MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tombert | 2025-05-09 22:32:30+00:00
Just to be clear, I think the act of being religious is harmful even if you were to get rid of every single church. Pedantic, yes, but the point is that this is purely a behavioral thing, not a specific action. I have tax-free ideas on the best ways to go about getting people to stop believing in dumb things but those are far beyond the scope of this conversation.

I am not “confusing” anything. In the case of teenage pregnancy, I have seen the conversation start and stop with “teenagers just shouldn’t have sex”.

If you’re just saying “I wish the world were X”, then sure you can make a declarative statement about what people are doing. That’s not what I have an issue with.

My issue is when people make a statement like “people should just…” without engaging in any meaningful way for that to happen.

Taxes on harmful behavior is one possible way we can curve it. It’s not the only way, and I am not claiming as such, but clearly righteous indignation telling people to stop using single-use plastics has not worked. We can wax philosophical as to why it hasn’t worked, and there might be value in that, but I just don’t think it’s particularly useful to begin an argument with “people should just stop buying single use plastic” as if that by itself is a meaningful thing to say.
by trevor-e | 2025-05-09 22:33:23+00:00
Lot of nice improvements here. I'm actually quite liking the async API after using it in a couple small apps and learning the fundamentals.

I really wish the entire Swift team would spend a quarter fixing bugs and improving the compiler speed, though. So many trivial SwiftUI cases trigger the "this is too complex for the compiler" errors which are so frustrating to fix.
by pj_mukh | 2025-05-09 22:33:49+00:00
They are doing that in East Bay [1] on BART owned land. They had been blocked so far by the most virulent NIMBY trash leading to some of the most scathing coverage [2]. Most have been unblocked and are under construction. The one still being blocked is Ashby BART because of (say it with me folks), a "HIsToriC flEa MARkeT" (that mostly sells stolen goods)[3].

[1]: https://www.bart.gov/about/business/tod

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/magazine/housing-berkeley...

[3]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/09/17/berkeley-ashby-bart-...
by cryptonector | 2025-05-09 22:35:43+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I laughed. You're probably right. And just as one might never convince newer generations to RTFM, one will have a similarly difficult time convincing older generations to do the newfangled thing.

Although I should say that I work with colleagues in newer and older generations, and I find that the younger ones do end up learning how to RTFM.
by Retric | 2025-05-09 22:36:21+00:00
The point you seemed to have missed was each of them were populist authors.. To look down on populist writing is to misunderstand western literature.

Further we never got to read a book by Shakespeare because of the lack of copyright at the time. Imagine a world where he had more time to devote to such things.

Similarly Dickens was hampered by being paid by the word.

Melville on the other hand wrote Moby-Dick through the commercial success of less famous works. What happened later in life isn’t particularly relevant here, what’s generally considered the greatest work of western literature was completely dependent on someone being paid for their writing. It wasn’t some breakout novel from a new writer it’s the culmination of serious refinement of his talents that takes not just inspiration and life experience but time.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-09 22:36:56+00:00
> My free square is one of their control computers’ parallel ports frying out and now they’re unable to find a replacement because they buy them all as old stock off of ebay

The last time I experienced a BART shutdown, the cause was that someone had found a box in one of the stations somewhere, and they (1) assumed it was a bomb; and (2) shut down the entire system. I'm not sure what stopping the trains while you investigate the bomb you've found accomplishes, but I don't think there were efforts to find additional bombs. (The box was not actually a bomb.)
by jongjong | 2025-05-09 22:37:44+00:00
Yes, but a lot of the complexity is unnecessary bloat. Almost every project I've ever seen or worked on was full of unnecessary complexity. People naturally tend to over-complicate things, all the programming books, including software design books focus on unimportant aspects and miss all the important ones. It's incredibly frustrating.

