MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by closewith | 2025-06-27 08:59:54+00:00
> We really need to up our defence game by not requiring collaboration with other countries or companies.

That would require reindustrialising, which while possible would require a complete reorganisation of UK society and accepting a much lower financial standard (financially, at least) of living as the workforce moves to manual labour from services.

> The UK has a lot of pioneering knowledge and continues to make breakthroughs but it would be better if we could be a bit more selfish and make our own stuff with our own supply chain.

This is just exceptionalist nonsense. The UK has neither the industrial expertise nor experience to rearm domestically.
by bgwalter | 2025-06-27 08:59:55+00:00
What is the benefit of nuclear sharing for European countries? The sites where the nukes are stored will attract Russian strikes and you don't have the launch codes.

It seems like the worst of all worlds to me. After a limited nuclear exchange, e.g. Manchester and Minsk, the glorious leaders of the U.S. and Russia will have second thoughts and only the vassal states will have been hit. They'll then make peace and nominate each other for the Nobel Peace Prize.
by feelamee | 2025-06-27 09:00:03+00:00
> Vim hangs when you open it

you can enable word wrapping as a workaround ( `:set wrap`). Lifehack: it can be hard to navigate in such file with just `h, j, k, l`, but you can use `gh, gj, etc`. With `g` vim will work with visual lines, while without it with just lines splitted with LF/CRLF
by cess11 | 2025-06-27 09:01:03+00:00
XML is great, one just need to have the appropriate tooling. XSLT, like XSD, is XML too, so the same tooling apply to those as well.

If you're manually writing the <>-stuff in an editor you're doing it wrong, do it programmatically or with applications that abstract it away.

Use things like JAXB or other mature libraries, eXist-db (http://exist-db.org), programs that can produce visualisations and so on.
by kypro | 2025-06-27 09:01:49+00:00
> Just an example - the Spitfire was wholly made in the UK in the 1940s with 200 companies subcontracted from big cities to small towns across the country.

Not the best example given the UK was a manufacturing powerhouse back then. We can't even build railways anymore. Even a lot of key infrastructure is contracted out to companies in other countries these days.
by meinersbur | 2025-06-27 09:02:07+00:00
There is a classic DailyWTF about this technique: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Sketchy-Skecherscom

> [...] the idea of building a website like this in XML and then transforming it using XSL is absurd in and of itself [...]

In the comments the creators comment on it, like that it was a mess to debug. But I could not find anything wrong with the technique itself, assuming that it is working.
by 55555 | 2025-06-27 09:03:00+00:00
Okay I installed it and this is pretty great. Although I think your extension doesn't work for Thai the way you think it does. Because there's spaces between sentences instead of between words in Thai, it's translating entire sentences even with the "words only" setting enabled. This is what I want anyways, but will be too difficult for most learners. I have written misc Thai learning softwares and just so you know you should use an LLM to do word-splitting, not a software library. If you do use a library, you need to split words while looking for the largest possible word, but it won't work well. Basically you can't tell without a brain whether it's a lot of small words next to one another or a smaller number of compound words. IME only an LLM or a human will do a good job of this.
by dcminter | 2025-06-27 09:04:27+00:00
There's definitely a zone of despair on most projects I've been on - particularly greenfield projects - the whole thing seems misguided, the codebase is no longer pristine, often I come up with some horrifying realisation of an overlooked technical issue. It feels like we're moments away from failure.

So far it's never proven to be true and, yes, it generally turns out that we're incredibly close to delivery.

I think it's because we get our noses rubbed in all the small problems of the codebase at this point - before that it's not working well enough to see all of the issues, we're more focused on delivering some big chunk of functionality at all to perceive the smaller flaws. Because the small flaws outnumber the "bug chunks" stuff it feels like we're going backwards, but we're not.

It's a bit like essay writing. You get fed up with the whole thing when it's nearly finished because you've looked at it SO many times that it feels boring and all the little typos and grammatical mistakes take forever to fix up and every time you do you find more. It's hard to keep in mind that the problems are getting smaller with each iteration even though they're increasing in number.

