MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-09 14:46:26+00:00
>18 months runs into the problem of nobody being willing to buy something on month 17

Well, that's one way to look at it. The other way is that it merely limits how much it can be sold for on month 17. When I was in high school, one of the big malls had a dollar-a-ticket movie theater. People would pay for things that are more easily/cheaply available soon, they just won't pay the premiums demanded now.

But there's a third way to look at it... the idea that they never owned the intellectual property anyway. It always belonged to the public domain, they had a temporary lease. And in that view, the idea that they'd have trouble extracting maximum dollars from it on the day before the lease ends is absurd. No one cares, nor should they care.

>I’d be tempted never to pay for another movie again a

Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience. I can do all the streaming I need, to any of my devices (or my friends' devices) anywhere in the world. Everything on demand, from every premium channel and streaming service, in the highest resolution. Every minute or every day. I read comments here and elsewhere about people complaining how they have to cancel Netflix, the show's over, but they have to resubscribe to Disney because the new show's on, etc. It's all bizarre. The stuff you guys are willing to put up with is mind-boggling.

>5 years is probably at the lower end of actually extracting a large fraction of total value

You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit. Not "value". The magnitude of the grift in the industry that gave us the term "Hollywood accounting" is beyond human imagination or capacity to comprehend. Stop enabling that.
by jitl | 2025-05-09 14:47:27+00:00
JSX is a better data structure than strings for expressing views, but this doesn’t use strings or any other data structure.

The beauty of the OP’s approach is the immediate mode render approach. JSX is a data structure, immediate mode implies a structure from the order of execution of computation.

You need JSX to pass around fragments of a view, unless your view is made entirely of computation, in which case you can just pass around functions.
by tombert | 2025-05-09 14:47:44+00:00
If your argument begins with "people should just..." then generally you've already lost the argument. The fact is that people aren't doing whatever you're suggesting, for whatever reason, and no amount of righteous indignation is going to suddenly make people change that. I guess you can sit there smug and feel good about yourself, and that's worth something, but you can't expect people to give a shit about that.

In this case, legislation could help ameliorate this problem, and maybe taxing the actual cost of things (e.g. environmental impact) instead of just letting the future generations deal with it.
by Karliss | 2025-05-09 14:48:01+00:00
There is no way to join 2 nodes without introducing new edge, unless there is some hidden shortcut. Also the "connect paths" ignores selection and instead randomly picks one of the two ends with matching direction. Even if you know the end direction rule you can't know which of the 2 endpoint pairs will be connected.

I might be slightly biased as I am more used to even/odd infill mode compared to non zero mode, but having user constantly keep track of which paths are clockwise and which are counterclockwise seems like unnecessary hassle, especially for paths without infill where it shouldn't matter. At least there is a UI indicator for it, otherwise I would be very confused.
by Retric | 2025-05-09 14:48:19+00:00
> Why aren't you tempted for that now? I gave in to that temptation, and it is the superior experience.

Ethics

> You should be concerned with whether they can extract their costs, plus modest profit.

The creative industry isn’t wildly profitable. Slash the amount of money movies/books/etc make on average and you dramatically reduce the amount of movies/books/etc published.

After all we could totally remove copyright, but then you don’t get leech off the fruits of other people’s labor if they never preform that labor.
by stncls | 2025-05-09 14:48:19+00:00
If this is business critical for you, you may want to switch to a faster solver. Glop is very nice, but it would be reasonable to expect a commercial solver (Gurobi, XPress, COpt) to be 60x faster [1]. By the same measure, the best open source solvers (CLP, HiGHS) are 2-3x faster than Glop.

Actually, the commercial solvers are so fast that I would not be surprised if they solved the IP problem as fast as Glop solves the LP. (Yes, the theory says it is impossible, but in practice it happens.) The cost of a commercial solver is 10k to 50k per license.

[1] ... this 60x number has very high variance depending on the type of problem, but it is not taken out of nowhere, it comes from the Mittelmann LP benchmarks https://plato.asu.edu/ftp/lpopt.html There are also benchmarks for other types of problems, including IP, see the whole list here: https://plato.asu.edu/bench.html
by DamnInteresting | 2025-05-09 14:48:24+00:00
Alan Bellows here, author of this article, and founder of Damn Interesting. For years I kept the site going by working a part-time coding job, along with occasional contract work. Combined with donations to the site, this brought in enough income to survive, while allowing me to dedicate 5-6 hours per weekday to writing/editing/etc.

