MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jltsiren | 2025-05-26 00:40:10+00:00
There is nothing sad about this. Mandatory pensions are not a vacation sponsored by the government but a way to provide for those who can't provide for themselves.

If you were born in the 70s, you should have known for most of your adult life that your normal retirement age is likely going to be around 70. The demographic situation is not new, the solutions have been discussed extensively since at least the 90s, and countries that take the situation seriously have implemented several pension reforms since then.

You are not going to be as wealthy in retirement as you are now, at least not on the mandatory pension alone. Your health is probably not going to be as good. If you live in Sweden, you should have plenty of vacation. If you think you would enjoy travel, golf, or climbing a mountain, you should do it now. It will probably be easier and more affordable now than in retirement, which may never come.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-26 00:40:51+00:00
When you say "do your DI by hand", do you mean wiring up each case, or do you mean writing a DI system that treats the cases generically? The former is what I'm suggesting becomes untenable at some point. The latter is just writing your own DI framework for, which I think would be fine.

DI frameworks are complicated, but they're a constant level of complicated, they don't get more complicated as the codebase grows. Not using a DI framework is simple at the beginning, but it grows, possibly exponentially, and at some point crosses the line of constant complexity from a DI framework.

Finding where those lines intersect is just good engineering. Ignoring the fact that they do intersect is not.
by barchar | 2025-05-26 00:43:08+00:00
It sometimes can, but you then have to balance the time spent optimizing against the time spent actually doing whatever you were optimizing.

Also on modern chips you must wait quite a number of cycles before executing modified code or endure a catastrophic performance hit. This is ok for loops and stuff, but makes a lot of the really clever stuff pointless.

The debuggers software breakpoints _are_ self-modifying code :)
by joshka | 2025-05-26 00:43:26+00:00
> The Senior Press Officer added that with many stations in close succession, the Victoria and Central lines experience frequent acceleration and braking, contributing to heat buildup within the tunnels.

I'm sure that this is probably one of those stupid suggestions that shows a lack of understanding of the problem, but could skipping stations help help this? Something like the following gets you 1/3rd less braking energy released into the tunnels:

Station ABCDEFGH Train1 .. .. .. Train2 .. .. . Train3 . .. ..

Taking a look at the peak time schedules they have trains coming every 2 minutes, so this seems like it would be reasonable for most people to have to sometimes wait 6 minutes for the right train, but generally not more than 4.
by bsder | 2025-05-26 00:43:27+00:00
> And what, every terminal application should have its own special knob for you to tell it what kind of terminal you have?

No, they should default to the only sane thing left, ignore TERM/termcap/terminfo, and leave the people who still want to run a VT-52 or Tek4014 in the dustbin.

There is a single combination for terminal usage which isn't broken in 2025--ANSI escape codes for output with the Kitty escape codes for input.

(And don't get me started about resolving the dependencies around ncurses, terminfo, etc. because some program is welded to a 15 year old version of curses ...)
by ModernMech | 2025-05-26 00:43:31+00:00
> English (or all spoken human language) is not precise enough to articulate what you want your code to do

Exactly. And this is why I feel like we are going to go full circle on this. We've seen this cycle in our industry a couple times now:

"Formal languages are hard, wouldn't it be great if we could just talk in English and the computer would understand what we mean?" -> "Natural languages are ambiguous and not precise, wouldn't it be great if we could use a formal langue so that the computer can understand precisely what we mean?"

The eternal hope is that someday, somehow, we will be able to invent a natural language way of communicating something precise like a program, and it's just not going to happen.