Does that sound like the thing you're talking about?
by weinzierl | 2025-06-27 09:04:34+00:00
This is sometimes called amalgamation and you can do it Rust as well. Either manually or with tools. The point is that apart from very specific niches it is just not a practical approach.

It's not that it can't be done but that it usually is not worth the hassle and our goal should be for compilation to be fast despite not everything being in one file.

Turbo Pascal is a prime example for a compiler that won the market not least because of its - for the time - outstanding compilation speed.

In the same vein, a language can be designed for fast compilation. Pascal in general was designed for single-pass compilation which made it naturally fast. All the necessary forward declarations were a pain though and the victory of languages that are not designed for single-pass compilation proofs that while doable it was not worth it in the end.
by gspetr | 2025-06-27 09:04:35+00:00
A billion dollar company isn't invincible, you can still be zeroed out by an unfavorable market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_Communications

In 2025 dollars their peak would have been $59.5B. To wit, this is roughly what Doordash is worth today, and that's a top-5 YC company. It died 9 months later.
by dspillett | 2025-06-27 09:05:03+00:00
> Worse in what ways?

It doesn't do what it is sold as doing¹ while causing a bit of faf.

The restriction is one of those put in place because someone somewhere want to be seen to be doing something.

> for (under normal circumstances) undesirable behavior.

Outside of a supply problem situation, which we don't have for that sort of thing and different at the time the change came in, why is it so undesirable?

--------

[1] Reducing accidental overdose rates², reducing people using out-dated-so-possibly-ineffective medicines, etc.

[2] Accidental overdose rates have fallen, but they have in many places without those restrictions, so I suspect that is a coincidence and probably more due to greater awareness³ of there being paracetamol or aspirin in other products and therefore the need to be careful what you take in combination.

[3] Due to better labelling?
by mikhailfranco | 2025-06-27 09:06:06+00:00
It would seem possible to create an economic index for climate change. For example, consider low lying coastal property that might be vulnerable to sea-level rise (chronic trend), storm surges and hurricane/cyclone damage (acute episodes).

Pick some basket of relevant countries/regions, then gather data on property prices and insurance rates. Have two sets of properties for each region: exposed coastal areas and 'safe' properties inland at higher elevations, perhaps sheltered from storms. The safe properties act as a control for demographics, overall economic activity and local laws/taxes (e.g. in the same US state).

Generate an index as some function over the difference of prices and rates between the two sets. The index would have regional components and some aggregate total.

Data could also be collected on actual damage and claims. These affect later rates, so they have a lagged impact on the index anyway, but it might be useful to isolate multipliers or confounding effects. There could be scaled impact values based on the total exposed property value in the region, but there would be significant non-linearities.

Of course, insurance companies have this data, and surely have internal models that incorporate local and regional indexes for risk. But it would still be useful to have public data, an agreed index methodology, and a wider geographical extent than a single company patch or country market.

Property is notoriously idiosyncratic and illiquid, so it would be hard to trade the index, or use it for hedging risk, but perhaps some prediction market could be built around the index.
by ratorx | 2025-06-27 09:06:24+00:00
This might work for the types you create, but what about all the code written in the language that expects the “proper” structure?

> Types either represent the data or not

This definitely required, but is only really the first step. Where types get really useful is when you need to change them later on. The key aspects here are how easily you can change them, and how much the language tooling can help.
by sschueller | 2025-06-27 09:06:37+00:00
Switzerland this week found out that "fixed price" does not mean fixed price. The 6 Billion Swiss francs that the purchase of 36 F35s was supposed to cost is going to supposedly cost 1.5 Billion more. [1]

Additionally they also found out that the Patriot missile system they purchased around the same time (which hasn't been delivered yet) is "not the latest version" and not compatible with other systems meaning the price is not the price that was agreed upon.

We also get fucked by the fact that the conversion rate (USD to CHF) IS fixed at the rate from 4 years ago which is way worse than today.

