MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by permo-w | 2025-05-19 09:57:15+00:00
>It's never been changed to a direct tax to prevent direct interference from the government

that's half of the reason, and also feeds into the other reason. if it's not a direct tax and it's semi-voluntary it's harder for people to criticise as unfair. not that they don't find a way

>The BBC has an obligation to serve everyone, not just subscribers. Netflix has an obligation to serve subscribers, at least well enough that they don't leave.

this is an intrinsic property of Netflix being a private business, not Netflix being a subscription service. the BBC could comfortably move to a subscription model and still have the exact same ethos. the BBC's payment model is not so different from a subscription model that right now a private company would be serving license fee payers rather than everyone in general
by ezst | 2025-05-19 09:57:50+00:00
> I think my only other question is around my preferred "Daily Journal" workflow and unreferenced tags

how do you generally go about that? Trilium has the concept of day notes¹, incrementally building a time-structured hierarchy (years/months/days, but you can configure that however you want), under which you can park your notes. Or you can just let them stay unordered under an "#inbox"² for later categorisation. It's up to you.

My workflow include both time-based (log of events on that day, meetings and appointments happening on that day, etc), and time-independent notes (notes on projects, places, etc), and I have essentially 3 top-level hierarchies:

- Journal ← time-based

- Hierarchical notes ← time-independent

- Reference notes ← collections of things being often referred to

- People - Places - …

(and I have a workspace³ for Personal-stuff and another for Work-related-stuff, but the Reference notes are "cloned⁴" - and hence accessible ‑ in both).

Interestingly, "Book" recently gained a "Calendar" mode, so you can very easily manage notes as events as well, move them from day to day, etc.

> On one hand I feel some surprise that you're noting a distinction between metadata/tags for collections of notes vs collections of blocks. On the other hand, it's a bit of a peeve of mine that there's a distinction between "pages" and "blocks" in logseq when it comes to linking & referencing.

At least it's consistent in that Trilium always holds metadata/tags at note-level. And using Inheritance⁵ and Templates⁶, you can guarantee that all your Reference notes are consistent in terms of type of metadata they hold (all Persons have a "born in" attribute, etc). At the moment I'm working on an extension of the "Book" note type to enable bulk metadata edition in an ag-grid control, effectively managing metadata like a database (not unlike what exists in Notion, but with composition/inheritance and proper sum types).

¹: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/day-notes.html ²: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/attributes.html ³: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/workspace.html ⁴: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/cloning-notes.html ⁵: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/attribute-inheritanc... ⁶: https://triliumnext.github.io/Docs/Wiki/template.html
by Daub | 2025-05-19 09:58:10+00:00
When I lived on a farm in wales, we would occasionally discover in our fields something called bog oak. This was trunks of oak placed in the ground by ancient farmers to drain a field. Over the centuries this had become semi-fossilized and in the process had become very strong. From high quality bog oak, it is possible to make wooden rings as strong as metal. Our bog oak was not so good (I tried) but certainly good enough for super strong dowels and suchlike.
by diggan | 2025-05-19 09:58:56+00:00
Maybe I got lucky, but in 2017 I bought a Brother DCP-L2520DW laser printer. No matter what OS, computer or network I connect it to, it seems to just work for everyone involved, always, and I don't think I've had a single issue with it since I got it nor did anything at all to set it up, basically installed CUPS on my desktop to get it to work and for Windows/macOS it just works.

Not affiliated, just happy user, at least some companies seem to be able to deal with it, regardless if it's open source (my stack) or not (my wife's Apple-stack).
by Liftyee | 2025-05-19 10:00:53+00:00
I'm curious about their methodology here. Just from a materials standpoint, a M.2 SSD has much less physical volume than a 3.5" HDD and fewer disparate materials (no moving parts = no coils,bearings,motors...)

