MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 20:04:22+00:00
First of all it's an infinitely difficult problem to justly gauge value for value approximations, so a roughly free market will always have price fluctuations where people experiment.

And there's nothing inherently wrong with advertising. How else do you let your potential market know you have a product that they would benefit from? It's not always deception to get into their wallets, sometimes it's a genuine fair value trade.

Though I do think modern practices are full of immoral patterns, especially what George Lucas pioneered of brainwashing children into buying things. So yeah I agree that in practice, most modern marketing is just plain deception.

On the other hand, you then have millions of young, talented developers wasting their time and energy on open source projects that are hugely innovative and useful, but because they wholesale reject marketing, their projects never get anywhere, and they settle for unfulfilling jobs that society could do without.

And maybe the saddest part of all is that many such young talented devs spent so much time making useful projects for free, and never saw a dime because of it, despite the fact that corporations are now profiting from their work daily. You may say, well, the dev put it out there for free and didn't ask for money, but in the current market, what other choice is there? The race to the bottom has already been won and first place was $0.
by ben_w | 2025-05-26 20:04:43+00:00
As an adult learner:

For apps, I use Clozemaster and Babbel. Unfortunately Babbel is starting to feel like it's also chasing gamification, but it does have sensible content.

For podcasts and YouTube content, I follow EasyGerman and Coffee Break German, and both are part of larger brands for other languages:

https://www.easy-languages.org/our-languages

https://coffeebreakacademy.com/

For kids… what about kids books in the target language?
by leoc | 2025-05-26 20:05:14+00:00
The quality of advice on Reddit seems to be variable, unfortunately. Apparently https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese is full of people who've spent years doing Genki (https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/ , probably an even bigger sinkhole for money, time and enthusiasm than DuoLingo) with little to show for it who are determined to drag everyone else into the same crab-bucket, for instance. OTOH https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/ used to be very helpful.
by hbn | 2025-05-26 20:05:27+00:00
I like that Duolingo gives me some kind of curriculum and guides me through new concepts so I'm exposed to new words and study them for a few days at a time. But you have to be intentional with your learning to actually learn. Learning a language is hard, and Duolingo knows people will stop using their app if they challenge people too much and the app becomes a place to feel bad about how little Spanish you know. So their lessons are designed to be passable and not frustrating rather than a method of learning.

Some techniques I use is not looking at the words when they're being read out to practice my listening (though sometimes the TTS voices make things unnecessarily difficult to understand), and I also try not to look at the word bank before trying to translate a sentence in my head first.

My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with words/phrases you haven't done in a while. It's a little too easy to get into the swing of a unit where the words are fresh in your brain's cache, but having them pulled out from cold storage would makes sure you've actually got them locked into your memory.

Also they should have a setting to disable word banks so you're forced to type everything.

Seedlang seems cool though, I'm gonna give it a download later.
by Unearned5161 | 2025-05-26 20:05:46+00:00
It looks nice, but I'm not sure I'd jump ship from my snippets setup I have with vim. At the end of the day it would be very similar to a mouse hand movement and would probably take a long time to get it as quick and comfortable as just typing "aa" for alpha when I'm in math mode which I get into with "mk"
by jajko | 2025-05-26 20:06:02+00:00
I only did it once (fb login for airbnb) and I deeply regret to this day. Airbnb cant even migrate my account to another type (plain old username & password is best for me).

The reason - over time I started renting an apartment there, the reputation and stream of guests is simply too big wall to climb over (I mean it can be done easily but it would hurt financially pretty bad).

Now I cant get rid of that cancer that facebook is. 10 years ago it didnt seems so, my mistake, should have seen it coming.
by eigenspace | 2025-05-26 20:07:19+00:00
Agreed. Even Seedlang was of limited use to me past a certain point, I just think it did a much better job at the same niche as Duolingo.

For me as someone who has never taken actual German courses, the biggest thing that contributed to my fluency was just listening to podcasts in German non-stop. Didn't matter if I wasn't understanding anything for months and months at the start.

I think the listening played a huge role in familiarizing my brain with wide swathes of the language. It made it so that when I learned other things later on, instead of being actually 'new', it was things I recognized and already had a sort of 'feel' for by association, even if I didn't know what it actually meant.

It was really cool watching as I went through a bit of a 'phase-change' at one point where one week I felt like I wasn't understanding more than few words per sentence and not able to actually follow conversations without looking stuff up, and then the next week it suddenly 'melted' and I was able to bridge the meaning between words and was actually understanding and following entire conversations.

My German still isn't perfect, especially my grammar and I probably should take some courses for that though. But I am at least fluent which is great.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-05-26 20:07:19+00:00
No-one voted for this. The police in the UK are using a combination of existing powers (for example, intimidating people by using their powers to question people), non-statutory instruments that politicians have told them repeatedly to stop using, and laws that are being applied to the online world in an expansive way (the current PM is the former head of government prosecutions so is basically the worst person possible to prevent this, the person who passed one of the most infamous laws, Tony Blair, has said it is problematic).