Also no one is talking about the 15 Billion that the F35 maintenance is "estimated" to cost for the first 5 years.

Switzerland has no alternative, no other plane can be delivered in the time frame needed and the F35 is already late.

Many are very pissed rightly so at what the people responsible for this as such issues were pointed out back then [3]. Not surprisingly many of them left their jobs earlier this year.

Best part was that the people in charge back then claimed they had to accept the offer now (before a initiative vote on the plane) or we would not get this "deal" of a price as the offer from Lockheed would expire before the vote.

And of course: the contract is secret...

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/various/f-35-costs-were-never-f...

[2] https://www.blick.ch/politik/deutsche-zahlen-fuer-f35-fast-d...

[3] https://www.blick.ch/politik/krach-um-kampfjet-f-35a-chef-de...
by Havoc | 2025-06-27 09:06:56+00:00
This is mostly just inheriting the weird decision making US side - navy and airforce using different refueling standards rather than some UK screwup.

Not ideal but seems like a reasonable compromise to me given that any scenario where UK is nuking anyone will presumably have European mainland buy in. i.e. could refuel there on the way to where you're going.

In any case seems unlikely that the UK would ever deploy nukes far away. UK is a regional power and has nuclear missile subs anyway for further out if needed.
by merksoftworks | 2025-06-27 09:08:08+00:00
So egui is great for projects where the application runtime is short lived, or for overlays in longer lived projects. The visual equivalent of scripts, where you know you need a small amount of immediate visual feedback and tweaking parameters for it to be useful to the end user.

Flutter answers questions about more robust UI.

It's good that you chose the right tool for the job and more people should know that there are options. But fundamentally I'm most motivated by the possibility of a robust UI framework made from first principles to be as low friction as egui but with the accessibility, performance, and visual flexibility of stylable retained mode guis.

Raph Levien and the xilem project might be getting us closer.
by guiriduro | 2025-06-27 09:09:09+00:00
Bingo. This would appear to be a ludicrous waste of public money. Useless planes built by a competitor/potential adversary that can't be refueled, designed to carry bombs the UK won't have full control of, at a time when the UK pretends that it can't even afford its current miserly welfare programmes.

Looks like only Spain is the smart one in defence spending and hasn't bought the "Russians will invade europe despite being stymied 2 years in eastern Ukraine" coolaid.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-06-27 09:09:18+00:00
I have no idea why you're replying to my comment, I wasn't insinuating that these regulations are hard to follow, I was replying to someone who suggested that small companies don't need to care about them because these laws are intended for large corporations only and won't be enforced on small business. IANAL but that's advice to operate in a legal grey zone and generally not recommended unless the respective laws explicitly make exceptions for small businesses - which they happen to make but OP failed to mention this.
by ity75303 | 2025-06-27 09:10:00+00:00
Flowkeeper is an old-school desktop application, which implements rather rigorously what Francesco Cirillo described in his original "Pomodoro Technique" book.

Some of the examples:

- It makes breaks unconditional. Aborting a break voids the corresponding pomodoro.

- There are no half or quarter-pomodoros. You can’t mark a pomodoro as completed prematurely, only void it.

- You can record interruptions.

- The tasks are estimated visually, as in the book, and the app distinguishes between planned and unplanned stuff, so that you can analyze it retrospectively.

- You can have several backlogs and move work items between them.

I'm the author, will appreciate your feedback and improvement ideas.
by nopassrecover | 2025-06-27 09:10:24+00:00
If I were to say to you for the sake of argument that contextual clinical interpretation was no longer required, let’s say that we had a perfect test some other way, does part of you feel threatened or attached or defensive or argumentative?

The reason I ask is that your response leans very heavily into the importance of expertise and a specific form of knowledge, without showing the kind of subjective empathy for the experience of the people dealing with these challenges that I’m confident you have in spades given your profession.

