MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arnsholt | 2025-05-16 07:43:35+00:00
So these are kind of fun to compare. At the high level they clearly all have the same purpose: in some cases it's socially useful to have the punishment for a crime simply be a statement of "person X did this thing". But the details vary a bit:

- It seems the Australian section 10 is handed out by the court, where the English and Norwegian options dispense with a trial entirely. It also looks like a Section 10 doesn't go in a person's criminal record, unlike the other two.

- It looks like the English caution requires an admission of guilt, while the Norwegian option is at the prosecutor's discretion within the rules of applicability of the procedure. Of course someone not demanding a trial when given this can be seen as an _implicit_ admission of guilt, but the legal nuance can probably be important.

- The English and Norwegian procedures are nominally also different in who makes the decision: the English procedure is handled by the police, while in Norway it's the prosecutor's office. But this is more a theoretical than practical difference I think, because the Norwegian prosecutor's office is organized differently than the English Crown Prosecution Service: here, the lowest levels of prosecutors are integrated into the police services they work with, so in practice I think it works out much the same.
by itake | 2025-05-16 07:43:39+00:00
> Do what buymeacoffee won't do and forget about regulations (that's what Uber does yeah?)

My guess is buymeacoffee isn't the problem, but their payment provider. They maybe can't justify the resources to switch providers and so its easier/cheaper to just drop those countries.

If you can find a payment provider that will service a "buymeacoffee-like" business in the open countries, then I'd be interested.
by casenmgreen | 2025-05-16 07:43:39+00:00
I would need to look into this again, but I am not sure this is actually true.

Something like the underlying account(s) used by the FinTech are secured in this way, but your account with the FinTech is not.

This is why Revolut for example have accounts which are something like "vaults", which are in fact accounts which are covered, because they are actual accounts, one per person, with a normal bank.

That sounds incredible, it needs to be checked, about to leave the house so can't right now.
by Huxley1 | 2025-05-16 07:44:02+00:00
I used to work with e-commerce teams, and without access to a proper photo studio, getting good product visuals was always a struggle.If this kind of tech can generate usable 3D views from just a few images, that’s a pretty big breakthrough. I’m especially curious how it handles reflective or semi-transparent objects—those are usually a pain even in traditional setups. If it becomes widely available, I could see it being a real boost for smaller sellers trying to compete.
by hedora | 2025-05-16 07:44:04+00:00
A long time ago, Acer made netbook form factor laptops with intel i7 processors in them. I miss mine. It wasn't that expensive.

This form factor looks great, and for $350, it's extremely reasonably priced. However, I'd be much more tempted if they had a version that was that price with better CPU and DRAM specs.

(I don't care if it's ARM or x86 as long as it runs linux well and has ~ 8 hour battery life, which this apparently does, under Linux, at least.)
by koonsolo | 2025-05-16 07:45:10+00:00
I also agree! I was afraid mouse and keyboard work would be too difficult, but actually it's not. Your wrist rests on the table, and so no problem at all.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod... is the article that did it for me!

Wolfram even walks in the forest while working on his laptop. Haven't tried that one myself :D.
by jajko | 2025-05-16 07:45:40+00:00
"send money to people" - WTF is even that? It doesn't sound like shopping for products or services, rather just emotional donations.

Maybe I am too old at this point but I have yet to meet a single 'influencer' (lol, what an idiotic term to be polite but maybe its insulting on purpose to all involved) worth a dime or my time. Quality of life and happiness lie elsewhere, ie actually doing and experiencing things rather than watching others do it.
by dagmx | 2025-05-16 07:46:52+00:00
It’s a shame that they’re trying to poorly frame what is a decent paper as a method of e-commerce

1. All the products shown would have CAD models already and have no need for GenAI to make 3D models. A mesher and decimation would give better results anyway, without risk of hallucination.

2. They don’t really address hallucination at all. Why would a reliable retailer trust an imperfect replica? Who is liable for the potential false advertising?

This really feels like marketing tried to co-opt R&D and missed the mark.
by monkeyelite | 2025-05-16 07:47:32+00:00
Initialization does look insane. But as with most C++ complexity this is inherent.

Lists of the “good parts” of C++ over C usually include RAII. But f we imagine starting with C and adding C++ features to see when complexity explodes. I think the worst offender is constructor/destructor.

They require the language to perfectly track the lifetime of each member of every structure. If you resize a vector, every entry must call a constructor. If exceptions are possible, but insert little cleanup calls into all possible code paths.

Want to make a copy of something? Who is responsible for calling constructor/destructor. Want to make a struct? What if one member requires construction? How do you handle a union?

The result is micromanaging and turning most operations into O(n) init/cleanup calls.

The modern C approach avoids all of this and allows you to manage pieces of memory - rather than values. Zero initialize or leave uninitialized.