Perhaps the embodied carbon of memory chips is higher than I expect. To be cynical, there's probably a lot of corporate spin - Seagate is a HDD company after all.
by itsteebz | 2025-05-19 10:00:56+00:00
We built Curio because the real currency of sales (and life) isn't money, it's relationships. And great ones start with great conversations.

But first meetings are often cold and transactional.

Curio warms them up.

Drop in two LinkedIns. We find the intersection — shared context, talking points, and thoughtful questions — so you can connect fast.

Any feedback is awesome! — this is just the beginning.
by Y_Y | 2025-05-19 10:01:11+00:00
Not only do we need to ask which steel, we also need to ask which strength. Off the top I my head, if were thinking about contructing buildings, then I'd want to know:

Compressive strength Tensile strength Shear strength Flexural strength Torsional strength Impact strength Fatigue strength Hardness

It would be truly shocking if it had better e.g., tensile strength.
by coffeeaddict1 | 2025-05-19 10:01:35+00:00
> The pieces can be combined with string-pasting, though we're looking at WESL as a more systematic approach.

> To get the same quality of developer experience with Slang, you'd need an implementation in Rust. I think this would be a good thing for Slang.

WESL has the opposite problem: it doesn't have a C++ implementation. IMO, the graphics world will largely remain C++ friendly for the forseeable future, so if an effort like WESL wants to succeed, they will need to provide a C++ implementation (even more so than the need for Slang to provide a Rust one).
by diggan | 2025-05-19 10:02:14+00:00
That's just governments being governments. I've spent 50% of my life in Sweden and 50% of my life in Spain, and everywhere it's the same. "had to tolerate the $NATION bureaucracy, $NATION lies, empty promises, and $NATION way of (not) doing things for decades" probably applies to most countries in the world, I know it applies for the countries I've lived in at least, and seemingly France too. Heard the same about every home country of my friends also.

Governments just move really slowly. Best we can do is cheer for the efforts we think will improve things, even if it'll take years, and protest about efforts we think are harmful.
by fastasucan | 2025-05-19 10:03:00+00:00
>I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences, examples, generalisations, properties, etc.

Yes. I really get the urge to automate stuff, but imo half of the benefit is from doing the leg work.
Big Beautiful Bill R&D Tax: Will tech go on a hiring spree again?
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-19 10:03:18+00:00
Since 2022, in the US, R&D had to be amortized in 5-15 years. That was one of the reasons (big)tech stopped hiring.

Now, the BBB[1] has changed that under Sec. 111002. Deduction of domestic research and experimental expenditures. Does this mean we can expect bitech to go on a (temporary) hiring spree?

Current Law: Under current law, taxpayers are required to deduct research or experimental expenditures over a five-year period. Research or experimental expenditures that are attributable to research conducted outside the U.S. are required to be deducted over a 15-year period.

Provision: This provision allows taxpayers to immediately deduct domestic research or experimental expenditures paid or incurred in taxable years beginning after December 31, 2024, and before January 1, 2030. This provision includes rules to coordinate the immediate deductibility of domestic research or experimental expenditures with the research credit, rules clarifying the treatment of foreign research or experimental expenditures, and other coordinating changes.

[1] https://waysandmeans.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/The-One-Big-Beautiful-Bill-Section-by-Section.pdf
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-19 10:04:23+00:00
How can any political party get anything done when they have one hand tied behind their backs as they fend off attempts by other parties to undermine them.

Also the average voter is a flip-flopping idiot who throws temper tantrums when they don't get low or no taxes, when costs rise for them right now even if lowering them is at the expense of later generations, etc.

Also US politics are a lot more complicated than who held majority within and area or state. As far as I can see if senate/congress has a huge bearing and those lip between majorities constantly.

I mean keep propping Trump up though, as a foreigner it's interesting to watch the show. It's a shame that countries are making deals with the US now, I would've loved to see us ban export of pharmaceuticals, weaponry, rare earths to the US just to educate Americans on why we should all be working together.

