MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-17 13:13:01+00:00
> It's too early to declare that there are irreducible things in the universe. [...] We can't declare victory on a topic we don't fully understand.

This isn't a matter of discovering contingent facts that may or may not be the case. This is a matter of what must be true lest you fall into paradox and incoherence and undermine the possibility of science and reason themselves. For instance, doubting rationality in principle is incoherent, because it is presumably reason that you are using to make the argument, albeit poorly. Similar things can be said about arguments about the reliability of the senses. The only reason you can possibly identify when they err is because you can identify when they don't. Otherwise, how could you make the distinction?

These may seem like obviously amateurish errors to make, but they surface in various forms all over the place. Scientists untutored in philosophical analysis say things like this all the time. You'll hear absurd remarks like "The human brain evolved to survive in the universe, not to understand it" with a confidence of understanding that would make Dunning and Kruger chuckle. Who is this guy? Some kind of god exempt from the evolutionary processes that formed the brains of others? There are positions and claims that are simply nonstarters because they undermine the very basis for being able to theorize in the first place. If you take the brain to be the seat of reason, and then render its basic perceptions suspect, then where does that leave science?

We're not talking about the products of scientific processes strictly, but philosophical presuppositions that affect the interpretation of scientific results. If you assume that physical reality is devoid of qualitative properties, and possesses only quantifiable properties, then you will be led to conclusions latent in those premises. It's question begging. Science no more demonstrates this is what matter is like than the proverbial drunk looking for his keys in the dark demonstrates that his keys don't exist because they can't to be found in the well-lit area around a lamp post. What's more, you have now gotten yourself into quite the pickle: if the physical universe lacks qualities, and the brain is physical, then what the heck are all those qualities doing inside of it! Consciousness has simply been playing the role of an "X-of-the-gaps" to explain away anything that doesn't fit into the aforementioned presuppositions.

You will not find an explanation of consciousness as long as you assume a res extensa kind of matter. The most defining feature of consciousness is intentionality, and intentionality is a species of telos, so if you begin with an account of matter that excludes telos, you will never be able to explain consciousness.
by lxgr | 2025-05-17 13:13:09+00:00
> Some relatives are arriving in Japan next Tuesday for a three-week visit, and they asked me what they should do about credit cards, digital money, cash, etc.

I've only been to Japan very briefly, but between an international credit card (Visa or Mastercard) and a Suica in Apple Pay, I never had any issues.

Maybe this is due to having been only to very touristy areas, but almost everywhere I had to pay took at least one of the two, and thanks to being able to top up the Suica directly in Apple Wallet from my credit card, running out of a balance there was never an issue.

Of course you'll need some cash for some smaller food stalls and shops, but getting that wasn't any issue either: ATM fees didn't seem particularly high as far as I remember (and my bank reimburses them).

I was fascinated by the sometimes dozens of different contactless (stored value and otherwise) and QR code based payment methods accepted at some stores, but with the exception of a few vending machines (that also took cash), I don't think I've seen any place taking only these but not also either Suica or Visa/Mastercard.

Quite the opposite, actually – ubiquitous ice cream vending machines on train platforms that accept the same card for payment people need to get into the station in the first place seem like a real health hazard :)
by radanskoric | 2025-05-17 13:14:16+00:00
I didn't put the number into the title to make it a competition. LoC is a poor metric. I put it to communicate to the reader that they won't have to spend a lot of time reading the article to get a full understanding.

I always put extra effort into trying to make my blog posts shorter without sacrificing the quality. I think good technical writing should transfer the knowledge while requesting the least amount of time possible from the reader.
by Arnt | 2025-05-17 13:14:28+00:00
If I'm part of the problem, then that's because of something I do, or else something I don't do.

The thing I do is build a knowledge base. If that's it, can you explain why it's a problem? The thing I don't is something you also don't. If that's it, can you explain why you're not part of the problem?
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-17 13:14:51+00:00
When I discovered this feature, I looked everywhere in my codebases for a place to use it. Turns out most JS APIs, whether Web or Node.js, just don't need it, since they auto-close your resources for you. The few times I did call .close() used callbacks and would have been less clean/intuitive/correct to rewrite as scoped. I haven't yet been able to clean up even one line of code with this feature :(
by appreciatorBus | 2025-05-17 13:15:04+00:00
US govt transportation agency central planners will happily spend billions to bulldoze a neighbourhood for a freeway lane, all to shave a few hypothetical seconds off a car commute, so I don’t think the issue is that US culture isn’t interested in speed, latency, or throughput.

