MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonathanstrange | 2025-05-10 12:39:43+00:00
No, the article does not mention that it completely dismisses the rest of The Republic and just name drops Plato while deliberately ignoring one of his main points. It's particularly bad in this case because the remaining books of The Republic are basically a long reply to the aporetic ending of the first book.

It's intellectually lazy and rude. Don't grab quotes out of context to make a point the author never made, mentioning that you do so just makes things worse, not better.

My 2 cent, sorry if it sounds like nitpicking.
by ikt | 2025-05-10 12:39:51+00:00
> Lemmy is 1000x better even if the total amount of users is less in absolute numbers

This is so true, I've had to put a timer on how much I can use it as I'm addicted like the old school reddit days

I think all it'll take is reddit messing up and lemmy.world might be the new front page of the internet
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-10 12:40:01+00:00
It's obviously not a perfect analogy. Doesn't mean it's not happening.

> Voluntary participation

That's only true for large groups of people. It's false for individuals. Try "voluntarily opting out" of whatever instant messaging platform is dominant where you live. You will be ostracized. Network effects make switching difficult.

> Digital serfdom and monetization of data

Benefits are irrelevant. Surveillance capitalism is sinister and exploitative despite the benefits it offers. Once data has been collected and transmitted, it's out there and it will never be fully deleted. There's no telling what it will be used for.

The increasing regulation is evidence that people are resisting technofeudalism, not that it doesn't exist.

> Innovation and competition

The technological world is filled with literal monopolists leveraging intellectual property to destroy competition and lower market efficiency. Technology companies may have displayed a pattern of innovation and disruption once but they have kicked the ladders out from under them a long time ago. They have absolutely no intention of allowing upstarts to disrupt them like they did to their predecessors.

Thus we get absolute nonsense like "anti-circumvention" laws which lead to "felony contempt of business model". They put artificial limitations into products so that people will pay to lift them. Then they make it illegal for others to lift the limitations.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...

> Access to resources

The world wide web is now centralized in the hands of relatively few big tech companies and it's only getting worse over time. Nobody buys domains and starts their own site these days, they create social media accounts. Can't access much of anything without an Instagram or X account these days. Try joining a community without Discord.

> Global connectivity vs. local feudal systems

You can control the people of the entire world with computers. Their socialization, their education, their culture, their employment, the very flow of money, all of it is controlled by computers. It's easier than ever and you don't even need to commit violence. The lash is no longer literal but economic.

> Regulation and governance

Yeah, people are seeing the effects and they are resisting. This is evidence that there is something worth resisting.
by jampekka | 2025-05-10 12:41:03+00:00
The portrayal of medieval feudalism here is a bit of a caricature. Serfdom was not a universal feature of feudal societies and at many times and places peasants were free to go and starve on their own. This is the dynamic of the currently developing techno-feudalism. Theoretical freedoms don't mean much if exercising them comes at heavy penalties in practice. This seems to be a huge blind spot in liberalist ideologies.
by bdelmas | 2025-05-10 12:41:49+00:00
Yep I think people just want the fast track to being rich and are not interested into putting the hours and the grind for it. There are amazing books out there but they are textbooks. 1000 pages long on a single subject, and people don't want that. But for the most part, that's where the real knowledge is.

They would rather read 10-15 books on marketing rather than study and master a single textbook about marketing. Even when they don't have to master all of it and that would still give them more value and professional knowledge than reading all of these other books.

I read my far share of business books and at some points I was seeing the edutainment behind it and the lack of value that from now on every time I search for a book I start by searching in the textbook section on Amazon not the book section.
by viktorcode | 2025-05-10 12:42:48+00:00
As he mentioned in a forum post some years ago, Chris wanted the language to be more modular, but Apple's drive for adding features to it sets very different priorities.

To be fair, every new language version usually includes things that eliminate those special cases making writing the code more straightforward. Like the described support of functions in key paths, or the ability to set default global actor isolation.
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-10 12:45:29+00:00
As dang's written previously:

HN's convention of putting years on titles is definitely not intended to devalue an article—on the contrary! Historical material has always been welcome here—more here than nearly anywhere else on the internet. One of the best functions of HN is that it helps spread knowledge of history.

