page, which turns out to be unordered headlines. First cut organised those heads by section, the link above adds lede lines to those stories, with more prominence and significance to earlier stories and selected sections, less to the fluff bits (sport, entertainment, food, style, etc.).
by kelseyfrog | 2025-05-01 05:01:09+00:00
"But then there are good, smart, law-abiding people who still root for [Walter White], and I find that a very interesting sociological study"[1] - Vince Gilligan creator of Breaking Bad.

"Nevertheless, [Dan Harmon] and Roiland insist these people are a small subset. The worst of them—the ones who see Rick as a role model—are missing the point."[2] - On Dan Harmon's[Co-creator of Rick and Morty] view of Rickfandom.

"Tyler [Durden] has proven so perniciously stubborn as a hero of alienated young men."[3]

Generally, I see this aligned with Protagonist-centered Morality[4]. The way I discovered this phenomenon was repeatedly observing it in fan forums. I decided not to link to those because they are low signal to noise[5], but you're welcome and encouraged to seek them out. In revisiting them to refresh my memory, my present impression is:

1. Some people just like rooting for and sympathize with the main character above all else - no amount of atrocities can change that.

2. Some people just think the these characters are 'cool'.

Tony Soprano is an interesting case, because the creator was one of the die hard Tony fans, while much of the audience concluded that "He was a fucking murderer." I guess being in the creator seat doesn't magically bestow insight.

1. https://filmmakermagazine.com/84504-its-better-to-be-somebod...

2. https://www.gq.com/story/dan-harmon-rick-and-morty-profile?

3. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a44891150/chuck-...

4. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProtagonistCente...

5. ie: Reddit.
by sabslikesobs | 2025-05-01 05:02:00+00:00
"Crown of Ash and Honor," the sample book linked on the "Start Writing" page [1], seems like a counterproductive example. With "novel-length drafts" being the main selling point for the app, this draft seems acceptable for the prose itself (it's on par with most AI writing) but doesn't really demonstrate novel-length strength.

The story begins with a boy yearning to be a knight in a war-torn fantasy world apparently without magic, then there are extra-terrestrial invaders hunting a technological artifact and he suddenly knows how to fix a shield generator by crossing wires, then it suddenly turns again into a dark fantasy story with corrupted zombie-ish warriors.

On the technical front, clicking on a link in Section 2 of the story's ToC takes me to that number in Section 2.

[1]: https://www.varu.us/books/cm9w5b2jq0001l204f2r10bnu?scene=1
by manmal | 2025-05-01 05:03:19+00:00
> Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%

That must be a joke. Xcode is so bad, compared to Android Studio, it’s not even funny. As iOS dev I have to constantly apologize to my Android team members, that, no, Xcode can’t do this and that, and, no, we can’t do X in the build pipeline. And I‘m generally 10-20% slower than them because the tooling is just terrible and flaky.

BTW there was a promising IntelliJ option for Apple development, but Apple made life so hard for them that they had to give up. It was called „AppCode“ and some people are still sad that it doesn’t exist anymore.
by chii | 2025-05-01 05:06:42+00:00
> it comes at the cost of destabilising something foundational like Chromium

the benefits have already been contributed to chrome, and is easily available even if funding is cut today.

However, google didn't give chrome and their money away altruistically. They wanted something back - control of the browser market, and ability to dictate certain aspects of the web. I do not believe they should have this ability. Taking away monopolistic practises with the browser market can help with this aspect.
by asadotzler | 2025-05-01 05:06:51+00:00
Google's been paying Mozilla for search traffic for more than 20 years, just like the other major browsers. It's not out of kindness any more than paying Apple for Safari traffic is out of kindness. It's literally payments for search traffic and reported to the IRS by Google as "traffic acquisition cost" or TAC. Google doesn't do it for "keeping Firefox afloat," it's about Google grabbing even more search traffic and dissuading browsers from sending their traffic to alternatives, or creating their own search engines, and always has been.

But Google was a mostly reasonable partner to browser makers until they got into the business themselves. After Chrome shipped, Google properties started mysteriously becoming slower or broken in Firefox in ways that had no good technical support and that consistently siphoned large numbers of Firefox user over to Chrome before being addressed. It happened over and over on major Google properties like Gmail and Docs all through the 2010s. Jonath's Twitter thread is gone but the reporting isn't https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

And they did it to IE and Edge too, until MS finally capitulated and jumped on Google's tech to escape the sabotaging. There's reporting on that too https://www.neowin.net/news/former-edge-intern-says-google-s...
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-01 05:07:06+00:00
The issue is much deeper and more concerning. They’ve been using Signal like this across multiple administrations because the “official” tools are broken to the point of being almost useless. Signal has been one of the major workarounds.

It isn’t enough to say “don’t use Signal”, at some point they need to address the reality that there are no functional alternatives.
by lurking_swe | 2025-05-01 05:07:24+00:00
i hated using MS Teams (in the past) so much, i would probably look for a new job immediately if my company decided to do this today. I’m not joking in the slightest. And i’m not a slack fan boy, i just dislike MS Teams that much.