Early in the pandemic my job wrapped up, and when I went looking for a new part-time or contract gig, there was absolutely nothing. I networked and searched for a year and a half, and never found a single part-time opening. In the meantime, donations to the site were on a steady downward trajectory. I was burning through my savings at an alarming rate.

Eventually I had to take a regular full-time job just to have income again. I hoped I could find some plausible approach, but so far it's been unworkable. I also have a six year old, so evenings and weekends tend to be spoken for. And after the little one's bedtime, there's not much left in the fuel tanks. I'm approaching 50 now.

Maybe I'll find a part-time gig, or perhaps some anonymous wealthy benefactor will fund the site for a while. Both have happened before. If not, we may need to pack it up soon. 20 years is a pretty good run.
by hmsimha | 2025-05-09 14:48:42+00:00
I think there are some issues with cryptpad, most significantly that documents which are shared via their share link (default way of sharing) will effectively be shared with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and so on. I think this is dangerous because some users may be under the impression that Cryptpad secures their documents from the prying of big tech's eyes, but since it's guaranteed that at least some document collaborators will be using those companies' browsers, and browser history is synced, the URLs (which contain the key to decrypt the document after the fragment) to any document which is shared with more than handful of cypherpunks will certainly end up shared with the main browser vendors

Additionally, they've failed to make some architectural and delivery decisions which would protect users from various attacks like a server compromise (for example, a server seized by an adversary may send malicious client code that conducts a document exfiltration), as well as document exfiltration via a malicious browser extension. Both of these can be mitigated somewhat by delivering the frontend as a desktop app or signed browser extension, and setting reasonable CSPs in the decryption modules. This is exactly the reason Signal doesn't offer a web app.

Cryptpad does offer the ability to additionally encrypt documents with shared passwords, and this offers a fair modicum of greater protection against document interception. But this isn't the default document mode, so I doubt most documents are password-protected in practice.

I did share all of the above with the Cryptpad team, and was told they don't intend to address the above issues, so I'd recommend against putting to much faith in them for the time being.
by crowbahr | 2025-05-09 14:48:42+00:00
What's the point of learning how any exploits work. Why learn about SQL injection or xss attacks?

It sounds like you're reflexively defending the system for some reason. There are endless reasons to learn how to break things and it's a very strange question to pose on a forum who's eponym is centered around this exact subject. This is hacking at its core.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-09 14:49:10+00:00
> I'm interested in seeing how well this could be attained in SQLite with window functions[1] since SQLite doesn't seem to support a CREATE AGGREGATE.

SQLite3 very much does support user-defined aggregate functions, just not with a CREATE AGGREGATE statement. You have to use one of the `sqlite3_create_function*()` C functions[0][1][2] to create a user-defined aggregate function:

The sixth, seventh and eighth parameters passed to the three "sqlite3_create_function*" functions, xFunc, xStep and xFinal, are pointers to C-language functions that implement the SQL function or aggregate. A scalar SQL function requires an implementation of the xFunc callback only; NULL pointers must be passed as the xStep and xFinal parameters. An aggregate SQL function requires an implementation of xStep and xFinal and NULL pointer must be passed for xFunc. To delete an existing SQL function or aggregate, pass NULL pointers for all three function callbacks. The sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth parameters (xStep, xFinal, xValue and xInverse) passed to sqlite3_create_window_function are pointers to C-language callbacks that implement the new function. xStep and xFinal must both be non-NULL. xValue and xInverse may either both be NULL, in which case a regular aggregate function is created, or must both be non-NULL, in which case the new function may be used as either an aggregate or aggregate window function. More details regarding the implementation of aggregate window functions are available here.

> There would also need to be some python[2] to provide the PL/SQL logic shown.

Ah, so you do know about the `sqlite3_create_function*()` functions. You don't have to use Python, though you can of course.

[0] https://sqlite.org/c3ref/create_function.html [1] https://sqlite.org/appfunc.html#the_aggregate_function_callbacks [2] https://sqlite.org/windowfunctions.html#udfwinfunc*
by Swizec | 2025-05-09 14:49:16+00:00
> > Subskills cover skills > Isn't this requirement a common fallacy in education?

Whole careers have been built on being one of only a few people in the world who can perform A and B together. Like that physics guy who can also write good sci-fi.

There are 3 skills actually. A, B, and A u B. That intersection is often the hardest.
by horsawlarway | 2025-05-09 14:49:31+00:00
> The only thing the standard not adding them did was make sure we can't rely on them being there.

I mean... that's basically the entire point of the decision. If you can't rely on them... you can't rely on them to ship metadata.

