MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-20 09:04:44+00:00
The problem is, as I noted: housing isn't everything. You need the support infrastructure as well to develop a new city quarter, and that's all but easy: you need schools and kindergartens with playgrounds (which consume a lot of space and create noise), shopping (at least a grocery store and a pharmacy), a general practitioner doctor, a bakery... and then, you need the "invisible" infrastructure that barely anyone thinks about: public transport, streets able to support the traffic that inevitably comes even with a good public transport system, larger streets in the surrounding grid, water and sewage grids, a power grid, heating grid.

The problem is, Munich got lots of new real estate around the city, but especially the public transport system wasn't expanded anywhere near close enough to what's needed. There hasn't been an actual new rail laid for the S-Bahn or the regional trains in decades (in fact, if you go to Mühldorf near Munich, the railway dispatch tech dates back to the era of the Kaiser, so even before Hitler and the Weimar Republic), the U-Bahn hasn't seen meaningful expansion in the core grid as well (only the leaves were expanded, in the late 90s to Messestadt, in the late 00s to Moosach).

And now, the road and public transport networks are at capacity. Munich physically cannot support more people moving here.
by dahrkael | 2025-06-20 09:05:12+00:00
I started because I needed a tracker for another project but the tracker turned to be more fun to make. I did glance over other trackers code but their code tends to be either overly complex or too simple so not very useful. So far its been 3 months of revenge bedtime procrastination. While this is not a client like qbittorrent I have ideas for a seedbox-oriented client project in the future.
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-20 09:05:28+00:00
> I live there and I know this to be true, but I don't get it.

All that Söder wants is photo ops with famous people, the famouser the better. And if that's not given, at least a single photo of #Söderisst a day is a minimum.

Söder isn't interested in actual politics, he's a showman. He's not willing, I'd say even unable, to deal with the consequences of his actions.
by a2tech | 2025-06-20 09:06:42+00:00
This is not helpful, funny, or intelligent. It’s a child’s rant about the world.

At the end of the day, the reason more housing isn’t built is that the incentives are greater to not build it. You can build a high rise with shoebox apartments that have to be aggressively managed and make a profit. Or you can build a high rise with half the units, higher reoccurring revenue and less hassle and make 2x the immediate profit.

At the end of the day as long as there is demand for more expensive housing that’s what’s going to get built.
by stabbles | 2025-06-20 09:06:52+00:00
That's entirely orthogonal.

In probabilistic programming you (deterministically) define variables and formulas. It's just that the variables aren't instances of floats, but represent stochastic variables over floats.

This is similar to libraries for linear algebra where writing A * B * C does not immediately evaluate, but rather builds an expression tree that represent the computation; you need to do say `eval(A * B * C)` to obtain the actual value, and it gives the library room to compute it in the most efficient way.

It's more related to symbolic programming and lazy evaluation than (non-)determinism.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-06-20 09:07:52+00:00
Why do you want to be not "meaningless"? If they don't like something that they don't have to use, they are free to do that. How is breaking up big tech going to solve anything.

Also big companies are easiest to regulate and all the countries regulate them all the time. If you have 100 different TikToks, they threaten democracy even more as the profit incentive push towards extremism in any case.
by ben_w | 2025-06-20 09:07:53+00:00
My example with Lean is that it's specifically a thing that does a priori knowledge: given "A implies B" and "A", therefore "B". Or all of maths from the chosen axioms.

So, just to be clear, you were asked:

> What does "real intelligence" mean?

And your answer is that it must be a priori knowledge, and are fine with Lean being one. But you don't accept that LLMs can weakly approximate theorem provers?

FWIW, I agree that the "Justified True Belief" definition of knowledge leads to such conclusions as you draw, but I would say that this is also the case with humans — if you do this, then the Gettier problems show that even humans only have belief, not knowledge: when you "see a sheep in a field", you may be later embarrassed to learn that what you saw was a white coated Puli and there was a real sheep hiding behind a bush, but in the moment the subjective experience of your state of "knowledge" is exactly the same as if you had, in fact, seen a sheep.