These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
by rl3 | 2025-05-01 05:07:45+00:00
>If this is a material security threat, I need a lot of writers to explain why because most people don’t know.

Because personal smartphones aren't considered secure for protecting classified information. Signal in and of itself might be fine when used properly, but it doesn't matter when the underlying platform is consumer-grade security. The risk of side-channel attacks is astronomical.

>My point is that “make liberals sad” is also a stated policy goal of this administration.

>If it’s a sad liberal, ...

I'm not sure any of that furthers whatever argument you're trying to make. Signal being used in that manner didn't only violate a myriad of established protocols, but it was straight up illegal on top of it. In any normal political climate we would've seen resignations from day one, regardless of party.
by oliomap | 2025-05-01 05:07:50+00:00
Currently it resolves the conflict via an LLM-call. The plan is to replace that call with a communication routine between the responsible nodes, e.g. also a prompt but instead of directly to OpenAI, to the other node. They should then communicate until resolving the issue and finding a better solution. As soon as we built a personalization and a memory, this should be doable, right?
by refulgentis | 2025-05-01 05:09:09+00:00
I pretty much grew up on this site. 19yo-37yo. economics dropout from nowhere => waiter => startup => sold => 7 year tenure at google => back to a new startup), and I honestly was absolutely horribly over-the-top stunned at how people were just...normal? to put it nicely?...at Google.

You're absolutely right that it's an unwarranted assumption, yet simultaneously, I just always assumed higher class == higher morals. If anything it seemed to select for senior year of HS math class score and sociopathy.

Stuff I used to hear as grousing, from tired, defeated, adults, that couldn't hack it now ring as universal truths.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-01 05:09:50+00:00
>> There's a huge gap between ie6 and what's happening now.

Yes. The fast paced development, and rich environment we see now is sooooo much better than the stagnation of IE6.

Cutting funding essentially returns us to the IE6 monoculture with no progress.

I, for one, am not advocating a return.
by mickelsen | 2025-05-01 05:10:38+00:00
The closest I’ve found is a curated feed of X (Twitter) accounts: MDs, researchers, journal subaccounts in your field of interest (from Elsevier, Wiley, Springer...), plus sites like Medical News Today or MedPage Today. Sometimes good discussion happens in replies, the experts might chime in, some do have old-school blogs.
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by taftster | 2025-05-01 05:13:44+00:00
On the surface, it's easy to agree with your opinion.

But then I think, what would it have been like without this investment. Maybe browsers would stay buggy and we'd have an internet with much more diversity in protocol. The internet of today is monotone and subservient to its web master.

I wonder if innovation stagnated because of the extensive (ab)use of the web. Granted, early on, Google's contributions have been more than just pioneering. Both on the backend and the frontend, we all owe them a pint.

But recently, it feels it's just been self-serving. And the monopolistic overtones plus the loss of "do no evil" has arguably hurt us in recent years.

That being said, if the web browser isn't funded so deeply, maybe this is a good thing? Maybe that will give birth to fresh cycles again. I kind of think like letting a corn field grow a new crop to let it regenerate. It could usher in new innovations.
by adastra22 | 2025-05-01 05:13:49+00:00
> Chemists were concerned that rod logic knobs touching each other would form chemical bonds and remain stuck together, rather than disengaging for the next clock cycle.

The rod & shaft designs are passivated. This kind of reaction wouldn't happen unless you drove the system to way higher energies than were ever considered.

> Someone calculated the power density of one of Drexler's early proposals and found that it exceeded the power density of high explosives during detonation

I think this is a (persistent) misunderstanding. His original work involved rods moving at mere millimeters per second. There are a number of reasons for this, of which heat dissipation is one. However all the molecular mechanics simulations done operate at close to the speed of sound in the material, simply because they would otherwise be incalculable. There is sadly a maximum step size for MD simulations that is orders of magnitude lower than what you would need to run at realistic speeds.

> You could just run them many orders of magnitude slower, but Merkle tackled the issue instead by designing reversible logic families which can dissipate arbitrarily little power per logic operation, only dissipating energy to erase stored bits.

The rod logic stuff is supposed to be reversible too. Turns out it isn't though. But it could be close enough if operated at very low speeds or very low temperatures.

The rod logic stuff is WAY smaller than the rotational logic gates in TFA. For some applications that matters, a lot.

If you are going to go for the scale of these rotational systems, you might as well go electronic.
by godelski | 2025-05-01 05:15:39+00:00
1) chromium is open sourced and there are plenty of forks

2) You're being facetious if you're saying Firefox is much worse. Feature sets and performance are very similar. Most people would not notice the difference if reskinned

2.1) ditto for Safari or any of the chromium browsers.