Knowing the year helps orient people to what they're reading. It's interesting to know when something was written, and often important for understanding it correctly. Also it provides a nice demarcation between news of the moment and older articles, which are often uncorrelated and go deeper than the mass of current stories. That's a good thing.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35944257>

For myself: it's helpful to know that something isn't immediately current, and also to realise that there may be earlier discussions with interesting aspects to them to search.
by interpol_p | 2025-05-10 12:45:57+00:00
I don't completely agree with you. Having used both SwiftUI and UIKit extensively, I value both of them and think they are both quite strong in different areas

I have published a word game written entirely in SwiftUI [1], the effects and animations would have been much more difficult to do in UIKit, and the app itself would have been hairier to write and maintain [2]. I also track crashes, and this particular app has had four crashes in the past year, so I am very pleased with the stability

That said, there are definitely times, as you say, where you have to drop to UIKit. For the word game mentioned above, I had to drop down to UIKit to observe low-level keyboard events in order to support hardware keyboard input without explicitly using a control that accepts text input

SwiftUI is mature, it's pretty advanced — especially for graphics and animation heavy UI. It has limitations, particularly around advanced input event handling, as well as the application/scene lifecycle

I plan to continue to use both UIKit and SwiftUI where they make sense. It's easy enough to bridge between them with UIHostingController and UIViewRepresentable

[1] https://retrogram.app

[2] Specific examples include: image and alpha masking is trivial in SwiftUI, Metal Shaders can be applied with a one-line modifier, gradients are easy and automatic, SwiftUI's Timeline+Canvas is very performant and more powerful than custom drawing with UIKit. Creating glows, textured text and images, blurs and geometry-based transitions is much easier in SwiftUI
by xianshou | 2025-05-10 12:46:40+00:00
Bravo! Planning your life in order to minimize deathbed regrets has always bothered me, because the nature of humanity is to want what it hasn't got. If you assume that, on average, people make correct decisions to work hard and pursue what matters to them at the opportunity cost of not enjoying quite enough free time, then their final wishes will naturally include the time they gave up to live the life they had. If, however, they had fully indulged the desire to enjoy and maximize free time, their wishes might instead have revolved around the unfulfilled potential thereby relinquished.

The problem, of course, is that the feeling of regret considers what may have been gained without reflecting on what would have been lost.

Now the right way to deal with this is some sort of self-consistent closure, where present you and past you with the same values and access to the same information (which could be anything from zero to complete knowledge of then-future outcomes and downstream effects) would make the same choices including both upside and downside. But that would be too complex for motivational advice, which is primarily about creating an inspirational mood, somewhat about positive first-order consequences, and not even a little bit about recursive self-consistency.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-10 12:48:17+00:00
Distillation removes most byproducts but not enough to really matter. Their boiling points aren’t different enough and like with ethanol, distillation concentrates the bad stuff. It depends on the fermentation source but even vodka becomes significantly more drinkable when properly filtered.

18% requires a lot of tricks if you’re going the classical EC1118 route* but you can easily get 20% in a week or two from just turbo yeast (although its nigh undrinkable). I haven’t seen many reliable reports of 30% but plenty of 24-26%.

* which IIRC is capable of 21% en extremis
by crispyambulance | 2025-05-10 12:48:21+00:00
Well, what would be a more “accurate” word, then?

Varoufakis uses the word “techno-feudal” because it reflects the fundamental character of where things are headed. Moreover, even the author pointed out why the case is strong for the analogy.

I don’t think it’s fair to expect 100% consistency with “feudalism” to rightfully use the word “techno-feudalism”. But if one is compelled to point out the inconsistencies anyway, the ones the author pointed out are not particularly convincing.

The first three basically boil down to the idea that citizens are free to “opt-out” or find/create alternatives. Are they? I guess in theory, but in reality that’s a far more complicated problem.

Sure, in medieval days, kings could force their will and crush opposition without concern of law, morality, or anything other than who has more power. Today we have surveillance capitalism, and the comprehensive manipulation of truth and attention. Originally this was employed to merely sell toothpaste, but the same tools more lately can and have been used for far more sinister and greedy motivations.

If you don’t agree with that, fine, but but if you must quibble about “inconsistencies” with the usage of the word “techno-feudal”, then at least provide a better alternative word.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-10 12:48:47+00:00
At this point we can, more or less, objectively assess who has been being honest throughout the war. And as is usually the case in war, the truth is on the side that's winning. The way to do this is simply to look at what each side is saying and contrast it against what happened, which you can easily do with web archives.