Just, be careful with what is meant by the word "belief", there's more than one way I can also contradict Wittgenstein's quote on belief:

> If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

Depending on what I mean by "believe", and indeed "I" given that different parts of my mind can disagree with each other (which is why motion sickness happens).
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-06-20 09:08:00+00:00
Isn't it also the same with alcohol, at least the beverage that people drink? Wine especially is very susceptible to conditions; soil, weather, strain, location, barrels, harvest time, aging conditions/temperature, etc.

Sure, the alcohol chemical is the same everywhere, but so is THC/CBD when you want to reduce it like that. Watered down ethanol is probably a thing but few people drink it like that.
by fergie | 2025-06-20 09:08:26+00:00
Europe has a number of loopholes for the accumulation of wealth that have traditionally been used by the aristocracy. These apparently only become problematic to the signatories when members of the bourgeoisie, for example tech entrepreneurs, start using them as well.

There is a general need for taxation on wealth rather than labor in western societies. Its silly to single out big tech companies, which are actually an example of capitalism and free markets doing good: creating and rewarding the best products.
by yunohn | 2025-06-20 09:09:54+00:00
> I’m the kind of person who contributes to society by starting companies that leverage technology to build smart tea kettles that brew themselves while you sleep at night. I’m a fucking innovator.

Is there a reason that the press is always making scapegoats out of tech nerds? The vast majority of people are not employed in tech, and are part of the same society and have very similar self interests.

Truly tired of everything being a criticism of Silicon Valley, as if everyone else are saints.
by lproven | 2025-06-20 09:10:13+00:00
Not enough.

1. Is it any good, though? Does it work well?

2. Is it better than you could do by hand?

3. Do you care that the vast environmental footprint of the racks of servers that are vastly inefficiently wasting energy to do your job for you – badly – are destroying the planet and meaning that my child has no future?

Because I care a lot about that.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-20 09:11:08+00:00
Adjacent comment pretty much explained it. Sometimes it's printf, sometimes it's subtle tweaks to program behavior in strategic places, sometimes it's adding asserts (that might very well call functions not intended for public consumption).

I always start debugging by coming up with a theory about why the observed behavior occurred. The fastest way to validate that is generally one or two tiny changes to the program.

I only break out the debug tooling for the serious stuff that has me scratching my head in confusion. Either because the behavior has me thinking "there's no way that's possible" (spoiler: almost always memory corruption) or because I'm segfaulting in a shared library that I didn't compile or because I'm well into some obvious badlands with concurrency or memory corruption or the like.
Show HN: A macOS desktop wrapper for YouTube Music that plays in the background
by vedants27 | 2025-06-20 09:11:32+00:00
Hey HN,

I built a lightweight wrapper for YouTube Music on macOS using Electron. Most people run YouTube Music as a PWA or in a browser tab, but that stops playback when the window is closed.

This app continues playback in the background and supports media keys.

GitHub: https://github.com/vedant-sharmaa/ytm-wrapper

Would love feedback — I use it daily myself. :)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-20 09:11:48+00:00
> Strangely it seems to me that a lot of effort is going more into being able to simulate full cells that contain unknown mechanisms, rather than trying to use the capabilities to create hypothesis to uncover the unknown mechanisms. Yes, that probably expedites the path towards simulating much bigger human cells, but ultimately still leaves us in the dark on most fronts.

I imagine it's much easier to create and test hypotheses about the unknown mechanisms, when you can view them in context of a larger system, with reasonable performance, allowing you to metaphorically "grab them in your palm" and tweak on the fly. We work better when we explore things, instead of immediately taking on problems that are at the limit of our computational tools, requiring individual brains (and tons of paperwork) to make up for the difference.