Just generally, this model doesn't apply to the UK. There is an extremely long history of people voting one way and the government doing something else. This is because the country is led by people whose views are shared by no-one, and the tremendous power of the Civil Service (elected officials have limited powers to direct civil servants and cannot remove all but a handful of civil servants...there was an example recently of a senior civil servant giving incorrect information to a minister, the minister was forced to resign, that senior civil servant stayed in for several years, another minister attempted to remove them, the civil servant sued and won a substantial settlement then chose to retire early on a full pension...he was responsible for several massive issues in his department too, Windrush was one, there were many others).

A more nefarious factor is that turnout has collapsed because voters, correctly, understand that their vote doesn't actually matter. The government is unable to do things so why bother voting. Turnout is significantly higher in Russia presidential elections.

To give you an example, the current level of immigration is supported by ~3% of the population. No-one supports this. The government knows no-one supports this. Immigration has stayed high for multiple years, we have had elections, it doesn't matter. If we elected someone to fix it, they would be unable to fix it. Labour have tried to fix it...they spent years in opposition saying the Tories couldn't fix it with their policies...they get into government, within a year they are now trying the exact same policies...because Parliament has no real control, whether in theory or in reality, to change anything, the government gets in, the civil service present the same choices that won't work...you have to be actually mad to think voting makes a difference. The idea that you can fix things by voting is the reason why things are stagnating.
by KaiserPro | 2025-05-26 20:08:14+00:00
The article is out by a factor of 10, from the data I can find its 900 arrests in 2 years.

The problem is that this act is also the way to prosecute death threats.

In the UK its generally frowned on to send threats of violence. Given that we also have a much lower homicide rate, I'd say thats a fair exchange. even if the act causes aberrations.

The article would be more convincing if it talked about the pub order act 2023, which allows the police to do this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj3x5j6g30ro

But as thats protest law, it appears that it doesn't count as free speech.

Now the bits that are concerning are that the courts system is so underfunded that there is no legal support for defendants. Proper representation would help eliminate a large number of the stupid and frivolous cases. This is why legal aid needs to be for everyone. ITs not down to funding to determine guilt, its the courts.

The point about magistrates being untrained is bollocks. They are "lay" for a reason. Thats the bedrock of common law.
by catigula | 2025-05-26 20:08:18+00:00
The CEO of my company is the same person.

Narcissism blinders on, "you can develop an entire application in minutes, we can fire our whole staff".

Doesn't realize that if this was true he'd be fired as well.

The entrepreneurial mind isn't responding well to the realities and risks of AI. It appears to be oil and water.
by IngoBlechschmid | 2025-05-26 20:08:48+00:00
I like Vim's digraphs, which go in a similar direction. For instance, Ctrl-K = > gives ⇒, Ctrl-K a * gives α. An overview of available digraphs is available at :digraphs.

Otherwise I like the Agda input method of Emacs, where \to gives ⇒ and \alpha (or \Ga) gives α.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-26 20:09:26+00:00
Illiberal democracies are also democracies if we treat 1950s era US, Australia, UK, and Canada as democracies.

Much of the Western world only saw a shift to Liberal Democracy (as in the enshrinement of civil liberties and limits to majoritarianism) in the 1960s to 1990s.

Liberal Democracy can be protected only if it's norms are enshrined in jurisprudence, and a lot of Liberal Democracies like the UK didn't do so.
by alwa | 2025-05-26 20:09:28+00:00
Burning is the how, but turning it into useful energy is the what. When I think of burning waste, I think of burn pits: making the stuff go away, but not making anything new with it. This seems different from that (and even a clean, high-temperature incinerator, one that fully combusts everything, is a different beast from a smoggy sooty open burn).

Of course glass, aluminum, and paper aren’t made of lightly-modified oil: they’re not all that useful as far as producing energy, nor can they substitute for new extraction of an energy resource.

I guess you could process paper into pulp pellets for fuel, and by instead turning paper into slightly-crappier paper you cut out a highly intensive transformation from timber to paper. But for plastics, isn’t the transformation from oil to plastic relatively minor?

Why is it especially virtuous for the end recycled product to be a structural product as opposed to a fuel product? Especially when it’s substituting for existing petroleum-based production, and unlikely ever to drive demand of its own? And why would burying it in the ground compare favorably to either?
by Flemlo | 2025-05-26 20:10:01+00:00
I believe we are seeing the new car, Internet etc

And we live now in such a fast pace that it feels like Ai should be perfect already and it's of course not.

I also see that an expert can leverage Ai a lot better because you still need to know enough to make good things without.