Don't get me wrong, China & Russia are much worse for it. And NK is an absolute disgrace, all those millions of people...in a thousand years we're going to look back on this period of history as "they had the means for peace but chose oppression and violence". Future humans will look at us as barbarians as we do many of those who lived hundreds of years ago.
by esperent | 2025-05-19 10:04:49+00:00
Rejection: an incredibly complex proof can fall for (comparatively) simple reasons. If the AI scans the entire proof and says yep, there's the flaw, page 126 theorem X contradicts <well established known theorem> then a human can verify this without having to understand the whole proof.

This could lead to the proof being rejected entirely, or fixed and strengthened.

Confirmation: if the AI understands it well enough that we're even considering asking it to confirm the proof, then you can do all kinds of things. You can ask it to simplify the entire proof to make it easier for humans to verify. You can ask it questions about parts of the proof you don't understand. You can ask it if there's any interesting corollaries or applications in other fields. Maybe you can even ask it to rewrite the whole thing in LEAN (although, like the author, I know nothing about LEAN and have no idea if this would be useful).
by notpushkin | 2025-05-19 10:05:49+00:00
I loved AutoIT as a kid! And it was also fun playing around with stuff like https://www.perfectautomation.com/ (nice to see that it’s now freeware, and the newer replacement project is completely free / open source!).

But it was about the same time as I started digging around in Delphi 7, then discovered a RAD package pretty much exactly like Delphi, but with PHP instead (wild times), and as I was going down the webmaster route in parallel it was the thing I spent most of my days in. (That, and making bootleg Windows XP builds just for fun, of course.)
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-19 10:06:12+00:00
> It's absolutely true that nobody in the French govt, French semi-public companies (so-called "SEMs") or French large private companies uses anything but Microsoft and the big US cloud providers.

I work from one of the biggest French companies and this is definitely untrue.

Everyone starting from the very top is concerned about the issue of sovereignty surrounding the cloud. This was true before and is even more true nowadays.

Obviously, everyone still use Office because, well, there is no alternative to Office. The only serious competitor is Google and it's a poor one on top of still begin an American company.

Still, you have some very successful initiative at the state level. Messaging is a good exemple. So is all the work done around GED and open data.

Do you realise how funny it is to see you complain that you can't see the car brands in a data base about road accidents while not realising how awesome it is that you have access to such a database?
by askonomm | 2025-05-19 10:07:01+00:00
Modern PHP is not a templating language. It can be, much like many other languages can be, but it's not how it is used. Most other languages also implement their own templating languages. Have you seen modern PHP ... I don't know, sometime in the last 10 or so years, or is this just another circle jerk of hating on something you have little clue about?

Now if you see that as a bad thing, separating business logic and presentation, and sandboxing presentation so it has no larger access to the system, then I'm afraid you're just not a good programmer.
by jrvieira | 2025-05-19 10:07:27+00:00
The world has always been changing in quantifiable ways. Today's social media has not been more impactful, socially, than printed press, the telegraph, the telephone, television, the computer, cell phones or the internet first were. Climate change has been an issue since a lot longer than you probably realize; and before that, environmental issues not under the umbrella term certainly were. I'm not even going to discuss geopolitical alignment. In historical terms, there's really not much to be seen here today.
by kd5bjo | 2025-05-19 10:08:13+00:00
I use Anki more as a serendipity engine than for memorization: Whenever[1] I have an interesting observation or thought, I'll write a couple of sentences about it and file two copies: One in Obsidian, with links to any adjacent/relevant notes (if any), and another in Anki as a Close deletion.

Anki is set up with a long review cycle (1 day, 1 week, 1 month, then automated) and I sit down to do my reviews about once a week. In that process, I usually end up having new ideas to make notes about based on either the randomized order the notes show up in or spotting a connection between the review note and something I've been working on lately.

[1] In practice, I let many/most of these go unrecorded - I probably average about one new note per day, but in bursts.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-19 10:08:45+00:00
> It's just that MS software has degraded to the point of utter shittiness (see: Teams) that now it's just plain worse than their own software from 15 years ago.