Why do I think this? Because we can't even use natural language to communicate unambiguously between intelligent people. Our most earnest attempt at this, the law, is so fraught with ambiguity there's an entire profession dedicated to arguing in the gray area. So what hope do we have controlling machines precisely in this way? Are future developers destined to be equivalent to lawyers, who have to essentially debate the meaning of a program before it's compiled, just to resolve the ambiguities? If that's where this ends up, I will be very sad indeed.
by ghaff | 2025-05-26 00:43:44+00:00
People who complain about Fahrenheit vs. Celsius are correct to the degree (sorry) that the Celsius degree unit of difference is the standard in a lot of engineering calculations. But Celsius as a temperature scale is no more logical than Fahrenheit, which is arguably more practical for day to day use--and Kelvin is more likely required for a lot of engineering and chemical calculations anyway.
by prawn | 2025-05-26 00:44:21+00:00
There are multiple pension-related plans to supplement or replace the government pension, and most work in ways so that it's not just "smart and disciplined" people.

Retirement age in Australia is 67. A report from 2024 going on the 2022/23 FY said the average age at retirement (of all retirees) was 56.9 years. People typically plan for 65.

Couldn't find Danish data, but 43% in AU rely on a government pension. 27% on superannuation or similar (I assume this will grow a bit). Those reporting no personal income is down from 24% to 12% over the last 10 years.

Here, companies compulsorily pay 11.5% into super funds for staff.

All that said, I'd rather see more support for people living in their prime rather than being tied to a desk. I don't see the point in purely waiting until retirement.
by linsomniac | 2025-05-26 00:45:25+00:00
I developed "LessEncrypt" for my dev environment, an ultra lightweight, hassle free alternative to LetsEncrypt for use with self-signed CAs like in a dev or homelab environment. At work we have self signed keys for our dev/stg environment, and manage it with Ansible and some scripts, but spend a surprising amount of time dealing with it. This is an experiment to get us out of that business.

https://github.com/linsomniac/lessencrypt

Short description:

- Client generates RSA keypair and connects to server from <1024 TCP port, sends pubkey. - Server uses reverse DNS to come up with cert name (rules can specify alternate CN and SANs, override TTL, etc). - Server generates a signed cert and connects back to client on <1024 TCP port and sends cert.
by jprokay13 | 2025-05-26 00:45:30+00:00
I built a web app for looping specific sections of YouTube videos as a way to practice songs.

https://proloops.jprokay.com/

Slowtube was a huge inspiration for me (I’ve spent many hours with it), but I wanted a way to save my loops and continue my practice.

Saving is solely to the browser’s database right now.

Feedback is much appreciated!
by bitshiftfaced | 2025-05-26 00:46:11+00:00
I'll try to summarize it for you. My first point was that with from the EU buyer's perspective, the German car can be delivered a bit cheaper because VAT is totally removed from it up until the end. The US car entering the EU market might have has sales tax embedded into the cost due to the differences in the tax systems.

To illustrate my second point, let's imagine both countries have a 10% tariff, and it takes $50,000 to build a car (ignoring point #1). In Germany, the German car's after tax cost is 50000*1.19=59500 and the US car's is 50000*1.1*1.19. The difference between the two cars in the German market is 5950.

In the US market, taking the average sales tax, the German car's after tax cost is 50000*1.1*1.085=59675 and the US built car is 54250, a difference of 5425. The difference between the cars is $525 tighter in the US market compared to the EU market. The German car makers get an advantage by virtue of how VAT is systemically higher and the resulting multiplicative effect, even when the tariffs are the same. When the EU tariffs are relatively higher, as they are now, the effect is even greater.
by RhysU | 2025-05-26 00:46:13+00:00
I said human wants are limitless. You said no they're not. I said yes they are, giving the example of population growth as a way that aggregate demand increases even if some people are completely satisfied. This is ECON 101 and a small amount of biology. That's what I am talking about. Notice "need" and "want" are 2 distinct words and you are reading past the difference.

Demographic transition in one culture does not imply universal demographic transition across the species. Because those who haven't yet transitioned will control population growth rates.