Airline boarding is not the only class system in play. At every level of government, even within transit agencies, transit and its customers are seen as and treated as second class citizens. The idea of investing money, time or energy to shave even scores of minutes off the commute of someone who uses a bus, often seems as if it’s an unthinkable thought in these organizations.
by raluk | 2025-05-17 13:15:31+00:00
One problem with fast writing is that it requres more energy to transmit from reader to a card in order for a card that has no internal source of power, to toggle bits. It is harder compared to just reading a bit from a card. Additonaly it is tricky to implement trasaction with single write, given that data transfer can be interrupted (for example user removes card from RF field). I am not sure if single write is enough for making this robust/transactional. It also helps a lot if RFID antenna is well tuned. Proximity of metal and way it is mounted has a big impact, so it is important that RF antenna for reader is tuned for exact environment it is mounted in.
by beowulfey | 2025-05-17 13:15:39+00:00
I work in academia. There is no way anything is so organized and directed as that. That would require laughable levels of efficiency and planning across multiple organizational layers. Do you know how long it takes to make literally any decision? Who would even be directing such a scheme? Are the president and this PhD student in cahoots on this insider trading scheme you are envisioning?
by johnisgood | 2025-05-17 13:15:48+00:00
I don't disagree, I do find Ruby readable, and it was the first language that caught my eye back when I was a kid, precisely because of its readability and expressiveness.

I suppose we have to define expressiveness (conciseness, abstraction power, readability, flexibility?), because Ruby, for example, has human-readable expressiveness, Common Lisp has programmable expressiveness, and Forth has low-level expressiveness, so they all have some form of expressiveness.

I think Ruby, Crystal, Rebol 3, and even Nim and Lua have a similar form or type of expressiveness.
by sunrunner | 2025-05-17 13:16:18+00:00
It's also produced some of the worst. Other channels and services have also produced some of the best and some of the worst. Because it's fairly subjective and there's no accounting for taste.

It feels a bit disingenous to compare a limited number of already very well known classic programs that have survived the test of time against the entire breadth of newer programs (of which there are vastly more in number, so the likelihood of even being seen is much lower).
by eigenspace | 2025-05-17 13:16:21+00:00
The real story here is how small the downgrade is and how long it took to be issued.

Does any sane person actually think that the USA in its current form will honour its debts if doing so is at all inconvenient to the administration?

IMO the main factor here is the credit agencies being cautious about retaliation from the US government if they make too much noise.
by linker3000 | 2025-05-17 13:16:27+00:00
I tried HA back in the day and got YAML-bound trying to get various sensors and controllers to integrate and work reliably. I revisited HA a couple of times over the years, but by then had become cosy with Node-RED and saw no strong reason to change. I understand HA's now more configurable through the front-end GUI, which is nice.

I've just integrated an office UPS with the Node-RED stock dashboard to log status, mains voltage and battery charge state - it took all of 5 mins, including the time to install the UPS NUT plugin for Node-RED via the GUI.

I love the ease of the visual, block-based configuration, and the ability to add codable function blocks to process and modify data.

The only things that are not so great in Node-RED are the dashboard look and feel, and the dashboard setup tools.
by generichuman | 2025-05-17 13:16:40+00:00
I landed on "immutable distros by default for average users" as well. It is a more Windows/macOS like experience where it is much harder to mess up the system.

Flatpak guarantees everything will work in most cases, and for other cases there's AppImage. Just need to get most devs to distribute AppImages. BoxBuddy with distrobox will solve _all_ edge cases where someone says "X works with Y in Z on my machine" so you replicate their machine in distrobox.

I know this is trading program size with convenience, but that's what Windows and macOS does too. It is better to be on some immutable linux distro rather than Windows in my opinion. We don't have to force the average person who just wants their computer to work to install (extreme example) Gentoo or whatever.
by masklinn | 2025-05-17 13:17:31+00:00
> This looks most similar to golang’s defer. It runs cleanup code when leaving the current scope.

It's nothing like go's defer: Go's defer is function-scoped and registers a callback, using is block-scoped and registers an object with a well defined protocol.

> It differs from [...] c# “using,”

It's pretty much a direct copy of C#'s `using` declaration (as opposed to the using statement): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref....

This can also be seen from the proposal itself (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen...) which cites C#'s using statement and declaration, Java's try-with-resource, and Python's context managers as prior art, but only mentions Go's defer as something you can emulate via DisposableStack and AsyncDisposableStack (types which are specifically inspired by Python's ExitStack),
by radanskoric | 2025-05-17 13:17:32+00:00
That's a very neat idea, maybe even add something like browser-use to allow it to implement a Rails app and try it out automatically. I think you should try it. :)

I'm being serious. This sounds like a fun project but I have to turn my attention to other projects for the near future. This was more of an experiment for me, but it would be cool to see someone try out that idea.
by lxgr | 2025-05-17 13:18:22+00:00
Apple is the exception here. What's missing for all other phones not targeted to the Japanese market are the agreements between any non-Apple device manufacturer and the Japanese IC card issuers (JR East for Suica etc.)