If you could rely on them to ship metadata... you start seeing parsers diverge wildly in features and scope - to the point that you've really got several different protocols all pretending to be "JSON". You end up with JSON_V1_UTF8_RTL, and JSON_V4_UCS2 and JSON_V3_EXT_UNICODE_LE, etc... All of which will be subtly (or not so subtly) incompatible, and then you're right back at XML.

No one is stopping you from writing config files in a superset of JSON that supports comments (yaml being the most common).

But the HUGE win here is that those formats are actually supersets - not alternative protocols. They all parse plain JSON. They might also happen to do tricky things - but if you give it standard JSON it works a-ok.

---

I think that there's an argument to be made that given how successful JSON is NOW - adding the ability to insert comments might be valuable (See: JSONC, or JSON5)

But I think as far as the initial stages went, not having comments was pretty clearly the right call.

Like - it's just a small step from comments to processing_instructions (ala XML: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processing_Instruction) and while I don't always agree with Crockford... I'm with him 1000% that the second you let that kind of metadata live in the format... the complexity EXPLODES.

Better to keep the standard format intentionally clean of it, and let people declare their own supersets.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-09 14:49:55+00:00
To a large extent, insofar as Trump is a dictator, it is only because Congress have decided to allow that through inaction. At least for the time being (though, see, for instance, the Weimar Republic; this may end up being a use-it-or-lose-it ability), they still do have the power to largely put him back in his box if they want to.
by pc86 | 2025-05-09 14:50:03+00:00
Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of journal publication and that sort of thing.

But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
by roenxi | 2025-05-09 14:50:26+00:00
This idea is probably more interesting if applied to software engineering management. There is a bit of a competency crisis among software managers where it isn't possible to tell whether they are any good at what they are allegedly doing.

The kneejerk reaction of most businesses seems to be either metrics that don't really work or relying on hypercompetent individuals in the higher parts of the management tree. Neither approach works particularly well. But I haven't seen a skill tree style competency training & testing approach and I suspect it'd work better than the apparent status quo. At least on paper the managers have been trained to do something instead of just dumping smart people into the role and hoping that they figure it out.

For example someone can get certified in Agile and that is ... in some sense a bit silly because then they just spend the rest of their life noticing that most people don't use Agile. But a skill-based approach to the components of Agile development and training them to raise hackles in particular situations where people make common bad architectural decisions would cause productive cultural shifts. I suppose the sort of training that gets done doesn't go far enough.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-09 14:50:32+00:00
I am for sure not educated about the difference between CCS and CCS2 but it does say it's not just CHAdeMO https://openinverter.org/wiki/ZombieVerter_VCU#:~:text=ccs%2... and further down they cite a BMW i3 which I had and it fast charged to my satisfaction
by just6979 | 2025-05-09 14:50:50+00:00
It's not recommended as much anymore because of unit tests. Instead of peppering the code with asserts, you build tests based on those assertions. You don't have to worry about turning it off in production because the tests are separate, and you also don't have to worry about manually triggering all the various asserts in a dev build, because the test runs are doing that for you even before a build is published.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-09 14:51:36+00:00
>that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data,

I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who do wrong.

But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get them the death penalty by testifying, but without increasing the odds of the death penalty.

"Career death penalty" here is like that.

>"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification.

It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and attempt to show that things need to change if we want the fraud to go away.

>You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate

We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.
by Onawa | 2025-05-09 14:51:52+00:00
> tariffs to shield American blue collar jobs

Except that Trump's tariffs are causing massive financial uncertainty for small/medium-size businesses. If you want to onshore manufacturing and production, and specifically build up the blue-collar class, you don't implement tariffs immediately and unilaterally. You plan for them to be implemented over time and give businesses the opportunity to shift their procurement and production to domestic sources.

When you implement tariffs with no warning, the only businesses that can absorb those increased costs are the largest businesses. Then those large businesses can also start to buy up every other business, or at least outcompete on price long enough to monopolize the market.
by CoffeeOnWrite | 2025-05-09 14:52:22+00:00
I’m worried about BART. The new gate tap scanners work so poorly, somebody really screwed those up, and they haven’t publicly explained what went wrong. I don’t understand why the media doesn’t cover this apparent bad screw up. There were a number of articles on the selection of the design and the planned rollout and the demonstrated susceptibility to ongoing fare evasion, but silence on the adverse impact on paying passengers.