Now why did I say this? Because you opened by presuming that socialism would solve human wants. Which is nonsense. Nothing solves human wants.
by coverj | 2025-05-26 00:46:46+00:00
I think a lot of people in office jobs day dream about this sort of thing. My father-in-law is a third generation farmer producing ultra fine wool. I am a source of free labour at shearing time and I will tell you that when I treat myself to a sleep in on Monday morning and roll out of bed for standup at 9:30 I sit there with the biggest shit-eating grin on my face meanwhile my father in law is already 4 hours in to his 12+ hour day.

Also if I was to go into farming I'd have to do something with crops/fruits/vegetables. I am a bit of a softie but the realities of livestock husbandry when met with the economics of farming can be quite confronting.
by callamdelaney | 2025-05-26 00:47:08+00:00
Perhaps in the US 20 years ago it was more attainable. Self taught in the UK is pretty tough, I lucked out getting a real engineering job at 19 in London, then I went into contracting which was great money. Now I’m working at a startup which I think has a solid team, but even with a decade+ of experience I’ve never even gotten a call back for roles at Google, Meta or the like.

Did interview with apple once for a low rate contracting role, pretty sure I gave them a superior architecture for their solution in the interview and they took it and ran with it, didn’t hear back.

I’ve had a heavy interest in finance since a young teenager but haven’t really be able to land an interview there either.

I’m genuinely considering getting a degree, I guess at 28 it’s not too late, though I feel I’ve wasted a lot of time.
by throwaway31131 | 2025-05-26 00:47:18+00:00
In what year did you get your first job as a programmer? I think it was not all that rare in the 80s and 90s for self taught programmers to get decent roles. And once you had more than, say five years, paid experience you were considered equivalent. But I haven’t heard of anyone getting an entry level job as a programmer without a degree recently.
by chmod775 | 2025-05-26 00:48:40+00:00
My guess: Empty seats look bad and and pricing fans out of concerts may hurt fan relations, even losing them completely.

Also concerts are mainly for the artist to make money. Traditionally they're getting fucked by record labels, making very little on sales of media. Concerts is when you're actually getting paid. It thus being a somewhat less corporate process to decide ticket prices can mean that they just charge as much as they need and want, not as much as they can. Artists are generally considered to be a polar opposite to the "short-term-profit-maximizing" crowd.
by skissane | 2025-05-26 00:48:48+00:00
> For temperature neither argument is objectively better.

I think Celsius is objectively better in that:

(1) its endpoints–freezing and boiling point of water–are more natural / less arbitrary / more fundamental than Fahrenheit's–coldest temperature you can reach with salt and ice to average human body temperature. Water is a fundamental substance to all known life; the freezing point of pure water is much more fundamental than the freezing point of a water + NaCl mixture (actually apparently Fahrenheit used ammonium chloride not sodium chloride, which is arguably even more arbitrary than sodium chloride would be). If you imagine some extraterrestrial civilisation independently invents a temperature scale, they'd be more likely to come up with something close to Celsius than something close to Fahrenheit

(2) while both scales contain some error in that the nominal value of their endpoints differs from the real value, the error is greater for Fahrenheit

(3) According to Wikipedia, Fahrenheit didn't have 100 degrees between his two endpoints, he originally had 90 then increased it to 96 – given base 10 is the standard number base used by humans, 100 divisions is less arbitrary than 90 or 96

(4) nowadays, all other temperature scales are officially defined in terms of Kelvin – and Celsius has a simpler relationship to Kelvin than Fahrenheit does (for Celsius it is purely an additive offset, for Fahrenheit it involves both addition and multiplication)

(5) conforming to the global standard is objectively better than sticking with an alternative which lacks clearcut advantges
by quotemstr | 2025-05-26 00:48:48+00:00
Most terminals are not kitty. Should my program not work with them? What happens when kitty adds a feature? How do I know whether it's supported?

What we really need is robust feature detection, not TERM. The terminal universe doesn't seem particularly receptive to the idea: https://github.com/alacritty/vte/issues/98

In the meantime, we have TERM. I'll stop advocating people use TERM when the terminal ecosystem learns what the web had to learn ages ago and embraces feature detection. It's pointless to break even UA detection.