In this sense, researching the nano-scale basics, and aiming to simulate micro-scale cellular systems, are actually aligned - as long as they're not cutting too much corners, the latter is creating space for former work to be done efficiently.
by krustowski | 2025-06-20 09:12:48+00:00
NGL, the codebase of the first iteration is pretty much a mess. It had been written in my mid-teenage years, so the C code is not very consistent across the project. There is a filesystem prototype written in Go as well... Also, it is quite complex to even compile RoureXOS: it needs Borland TCC and TASM (ca 1989 btw) to properly build a 16bit executable(s). It is feasible to compile it using DOSBox though. Maybe some day I could open source that one repository too.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-06-20 09:13:16+00:00
There's nothing remarkable about it:

• Drill.

• Goto step 1.

Does this make the child "more intelligent"? Not in any meaningful way! But they get better at IQ tests.

It's a fairly common protocol. I can hardly be said to have invented it: I was put through it. (Sure, I came up with a few tricks for solving IQ-type problems that weren't in the instruction books, but those tricks too can be taught.)

I really don't understand why people think IQ test results are meaningful. They're among the most obvious cases of Goodhart's law that I know. Make up a sport that most kids won't have practised before, measure performance, and probably that's about as correlated with the (fictitious) "g factor" as IQ tests are.
by karel-3d | 2025-06-20 09:14:18+00:00
10.4 looks and behaves basically the same as ... whatever is the latest macOS version. (I stopped caring about macOS versions few years ago) even with Liquid Glass it still behaves similarly.

The app installation is still the same "ikea dmg app dragging", and occasional zip or pkg. The Finder window already has bookmarks in the left bar. The dock behaves identically. (They went through their weird 3D dock phase but that was... Leopard? I think?)

There is no Mac App Store but barely anyone uses this nowadays anyway... Spotlight... was new in Tiger.

It is much more recognisable than Windows XP vs 11. XP behaves very differently to 11!
by bilbo0s | 2025-06-20 09:14:35+00:00
Let's be honest about what they're targeting..

the problem is US tech dominance.

So Europe sees a need to break that sooner or Later.

So yes, the list of companies to rein in has as many companies as they need to affect the security and economic changes the Europeans would like to see.

I would say we (the US) should negotiate with them, but considering the negotiating prowess of the current admin, maybe now is not the right time for that?
by friendzis | 2025-06-20 09:14:47+00:00
> I think you are on the right track but for me personally it really depends on how difficult it was to produce the result. Like if you enter "spit out harry potter and the philosophers stone" and it does. Thats black and white. But if you are able to torture a repeated prompt that forces the model to ignore its constraints, thats not exactly using the system as intended.

Let me offer a different perspective. Having an LLM that is trained on copyrighted material, memoized (or lossily compressed it) and then some "safety" machinery that tries to avoid verbatim-ish outputs of copyrighted material is fundamentally not really distinguishable from simply having a plaintext database of copyrighted material with machinery for "fuzzy" data extraction from said material.

Suppose a company stores the whole of stack exchange in plaintext, then implements a chat-like interface that fuzzy matches on question, extracts answers from plain-text database, fuzzes top-rated/accepted answers together and outputs something, not necessarily quoting one distinct answer, but pretty damn close.

How much "fuzziness" is required for this to stop being copyright violation? LLM-advocates try to say that LLMs are "fuzzy enough" without clearly defining what that enough means.
by seydor | 2025-06-20 09:15:21+00:00
Fighting insanity with more insanity: Asking the EU to force break up american corporations.

There is a simple path to EU sovereignity, china has already done it: Ban US services in order to spring up local alternatives. Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling. then you won't have to bother with "big tech".

But all of that would require doing actual work, and judging by the list of signatories, they don't want to do it.
by ReptileMan | 2025-06-20 09:15:51+00:00
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/07/wikileaks-to-leak-5...

Brilliant steve yegge article on the topic.

Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects With All That Private/Final Bullshit Removed

On a more serious note. While I can see the reason for private members, the case for private methods has always been much weaker.
by gavinray | 2025-06-20 09:17:51+00:00
So, myself and many folks I know have taken to writing tests in the form of ".http" files that can be executed by IDE extensions in VS Code/IDEA.