So what do we lose? Well classes own resources. If you have a vector<MyObject> and MyObject has a member vector<Items> then we should be able to cleanup without looking inside each member of each element.

I think we should separate resource allocation from use. Allocators are the things that care about cleanup, move, etc. This should be the exception - rather than the default way to think about structs.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-16 07:47:46+00:00
>So, while I think you can say things like that, ie the ability and allowance, I think you should question whether you should.

You should because many choice in life are not strictly black and white. Saving a babies life versus introducing gene editing to humanity. If there was a baby where we knew he would grow up to slaughter millions it's absolutely worth talking about. In the age of AI and gene editing where things are influencing what it even means to be human, it is wise to stop and pause for a minute to ask the right question rather then charge forward with change that can't be taken back all because we wanted to save a baby.
by piva00 | 2025-05-16 07:47:50+00:00
I feel I need to repeat myself so you can properly read: I clearly mentioned both were required to bring forth better quality of life to workers. Without workers' revolt there is only ever increasing exploitation, every single perk the poorer have got after advances brought forward by free markets was through a revolt, a mass protest, general strike, without those there would still be slavery, legalised child labour, 16h workdays, etc.

Yet again you are lost in ideology, Walter, it gets very tiring after a while, you only got a hammer and you gotta nail everything with that hammer. It's comically myopic.
by hulitu | 2025-05-16 07:47:50+00:00
> Dolphin whistle decoders win $100k interspecies communication prize

They didn't decode anything. Just noticed that delfins had different whistles (and it took them 30 years - they should have asked somebody). I was expecting a Google translate link for the dolphin language with, at least, "So long, and thanks for all the fish" translated, but, no, all they have there, is how good the Pixel phones are at recording dolphin language. Makes you wonder if you can use a Pixel to make a phone call. /s
by ggm | 2025-05-16 07:48:41+00:00
Meta is or was being sued by very high net worth individuals from Australia for not blocking faked voice AI lite ads using them to sell fintech.

This wasn't some minor court case either: the person(s) have fuck you money to go the distance in the US legal system.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/19/m...
by eru | 2025-05-16 07:49:35+00:00
> It is not on the list, but #define CMP(X, Y) (((X) > (Y)) - ((X) < (Y))) is an efficient way to do generic comparisons for things that want UNIX-style comparators. If you compare the output against 0 to check for some form of greater than, less than or equality, the compiler should automatically simplify it. For example, CMP(X, Y) > 0 is simplified to (X > Y) by a compiler.

I guess this only applies when the compiler knows what version of > you are using?

Eg it might not work in C++ when < and > are overloaded for eg strings?
by croemer | 2025-05-16 07:50:39+00:00
Questions asked isn't the metric to declare it dead. What matters for financial viability is traffic and deals with search engines/indexes (used by LLMs)

For community viability: people will keep using it where LLMs fail. For new problems. It's still the place to go for undocumented workarounds.

Traffic and voting activity is certainly down but there is still immense value and new valuable questions are asked and answered there.
by jjani | 2025-05-16 07:51:07+00:00
> openAI models have an issue where they are pretty good at everything but not incredible at anything. They're too well rounded.

This suggests OpenAI models do have tasks they're better at than the "less rounded" competition, who have taks they're weaker in. Could you name a single sucg task (except for image generation, which is an entirely different usecase), that OpenAI models are better at than Gemini 2.5 and Claude 3.7 without costing at least 5x as much?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-16 07:51:24+00:00
In ChatGPT, at this point I use 4o pretty much only for image generation; it's the one feature that's unique to it and is mind-blowingly good. For everything else, I default to o3.

For coding, I stick to Claude 3.5 / 3.7 and recently Gemini 2.5 Pro. I sometimes use o3 in ChatGPT when I can't be arsed to fire up Aider, or really need to use its search features to figure out how to do something (e.g. pinouts for some old TFT screens for ESP32 and Raspberry Pi, most recently).
by eru | 2025-05-16 07:51:27+00:00
> Multiplications of this word length, one should clarify. It's not that multiplication was an inherently more expensive or different operation back then (assuming from context here that the "old days" of coding inner loops in assembly language pre-date even the 32-bit ALU era). Binary multiplication has not changed in millennia. Ancient Egyptians were using the same binary integer multiplication logic 5 millennia ago as ALUs do today.

Well, we can actually multiply long binary numbers asymptotically faster than Ancient Egyptians.