I sometimes feel like I live in a parallele universe reading the comments here on Office.

The addition of collaboration and how it seemlessly integrated with sharepoints while easing the sharing of documents make Office365 a blessing in most office environment. There is no way people are going back to sharing files like before after having worked this way.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-19 10:08:56+00:00
> If that was the reason they would simply not pay for commutes at all, as is normal in most other countries.

Paying for commute is mostly a tax thing. It's the same kind of adjustement as doing BYOD or giving employees PCs that have passed their business depreciation value instead of doing leases.

It's way easier to do with train transit, as train companies will give traceability/limitations on the commute and it's way easier to explain that just paying for a week's worth of gasoline or a car's insurance, or other costs.

If a country doesn't have any arrangement to make these expenses easier to pass on the company, I see how commute would just be cover privately by the employee.

> "private" railway companies were set up with immensely valuable government funded capital assets and would never have been able to operate without them,

Fundamentally no business of significant size operates without any gov. oversight nor preferential treatment. Tim Cook shaking Trump's hand is not the outlier, and at the size of a railroad company you better be in good terms with regulators if you want anything done.
by ben_w | 2025-05-19 10:09:06+00:00
>> While LLMs are pretty good, and likely to improve, my experience is OpenAI's offerings absolutely make stuff up after a few thousand words or so, and they're one of the better ones.

> That's not how you get good translations from off-the-shelf LLMs! If you give a model the whole book and expect it to translate it in one-shot then it will eventually hallucinate and give you bad results.

You're assuming something about how I used ChatGPT, but I don't know what exactly you're assuming.

> What you want is to give it a small chunk of text to translate, plus previously translated context so that it can keep the continuity

I tried translating a Wikipedia page to support a new language, and ChatGPT rather than Google translate because I wanted to retain the wiki formatting as part of the task.

LLM goes OK for a bit, then makes stuff up. I feed in a new bit starting from its first mistake, until I reach a list at which point the LLM invented random entries in that list. I tried just that list in a bunch of different ways, including completely new chat sessions and the existing session, it couldn't help but invent things.

> In an open ended questions - sure. But that doesn't apply to translations where you're not asking the model to come up with something entirely by itself, but only getting it to accurately translate what you wrote into another language.

"Only" rather understates how hard translation is.

Also, "explain this in Fortnite terms" is a kind of translation: https://x.com/MattBinder/status/1922713839566561313/photo/3
by filiptrivan | 2025-05-19 10:09:42+00:00
Hi! As years passed while working for my company, I found it increasingly frustrating to constantly rewrite code. Additionally, when new people join the company, even senior developers, they often need a lot of time to adapt because of our architecture, coding style, and other conventions.

When I discovered Source Generators, it blew my mind. I began generating as much as I could, transforming many of our internal processes and significantly boosting productivity. This inspired me to share my work with the community, so I created an open-source project.

The project is licensed under MIT, feel free to use anything you find helpful to boost productivity in your company or on your side projects!
by bjoli | 2025-05-19 10:12:01+00:00
I cane back to plasma after about year of gnome. It made me realize how much I dislike gnome. There are just so many issues. Inhad to solve them with extensions, but then it broke on updates. I couldn't get it to have English as language but ISO units.

I had to install an extra app to control startup applications.

Fractional scaling and several displays was wonky, made screen recording impossible. My 60fps display has a stuttery mouse pointer.

Hiding keyboard layouts like Swedish Sami or svdvorak didn't make things better.

Copy and paste not working cross screens (wtf?). Drag and drop not working if you switch windows using alt+tab. Context menus locking focus from the whole desktop: open the nautilus file transfer dialogue and suddenly I couldn't click anywhere else than in nautilus. Having it open and trying to interact with another app just wouldn't work.