The only question is when to start. And I think May 2023 was probably the critical point in the war. That was shortly before Bakhmut would fall, and also shortly before the Ukraine counter offensive would be launched and also ultimately fail. The war was arguably effectively decided by July 2023. So here are state media from May 1st 2023. You can skim forward using the widget in the top right corner.

RT : https://web.archive.org/web/20230501115431/https://www.rt.co...

Kyiv Post: https://web.archive.org/web/20230501000808/https://www.kyivp...
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-05-10 12:51:13+00:00
> The problem I notice in npm land is many developers have no taste.

Programming is not the same as hanging out some hoity-toity art gallery. If someone critiqued my software dev by saying I had "no taste", I'd cringe so hard I'd turn into a black hole.

I know this is hackernews, but this reeks of self-importance.
by michaelt | 2025-05-10 12:52:43+00:00
Content like this has to choose the point they're targeting on a rigorous-education-to-entertaining spectrum.

Chess teaching content that's only for people at ~2300 ELO on how to get from there to 2400 ELO? Potential audience of perhaps 10,000 people worldwide.

Chess-themed entertainment content, with educational content mixed with lots of jokes and memes, accessible to players at all levels? Potential audience of 10,000,000 people.

Likewise, you don't become a bestselling business author if your book on how to be a Fortune 500 CEO only has an audience of 500 people. If your book succeeds, 99.95% of your sales will come from people who don't ever plan or expect to become a Fortune 500 CEO.
by movingontonext | 2025-05-10 12:53:03+00:00
And the fact that she was able to execute effectively on the fund raising and marketing aspects of her venture doesn’t mean that she IS an expert in her field. The problems with and ultimate outcome of Theranos paint a pretty clear picture of that.

Visible association with a convicted fraudster, especially one as high profile her, should be a giant red flag to investors and consumers.
by antihipocrat | 2025-05-10 12:53:12+00:00
Even the choice of how payments are made is being eroded. I see a not too distant future where cash and physical cards are replaced by a single digital option via our phones. Associated data relating to the transaction is then captured by the techno lord as well.

It's also very naive to think that these companies will continue to innovate. Once monopoly is achieved rent seeking becomes more profitable than innovating.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-10 12:53:48+00:00
> when we talk e.g. about "fascism" in modern day, how close is it to Mussolini's fascism?

Putting aside your main argument, I will only comment that this example does not serve it. "Fascist", like "Marxist", are thrown around by the left and the right, respectively, to smear anything they don't like.

So while pedantry can get in the way of understanding, so can sloppy use of terminology.

> When we talk about "democratic government" how close is it to the Athenian democracy?

Like Mussolini's variety of fascism, Athenian democracy isn't really the basis for a definition of democracy. Democracy has a general definition that is not defined by empirical contingencies given that label. That puts the cart before the horse.
by chesterhunt20 | 2025-05-10 12:53:48+00:00
In my experience, I find that business books often lean more toward entertainment than providing actual strategic tools. While they can be a great source of inspiration and motivation, they don’t always offer the practical, data-driven strategies that you can directly apply to your business. I appreciate the stories and insights they provide, but I believe that true strategy comes from real-world experience, experimentation, and adapting to the unique needs of your business.

Reading business books can certainly help me think differently or spark new ideas, but for actionable strategies, I usually rely more on hands-on experience, mentorship, and tools that are specifically tailored to my industry. There’s a time for inspiration, but when it comes to building something sustainable, it takes more than just theory.
by jampekka | 2025-05-10 12:53:54+00:00
E.g. in feudal Norway there was no (de-jure) serfdom: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Norway

Also e.g. Finland had a manoral tenant system until the 1920's where the tenants were free to leave.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenant_farmer
by dgb23 | 2025-05-10 12:54:07+00:00
Not all web servers deal in HTML or JSON, many don't have databases outside of managing their internal state.

Even ignoring that, those are just common formats. They don't tell you what a particular web server is doing.

Take a few examples of some Go projects that either are web servers or have them as major components like Caddy or Tailscale. Wildly different types of projects.