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karatsuba_algorithm
by slivym | 2025-05-16 07:51:31+00:00
People talk about this being a replacement for busses, but I think that misunderstands what a bus service is. A bus service generally is a utility provided by the local government to meet the needs of constituents. The routes are determined by what the government decides are useful, not by which routes are profitable. The problem with introducing competition to this system is that a universally provided bus service is going to have profitable and unprofitable routes and cross-subsidization. If you introduce a new service that's private you're going to find that service very quickly identifies and competes for the profitable routes, but it won't have an interest in the unprofitable routes. Suddenly the local utility is more unprofitable than before, there's no reason for it to be running on routes that are now serviced by the private company, and now the private company can start extracting a higher and higher premium on the profitable routes.
by sunderw | 2025-05-16 07:51:54+00:00
It really shows that you know nothing about sleep-related disabilities. I know someone suffering from idiopathic hypersomnia[1]. You can't just "choose" to go to bed earlier to wake up earlier in the morning. Sometimes it might work, most of the time it doesn't.

You think it's the disabled person's responsibility to never put a burden on others when others' expectations puts an unreasonable amount of burdens.

And we're talking about this specific kind of disability, but as someone else said in a sibling comment, it could be anything. Imagine you really have to go to the bathroom for some reason (pregnancy, diarrhea, ...). That can happen to a lot of people. Should all of them be prevented from being accepted into class ?

That's why we speak about "empathy, tolerance, flexibility". Empathy towards the weaker few, not empathy towards the "normal" many.

[1]: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypersomnia/s...
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-16 07:51:57+00:00
> Always seemed weird to me that they decided to abandon existing browser to create a ... browser? Maybe there were some technical issues with Arc that they couldn't build on or maybe just marketing play

This might be relevant.

Gaining access to anyones Arc browser without them even visiting a website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41597250 - September 2024 (513 comments)
by iamsaitam | 2025-05-16 07:53:45+00:00
Why do nouns have "random" articles attached to them? In latin languages like Portuguese the ending of the word tells you which article (masculine or feminine) to use, but in German only "die" has some rules. This is my biggest griped with the language and it's major flaw, when you pair that with adjective declensions and other sort of structures that rely on KNOWING which article to use.
by koonsolo | 2025-05-16 07:55:38+00:00
I code with Aider and Claude, and here is my experience:

- It's very good at writing new code

- Once it goes wrong, there is no point in trying to give it more context or corrections. It will go wrong again or at another point.

- It might help you fix an issue. But again, either it finds the issue the first time, or not at all.

I treat my LLM as a super quick junior coder, with a vast knowledge base stored inside its brain. But it's very stubborn and can't be helped to figure out a problem it wasn't able to solve in the first try.
by twelvechairs | 2025-05-16 07:57:00+00:00
This is a major reason (maybe the major reason) crypto keeps going up. Many people want money to avoid government oversight - for reasons both benign (e.g. avoiding having money confiscated arbitrarily) and nefarious (everything from tax avoidance to funding crime and war).

Not long ago we lived in a world where currency from anywhere other than the nation you were in (or maybe somewhere close by) was impractical to use on a daily basis. Things have changed now and the government's use of money as a tool to keep control of citizens is loosening. For better and worse.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-16 07:57:13+00:00
I'm reading something else; I think they would have been financially secure, if not rich, for the biggest part of those 20 years already - if they weren't, during the boom times they could've jumped ship a dozen times over already.

Very, very few people actually work for that long for a tech company these days, at least in the IT sector in Europe.
by notpushkin | 2025-05-16 07:57:23+00:00
I think the problem is the jurisdiction.

Many of Telegram payment-related services use https://smart-glocal.com/, which is registered in Hong Kong (with a UK company handling EEA operations). They don’t say it on the website, but I believe they do work with Ukrainian (and apparently even Russian) citizens and can handle payouts there. (Note, however, that Smart Glocal is owned by a pro-Kremlin guy from Russia: https://en.zona.media/article/2022/08/08/premiumdonate-trl)
by elric | 2025-05-16 07:59:51+00:00
Debanking small accounts isn't something that I'd heard of before. But debanking "undesirables" is certainly a problem.

Over here (Belgium) we have legalized prostitution, but it's very hard for sex workers to open a bank account. There's some legislation that forces banks to offer them a basic bank account (at a steep fee) if they can prove that they've been rejected by N banks. Which is a start, I suppose.

Banks have basically become an extension of law enforcement, tax collectors, anti-terrorist operations, and morality police. Which is ironic, given how many banks brazenly break laws on the regular, how absolutely depraved parties with bankers are, etc. They're hardly paragons of virtue. Yet they get to gatekeep "virtue".
by verzali | 2025-05-16 08:00:08+00:00
I believe physicists would benefit from studying at least some of the underlying philosophy. I managed to make it through a four year degree in physics without ever being taught anything about the ideas of Popper or Kuhn other than vague mentions in random lectures. It was only later when I looked into them out of my own interest that I realised they had something relevant to say - and I reckon many physicists never get to that point at all.
by ReptileMan | 2025-05-16 08:00:50+00:00
Somewhat relevant and related.