But Ai progresses very fast and still has achieved things were we have not had any answer than before.

What it can already do is still very aligned of what I assume/expect it from the current hype.

Llama made our ocr 20% better just by using it. I prompted plenty of code snippets and stuff which saved me time and was fun using it. Including python scripts for a small ml pipeline and I normally don't write python.

It's the first tech demo ever which people around me just 'got' after I showed it to them.

It's the first chatbot I have seen which doesn't flake out after my second question.

Chatgpt pushed billions into new computer. Blackwell is the first chip to hit the lower estimation for brain compute performance.

It changed the research field of computer linguistics.

I believe it's fundamental to keep a very close eye on it and trying things out regular otherwise it will over roll us suddenly.

I really enjoy using Claude.

Edit: and eli5 on research paper. That's so so good
by ankushnarula | 2025-05-26 20:10:07+00:00
You have not earned the right to be heard in this context.

You have not earned the right to direct the attention of others.

You have violated the sacred trust placed in you by your employer by exploiting your access to a public-facing employer event.

If you cannot control your thymotic impulses where you earn your food and shelter, then you cannot be trusted again.

You must accept the consequences of your moral convictions.

This is dharmic justice.
by to11mtm | 2025-05-26 20:10:26+00:00
> timing skew between lanes

That's a big part of it. I remember in the Early Pentium 4 days, starting to see a lot more visible 'squiggles' on PCB traces on motherboards; the squiggles essentially being a case of 'these lines need more length to be about as long as the other lines and not skew timing'

In the case of what the article is describing, I'm imagining a sort of 'harness cable' that has a connector on each end for all the fibers, and the fibers in the cable itself are all the same length, there wouldn't be a skew timing issue. (Instead, you worry about bend radius limitations.)

> Would the SerDes be the new bottleneck in the approach

I'd think yes, but at the same time in my head I can't really decide whether it's a harder problem than normal mux/demux.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 20:10:43+00:00
The $.50 version is barely food. The $1.69 is not much better, and still very unhealthy for you. Have ground beef and a fiber rich low calorie food like brocoli or whole wheat whole grain noodles or something.

Anyway you're not really helping the poor in practice when you do this. Corporations aren't hurting because one guy or even a dozen he inspires through HN stop buying a few boxes of kraft dinner.

If more people did it, and it became a movement, like buying clothes from the thrift store is becoming, then clothiers will shift business focus. Which to some extent they seem to have done over the past 20 years. But only slightly.
by joenot443 | 2025-05-26 20:10:55+00:00
This sort of notification-barrage is a common problem in mobile apps with multiple teams and I really wish it wasn’t. I still use Facebook quite a bit and I’m consistently frustrated by how degenerate the concept of a “notification” has become. Some of the finest engineers I know work at Meta, I know it’s not a technical problem, I think it’s an organizational problem. For example…

Team A ships feature X and sets their KPI to some arbitrary measure of engagement. They miss, obviously, but instead of regrouping and hitting the drawing board, A doubles down and pressures Team B to point towards X in feature Y. A sees some marginal level of gain in engagement for X, obviously, so the intervention is deemed a success. 6mos later, Team A is asked to return the favor and add a modal pointing to new feature Z, per the request of Team B.

I don’t really know what the solution is except outside of careful org-wide watchdogging to ensure this sort of user-hostile engagement infighting gets nipped in the bud.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-26 20:11:31+00:00
Well, besides their handling of the former bloc countries post-Soviet dissolution. That was pretty clutch.

And the DMA/DSA too, both of those are some ballsy consumer protections. The flaccid CEOs in America would blackball that before it hit the ticket.

The security guarantees are rather spiffy too, and you can't deny they've got a competitive trade policy. Redundant weapons suppliers are also important ever since America started backdooring F-35s and F-16s. Plus their regional wines are really quite tasty and cheap when enjoyed domestically.

But besides all those things, what has the EU ever done for us?
by jay-barronville | 2025-05-26 20:11:51+00:00
> I think NodeJS apps typically rely on JavaScript event-loop instead of starting new processes all the time.

> Spawning new processes for every user is possible but would probabaly be less scalable than even thread-switching.

I’d just like to note/clarify that there is, in fact, multi-threading happening under the hood when running Node.js. libuv, the underlying library used for creating and managing the event loops, also creates and maintains thread pools that are used for some concurrent and parallelizable tasks. The fact that JavaScript (V8 in the case of Node.js) and the main event loop are single-threaded doesn’t mean that multi-threading isn’t involved. This is a common source of confusion.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-26 20:12:04+00:00
I didn’t see anyone else bring this up here, but the real issue with plastic recycling is twofold: it is a dead end and recycled plastics shed microplastics like crazy. Other materials, like aluminum, can effectively be infinitely recycled, but plastic cannot; recycled plastic is worse than virgin plastic in every way. It also destroys the environment around us, because recycled plastics are effectively really shitty plastics that shed everywhere.