And given your personal draw to scientific expertise (given your profession), and investment in building that expertise in yourself, and continued personal material and ego investment in that expertise being valued (and the school of thought that legitimises and makes that expertise worthy), as well as your clear intelligence and exploration and insights in this space, it seems an interesting question to ask whether in your deepest reflection there is any sense of conflict or tendency to bias, and how you consider if that shapes your views.
by pastage | 2025-06-27 09:10:28+00:00
> [Bogong moths] provide an ample food source due to their large numbers and high fat content.

Considering they were eaten near the alps where they spend the summer sleeping in caves (aestivate not hibernate!), there must have been some serious respect for that food resource. There apparently are 16000 months per square meter in those caves. Feels like the risk of over fishing is high.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-06-27 09:10:31+00:00
> Hard not to laugh out loud at "We know what good syntax for templating looks like." We don't. Not even close. Because I'd hazard a good template is almost certainly more of a visual thing than it is a symbolic one.

How do you come to this conclusion? It seems to me that what you mean is a general gripe with HTML+CSS, not with how it's generated.

And why do you bring up absolute positioning?

I hear this take on HN again and again and sure, absolute positioning has its place, and is needed for many things.

But when it's used for page/app layout, most of the time I came across this it was an absolute nightmare, falling apart at the slightest content (even text!) or screen size changes.

Even print newspaper layout can't work like this, because typography is involved, although it's probably a lot closer to what I imagine you are describing.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

But when I was doing more CSS-intensive work (I still do a fair bit), developing something on a basis when someone created a layout based on absolute positioning that looked like it was "almost ready", it was a terrible time sink to try to fix it and recreating it using flex, flow et al for layout (I'm not that fond of grid outside of some scenarios, and at the time I didn't use it due to browser support) was always faster because the problems with absolute positioning as the main layout tool were basically unfixable.

Maybe there are techniques using calc() and viewport units where it makes sense, but absolute positioning is not suitable for any layout outside of completely static content and viewport dimensions, in my experience.
by chii | 2025-06-27 09:10:40+00:00
> People will go through obscene lengths to recreate what judicious use of absolute positioning can achieve fairly well

the web has the requirement that the 'document' look good no matter what device size/dimension, orientation, and/or capability.

In regular apps (say, a windows app), you don't have this requirement. In mobile apps, there's a standardized set of sizes. Only on web do we have both!
by notorandit | 2025-06-27 09:10:51+00:00
Theming, UI design is nowadays a form of art.

We, the users, should just contemplate it, not really use those things.

Jokes aside, it's a worrying trend indeed, like very low contrast colors, actions and info hidden a click away from an almost empty display.

Even Wikipedia is not using the full page width and doesn't bring the default focus on the search widget.

All that said, also for me Plasma really rocks. Only defaults are a little bit pesky.
by ChrisRackauckas | 2025-06-27 09:10:57+00:00
Benchmarks of an early version on NVIDIA's blog show that it is about the same (the average across the benchmark shows Julia as actually a little faster here, but it's basically a wash) https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/gpu-computing-julia-progra....

While much has changed since then, the architecture is effectively the same. Julia's native CUDA support simply boils down to compiling via the LLVM .ptx backend (Julia always generates LLVM IR, and the CUDA infrastructure "simply" retargets LLVM to .ptx, generates the binary, and then wraps that binary into a function which Julia calls), so it's really just a matter of the performance difference between the code generated by the LLVM .ptx backend vs the NVCC compiler.
by Nursie | 2025-06-27 09:11:02+00:00
My first reaction is - why should the UK be launching US-made nuclear weapons?

It's been widely reported that these aircraft will only be able to use US nuclear munitions, and that will require US permission.

God forbid they ever be used, of course, but it seems like a weird choice, especially when the UK is apparently able to build warheads for trident, and is allegedly able to operate that system without US oversight (though of course with US ballistic missiles as the carrier...)
by kreetx | 2025-06-27 09:11:04+00:00
(I've a recently acquired strong opinion on MCP, beware)

MCP seems to be the idea to expose literally any data source to AI agents as context. E.g, in work/business context: a database, source code, a kanban board; in private context: your photo library, notes, etc. This is good and makes sense.