Those basically go in the form

POST http://localhost:8080/api/foo Content-Type: application/json { "some": "body" }

And then we have a 1-to-1 mapping of "expected.json" outputs for integration tests.

We use a bespoke bash script to run these .http file with cURL, and then compare the outputs with jq, log success/failure to console, and write "actual.json"

Can I use HURL in a similar way? Essentially an IDE-runnable example HTTP request that references a JSON file as the expected output?

And then run HURL over a directory of these files?
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-20 09:18:18+00:00
I don't find the consequences very hard to bear:

For example

> E.g. punishment for the sake of retribution is near impossible to morally justify if you don't believe in free will because it means you're punishing someone for something the had no agency over.

and

> E.g. punishment might still be justified from the point of view of reducing offending and reoffending rates, but if that is the goal then it is only justified to the extent that it actually achieves those goals

are simply logical to me (even without assuming any lack of free will).

So what is emotionally difficult about this, as you claim?
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-06-20 09:18:39+00:00
Darwinism isn't a weakness of rationality, teleology has fine tuning problem, while darwinism is minimally fine tuned to work from scratch, which can be said to be optimal. Also darwinism doesn't select for reproductive fitness, it's only a proxy goal; true goal is survival, so you can produce more offspring only in a way compatible with true goal.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-06-20 09:19:07+00:00
This argument proves too much. If rationalism can't "triumph" (presumably over other modes of thought) because evolution makes moral realism unobservable, then no epistemic framework will help you - does empirically observing the brutality of evolution lead to better results? Or perhaps we should hypothesise that it's brutal and then test that prediction against what we observe?

I'm sympathetic to the idea that we know nothing because of the reproductive impulse to avoid doing or thinking about things that led our ancestors to avoid procreation, but such a conclusion can't be total because otherwise it is self defeating because is is contingent on rationalist assumptions about the mind's capacity to model knowledge.
by simiones | 2025-06-20 09:19:16+00:00
I don't think it's making scapegoats per se. But Sillicon Valley has been very influential in the public discourse in the previous 1-2 decades, and huge SV (or tech in general) entrepreneurs have used their success and money to gain an outsized political influence on many of these issues. Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are some of the most obvious figures that have driven public policy discourse (and Elon Musk at least even had a direct hand in the implementation of said policies), but there are many others.

What you're seeing is a backlash to this influence, and the fairly disastrous consequences it has usually had.
by klntsky | 2025-06-20 09:19:26+00:00
Homelesness exists in the US because it's comfortable to be homeless in a rich society. It is not always a result of choice, but so is living in a home.

Still, I sincerely believe more people would choose to be homeless if they tried it, because there is nothing inherently bad in living in a tent if the climate allows it. It's just like tourism but with more amenities available due to urban infra + the stigma (that people mostly learned to ignore due to cultural conditioning of the 70s-today period).
by fergie | 2025-06-20 09:19:33+00:00
> There was a decade of opportunity for OSS to coordinate around an IDE protocol, but that didn’t happen, because OSS is bad at coordination.

Its also because a lot of the key people in Open Source, and senior hackers generally, don't actually use IDEs.

We should encourage more of the younger generation over to powerful configurable editors such as Emacs, rather than locking everybody into VSCode/JetBrains/etc.
by awongh | 2025-06-20 09:19:53+00:00
I'm not against this in principle but I am a little skeptical that it would actually work in this case- I think search could be a good case for this (Google) but it's also in the process of being disrupted by LLMs so I feel like it's becoming less relevant.

One thing that I do believe could be relevant is regulation that forces open the platforms- social media and messaging as an open standard. Now that the technical underpinnings of it are well understood I don't know why we couldn't have an open standard for making posts that my real friends could see and rich-media standard for me sending messages and being in group messages. It's ridiculous that we're locked into these messaging platforms that want to show us ads when the tech to run these things is well understood and should be commodified in a more open market. The cost of switching should be near zero.
by logicchains | 2025-06-20 09:19:59+00:00
Europe can't even build its own tech companies and now it's trying to destroy foreign ones. Fundamentally the European cultural hostility to business and change is not compatible with a modern tech economy, and it'll continue to fall further and further behind the US and Asia, as GDP per capita in western Europe remains stagnant.