3) a monopoly is good for noone (even the monopoly)
by kevingadd | 2025-05-01 05:18:17+00:00
I'm quite certain Apple would have continued their browser engineering and security efforts with or without Google. In the first place, Chromium was a fork of WebKit (which itself is derived from the work of the KHTML team). Apple values the security of their iOS users a lot so they wouldn't have just sat around and watched them get exploited.

It's true that Google 'got there first' on a lot of stuff and that groups like Project Zero do incredible work but the idea that we'd be nowhere without Google is a bit silly.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-05-01 05:18:45+00:00
PSCO stands for Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. The dataset mentioned contains 47,784 mugshots of 18,007 recidivists spanning from the years 1994 to 2010.

Dataset information gleamed from https://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/Publications/Face/DebBestRowd...
by rdtsc | 2025-05-01 05:19:06+00:00
>'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly,

I'd think it just takes a blessing from the dear leader to mock his rotundness in front of the evil capitalists, as long as it brings in the dough and the corporate secrets.

I would think the people doing this are not the lowest level foot soldiers but are somewhat closer to elites and as such can afford to be a tiny bit cynical if the dear leader signals his approval.
by Twirrim | 2025-05-01 05:19:11+00:00
You'll have a bunch of peers request feedback from you. Your feedback will need to be specific and focused around the leadership principles. It'll need to include some kind of constructive criticism. The feedback you provide plays an important part of any promotion opportunities. Oh, and naturally they stack rank, no matter how much they say they don't and try to pretend what they're doing isn't actually stack ranking, when really it is.

The more time you spend there, the more requests you'll get, so after a couple of years it's not unusual to get 30+ feedback requests.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-05-01 05:20:29+00:00
Maybe it's because I've lived in Canada for 4+ decades now, but I wouldn't exactly call what we have access to universal healthcare. It's hard to find a family doctor, if you do find a family doctor, whether you can get reasonable appointment access, is highly dependent on the doctor and not always available. If you do get an appointment and you need to see a specialist or other service that needs a referral you often face a substantial wait list. It's nothing like what it was in the 80's and 90's where appointments were always easily same day or next day and wait lists were short or non existent. To me this is just broken in the opposite way that america's system is broken.

Also, the gun thing makes me think people don't understand statistics. The number of gun related deaths in the usa was 14.6 per 100k people in 2021 and around 0.5 per 100k in Canada, so yes it's drastically higher in the usa but that ignores that 60% of those are suicides and it ignores the highly geographically concentrated nature of the problem.You avoid a handful of neighborhoods and think happy thoughts and your gun death risk basically disappears. unadjusted its a ~1% risk over an 80 year lifetime in the USA vs 0.04% in canada. When you take into account reality and realize you aren't suicidal and you aren't going to visit or live in that tiny handful of extremely high risk neighborhoods the USA risk also drops to almost zero, even over a lifetime.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-01 05:20:35+00:00
As far as I recall, the Netscape browser was free. There may have been a paid one (for enterprise), but I'm pretty sure we had a free one.

They did charge OS makers to bundle it (via support contracts) but the biggest market there (Windows) wrote their own. By IE5 Netscape was basically gone, IE6 had no competition (and hence no development) until Firefox came along.
by bonzini | 2025-05-01 05:22:29+00:00
You'd be surprised, this is one of the ways in which Red Hat stays independent from their mothership. IBM prefers to donate to OSUOSL and Red Hat uses it for Fedora.

Then there are private labs, internal to Red Hats, that are used by developers especially for testing, but they're not stocked particularly better than they were prior to the acquisition.
by pmontra | 2025-05-01 05:22:41+00:00
A legitimate answer could be "who?"

I played a game of Taboo (a party game) yesterday night. I asked the question "the surname of the leader of party ..." (the third largest one in my country). The guy I asked it to looked at me and answered "I have no idea." He's old enough to vote even if he didn't have to do it yet. Leaders of foreign countries? Maybe he doesn't know where to place North Korea on a map, even the general area.

OK, we could say that the lack of a general culture could be a hint not to hire that person so that could be a legitimate termination of the interview anyway.
by syllogism | 2025-05-01 05:23:35+00:00
Carville (DNC strategist) is advocating a "play dead" strategy. Let Trump implode so that he owns the inevitable failure. His base will desperately want to blame the left for not letting the policies work as intended. The less the Democrats do, the harder that is. I think a lot of Democrat politicians are going this way, and it's why Schumer rolled over on the budget.

Part of the logic here is that Trump is indeed different from other authoritarians. He's even less competent. He's blowing all his political capital on imploding the economy. He also can't understand the legal battles, so when Stephen Miller tells him they won the Supreme Court case 9-0, he believes him. This seems to have been a big wake-up call to Gorsuch, Coney-Barrett and Kavanaugh. The administration has shown its hand much too quickly, before it fully consolidated its power.

What the Democrats should be doing already is campaigning more. Run ads that are literally just Trump quotes. Show people Trump calling January the "Trump economy" before inauguration, then calling April the "Biden economy" now that he's crashed it. If Trump polls low enough, more senators will jump ship, and impeachment could be possible.