Yet, if someone were to write a book which explained things properly (probably a 3000 word article would suffice to turn anyone into a 10x dev), nobody would buy it. This industry is cooked.
by chairs | 2025-05-09 22:38:12+00:00
This is effectively the same sentiment I echo when talking about AI to folk in the tech industry who are scared of, rather than resistant to, change.

I haven’t professionally built anything on bare metal in years. It sits somewhere in the aether these days, and I no longer have to worry about it in the same way.

I can’t speak for other languages, but Spring Boot made enterprise level Java development accessible to the masses, and the jobs are still there. They have just shifted.

If you haven’t done the groundwork and seen what these frameworks are replacing, you won’t truly grasp what the tools are doing. That is why vibe coding leads to unintended side effects, and I feel for students who are dropped straight into frameworks that obscure what is going on under the bonnet. It is not magic, it just looks like it.

If an organisation treats AI as a silver bullet, the best they will get is an off-the-shelf assistant. The real gains will come from domain-specific models that understand the business well enough to generate tailored, useful output. But that does not remove the engineer, it just shifts their role towards quality, safety, and accountability.

Compliance alone – GDPR, PCI, and the rest – will slow down any industry-wide adoption of truly bespoke AI models. Retreading the same ground just to offer suggestions that feel human? That could cost tens, if not hundreds, of millions per organisation.
by Ray20 | 2025-05-09 22:38:27+00:00
>Would you have believed a few months ago that the US government would be trying to strong-arm foreign nations who are nominally allies into compliance with its policy preferences?

What do you mean? Hasn't the USA pretty much ALWAYS done this?

>The whole hysteria about illegal immigrants is based on the specious claim that one party is importing them wholesale and somehow converting them into voters to steal elections from conservatives forever.

In fact, the whole hysteria is based on the existence of tens of millions of illegal immigrants who are committing huge numbers of crimes and are systematically discriminated against because of their illegal status. And when your political opponents so loudly try to deny such an obvious for everyone problem, it is stupid not to take advantage of it.

I don't know, maybe I don't understand American politics, but from the outside everything seems pretty clear to me.
by palata | 2025-05-09 22:38:50+00:00
> some of the difference here is just perception due to dependencies in C/C++ being less immediately visible since they're dynamically loaded.

Not in my case. I manually compile all the dependencies (either because I need to cross-compile, or because I may need to patch them, etc). So I clearly see all the transitive dependencies I need in C++. And I need a lot less than in Rust, by a long shot.
by jraph | 2025-05-09 22:39:07+00:00
Cryptpad is E2E encrypted. At a first glance, this is not.

Which also means its features won't be constrained by the E2EE architecture.

At a first glance, it seems the suite numerique wants to be simpler than full traditional office documents. It seems to compare itself with notion and outline.

CryptPad has very simple modules and also more complex, OnlyOffice based modules.

Ultimately, if the suite numerique's frontend is able to send editing patches as JSON, it should not be too complicated to make it work on a CryptPad server and make it E2EE, which is exactly what the CryptPad team did to OnlyOfficr (the "why not both" option)
by CountSessine | 2025-05-09 22:39:39+00:00
If you read Miran's paper, the point of the tariffs is to bring US trade partners to the table to negotiate the alliance, so really they could be anything at all. It could have been 420% or 31.4159% or whatever, right across the board.

But the amounts are actually kind of clever and it reflects the fact that there's a more mature understand of trade barriers now vs when the WTO was negotiated.

How much do you know about trade barriers? Beyond tariffs, they're extraordinarily complicated and rely on regulations, trip-wires, and unequal application of rules.

Canada has "free trade" with dairy, but only on dairy imports up to a point, and after that heavy tariffs apply. But no one ever imports enough to incur those tariffs, so, that's free-trade, right? But actually, no one considers the Canadian dairy market worth the trouble without being able to import large amounts of dairy. So Canada can legitimately say that the trip-wire isn't applied, but it's a long ways from "free trade" because large importers are kept out.

China requires that foreign companies must partner with local companies to sell into the Chinese market. This effectively leads to a lot of technology transfers. It's not a tariff, but it's pretty clearly a "trade barrier" because companies that want to protect their IP are denied access.