A question to Europeans here, why do you believe that the bureaucracy that's been so completely ineffective at facilitating the growth of modern tech companies in Europe, should be given even more power and control?
by ben_w | 2025-06-20 09:20:21+00:00
As you link to The Copy Principle: it, or at least that summary of it, appears to be very much what AI do.

As a priori knowledge is all based on axioms, I do not accept that it is an example of "something truly novel, not related to anything it's ever seen before". Knowledge, yes, but not of the kind you describe. And this would still be the case even if LLMs couldn't approximate logical theorem provers, which they can: https://chatgpt.com/share/685528af-4270-8011-ba75-e601211a02...
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-20 09:21:01+00:00
> Munich probably has one of the best public transport systems in the world, but god forbid the S Bahn have some issues during winter or a storm, and some people have to lose their minds about what a disaster the public transport is.

Well, the winter storm of two years ago [0] when there wasn't a single tram running for days should be an example... there hasn't been any investment in resiliency for decades. Only one tram car [1], a 1950s catenary service vehicle [2], was able to run, there was nothing else that was heavy enough.

And even when there is no weather extremes, the S-Bahn is at record levels of unreliability [3]. Particularly the older people remember how reliable public transport used to be. It hasn't even come close to growing with the city, and that's why people are rightfully pissed.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintereinbruch_in_S%C3%BCddeut...

[1] https://www.tramreport.de/2023/12/08/mvg-schneechaos-2023-1/

[2] https://www.trambahn.de/atw2942

[3] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/s-bahn-muenchen-2024-er...
by zimpenfish | 2025-06-20 09:22:03+00:00
One of my first software contributions was indexing and cross-references for noweb in plain TeX. I had thought it was completely lost to time and hard drives but it seems someone has actually kept it around! Bonkers.

(The username being `partingr` suggests it was some time late 92 to mid 95 whilst I was at cs.man.ac.uk)

https://github.com/nrnrnr/noweb/tree/master/contrib/partingr
by sofixa | 2025-06-20 09:22:33+00:00
> Tech is inherently monopolistic due to network effects and infinite scaling

Social media, yes. There are no network effects on most other "big tech" mono/oligopolies - using Google vs Bing vs Kagi or Claude.ai vs ChatGPT vs Gemini or Android vs iOS (other than in the US) or BackMarket vs Amazon vs AliExpress, etc.
by MichaelGlass | 2025-06-20 09:23:23+00:00
I thought it was funny. And sad.

The incentives you're talking about -- they're missing because of NIMBYist overregulation. The whole point of NIMBYism is to use regulation to hamstring the positive incentives in the market. "There's demand for twenty units here but the place is zoned for a single unit." or "There's demand for twenty units but the city demands that if we build a multitenant unit, we have to do a twenty-year environmental survey first".

Do you live in a place with a homeless crisis. Guess what: You're a citizen and you have some agency. Democracy can be a backstop to "pure" (or mis-regulated) market forces. I, for one, enjoy clean drinking water (and also: a good deal from a healthy competitive market).
by stabbles | 2025-06-20 09:24:03+00:00
A couple make flags that are useful and probably not very well known:

Output synchronization which makes `make` print stdout/stderr only once a target finishes. Otherwise it's typically interleaved and hard to follow:

make --output-sync=recurse -j10

On busy / multi-user systems, the `-j` flag for jobs may not be best. Instead you can also limit parallelism based on load average:

make -j10 --load-average=10

Randomizing the order in which targets are scheduled. This is useful for your CI to harden your Makefiles and see if you're missing dependencies between targets:

make --shuffle # or --shuffle=seed/reverse