(Unfortunately, as the thread shows, XTGETCAP is broken in too many places to use.)
by billy99k | 2025-05-26 00:49:26+00:00
I argued this point in the early 2000s when Richard Stallman was seen as a god in the software community and tried to convince everyone that this would be the new business model for software.

The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you.
by Xss3 | 2025-05-26 00:49:36+00:00
Dogs out of all creatures probably actually do have some parsing going on for human language. They learn it like we do, picking up context from the environment, actions, tone, facial expressions, body language, etc.

You can say 'what's that' in many different ways and a clever dog will react differently for each, even if it's the first time it's heard you say 'what's that?' In a scared tone it'll still react differently while knowing what you're asking.

They even do the cute head tilt when they're struggling to understand something.

I think people vastly underestimate the power of wetware and think animals and us are separated by a chasm, but I think it's a relatively small leap.

We base so much of our understanding of other creatures intelligence on their ability to communicate with us or express things in the ways we do. If elephants judged humans on their ability to communicate in infrasound to speak their names (yes they have names for each other) they'd wouldn't think too highly of us.

Sidenote but the latest I've heard is that elephants like us because they think we are cute.
by ummonk | 2025-05-26 00:50:13+00:00
I had a road map of the county, with an index mapping each name to squares on the map, and address intervals listed on each long road. It would take me a few minutes tops to prepare turn by turn directions to a new address.

If I needed a direction addresses for another city I'd just go there (had a full highway map of the country) and buy the local map - they were typically for sale near the front of basically every store (gas station, pharmacy, etc.).
by EGreg | 2025-05-26 00:50:26+00:00
I asked why are school vouchers bad since it’s a single payer system.

The “progressives” told me it would starve public schools of funds and students since private schools would admit only the best and brightest

So I said — don’t let the schools choose. Let the people choose. If the school is filled then you use a lottery for who can actually get in, M of N people. Simple.
by ghaff | 2025-05-26 00:51:06+00:00
Fahrenheit is about half the size of increments without decimals or fractions which, having grown up with it ,seems useful. Yeah, I kinda want to know about 32 degrees but that doesn't seem a huge cognitive load. Knowing sub-zero is fricking cold is a decent benchmark as is knowing that >100 degrees is fricking hot. Yeah, 212 degrees for boiling is a bit weird but don't really need that much and that's only at standard pressure anyway.
by euvin | 2025-05-26 00:51:13+00:00
I did write about that! tl;dr I think it'd be really cool as an augmentation, the only thing steering me away from solely AI-generated graphs are hallucinations. But I think it definitely has a place in some capacity for anyone who wants to discover "what they don't know that they don't know", to find the prerequisite skills they don't realize they're missing.

https://euvinkeel.github.io/tart/Traversing-Knowledge-Graphs
by ipdashc | 2025-05-26 00:51:18+00:00
> And then play becomes real, with real consequences.

Who knew WarGames would turn out to be so accurate?

EDIT: On further thought, it's kinda funny how most evaluations of the movie find that it's all relatively (exaggeratedly) realistic... with the one major exception of the whole seemingly-sentient, learning AI thing. And now here we are.
by mikhmha | 2025-05-26 00:51:21+00:00
Continuing to work on my MMORPG made with Elixir and Godot. The game has been live for 2 months but there's still lots to do. A lot of the architecture revolves around the AI simulation run in Elixir. I started working on this game after quitting my job on a whim (18 months ago!). I've started to get some daily players which is exciting.

https://swarmmo.games The game is playable in browser! And theres no sign-up required to try it out.
by stratts | 2025-05-26 00:51:32+00:00
Looks nice! Some thoughts:

const now = ctx.flag("now", bool); // type-safe flag access

This is type-safe, but only at run time. Since your flags are (or could be) known at compile time, it would be nice to have this throw a compile error if the type is invalid.