As a technical "standard" or "protocol" (as it claims to be), it's a total mess, read more here: https://modelcontextprotocol.io. Though I guess they are inventing it as they go.
by pjc50 | 2025-06-27 09:11:10+00:00
Possibly, but this is very expensive.

I also remember when the Scottish government tried to support Scottish shipbuilding by contracting the construction of some ferries to the single local bidder, Ferguson Marine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_ferry_fiasco

Garden shed industry gets you garden shed solutions. See the previous discussion about Ukranian cheap drones with limited effectiveness. It takes globalization to build an iPhone, and the larger your defence consortium the more advanced a solution you can build.
by preisschild | 2025-06-27 09:11:14+00:00
> because they focused less on stealth which is just not as big a priority for Europe

What do you mean "for europe"? Many European NATO members are buying stealth F-35s because for them stealth is a priority.

> FCAS, but there where delays, which is always the case.

The entry of FCAS into service is expected in 2040 lmao, definitely not "at present" like OP said.

Also the UK is a member of the competing GCAP (Global Combat Air Programme) project

> Now will dogfighting matter

No. Of course not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Combat_Air_Programme
by Ukv | 2025-06-27 09:11:23+00:00
> Copyright was build to protect the artist from unauthorized copy by a human not by a machine (a machine wildly beyond their imagination at the time I mean), so the input and output limitations of humans were absolutely taken into account when writing such laws

Copyright law was spurred by the spread of the printing press, a machine which has ability to output full replicas. It does not assume human-like input/output limitations.

> A fair ruling would have declared that authors must be able to forbid the usage of their work as training data for any given model because the "transformative" processes that are being executed are wildly beyond what the writers of the law knew were even possible

Copyright's basis in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Declaring a transformative use illegal because it's so novel would seem to run directly counter to that.

To my understanding it's generally the opposite (a pre-existing use with an established market that the rightsholder had expected to exploit) that would weigh against a finding of fair use.
by darrenf | 2025-06-27 09:12:56+00:00
I could only get through a few rounds of this -- it messed with my brain much more than my fingers. Proper nouns without capitals, flipping between -ize and -ise, and the outright bad grammar were all reasons I typed slower than I normally would.

> geohumanities, sometimes written geohumanities or the geohumanities is a term has been used with varied meanings to describe areas of academic study
by barrell | 2025-06-27 09:13:21+00:00
Yeah Japanese TTS is a lot harder than it looks. I’m also building a language learning application, and constantly ran into incorrect readings. Eleven labs, eleven labs v3, OpenAI, play.ht, azure, google, Polly — I’ve tried them all. They are all really bad (more than 1/3 the expressions had an error in them somewhere).

It _is_ fixable though. It took me about a week, but I have yet to find a mistaken reading now. This also seems to just be the case with Japanese - most tonal languages seem to have the correct tones (I’m not qualified to comment on how natural the tones sound, but I have yet to find a mismatch like in Japanese)
by srean | 2025-06-27 09:13:40+00:00
A British F-35 has been stranded in an Indian airport for over a week, post it's emergency landing.

It's not clear why. Official reason is that it ran low on fuel (a reason that's not been taken seriously).

Britain has rejected India's offer of a hangar. So it's been sitting there in the open since it landed.

https://www.indiatoday.in/amp/india/story/british-f35-jet-st...
by tomaytotomato | 2025-06-27 09:13:47+00:00
> This is just exceptionalist nonsense. The UK has neither the industrial expertise nor experience to rearm domestically.

No, you are writing nonsense -

Here is a non-exhaustive list of modern (80s - current era breakthroughs which are British)

- Chohbam composite tank armour (the best in the world)

- Dragonfire Laser

- Rapier AA missile, now being replaced by SkySabre

- Accuracy International firearms (best sniper rifles in the world)

- Rolls Royce jet engines

- Naval Sonar and Radar systems

I could go on