In the 80's when US trade reps were negotiating with Japanese trade reps, the Americans would try to convince the Japanese that free trade was best for Japanese consumers. The Japanese reps would just respond, "how much do you want us to buy?"

The Japanese really didn't believe in free trade, and they were actively manipulating the value of the Yen at that point (it would be a few years still before the Plaza Accord), so they knew that just lowering tariffs wasn't going to make US goods sufficiently more competitive in Japan.

What's changed in 35 years is that the US doesn't really believe in "free trade" anymore either - not after all of the grief the WTO brought. The simple formulas are a no-bullshit approach to trade - the same ones that motivated those Japanese trade reps.

"I don't care how your trade barriers work - currency manipulation, tariffs, excess regulation, unequal rules - just fix your sh*t to reduce the trade imbalance."
by rtkwe | 2025-05-09 22:39:45+00:00
It's also a relatively fragile pipeline. People can't just wait a few years when they hit transition points; universities have already massively curtailed their enrollment for the incoming graduate class because of their attempts to completely shut off grants both new and existing, new PhDs are going to have a tough time getting Post Doc positions and post docs are going to have a hard time getting faculty positions. All those people need jobs so they'll have to either find temporary work and hope to get back on the track after that (competing against all the people who had to do the same over the next 4 years unless they're stopped soon) or go overseas.
by dathinab | 2025-05-09 22:40:36+00:00
> isn't much momentum yet to change the status quo.

it's complex problem with tons of partial solutions which each have tons of ways to implement them with often their no being a clear winner

i.e. it's the kind of hard to solve by consensus problem

e.g. the idea of a extended standard library is old (around since the beginning of rust) but for years it was believed it's probably the best to make it a separate independent project/library for various reason. One being that the saying "the standard library is the place where code goes to die" has been quite true for multiple ecosystems (most noticeably python)

as a side note ESL wouldn't reduce the LOC count it would increase it as long as you fully measure LOCs and not "skip" over some dependencies
by fatbird | 2025-05-09 22:43:05+00:00
The backing the US dollar has is the strength of the world's only superpower. It doesn't matter if it's backed by gold or commodities, what matters is whether people believe there's an entity backstopping the currency that can guarantee its stability. That means an entity strong enough to be fully independent, and governed by the rule of law, so that if you're holding a bunch of that currency you can be confident it'll be worth as much tomorrow as it is today.

It doesn't matter if Russia or China peg their currencies to gold reserves, no one trusts them keep the currency market-stable, because they're autocracies. And if Canada pegged its currency to gold or commodities, it wouldn't matter because it's not strong enough to maintain its independence by force, if it came to war.

The EU and the Euro might be a replacement for USD in terms of a currency backed by a big enough, stable enough entity to make it that trustworthy, but that's a long way in the future. Though, as US Treasuries lose their preferred status, European instruments will likely gain from that.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-05-09 22:43:12+00:00
There's examples of maintainers/packagers effectively sabotaging other peoples projects when making packages for distros, whether that's shipping them broken, ancient versions etc.

e.g. Bottles, WebkitGTK (distros liked keeping this one held back even though doing so is a security risk)

IMHO it shouldn't be the responsibility of the OS vendor to package third party applications.
by palata | 2025-05-09 22:45:34+00:00
My point is that if, in the language, everybody is incentivise to use fewer dependencies, then a random library that I would not write myself (because it is an entire project in itself) would have fewer dependencies. Because it is not the case, either I take that library and accept its transitive dependencies, or I don't have a library at all.

In Rust, I'm sometimes actually tempted to wrap a C/C++ library (and its few dependencies) instead of getting the Rust alternative (and its gazillion dependencies).
by peterfirefly | 2025-05-09 22:45:45+00:00
MIPS used to not have interlocked pipeline stages. It was the compiler's job to work around that. MIPS -- and many other RISCs -- had a branch delay slot. It was the compiler's job to try to do something useful with that. RISCs stayed in-order for a long time -- it was the compiler's job to try do schedule the instructions in a way that compensated as well as possible for that.