Since these cards actually "store money offline", the symmetric keys involved are really not something the issuers ever want to see leaked, so I assume it's not only a question of money (i.e. licensing fees), but also trust in the security posture of the secure element of the phone (if it even has one; many Android phones don't).
by 0x0203 | 2025-05-17 13:18:28+00:00
Yes, to a degree, but probably not quite like you're thinking. The super computers and HPC clusters are highly tuned for the hardware they use which can have thousands of CPUs. But ultimately the "OS" that controls them takes on a bit of a different meaning in those contexts.

Ultimately, the OS has to be designed for the hardware/architecture it's actually going to run on, and not strictly just a concept like "lots of CPUs". How the hardware does interprocess communication, cache and memory coherency, interrupt routing, etc... is ultimately going to be the limiting factor, not the theoretical design of the OS. Most of the major OSs already do a really good job of utilizing the available hardware for most typical workloads, and can be tuned pretty well for custom workloads.

I added support for up to 254 CPUs on the kernel I work on, but we haven't taken advantage of NUMA yet as we don't really need to because the performance hit for our workloads is negligible. But the Linux's and BSD's do, and can already get as much performance out of the system as the hardware will allow.

Modern OSs are already designed with parallelism and concurrency in mind, and with the move towards making as many of the subsystems as possible lockless, I'm not sure there's much to be gained by redesigning everything from the ground up. It would probably look a lot like it does now.
by cb321 | 2025-05-17 13:18:36+00:00
Fair enough. Sorry! You were pretty clear.

I continue to think that the world would be less confusing if people didn't go around citing GB/s for hash-table hashes, but rather (perHash+-err, perCost+-err) on CPU xyz. Cuts right to the heart of the matters and then folks like jandrewrogers don't have to be vague with "small" to then inspire questions like yours. (Of course, CPUs really vary a lot, too.)

I also think when people measure these fast string hashes for strings > L1 CPU cache they're mostly measuring a melange of IO/memory system not the hash computation - maybe sometimes unwittingly. L1 CPU caches can deliver 100s of GB/s after all. 1 64B cache line per cycle is 64B/0.2ns = 320 GB/s. Intel's Skylake could do that a decade ago. The memory wall can be a real bear.
by jgalt212 | 2025-05-17 13:20:02+00:00
Indeed, I was under the impression that Clojurescript was self-hosted (no Java dep) some time ago. Was this reversed?

Also, it's easy to say in retrospect leaning on the benevolence of Google would a bad idea. But the Clojure community are smart people, and I trust Closure was the least bad solution available at the time.
by lol768 | 2025-05-17 13:20:18+00:00
> Attempts were made to reach out to O2 via email (to both Lutz Schüler, CEO and securityincidents@virginmedia.co.uk) on the 26 and 27 March 2025 reporting this behaviour and privacy risk, but I have yet to get any response or see any change in the behaviour.

This is really poor. And why is a Virgin Media address the closest best thing here? https://www.o2.co.uk/.well-known/security.txt should 200, not 404.

To be clear, I have no problem with disclosure in these circumstances given the inaction, but I'm left wondering if this is the sort of thing that NCSC would pick up under some circumstances (and may have better luck communicating with the org)?
by bitwize | 2025-05-17 13:20:22+00:00
Emacs has no "plugins", it's all just Lisp code, all the way down. Big Ball of Mud architecture refined to a state of sublime elegance.

Can I put my cursor on a defun in Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, or IntelliJ, mash C-M-x, and immediately have that functionality available in my running editor session with all my work? I can in Emacs, and that capability has allowed me to smooth out the rough spots in many a workflow.

Lisp is not just an "implementation detail", it's central to what makes Emacs great. GNU Emacs is a running Lisp image, which you can extend and shape at will as you work on something else. A phenomenal tool.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-05-17 13:20:34+00:00
As someone using nix because I messed up my arch luks encryption because of single command on stackoverflow.....

I haven't really learned nix os language right now and I have only installed bare minimal software like a librewolf, prism launcher, kde, I used to be a hyprland user and I might switch back in some days.

The biggest advantage to me feels nix-shell which is cross platform

I installed obs-studio from nix-shell, built a video, then used another nix-shell for ffmpeg and converted video to mp4 and uploaded it to github.