>“So, it’s a bug in Lotus 123?”

>“Yeah, but probably an intentional one. Lotus had to fit in 640K. That’s not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That’s really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn’t matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past. It looks like the Basic guys wanted to be anal about those two months, so they moved the epoch one day back.”

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
by Skeime | 2025-05-16 08:01:35+00:00
Context, maybe just for others: Schiff is ship and Fahrt is ride, so eine Schifffahrt is a cruise (and without the article, it is also the term for seafaring in general). Anyway, you can see that Schiff ends with two Fs and Fahrt starts with one, so if you put them together to form a compound word, you get three Fs in a row, Schifffahrt. In pre-reform German spelling, this was deemed excessive, so one would write Schiffahrt, instead. The German spelling reform in the mid-90s changed this, so now you do the logical thing. (Whether the old way really was confusing and which way is more aesthetic are separate questions.)
by woodpanel | 2025-05-16 08:01:47+00:00
Well, it's not a coincidence that the English word for the language of the Netherlands is the same the German state calls itself: "dutch" / "Deutsch".

A people and their language predated the concept of nation-states, but when the latter arrived obviously (geo-)political interests started to blur the facts.

So if you conflate the German state with Germans (I'd challenge that and view the German state as a continuation of the Prussian state), and you don't like the interests of the German state, it is predictable where you'll land on this issue.

Because of this, even if their national anthem does so, calling the Dutch Germans would infuriate them and rightly so, because it would imply justification to some for things like those happening between Russia and Ukraine right now.

I think in the end it is also a matter of "national" self-confidence. While Luxemburgish is virtually indistinguishable to the German ear from say the dialect of Cologne, Swiss-German is hardly understandable for anyone outside of Switzerland. Yet, the Swiss don't have an urge to re-label their dialect as a separate language. And the urge of the Dutch to re-lable themselves is lesser than that of Luxemburg because seemingly no one questions their identity.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-16 08:01:49+00:00
Seconding. In the past months, when using Aider, I've been using the approach of discussing a piece of work (new project, larger change), and asking the model to prepare a plan of action. After possibly some little back and forth, I approve the plan and ask LLM to create or update a specification document for the project and a plan document which documents a sequence of changes broken down into bite-sized tasks - the latter is there to keep both me and the LLM on track. With that set, I can just keep repeatedly telling it to "continue implementation of the plan", and it does exactly that.

Eventually it'll do something wrong or I realize I wanted things differently, which necessitates some further conversation, but other than that, it's just "go on" until we run out of plan, then devising a new plan, rinse repeat.
by znanz | 2025-05-16 08:03:04+00:00
I’ve been working many years in the banking and Fintech industry. These companies are driven by compliance before profit. Sometimes, compliance will order a country to be blocked because of the risk to service bad actors, and they can get this done bypassing every other department. This is also why it takes forever to get an account opened, the know you customer and know your business processes are long and tedious, use manual and semi automated process to establish a risk score and make a decision wether to service a customer or not. Most of the time, these processes are about ticking boxes and filing required documents to cover the institution. In the case of the article, servicing a zone at war, with a lot of parties under sanctions is a risk that either BuyMeACoffee and / or a few of their providers were not willing to take.
by netsharc | 2025-05-16 08:03:12+00:00
After reporting 1 or 2 scams, I wondered "Why am I doing Zuck's work for him? I should just let the scammers be, so everyone can see what festers on his rotten creation."

Heh, not that he gives a shit, the stinking pile bought him a $900K watch, amongst other things.
by cess11 | 2025-05-16 08:04:13+00:00
Bourne-Again SHell is a shell. The "reverse" part is just about network minutiae. /bin/sh is more portable so that's what you'd typically put in your shellcode but /bin/bash or /usr/bin/dash would likely work just as well.

I.e. exposing any of these on a public network is the main target to get a foothold in a non-public network or a computer. As soon as you have that access you can start renting out CPU cycles or use it for distributed hash cracking or DoS-campaigns. It's simpler than injecting your own code and using that as a shell.

Asking a few of my small local models for Forth-like interpreters in x86 assembly they seem willing to comply and produce code so if they had access to a shell and package installation I imagine they could also inject such a payload into some process. It would be very hard to discover.
by ThePhysicist | 2025-05-16 08:04:25+00:00
These companies aren't public utilities, no one would complain about a US bank not doing money exchange business with entities in the Ukraine or Belarus, why would that be different for US companies offering donations over the Internet? The fact is that all platforms that facilitate cross-border money transfers between two parties without clear services or good being exchanged are used for all kinds of money laundering, and governments try to contain that for good reasons. In the end they probably don't care much about the revenue they make in these countries as it's probably negligible. Again, their good right to do so, I don't see any issue with this at all.