At the end had accidentally tried KDE in a VM and realized I wouldn't tolerate a hammer behaving badly. I went back to opensuse the same day.
by sokoloff | 2025-05-19 10:13:37+00:00
Does anyone seriously argue that mere millionaires shouldn’t exist? That’s a level of wealth that permits only around $50K/yr in retirement, assuming it's 100% liquid/investable. If a retiree had a paid-off house at the median price level, they'd have less than $30K/yr in retirement if they had to remain "not a millionaire".

Nearly 10% of Americans are millionaires (at least at the household level, not necessarily per-person). It's around 6% for UK and France.
by LeonM | 2025-05-19 10:13:54+00:00
Depends a bit on the country and era of the sleepers ('ties' in US), but traditional wooden sleepers are treated with creosote [0], which is tar/oil impregnation.

I'm no expert on this subject by any means, but I happen to volunteer at a museum where we have steam trains running. We build our tracks to look traditional, so we use wooden sleepers and no ballast. Most of our sleepers are donated from the commercial railroad companies, typically they are old stock but we also receive used ones occasionally. In my part of the world wooden sleepers aren't common anymore, so it's getting harder to find usable ones. This is a concern for us, as apaearantly there aren't any suppliers left in our part of the world for new ones. At our museum they typically last for about 15 years, mainly because we place our sleepers directly on the soil (no balast). The tar/oils will eventually dry out and the wood will just rot/decompose naturally. Wooden sleepers are considered chemical waste in my part of the world, though I do believe we are allowed to let them decompose fully as biomatter, which goes quite quick if in contact with moist soil. Though we typically dispose our used sleepers at a specialized waste facility, I'm not sure how they process it there.

Oh, and in case you are wondering: no, they don't burn, so we can't use them as firewoord for our steam engines ;-)

Appearantly in the USA, at least as of 2008, around 90% of all track was still using wood [1]. I didn't expect that. For most of the world we have used concrete sleepers for a long time already. Plastic sleepers are also common nowadays, which are typically made from recycled materials.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creosote [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_tie
by TheDong | 2025-05-19 10:14:01+00:00
Verify how?

Go look at the "build log" in your compromised jenkins server and download the (already compromised) build artifact and make sure it matches the mega.co.nz file?

Do you expect the average software engineer to be able to look at a .exe, pull up a disassembler, and know that all the assembly maps back to the source code?
by awanderingmind | 2025-05-19 10:14:04+00:00
I am not suggesting models will be capable of generating 'all' proofs - that is clearly impossible. Merely that they will get better at doing so, and there is no clear reason at the moment to believe they will never reach a human level of competence. If you have one model functioning at such a level, it is presumably trivial to have a million of them, none of which will need to be paid, housed, or sleep etc.
by camgunz | 2025-05-19 10:15:35+00:00
I had an X62 (upgraded motherboard in an x60 shell from 51nb) and my brother had whatever the upgraded X220 was, but they were a little flaky. Super cool though.

AIUI the thermal design is the blocker with modern chipsets. Usually it's really carefully tuned along with software to dial in the right performance/battery life/longevity/safety metrics, and that's a different skillset than EE'ing a new board.

> The thing about a Pi 5 though is that it is really not any faster than the X220 natively.

It's generally faster [0] but I mean, it's the Raspberry Pi experience. Battery life would be much better, though. I understand people wanting a "modern" X220, but a big benefit for me is that I can't write junk slow software on it, so something circumspect like an SBC is ideal for me. Plus I love the idea of slapping a new CM in there and everything getting better.

> speakers are still top shelf

I'll confess to apostasy: I bought a 14" M1 Max at the end of 2021. Although it's quite different than the X220 it's a great machine in its own right, and one of the ways it's objectively better is its speaker system. It's bananas how good it sounds. It's a computer I hate to love, but I agree the Apple Silicon laptops are probably all time great laptops. I"m tempted to say they're maybe even on par w/ the X/T series 2005-2012, but they're essentially not user serviceable, and in particular I'm skeptical the keyboards and storage hold up over time, so we'll see what the used market looks like in a few years.

[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/12009065?baseli...