Or even better - fully lean into comptime and generate a struct so you can use field access without specifying a type:

const now = ctx.flag.now;
by rchaud | 2025-05-26 00:53:27+00:00
Apple famously didn't use it because it didn't sit inside their walled garden and they couldn't put any ads in it, take a cut of every sale, nor charge developers annually for the privilege of building on their property. That's 3 revenue sources that users and developers were skipping out on.

Android phones had Flash support and it worked well enough. Was it desktop-level, of course not. But Android native apps themselves were a mess from a power consumption standpoint until they implemented a JIT compiler in v2.3 "Gingerbread" as well as a task manager that freed up RAM by closing inactive applications. I remember specifically choosing an ASUS android tablet over an iPad because I wanted to use the full web, open multiple tabs at a time and play Flash games, rather than deal with iOS' "one app open at a time" philosophy.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-26 00:53:40+00:00
> [...] at minimum looking at SQLite Encryption Extension (SEE) (https://www.sqlite.org/see/doc/trunk/www/readme.wiki).

SEE is a proprietary extension, however generous its license is. So it is not very meaningful when sqlar is compared against ZIP. Not to say that I necessarily see encryption as a fundamental feature for compressed archive formats though---I'm advocating for age [1] integration instead.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/age

> IMHO sqlar is not competing with ZIP (can zip do metadata and transactions?)

In my understanding SQLite's support for sqlar and ZIP occurred at the same time, so I believe that sqlar was created to demonstrate an alternative to ZIP (and that the demonstration wasn't good enough). I'm aware that this is just a circumstantial evidence, so let me know if you have some concrete one.

ZIP can of course do metadata in the form of per-file and archive comments. For more structured metadata, you can make use of extra fields if you really, really want, but at that point SQLite would indeed be a better choice. I however doubt it's a typical use case.

ZIP can be partially updated in place but can't do any transaction. But it should be noted that SQLite handles transaction by additional files (`-journal` or `-wal` files). So both sqlar and ZIP would write to an additional file during the update process, though SQLite would write much less data compared to ZIP. Any remaining differences are invisible to end users, unless the in-place update is common enough in which case the use of SQLite is justified.
by teeray | 2025-05-26 00:53:53+00:00
> What if I've got 20 different handlers, each of which need 5-10 dependencies out of 30+, and which run in 4 different environments, using 2 different implementations.

Listen to your code. If it’s hard to write all that, it probably means you have too many dependencies. Making it easier to jam more dependencies in your modules is just going to make things worse. “But I need all those…” Do you really? They rarely ever are all necessary, in my experience. Usually there’s a better way to untangle the dependency tree.
by bsder | 2025-05-26 00:54:21+00:00
You can't put Ticketmaster aside precisely because Ticketmaster likes scalpers. They don't want to shut down scalpers. Hell, for all I know, Ticketmaster might actually BE the scalpers (talk about paranoia ... but, hey, vertical integration for the win).

Consequently, even if there are "technical" solutions to scalpers, the socio-political aspects prevent the solution from being deployed.
by tootyskooty | 2025-05-26 00:54:37+00:00
https://periplus.app

A website for open-ended learning with LLMs. Something like a personalized, generative Wikipedia. Has generated courses, documents, quizzes and flashcards.

Each document links to more documents, which are all stored in a graph you grow over time. Currently using the graph for topic suggestions, though I've also been playing around with steering document generation with it as well.
by thingsilearned | 2025-05-26 00:55:01+00:00
I recently released suggestion-mode functionality for prosemirror

https://github.com/davefowler/prosemirror-suggestion-mode

and now I'm building it into my reading and note taking app for a better interaction of AI giving assisted edits, most similar to the Patchwork project from ink and switch https://www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/notebook/07/
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-26 00:55:25+00:00
Go ask the operator of a Chinese room to do some math they weren't taught in school, and see if the translation guide helps.

The analogy I've used before is a bright first-grader named Johnny. Johnny stumbles across a high school algebra book. Unless Johnny's last name is von Neumann, he isn't going to get anything out of that book. An LLM will.

So much for the Chinese Room.