GPUs rely on fairly smart compilers -- but they also hide latency (memory access) by switching hw threads (a bit like barrel processors of yore).
by krick | 2025-05-09 22:45:58+00:00
Honestly, for me it's kinda minimal, simple and ergonomic UI is the point. It has some more sophisticated features, but they don't distract me, nor I actually need them. For instance:

- bookmarks (I tried to use them, but it's too much work, if I really need to take a note, I better do it in written form)

- UI to write down characters (same: I used it a couple of times, just because it's there, but it's not worth it, use normal note-taking app for note-taking)

- equalizer (I'm sure somebody uses it, but I never truly needed it for audio-books)

And many more.

What actually matters are small details:

- Granular playback speed control. ABS seems to have it done right too, but some players have like 1-1.25-1.5-..., which is not granular enough to get normal conversational talking speed out of somebody way too slow.

- It is possible to enable ID3, but it doesn't force it either.

- It recognizes chapters in whatever I have. m4b, mp3, cue, many files in a single folder, many nested folders, whatever. If it gets things wrong, it is possible to merge books in the library. I guess, the worst case is if I am overzealous with chapters (like marking chapters in a youtube podcastwhich has a mark like every 2 minutes), but then again, it only means "stop at the end of the chapter" becomes not feasible, but otherwise it's fine.

- I guess, every audio-book player does, but still: it does remember positions in multiple books, so I can switch between lectures and fictions and get back to where I stopped.

- It takes into account the current playback speed when estimating how much time is left.

- It is possible to remove buttons you don't need, it's possible to choose an action at the end of the book, it's possible to choose a lot, but defaults are really just fine for me.

- I never used it, but thinking about your question I just found out it has "Skip start/end" functionality. This is just great, I'm excited to try it out ASAP.

Anyway, I probably forget some small details, so you better take a look yourself. It's not perfect, but good enough to study when building something similar. I can also suggest 1 thing that is not in SABP, and, again, it's important to not overload the UI, but I sometimes wished it was there. In SABP it's only possible to either stop after X minutes (with sleep-suggestive volume fade), or at the end of a chapter (without fade). Sometimes I wish I could tell it to stop at the end of a chapter approximately after X minutes (like, if it has a chapter every 7-15 minutes, and you are planning to listen for about 30-40 minutes more, but you don't want it to fade volume an to stop in the middle of a chapter overall). So it's either "approx X minutes" or simply "N more chapters". Neither is possible in SABP.

Also, I don't know it I actually want it, but it seemed nice listening to podcats in NewPipe (SABP doesn't have it). There is an option to skip silence in NewPipe. I didn't actually use it too much, and the last time was a while ago (I pretty much stopped to listen podcasts on it), but I seem to recall it worked nicely.
by vanviegen | 2025-05-09 22:46:10+00:00
Here's what your Mithril examples looks like with Aberdeen:

let count = proxy(0); function Counter() { $('div', () => { $('h1:Counter'), $('p:'+count.value), $('button:+', { click: () => count.value += 1 }), $('button:-', { click: () => count.value -= 1 }) }) } $(Counter); // Or just Counter() would work in this case

The '.value' is needed because we can't proxy a number directly. This extra step goes a way if you have more data to store, like `person = {name: 'Peter', age: 42}`.

Besides that, looks pretty similar yeah! Works rather differently though. :-)
by skissane | 2025-05-09 22:46:32+00:00
Let's say some random country follows your advice and decides to go back to the gold standard – is that going to convince people globally to use their currency? Probably not.

Because even if the currency is on the gold standard today, what stops the country's government from switching back to fiat tomorrow and pocketing all the gold? Or, gradually doing so by introducing restrictions on gold redemption and slowly tightening them over time?