Every day the last week at my station there are piles of commuters held up by the semi-broken scanners. Kudos to the front line staff down there apologizing. I am not holding my breath it’ll be fixed anytime soon.
by zahlman | 2025-05-09 14:52:52+00:00
The developers and other big community names are also fond of the joke. For example, from https://peps.python.org/pep-2026/ (proposing to switch to proper calendar versioning for Python, since it already has a yearly release cadence):

> [under "Rejected Ideas"] Change during 3.14 cycle

> The Python 3.14 release must go ahead because: π.
by jfindley | 2025-05-09 14:53:52+00:00
Plus one on the floating thing, on desktop it'd be great to be able to move it out of my way but still have it present.

Also, while I assume/hope there are shortcut keys on desktop, I have no idea what there are and if they're documented anywhere I can't find it. If there aren't shortcut keys, it'd be super useful to add them, at least for common actions.
by ghaff | 2025-05-09 14:53:58+00:00
Yeah, multiple opulent houses seems like a lot of work. Even if I hire people to manage seems like a lot of head-space. I can stay in really nice hotels and eat in nice restaurants for a lot less money and effort. OK, maybe a private jet or at least NetJets or whatever the current thing is.

At a much smaller scale I've thought about a small city place and concluded it just wasn't worth the effort vs. renting at a nice time of the year.
by marianoguerra | 2025-05-09 14:54:05+00:00
in the browser you can compile modules and create instances from arrays of numbers/bytes, here's an obfuscated example: https://wasmgroundup.com/blog/wasm-compiler-in-a-tweet

if the host provides the guest wasm module via imports a function to create and run from an array of bytes then it can be done today (if I understand you correctly).

Here's some related content: https://github.com/pdubroy/til/blob/main/wasm/2024-02-22-Run...
by tombert | 2025-05-09 14:54:27+00:00
I mean there is an argument that the robber-barons during the Gilded Age were a net negative, in that they exerted way too much control and a lot of people needlessly suffered in the process.

Generally, though, I'm against the arguments of "automation is bad cuz less jobs". I think that might be true in the very short term, but we're never going to have a case where "all possible work is done", because that's a completely malformed premise. There's pretty much an infinite amount of potential work to do.
by fhkatari | 2025-05-09 14:54:33+00:00
I used to live in Oakland, and am really sad to see continued failures of BART. They had started significant expansions right before the pandemic, allowing a long (but no traffic) ride possible from Oakland to San Jose. A key challenge for BART is that they depend a lot more on ticket sales than subsidies, and as a result, have been hit much harder with lower ridership.
Ask HN: How to get good at marketing your product and SEO?
by flashblaze | 2025-05-09 14:54:38+00:00
I recently "launched" my product by mentioning it across Twitter and Discord which led some traffic to it. However, that is not a long-term strategy.

I have heard about Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/, but I don't want to spend $129 right now since I'm not sure whether the ROI on it would be worth it.

Are there any strategies or tips you might be able to share? Thanks
by os2warpman | 2025-05-09 14:54:46+00:00
In the 40s and 50s programmable general-purpose electronic computers were solving problems.

Ballistics tables, decryption of enemy messages, and more. Early programmable general-purpose electronic computers, from the moment they were turned on could solve problems in minutes that would take human computers months or years. In the 40s, ENIAC proved the feasibility of thermonuclear weaponry.

By 1957 the promise and peril of computing entered popular culture with the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn film "Desk Set" where a computer is installed in a library and runs amok, firing everybody, all while romantic shenanigans occur. It was sponsored by IBM and is one of the first instances of product placement in films.

People knew "electronic brains" were the future the second they started spitting out printouts of practically unsolvable problems instantly-- they just didn't (during your timeframe) predict the invention and adoption of the transistor and its miniaturization, which made computers ubiquitous household objects.

Even the quote about the supposed limited market for computers trotted out from time-to-time to demonstrate the hesitance of industry and academia to adopt computers is wrong.

In 1953 when Thomas Watson said that "there's only a market for five computers" what he actually said was "When we developed the IBM 701 we created a customer list of 20 organizations who might want it and because it is so expensive we expected to only sign five deals, but we ended up signing 18" (paraphrased).

Militaries, universities, and industry all wanted all of the programmable general-purpose electronic computers they could afford the second it became available because they all knew that it could solve problems.

Included for comparison is a list of problems that quantum computing has solved:
by scarmig | 2025-05-09 14:54:52+00:00
I don't know the last time the entire BART system got shut down. There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages.

No information as to the actual cause right now. Easy to speculate that it's a cyberattack, but I'm going to go for the free square and wildly guess it is a DNS issue.

Best wishes and godspeed to the folks who are working on fixing the issue, whatever it is.