This is my general use case of obs and I very rarely make recordings and so this idea that I can install/try out software without having to worry about anything while still having no xdg issues unlike flatpak is a godsend.

Did I mention I started using nix-shell for places I would've used docker, like stirling-pdf one off cases

Most of the software on my computer needs to be rarely accessed and I love the sanity that nix provides knowing that It won't make my update times faster/if-any unlike archlinux and dependency hell is a problem I truly despise.

I have looked for better alternatives, maybe spack comes to mind, but nix-shell is still crazy good. And I can also some day use a functional programming to make it even more automated.
by BenjiWiebe | 2025-05-17 13:20:38+00:00
I'm not an interferometry expert, so I don't know what level of precision is required, but usually a GPSDO takes a lot more than a PPS output.

A PPS output makes for very accurate timekeeping over long time scales. A GPSDO is a very stable oscillator that gives you precise frequency.

Disciplining your oscillator with a PPS signal would be much harder than with the typically used 10 MHz signal. And I don't think an RPi would do very good at putting out a highly stable MHz signal disciplined to a PPS input.
by pcblues | 2025-05-17 13:21:39+00:00
Can someone please answer these questions because I still think AI stinks of a false promise of determinable accuracy:

Do you need an expert to verify if the answer from AI is correct? How is it time saved refining prompts instead of SQL? Is it typing time? How can you know the results are correct if you aren't able to do it yourself? Why should a junior (sorcerer's apprentice) be trusted in charge of using AI? No matter the domain, from art to code to business rules, you still need an expert to verify the results. Would they (and their company) be in a better place to design a solution to a problem themselves, knowing their own assumptions? Or just check of a list of happy-path results without a FULL knowledge of the underlying design? This is not just a change from hand-crafting to line-production, it's a change from deterministic problem-solving to near-enough is good enough, sold as the new truth in problem-solving. It smells wrong.
by ksec | 2025-05-17 13:22:23+00:00
Again as with Post Steve Jobs Apple. They have all the wrong timing on technology.

>Apple is a company that doesn’t have the most resources of everybody in the world, and the way we’ve succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride really carefully – technically. We try to look for these technical vectors that have a future, and that are headed up, and, you know, different pieces of technology kind of go in cycles. They have their springs and summers, and autumns, and then they, you know, go to the graveyard of technology. And, so we try to pick the things that are in their springs.

And, if you choose wisely, you can save yourself an enormous amount of work vs. trying to do everything. And you can really put energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform, rather then just okay because you’re spreading yourself too thin.

I dont think Vision Pro is wrong, but it is definitely 5 years too early. Just like Apple's self driving cars. Clearly when you have more resource than what you know what to do with it. This is what happens.
by lxgr | 2025-05-17 13:22:52+00:00
> If you really want to speed how people go through the gates, then _remove the damn gates_.

That comes with other problems.

Transit gates have the big advantage of providing you with instant feedback on whether your ticket or mode of payment is valid or not.

I've seen tourists get in trouble with ticket inspectors at least once in a very unpleasant way for simply having pressed the wrong button at an inscrutable ticket vending machine.

> I don't understand -- we are talking about 100ms or so of latency? which is almost completely dwarfed by any mechanical action such as the gates actually opening??

As others have already said, Japanese gates are open by default, and are more of a user interface indicator (to you and potentially station attendants nearby) than an actual physical barrier. You could step over or between the "barrier" that extends when the gate rejects your payment pretty easily in most, but it would be very obvious that you're skipping the fare.
by esafak | 2025-05-17 13:23:35+00:00
I agree, except for this example, where the author effectively (after a substitution) prefers the former:

fn f() -> E { if condition { E::Foo(x) } else { E::Bar(y) } } fn g(e: E) { match e { E::Foo(x) => foo(x), E::Bar(y) => bar(y) } }

The latter is not only more readable, but it is safer, because a match statement can ensure all possibilities are covered.
by swores | 2025-05-17 13:24:08+00:00
I just did that search, and several pages talk about "smart DNS services" which also proxy your IP... not a single result suggesting that DNS itself is relevant.

The thing is, I'm not guessing, I'm someone who has actually spent time learning about how networking works, doing my first Cisco course when I was 17, and then in my adult career I've on multiple occasions been involved in implementing geo-blocking.

So I'm sorry if I haven't been clear, or have given the impression of being an idiot to the point that you think not worth listening to anything I say, but if you actually go and read up about how geo-blocking works you will find out that I'm not making things up when I say that BBC cannot tell the location of your DNS server, and if you've found that using a particular DNS service does bypass the restrictions then it still has nothing to do with DNS other than that the DNS provider is also offering you a proxy service.

Here's a starting point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-blocking