I guess one has to expand "web server" to include general networking as well, which is definitely a well supported use case or rather category for the Go std lib, which was my original point.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-10 12:55:55+00:00
I replayed Cyberpunk 2077 four times because it is fun to play, not because I cared about immersing myself in the world or spending time with the characters

Yeah, Keanu as Silverhand is fun

But by the fourth time through the game when you hit those Relic Malfunctions that are long and drawn out and trigger long and unskippable talking scenes, I was pretty ready for a game option that was "Get rid of all of this and let me play without interruptions"

I would have loved a quest system in that game that would randomly assign a building in the city to have a random enemy type inside it and an objective to handle, so I could just play

I love that game. I think it is very fun. I like trying out different builds and weapons. I would probably play it more but the idea of starting a new game is not appealing. I don't want to slog through the first few hours of the game again until after the failed heist just to get the game world to open up
by chromatin | 2025-05-10 12:56:03+00:00
> There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes

What an insanely bad take.

Not only did you not read and/or comprehend the article, the article itself undersells the information content of the genome (I'll post on this at the top level).

> You are not predisposed to be anything.

This does not logically follow your preceding statement, even if we were to accept the foregoing limited information content as factual
by cryptonector | 2025-05-10 12:56:23+00:00
I rescued an elderly lady and her grandson who had no power for two weeks, the first week of which saw temps near 0F at night and below 25F during the day. No heat, nothing like parkas, no firewood for chimneys or firepits. I suppose the grandson could have figured something out. I'm sure the lady couldn't have. I don't know how many such households there were.
by sltkr | 2025-05-10 12:56:37+00:00
> The top of the Washington monument is capped with aluminum.

Interesting. I was curious how large and expensive this was.

Apparently the tip weighed only 100 ounce, at a time the price was around $1.10 per ounce. Translating to 2025 dollars it would be around $36 per ounce, or $3,600 for the entire tip; much less than I expected, but still more expensive than the silver price today ($32.75 per ounce).
by wjnc | 2025-05-10 12:56:44+00:00
Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There must be a good reason for this to happen, it even happens at the other end of the scale, but I would think the very basis (just any drivers, not even good ones) are an affordable investment? What use is your product if every review will say “good product, alas Windows and Linux won’t run”?

A reason I can imagine that drivers are (I don’t know!) somewhat interchangeable, so invest in drivers for your product and you are stimulating all current and future competitors as well.
by interpol_p | 2025-05-10 12:58:12+00:00
It's easier to read and navigate a well-written Swift codebase than a well-written Objective-C codebase

Conversely, it's easier to debug an Objective-C app than a Swift app, simply because compiling and debugging is so much faster, and debugging so much more reliable

I don't know about a software quality drop being attributable to the migration to Swift. So many other things have also happened in that time — much more software that Apple produces is heavily reliant on network services, which they are not very good at. I find Apple's local-first software to be excellent (Final Cut Pro X, Logic, Keynote) and their network-first software is hit-or-miss

They have also saddled developers with a ton of APIs for working with their online services. Try to write correct and resilient application code that deals with files in iCloud? It's harder than it was to write an application that dealt with only local files a decade ago!

Swift is easy to blame, but I don't think it's responsible for poor software. Complexity is responsible for poor software, and we have so much more of that now days
by boshomi | 2025-05-10 12:58:27+00:00
* PostgreSQL 18 introduces an asynchronous I/O (AIO) subsystem. : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43916577

* PostgreSQL 18 now supports parallel builds for GIN indexes, which are commonly used for search over JSON and full-text data.

* Full list: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/18/release-18.html
by bsaul | 2025-05-10 12:58:40+00:00
i think i prefer swift as a language, and rust as an ecosystem. The amount of quality libraries in rust is astounding.

But that may change with swift getting more and more into safety and reaching the limits of how many keywords a language can have and remain descent. I honestly don't know what the feeling of learning swift would be like today.

And on the other hand, i don't see how the rust language can really get nicer without sacrificing on a few design decisions and goals (in order to keep the language extremely versatile).
by viktorcode | 2025-05-10 12:58:52+00:00
My guess is you've encountered issues with actor isolation made suddenly explicit in your language upgrade. This is exactly what's addressed in Swift 6.2, so it won't be nonsensical in that case. Speaking from my personal experience of trying to upgrade and stopping.

The moment this language version is released I will move to Swift 6. In our project case it will happen. with no source code changes.
by Julienjainrd | 2025-05-10 12:58:57+00:00
Location: San Francisco, CA

Remote Work: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: Educational and computational 3D design [Maya 2024, Adobe Creative Suite, Unity, Godot]

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y1GyJ_FXhnhsSOIab6MhmFs2...

Email: jjainrindone@ucdavis.edu