In short, plastic recycling is a fraud perpetuated by greenwashing initiatives. The only proper thing to do with old plastic is to incinerate it at high temperatures that achieve complete combustion. This is rare though; most plastic is burned at low enough temperatures that it causes pollution.

Great stuff, plastic, huh?
by kqr | 2025-05-26 20:12:23+00:00
For context, "worse is better" refers to Gabriel's observation that products with simple implementations and complicated interfaces tend to achieve adoption faster than products with complex implementations and elegant interfaces.

One of the original motivating examples were Unix-like systems (simple implementation, few correctness guarantees in interfaces) vs. Lisp-based systems (often well specified interfaces, but with complicated implementations as the cost.)
by eigenspace | 2025-05-26 20:12:25+00:00
Seedlang also has a curriculum design (and one that I think makes more sense).

> My main wish from Duolingo is some kind of lesson I could go into that just grabs questions from old lessons with words/phrases you haven't done in a while. It's a little too easy to get into the swing of a unit where the words are fresh in your brain's cache, but having them pulled out of nowhere would makes sure you've actually got them locked into your memory

Seedlang does this too. There's a gigantic library of all the exercises and you can go through them and put them in your review lists. Each time you review an exercise, you rate the exercise as 'hard' or 'easy', and depening on the rating, that exercise will then show up more or less often in the future. Eventually if the interval gets to be a year long, it'll give you the option to retire an exercise.

Each time you do a lesson, it'll list all the exercises from that lesson and you can choose which ones you want added to your review queue. It's really nice. Lots of control over your own spaced-reptition needs.

> Also they should have a setting to disable word banks so you're forced to type everything.

Yeah definitely. Seedlang also does this btw!
by JadeNB | 2025-05-26 20:12:29+00:00
> And the second goes for the people affected by the muddled laws too, who have way more discretion than the police.

Are you arguing that the fault for being on the wrong side of the powerful lies with the people who could have just decided not to be on the wrong side of the powerful?

We're discussing here laws where someone, whether the police or some other authority figure, is going to be deciding whether you're subject to them based not on plain and objective facts, but on subjective criteria - which inevitably, and unaccountably, will include your other activities. They're designed to offer a fig leaf so that you can be prosecuted for something whose punishment is comparatively palatable, without having to acknowledge the actual cause for offense.

Of course one can argue whether any particular law falls in this category, but I think it's difficult to argue that the designed consequences of such laws are the fault of the person subject to them.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-26 20:13:17+00:00
My comment definitely has more points than the two above it, but it's lower, even though that pattern isn't true with my other comments. Probably because Daniel manually demoted it as part of his manual/automatic hybrid moderation tooling, and probably for the sake of being humble about the amount of work he does for HN. Which I think is an interesting example of my other comment's point about how dang probably moderates HN. I'd be curious whether I'm very far off with this Daniel.
by KaiserPro | 2025-05-26 20:13:36+00:00
> but it's markedly less bad than the "hate speech" laws

those laws require due process. the american immigration "charges" are not tested by courts. They are executive actions, that might be challenged if you are rich enough.

The UK does not have "hate speech" laws. It never had, anyone who tells you otherwise is pulling your leg. What can happen is you can ask for a more harsh sentence if there is "hate" involved. Yes, you will have heard of cases where someone was simple "just a bit racist" but thats moreoften than not an aggravating factor.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-26 20:14:16+00:00
I'm not sure it can be attributed to political parties in the UK.

By most standards, the British political tradition has remained paternalistic in it's mindset, and a lot of the shifts in civil liberties happened fairly late (1980s-90s) and without the requisite judicial scaffolding being built in place.

Furthermore, a lot of the same powers and institutions used for internal security during the Troubles were redeployed during the GWOT and never pushed back against legally speaking.

For example, London was the first major city to deploy centralized CCTV surveillance en masse.

And this isn't a UK only thing - across Europe, mass surveillance laws and government perogative are much stronger than their equivalents in the US, and given tensions on the eastern border of EU+ due to a belligerent neighbor like Russia and Azerbaijan using grey zone tactics, I think we might see a further regression on this front, because NatSec will always trump liberties.

By most standards, we're in an interregnum period similar to the 1930s, the "Dreadnought Wars" (1906-1914), or the 1950s that can spill over.
by ben_w | 2025-05-26 20:14:19+00:00
Imagine the shareholders saying:

"Why settle for 3 years when you can milk people for a lifetime? If it takes 10,000 hours to master something," it doesn't but they'll likely use that meme, "and you plan to spread that learning over 72 years, they must not spend more than 22 minutes a day actually learning anything! The rest of the day should be adverts and retention."