Whether a currency is fiat or backed, it is ultimately a statement that you trust the government which controls the currency to take good care of it – and in general, it is easier to have that trust with democracies than authoritarian regimes. And this is part of the argument for fiat currencies – if trust in the institutions ultimately counts for more than what the currency is backed by, why do we really need the backing?

Which is why replacing the USD is so hard. I think even if the US starts to go really downhill, people will be looking at currencies like the EUR, JPY, GBP as an alternative. If the IMF allowed private parties to use SDR as a currency – a move the US has always blocked as a threat to the USD, but in a global crisis the US might feel it has no choice but to change its mind – that might become a viable alternative global currency. CNY may become important in trade with China and its close allies, but who outside of China trusts the Chinese government enough to use CNY as a long-term store of value? Only as a riskier bet in a diversified portfolio including safer options.
by yallpendantools | 2025-05-09 22:46:55+00:00
I've had similar ideas throughout the years of my personal mathematical journey:

- When I took my Discrete Mathematics course, I began to keep a separate notebook to compile proofs that I found to be particularly clever or, I thought, illustrated a particular concept/approach clearly. It was partially inspired by Erdős' concept of The Book.

- I did something similar for "Leetcode" problems but in this notebook I would only document solutions I personally came up with for when I feel like having solved the problem gave me considerable "XP" if not outright leveling me up. They ended up mostly dynamic programming problems and clever applications of number theory---I never really felt like I grokked these topics even now so it was useful when I detected similarities to past problems.

- Lately I've decided to give signal processing a deeper shot and a grid notebook has been my invaluable companion for the task. The last two notebooks were very neatly organized but this one is more like lab/field notes but for mathematics. It's gritty and dirty in there. There isn't really much point learning signal processing only from books so I'm always in front of my computer (with a lecture video or an interactive Python script) when I'm working on this notebook. Being able to formulate hypotheses/intuition, writing down thoughts to be considered later, annotating graphs/proofs where things don't make sense to me yet---it has been an extremely liberating learning experience. I've only been on this endeavor for a few weeks but I can definitely say it has allowed me to interact with the material at a deeper level.

The only way my signal processing effort could be better was if I had a teacher whom I can ask my noted-down questions to. I know the suggestion is gonna come up and I'll be lying if I say it hasn't crossed my mind so I'm just gonna address it unprompted (pun intended): I don't bring my questions to a LLM because I'm not yet smart enough to detect bullshit in this field of study. I don't think setting-up my own agent to ingest my notes would make any sense because then I would have to structure my notes and the core reason why it's been so liberating/has enabled me to interact deeper with the material is because I gave myself the freedom to be unstructured.
by Hilift | 2025-05-09 22:48:29+00:00
DC Metro can use funds from developing property near Metro stations. This has been one of the positive things about Metro.

The Purple line has evolved into a financial disaster. It will be the most expensive train line ever constructed, $10 billion for a 16 mile segment.

BART ridership is 40% of what it was in 2019. There's no way you can lose 60% of your customers and not have major problems.
by pedalpete | 2025-05-09 22:48:49+00:00
I don't know why you're getting down voted, this is an absolutely apt comment.

A shared repo on github would be great! I was wondering....where am I going to bookmark this so I'll remember to go back to it in the future. Though, how many of the people who would benefit most from these docs don't use git?

Though I may copy the docs into a confluence template.
by jraph | 2025-05-09 22:50:04+00:00
Synching is for syncing your files across several devices of yours. CryptPad is for working with other people, possibly at the same time on the same document.

The tools donc comapte, the needs are very different, and you might find them both useful in different situations.

It seems to me syncthing simply doesn't need anything more, you just use the desktop application of your choice for editing your documents.

And yes, you are kinda locked into CryptPad if you don't export your documents as you go. The server not having your documents at a central place and all the documents having different decryption keys means it's hard to provide a simple "take out" zip export. I guess some automation tool accessing your browser profile could be built to help with this.